There are all huge projects and we need more help. So we are currently looking for an extra Mac OS X developer.
Are you experienced in Mac OS X programming, OR a smart programmer interested in Mac development? Then read on…

About Collectorz.com

Collectorz.com® is a series of collection database programs for cataloging user’s home collection of music, movies, books, comics and video games. The key feature of the programs is the automatic downloading of media information (data and cover art) from our own online media databases.
Collectorz.com software is available in 3 flavours: Windows, Mac OS X and online/web-based. Next to that, we offer mobile companion apps for iPhone, iPad and Android.
Collectorz.com currently has 14 employees and we’re located in Amsterdam (WG Plein 384).

The job

You will join the “all-things-Apple” development team, to work on the Mac OS X editions of the Collectorz.com software. The goal is to finally bring our current Mac editions of Movie, Book and Music Collector to the same level as their Windows counterparts, in terms of features, usability and stability. Next to that, you will work on the new Mac edition of Comic Collector.

You will work together with the other Collectorz.com programmers, to keep the Mac editions in line with the Windows editions, and to connect them with the CLZ iPhone apps, iPad apps, Android apps and the online “Connect” editions.

Requirements

• University level, technical education
• Experience and affinity with Object Oriented programming
• Experience with Mac OS X programming (Objective C, Cocoa, etc…) is a pre, but not a requirement. (Smart OO programmers should be able to learn any programming language or API in no time).
• Affinity with Apple products and operating systems. Apple fan-boys preferred.
• Affinity with music, movies, books, comics and/or video games. Collector-geeks preferred.
• Living in or close to Amsterdam.
• No suits allowed.

Interested?

Send your cover letter and CV to jobz at collectorz dot com.

The purchase includes all rights to the CD Trustee software, the domain base40.com (former home of CD Trustee) and the CD Trustee customer database. With this acquisition, Collectorz.com is strengthening its position in the CD cataloging market.

“It’s great to see that CD Trustee users are so loyal to their trusted CD cataloging tool, and to its author Mike Paulick”, said Alwin Hoogerdijk, founder and owner of Collectorz.com. “We will do everything in our power to help these users convert their CD database, often representing years of work, to our Music Collector program. I am confident that they will feel right at home with their new software and the new mobile and online possibilities that are opened up for them now.”

“Music Collector really is the future. It is a much more powerful program than CD Trustee.”, said Mike Paulick, author of CD Trustee. “I feel good recommending such a well-supported product, and providing my customers a way to preserve their music data.”

About Collectorz.com

Collectorz.com is a software company based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and founded in 2000. It specializes in collection database software, tools used by home-users to catalog their personal collection of CDs, DVDs, books, comic books and video games. The first release of Music Collector, the CD database program, was in 1996, at the time called “Keep it Compact” and programmed in his spare time by Collectorz.com founder Alwin Hoogerdijk.
Currently, Collectorz.com sells 30 products, on 5 platforms: Windows, Mac OS X, iPhone, iPad and Android. On top of that, the company provides online subscription based editions under the Collectorz.com Connect brand.

About CD Trustee

The first version of CD Trustee was first released in 2001, by Mike Paulick of Sane Soft, LLC, based in Denver, Colorado, USA. Even though there has not been an update to the software since 2005, Mike has been fully supporting CD Trustee up till now. The program still has thousands of active users, most of them having spent a lot of time with the program, cataloging their multi-thousand CD collections.
Mike Paulick is retiring from the software business to be able to spend more time pursuing his many outdoor sports, including downhill skiing, whitewater kayaking, on and off-road motorcycling, camping, hunting and fishing.

Data transfer and Music Collector half price offer

Collectorz.com programmers have been working together with Mike Paulick, programmer of CD Trustee, to create an easy way for CD Trustee users to transfer their CD database to Music Collector, including all CD cover images. The data transfer is done by exporting to a “Music Collector CSV” file from a special final CD Trustee build, then importing into the latest version of Music Collector.
To facilitate the move to Music Collector, Collectorz.com has extended a special offer *only* for CD Trustee users: everyone who owns a CD Trustee license will be able to buy the Pro edition of Music Collector half price (for $24.95 instead of $49.95).

The Amazon-Free project has been taking up most of my time, but I have also spend two weeks on Maui (for vacation and for Perry Marshall’s Adwords seminar).

Anyway, I am back at it. The Maui seminar gave me lots of fresh marketing ideas and we’re working hard to implement all of them. I’ll post updates about the results here, probably in the form of more frequent short “brain-dumps”, as opposed to long articles.

But first things first… the new car… coming up next…

Here’s a sneak preview of my presentation on The Art of Ignoring:

The Art of Ignoring

You’ve got your hands full, doing development and customer support.

But then the experts tell you that you should:
Do SEO, run Adwords, split test your site design, fight piracy, fix your trial edition, send newsletters, write press releases, tweet on Twitter, create mac apps, register your trademarks, publish articles, find affiliates, track your sales, do retail, localize your software, create mobile apps, move to web apps, optimize your shopping cart, etc, etc….

Where to start? What’s most important right now? What brings in the most profits, the fastest so you can keep moving forward?

The bad news: Everything on the list really is important.

The good news: Depending on the phase your ISV is in, only a few things are important right now.

In this presentation I will go over the different phases of an ISV. I will clearly outline each critical stage and what activities are most important – even essential – during each phase. This will give ISV’s practical, targeted focus points to ensure maximum productivity and profits.

More importantly, I will cover the essential skill of ignoring 80% of the above list, at any time.

For example, in the early stages, you can safely ignore localization and sales tracking.
Later on, ignoring feature requests may be the biggest time saver (and money maker!) ever.

I hope to see you in Boston!

We decided that AJ should spend more time creating videos and that we should start looking for an extra customer support employee.

However, Sytske and I are quite busy at the moment. We didn’t feel like going through heaps of applications and spending hours talking with applicants. So we made up some “hoops” that applicants would have to jump through. Nothing complicated, just to make sure they were able to read and follow some simple instructions. We also included a real customer question for them to answer.

Here’s a quote from our job description on Monsterboard (posted July 1st):

Interested?
Upload your cover letter and updated CV (both in English) to Google Docs, in one document. Use “[Your Name] Wants The Job” as the document title.
Then share it with jobz at collectorz dot com.

Make sure to answer the following customer question in your cover letter:

“I have already added 1,723 DVDs to Movie Collector. Now I want to set the Purchase Store field of all entries to “Amazon”. I am not looking forward to editing each and every movie, one by one. Is there a quicker way?”

Here’s the results after six days: :

• We received 18 applications
• Fifteen of those were either sent by just hitting the Apply Directly button at Monsterboard or emailed to our jobz email address. None of those answered the support question. (Some of them didn’t even bother to write a cover letter)
• Only five applicants used Google Docs to share their application doc with us.
• Four of those had named their document right (“Johnny wants the job”)
• These four all answered the customer question, but only two had understood the reason for this assigment and had actually written a full response email, including a nice introduction:
  

  “Dear Mr. Hoogerdijk,
  Thank you for your e-mail today. I understand that you would like to modify the purchase store field for your DVD collection.”

  and a friendly ending:

  “If this does not answer your question, or you would like more detailed instructions, please let me know.
  Best regards”

So we just invited those two for a job interview. We spoke with the first guy yesterday and he’s great. We’re talking to the second guy tomorrow.