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Market Samurai Releases a Smoking New Upgrade

This post could have gone in the money mill category because it has to do with internet marketing, but because its about software I decided to put it in the technology section instead.

Last summer when I was taking part in the thirty-day challenge, Ed Dale and friends intorduced us to Market Samurai. Anyone taking part in the challenge could download a free copy of this market analysis tool. They also introduced WordPress Direct, a blog installation and maintenance automation tool. Not only was the tool offered free, but they even provided free hosting for the blogs created with WordPress Direct.

Needless to say, giving these tools away for free was not simply an altruistic thing to do. It was a brilliant development and marketing strategy on the part of the developers. By giving the tools away they enlisted around 50,000 beta testers to debug their products for them and pre-sold the products to that many people. I'm sure Ed had some kind of slice of the pie when the products went on the market, as well. All I can say about that is, more power to him. Every year, Ed's group puts on the thirty-day challenge to teach people the latest strategies for internet sales and introduces tons of free stuff. These people always under-promise and over-deliver, and they don't charge a cent. Ever. Period. Obviously they have a way of making money from it, but they do it by giving people much more than they expect. Having been involved in the field for a year now, I can tell you from my own experience that Ed, GuruBob and all the other members of his team are the good guys.

Market Samurai is a tool that takes a lot of the grunt work out of market analysis. The free version is still available, by the way. The paid version has many more modules like finding pertinent content. When I purchased my copy last year it cost me $98, and I honestly don't know what the current price is. I do know what the program did, though. It made it possible to do the same amount of research in one-fifth of the time. Now, there is a new version out that increases that speed by a factor of ten.

Here's the cool thing though. If you already have a copy of Market Samurai, you get the new version for nothing. (WordPress Direct has followed the same principals with upgrades to their products as well.) And they aren't increasing the base price.

These guys are seriously weird, folks. They have this crazy notion that the way to make money with software is to produce a fantastic product and then keep making it better and letting the happy users sell it for them by word of mouth. Not only that, they seem to believe that, if you buy their product you are automatically entitled to free upgrades. How insane is that?

I guess I've just about beaten this to death. The reason is that I've been in computers for over twenty years and I've been sickened by the tactics of the big software developers from Micro-soft on down. I'm sick of being charged for a new licence every time they fix a bug. I'm tired of version conflicts that make it necessary to re-purchase. I know that they deliberately make the new features incompatible with the old versions as a marketing tactic. Windows backup was the worst offender for this. Everytime a new version of Windoze comes out it can never read backups created with the previous version. Come on, guys, it ain't that hard. Unix solved that problem with TAR a long time ago.

That's why I'm so impressed with the new bunch like the people at Market Samurai and WordPress Direct. It isn't because their products are great, although they are. Rather its because they are doing business the way it should have been done from the beginning.  I hope they all become millionaires.

By the way, I'm not an affilliate salesperson for Market Samurai. I'm not even going to give you a link to their site. If you're interested you can google them fast enough. I just feel that people who are operating with honesty and integrity should be recognized, especially in today's cut-throat world.