We close the CppCat project

A little over a year ago, we decided to conduct an experiment and release an alternative to the PVS-Studio static code analyzer for small teams and individual developers. So there was a very inexpensive analyzer called CppCat. Now we can summarize this experiment and admit that it turned out to be unsuccessful. Over a period of just over a year, he brought about as much money as was spent on its development, promotion and support. Thus, the project is unprofitable. After all, the time spent (the most valuable resource) we could use to improve PVS-Studio. We are forced to close the CppCat project and focus on PVS-Studio. I hope readers will be interested in someone else's experience in implementing a new business idea. Negative experience is also a rewarding experience.

CppCat was announced in January 2014: "An alternative to PVS-Studio for $ 250. We wanted to present the world an easy-to-configure and inexpensive static code analyzer for mass use. It was an interesting project and an interesting marketing experiment.

We failed, and we decided to focus on our main PVS-Studio project . This is not it means that we will not do new experiments, for example, we plan to try to create a static analyzer for C # over time, however, now PVS-Studio will give priority and CppCat will cease to exist.

Reasons for closing the project

Many books and articles promote the idea of ​​making a software product inexpensive, but massive. Sometimes it works. The rapid development of the App Store confirms this. This is not suitable for everyone, but until you try, you don’t know.

We received a very large number of letters and comments that PVS-Studio is too expensive. We were agitated to sell PVS-Studio at a price of $ 300- $ 500. We were promised that as soon as we do this, a line of buyers will line up for us. And those who wrote us a letter will be one of the first in this line.

At the same time, very often we were sent a link to Joel Spolsky’s article “ Camels and the Sandbox". Why - it’s not clear. As for me, the article does not promise success at all with such a pricing policy. Nevertheless, I decided to mention Camels and the Sandbox, as we have been given this article as an argument more than ten times.

A stream of comments and letters made us think about the idea of ​​making the static analysis tool cheap. We were told that we are losing a huge pool of developers working in small companies or just freelancers or individual developers. Yes, and we ourselves were attracted by the idea of ​​moving towards the masses ovogo inexpensive product.

However, we did not want to simply reduce the price of PVS-Studio. In the end, PVS-Studio steadily acquired companies and then with this tool, and price all good.

And then we came up with CppCat. We made PVS-Studio convenient for working with large projects and CppCat for small ones. After all, it makes no sense to select customers from the more expensive PVS-Studio. However, it fully meets the needs of small development teams working in Visual Studio.

Moreover, in order to act for sure, we made the price lower than recommended. As I said, they wrote to us about $ 300- $ 500. We made $ 250.

The first “bell” that we made a mistake sounded immediately. The fact is that for some time we wrote out the contacts of all the people who said that the PVS-Studio tool is interesting, but is unacceptably expensive. When CppCat appeared, we contacted these people and offered them to purchase it for $ 250. Such an offer was sent to approximately 20 programmers. And what do you think is the result? Bought two.

This means that all these people did not really need a static analyzer, and they left their recommendations for no reason. In general, the following trend has long been noticed. Those who need it are buying a product. Those who do not need to discuss too high a price and shortcomings of the tool. Naturally, we were not the first to notice this. For example, I like the quote from the article "They abandoned the demo and the freemium - and eliminated a bunch of slag ":

Elba (online accounting system) at the start cost 300 rubles a month, and even then there were people who considered this price sky-high. The first buyer paid an annual subscription even before we have closed access to some functions at a free rate.This example perfectly illustrates two types of potential customers:

• A representative of the target audience who would hypothetically take advantage of your offer if he were paid extra for this;
• A true potential client to whom your tool will really benefit.

Although it is written about a completely different business, the coincidence is complete. However, it was too late to stop, and our company began to promote CppCat on the Internet.

A discussion of how and what was done to attract interest in CppCat is beyond the scope of this article. However, I note that a lot of work has been done, for which we spent more time for some time than promoting PVS-Studio.

CppCat began to be on sale, but sales volumes completely disappointed us. We cannot pinpoint the reason for the failure of the new analyzer, but we will outline our version.

A static analyzer is not in demand in small projects for the following complementary reasons:

• The density of errors in small projects is less than in large ones ( more ).
• In a small project, one or two people know the whole code and it’s easy for them to look for any error. In large projects, no one already knows how everything works. Because of this, finding and fixing errors is much more expensive. Each change in code can produce unexpected effects that no one can foresee. Therefore, if the tool helps to prevent at least 10% of errors, this is a huge saving in time. In small projects, there is simply no such problem.
• The programming culture of individual developers and small teams is lower than in large companies. Theoretically, we should take on the mission of advancing the static analysis methodology among them. Then there will be much more customers. But in practice this is not feasible. This level of mission is not available to our company. New trends in programming practice can only be promoted by such major players as Microsoft or Apple.

The bottom line is the following picture. Companies purchase and enjoy using PVS-Studio. Some companies purchase licenses for more than 50 developers. Many of them renew their licenses. There are already those who use PVS-Studio for the fourth year in a row. Let me remind you that our product has formed in the form as it is now by 2011.

Individual developers do not buy CppCat. The income received from CppCat is completely incomparable with the income from sales of PVS-Studio. Revenues from CppCat sales are approximately equal to development, support and promotion costs.

About six months ago, the futility of CppCat sales became apparent, but we did not rush to immediately abandon the product. I wanted to try to use it somehow for advertising purposes. Unfortunately, we were not able to come up with anything particularly interesting. The only idea was the free distribution of academic licenses. I will dwell on this a little more.

We started giving CppCat to students and teachers for free. The idea was that students would talk about the instrument at work, discuss in forums, or at least someone would post some kind of tweet. In general, some discussion arises and more people recognize about the analyzer.

The result is zero. Nowhere is there any mention of our share and CppCat. On the Internet is only what we ourselves posted. This type of advertising also failed.

By the way, I want to praise students from Ukraine and Belarus. They most actively requested licenses for CppCat. Perhaps the economic crisis is causing students to think more seriously about their careers, and they are actively learning tools and generally truly learning to be programmers. There is also a crisis in Russia, but our students turned out to be lazy and inactive.

Summarize. We were unable to make CppCat a well-selling product. We were not able to somehow advertise at his expense. We decided not to spend resources on the development and support of this tool. We are closing this project as unpromising.

What will happen to CppCat users

When closing a project, you need to think about the users who bought the license. In this sense, a small number of users is good. I think we can safely close the project.

Those who purchase a license for CppCat will receive a license for PVS-Studio for a while. We will issue licenses according to the following principle:

• Whoever expired the CppCat license, and he did not renew it, get a PVS-Studio license for a period of 3 months.
• License holders, which expires in less than 6 months, receive a license for PVS-Studio for a period of 6 months.
• License holders, which expires in 6-12 months, receive a license for PVS-Studio for a period of 1 year.

For clarity, I will depict this as a picture:



Another group of users is students who received free versions. We can not offer anything for them. They can use CppCat until the license expires. Perhaps in the future we will offer some other promotion for students to receive a free analyzer. But I won’t promise anything in advance.

For all questions CppCat users can contact us in the mail: support@viva64.com

What's next?

We are not sad at all with the situation with CppCat. On the contrary, we are more than ever more determined to develop PVS-Studio, because we regularly receive support words from our customers who use our code analyzer. And new projects from our team are already in draft.

UPDATE Eugene wrote a short note, which in part overlaps with questions of usefulness in different directions. It may be interesting: I finally understood what unit economics is .