This post welcomes and is dedicated to:
- Your business successes
- Small business anecdotes
- Lessons learned
- Unfortunate events
- Unofficial AMAs
- Links to outstanding educational materials (with explanations and/or an extract of the content)
In this post, share your small business experience, successes, failures, AMAs, and lessons learned. Week of December 9, 2019 /r/smallbusiness is one of a very few subs where people can ask questions about operating their small business. To let that happen the main sub is dedicated to answering questions about subscriber’s own small businesses.
Many people also want to talk about things which are not specific questions about their own business. We don’t want to disappoint those subscribers and provide this post as a place to share that content without overwhelming specific and often less popular simple questions.
This isn’t a license to spam the thread. Business promotion and free giveaways are welcome only in the Promote Your Business thread. Thinly-veiled website or video promoting posts will be removed as blogspam.
Discussion of this policy and the purpose of the sub is welcome at https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/ana6hg/psa_welcome_to_rsmallbusiness_we_are_dedicated_to/
**Success creating a simpler software installer**
I wanted to streamline the process for our clients to do their own installations of software products that we resell. The product vendors’ installers require a number of manual steps I wanted to eliminate. Fewer steps mean our customers can do the installations on their own, saving time for them and us. We expect to have happier customers and fewer support calls.
Today I successfully used the free, open source program, Inno Setup, to create an installer - a single file our customers could download and run by themselves to install third-party software. To keep it from presenting annoying extra windows, I needed to use a code signing certificate.
Ours is not a big operation, so cost is important. I found GoGetSSL had the lowest pricing for an EV code signing certificate. They resell subscriptions to DigiCert, a major certificate company, at a discount, but they and others wanted $120 extra for a required USB device. I found a small reseller offering a Safenet device for $43.
The process for getting the code-signing software to work was *not* simple. After creating two online accounts, downloading multiple applications, configuring the software, reformatting the Safenet USB device, adding a strong password, and multiple modifications of an Inno Setup file, I finally got it working!
We now have a simpler installer that our customers can use themselves.