Chris Cyvas

I’ve been pretty quiet lately. The jump from 2 kids to 3 is significant. For those of you with 2 kids thinking about 3 … let me pass on a little advice I received from my brother years ago:

“One is difficult because of the adjustment. Two is easier because they play together. Three is hectic, but four is absolute, f@#%ing chaos.”

I have found this advice to be pretty accurate. But I’m not going for 4 – that’s insanity!

There has been some good to come of the break I’ve taken though. I’ve been trying to figure out what has made dashCommerce so successful? This is not me being arrogant or all “check me out” – I am trying to figure out what the secret sauce is. By every measurable statistic I can put my fingers on, dashCommerce has become a great success and it’s moving even stronger than it has in the past. As I’ve mentioned before, there have been some good numbers from PayPal and I think the localization strategy has been well received. Also, we have more vendors over at dashCommerce.com offering up more providers – which confirms  that there is buy-in from the community for what we are delivering. There is value there for people.

Over the last two months I have been busy, just not much in the forums and I haven’t blogged in quite some time, but I have been working on things behind the scenes. Some has been overt – bug fixes and such into the main code branch, other work has been less obvious – check out my previous blog post. But I have been trying to take a hard look at what about dashCommerce has been successful, what hasn’t been successful, and where can I find the metrics to support my thoughts? I was checking out the international forums at dashCommerce.org – I usually don’t scroll this low in the screen – but I saw that we were approaching 20,000 registered users in the forums. I looked at that number in a generally unimpressed fashion, because, I figured, that it probably had always been around there. I couldn’t have been more wrong. You see, a lot of my impressions come from the “velocity of the forums”. There has been great satisfaction watching the forums die on Friday and come back to life Sunday evening / afternoon. Why? Because that tells me that, generally, people are not spending their weekend’s trying to get stuff to work. They are off enjoying their weekend! But the “velocity of the forums” does relate the frequency of questions and such. I was basing my impression on the feelings I had about that velocity.

But back to that 20,000 number … I got curious about that number as time went on, so I took a look at some of the other open source projects in the .NET space that have been around for a while, and what I found was that dashCommerce may be one of the most successful open source application projects in the .NET space. I was not prepared for that. The only one I could find that was bigger was DotNetNuke. Now, I am going based on forum membership only. Not exactly a great metric, but it does give you some insight.  So I dug a little deeper to see what the forum membership was when I took over the project in early 2007: 2,000 forum users – give or take a few, depending on what date you use. That means we have seen 20,000 users sign up since February 11, 2008. In 9 months we have signed up over 10X the amount of users as the CSK had in it’s entire history. That’s an impressive statistic, and one that I was entirely unprepared for.

So, I guess what I would like to know is – what do you like about dashCommerce? Why do you think it has been this successful? I really would like to hear from you because I would like to understand this better.

Thanks to everyone for making this such a success! (And a Special Thank You to Yitzchok and Naz!)