Getting Comfortable with Being Open

I ran a consulting company some years back. There I was coy about rates, progress, plans, directions. I kept my musings and ideas to myself. With Poker Copilot it’s been different. I was so excited at the outset that I started blogging on day one, and (so far) I never stopped. At first I was unsure whether it was wise being open about what I was doing.

Six months later, I’m now comfortable mentioning plans, problems, and processes. Furthermore, I’m pretty sure that regular and open blogging is my “secret sauce”. It shows potential customers that I’m a real, approachable person. It gives me the chance to hear what people like and don’t like about Poker Copilot. And it’s kinda fun.

Books Recommendations for Odds, Chance, Poker

If you play Poker, here are two books I highly recommend:

On the face of it they both have nothing to do with Poker. I consider these books, however, as useful reading for any endeavour based on playing the odds long-term. Choosing a career, playing the markets – and Poker.

A Happy Poker Copilot Customer

I got some nice Poker Copilot feedback today:

Great program Steve! I had trial downloaded an earlier version, and held off buying. Version 1.0 was a lot more basic, and I was holding out for Poker Tracker. Read over on the PT site today though that PT native for Mac won’t be available until sometime in 2009 “at the earliest” — http://www.pokertracker.com/forums/v…025f1&start=20 — Not promising.

After I read that I went back and looked at your site and noticed you’d already made some big improvements, so I bought it. Hope you keep up with it.

It’s already a much improved product. And the HUD has improved 10 fold. I’ve never used any kind of HUD before so it’ll be interesting to see what I get out of it. But just having the sortable hand histories and charting capabilities is fantastic. In 30 minutes I’ve found a couple painfully obvious leaks. Very happy with the new version and the purchase so far.

Please stay with it though, and keep improving/tweaking it. You own the Mac market right now. Grab it.

Thanks, Matthew!

Keeping the Website Running

Poker Copilot is a business that sells purely over the Internet. Therefore it is critical – nay, essential – even vital, that the Poker Copilot website is always running. But I can’t be manually checking this. Well, like most of us one-person software firms, I do check my website often, almost as a compulsion. But is it up when I am sleeping? when I am away from the computer? when people want to download or buy Poker Copilot?

Fortunately I found moni.tor.us, a free service that monitors my website. They send me weekly summary reports, and notify me when the site is down. Which fortunately seems to be hardly ever the case. And for that, I should give my site hosting firm, ServerPronto, a mention too.

It’s always comforting when I get my weekly moni.tor.us report showing somewhere between 99.5% and 100% uptime.

New Poker Copilot beta

Imagine if Poker Copilot…

  • had a custom chart generator, where you could compare any two stats, by date or by hands played? and could save the custom charts?
  • checked for updates automatically?
  • remembered all your filter settings between sessions?
  • had meaningful bankroll info for tournaments?
  • could import PokerStars tournament summaries?

You could imagine, or you could simply download the newest beta, Poker Copilot 1.35. This is an interim release, to make sure a bunch of tweaks, bug fixes. and new features are fine, while I continue working on the Big New Feature.

Warning for PokerStars Players

PokerStars have just announced that as of about … NOW … they are changing their hand history format slightly. This will almost certainly stop Poker Copilot being able to include new hands.

Naturally, I’ll be rolling out an update as soon as I can, hopefully by the end of the weekend.

Update: Contrary to what PokerStars announced, the hand history doesn’t seem to have changed at all. I worried for nought. So there is no imminent andimportant Poker Copilot update after all.

Create Your Own Big Shiny Download Button

A week or so ago I posted about Big Shiny Download buttons. The post was popular – ridiculously so, picked up by a popular aggregation site and linked to from several other blogs. It got 50 times more hits than any other of my blog entries. Sometimes this Internet thingy still surprises me.

Here’s the online tool I used to create the big shiny download button.

Got something positive to say about Poker Copilot?

I’m creating a testimonials section on our website to help prospective customers decide to try Poker Copilot. Would you like to help me build it? Then please e-mail me and tell me what you most like about Poker Copilot in a sentence or two.

Thanks!