Jitbit Software blog archive

[Jitbit News] Hosted Helpdesk downtime post-mortem

Our hosted help desk app was down for more than half an hour today. The outage affected all the services including the email-pickup modules and the web-app. During the outage anyone accessing the helpdesk app was getting a 503 "Service unavailable" error.

Startup hacks we learned in 2013

When I first started my company 7 years ago I thought running a software startup is 80% about writing software. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the other way around. Coding takes only about 20%. The remaining 80% is marketing, team-management, SEO, product management, strategy, taxes/accounting, customer support, hiring/firing and a hundred other things a typical programmer knows nothing about. And likes nothing about - to an average programmer most of these activities are dull and boring.

Great customer support improves metrics: the numbers

Let’s be honest, we put marketing and development first and everything else second. Despite the overall positive trend, customer support is still an afterthought for most small SaaS companies and that is a huge mistake.

I know, the only thing that could convince founders to do something nowadays is numbers and data, which is perfectly fine. That is exactly what I’m going to do – I’m going to use numbers to convince you to invest in customer support

Making churn an actionable metric

By now, everyone probably knows that the churn rate is one of the most important metrics you can track in a SaaS app. It’s a perfectly good metric apart from one thing – it’s not very actionable.

When we talk about, say, “new customers per month”, it’s perfectly clear what we need to do to increase that number: we need to get more people into the funnel or optimize the funnel itself, right? Things are not that obvious when we deal with the churn rate.

My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

In February 2013 Amy Hoy has shut down "Charm" - her web-based help desk app. The primary reason for the shutdown was high availability requirement (since downtime is not an option for a helpdesk app) and the product becoming too demanding in terms of server architecture and monthly bills. To sum up - it stopped being fun and became an engineering PITA.

Most of your AB-tests will fail

A/B testing is overhyped. It is everywhere these days. It seems like many people in our industry perceive it as a magic tool that will boost their conversions with very little effort. It’s easy to get hooked with the A/B testing frenzy — the Internet is filled with success stories about how changing a stupid button color resulted in a 300% increase in conversions.

How Google Authorship decreased our traffic by 90%

A lot of our readers are small businesses and self-funded startups just like us. So I hope it's OK if we share our findings and challenges.

Almost every single SEO-blog on this planet (including SeoMoz, Copyblogger etc. etc.) has written a post about why "Google Authorship" is so great and why you should "claim" it right now. In short - because after you associate your G+ profile with your website there will be a small picture showing up next to your website in Google search results (aka "the SERP" - "Search engine results page").

Jitbit's SQL interview questions

We have a lot of engeneers reading this blog (since we're selling a help desk ticketing system to - mostly - IT people). So we decided to share the SQL questions we give our candidates during interviews, you folks might find it useful.

Live Chat Software from Jitbit

We've been in the help desk software market for many years and finally decided to expand our product lineup to the live-support niche. And today we're proud to announce the launch of a live chat software application.

Helpdesk iOS app is coming

Many of you will be happy to know that we've just entered the private testing phase with our brand new Helpdesk iOS app. We're aiming to submit it to the Appstore within a week, so you can expect the release at the beginning of April.

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