weekends are for leisure

Knocked out Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It book a few Saturdays ago. Of course, this got me thinking once-again about other ways I could make some money.

Flam Swiss is fulfilling, but since by choice I’m targetting the high school level, there’s not a whole lot of opportunity for making money. Or at least not that I’m seeing right now. Most schools don’t have the funds to pay for music, and even fewer high school students are able to donate or purchase.

Read something last week about making money from derivative projects, which are tools or explorations you may create to aid in finishing a real project for a client. I may have something like this, but nothing immediately springs to mind.

Still thinking.

Never Again

Some business advice, and why I’ll probably never start another company if I have to do the paperwork and bookkeeping myself. Yet another post where I try to put things behind me and reflect on things I’d prefer to do differently next time.

Be sure you have enough to cover your unavoidable expenses for two years:

• Accountant fees. Plan on $700 a year. Make that $1500 a year. My accountant was a personal friend and gave generous discounts.
• State business operating fees. $50-200 a year.
• City and County license fees. $50-200 a year.
• Bookkeeping software or web service. Quickbooks was roughly $300.

Either find someone to take care of the following, or be a person concerned with being on-time and crossing every T, who enjoys reading PDFs from your state’s Dept of Corporations and the IRS.

• Business registration paperwork
• Renewing your business yearly
• Bookkeeping
• Quarterly payroll and income taxes
• Yearly payroll and income taxes
• Printing and mailing W2s
• City and County registrations, if required

Some things that further complicated my experience owning my own business:

• Moving three times in two years, which required updating addresses on my FL business registration, my FL Unemployment account, with the IRS, with the City and the County. There are probably other agencies I should have updated my address with.
• I had my business partner talk with my accountant when I should have done so since they were a personal friend. Mis-communication led to me having to file late forms and paying penalties.
• Changed my business from a three member LLC to one.
• Had some clients at the start, but totally neglected the continuous need to be drumming up work. If I had prior experience (aka success) with acquiring new clients, Greaterscope would probably still be in business.
• When we ran out of clients I had to invest some of my own money into the business to pay fees.

Luckily we had no expenses other than City, County, State, Federal and Accountant fees. We bought no equipment, spent nothing on advertising, used my personal host for the website, didn’t hire a graphic designer. It’s also unfortunate that we had no money to do the previously mentioned things.

Some other things that added to the bad experience:

• Waiting for my Schedule K1, and business taxes to be completed before I could file my personal taxes.
• Not having sufficient design experience, and not knowing a designer whose sense of style matched mine.
• Choosing to develop a product too large for our resources.
• Having to do by-the-hour web development to pay the bills while said product was developed, when it wasn’t what we wanted to do. Nor did we have the resources to do it well enough.

Whew. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s over. However, I just got a Census survey form for my business in the mail. When will the business-related paperwork end?!

Bring the Background Noise

Think I listened to 8 Charlie Rose episodes yesterday while working. All of Michael Arrington’s (because I was curious), a few with Bill Gates and the newest with Jeff Bezos.

I think if I could trade places with any successful tech CEO/entrepreneur, it would be Jeff Bezos. He’s 100% likable, with tons of energy.

Charlie asked Jeff which qualities most helped him be successful and Jeff responded, “The willingness to be misunderstood. The willingness to fail. The willingness to be long-term oriented.”

Jeff also gave great advice about focusing on the things that won’t change in your business (or the world) any time in the near future. Customers will always want lower prices, and better customer service. So one should put tremendous amounts of energy into doing those well.

William Gates Sr. said of his son, regarding the characteristics that he thought most contributed to Bill’s success:

• Insatiable curiosity
• He remembers everything he reads

I couldn’t agree more. Nor could I be more jealous of those characteristics. With those qualities one’s exposure to the world would be so rich. It would provide the best possible vantage point for identifying problems that have yet to be sufficiently solved. Unfortunately, I have neither of those qualities, and in great supply.

Oh, I failed to say something about Michael Arrington’s appearances. The interviews were fine, but mostly about tech news of the day, which is of little value to me years later, or even a day later.

A Personal Touch

On Nov 11, I updated the survey system on Flam Swiss, my drumline cadence composition venture. In the process I also thought, I’ll dedicate the right side of the site to surveys, that way they won’t be missed, and visitors will know what to expect.

Well, this also means I removed my photo from the right-side of the site. It was on every page and sat just above the survey questions. It was a personal touch and was an instant clue as to who’s behind the site and the cadences. During the two days that the photo was removed I received no survey responses. There were 10-13 visitors during that time period so I expected to get at least 1 submission.

Last night I realized what I had done, added the photo back, and today somebody submitted answers to three questions. I’m not ruling out a pure coincidence, but I still think a personal touch is priceless.

Survey Experiments

With so much to learn about my target market for Flam Swiss, I’ve been making use of surveys to find out who my site visitors are.

Wufoo is great, but I only had 1 response when visitors were asked to visit a link in order to fill out my Wufoo survey form. When I decided to embed the Wufoo form directly in my webpage I got** 12 responses**. So much better! However, Wufoo wasn’t built to be used for surveys, and I found it difficult/impossible to match the embedded wufoo form to my site’s design.

There are many questions I want to ask my website visitors, and I’ll be adding more constantly, so I needed something different than a traditional form, where I can roll out questions as I think of them. Also:

• It needs to allow visitors to answer one question at a time (no need to answer all questions and then submit)
• Some questions should only show when a previous question is answered in a certain way

Being a programmer is both a blessing and a curse because I feel compelled to do everything myself. I wanted a simpler survey system, so rather than look for an existing solution and instead of trying to bend Wufoo to meet my needs, I created one myself in an evening: last night. You can see it here, on the right side of the site.

Conclusion

Even one click away is asking too much of your visitors. You shouldn’t ask people you have no prior relationship with to go out of their way in order to fill out a survey.

Worth noting: I haven’t been 100% methodical with my surveys. It looks like I took down the link to the wufoo form on September 6th, and I can only assume I put it up some time in the Spring of 2009. If it was up for 3-6 months, and I only got 1 response, that’s not good. Granted, I was only averaging about 4 visit per week for that period, and now I’m getting somewhere around 10.

Minimum Viable Product and Letters of Intent

I really liked this case study outlining new approaches to gleaning customer feedback, developing a software product that customers actually want, and trying to lock in customers that will actually pay for what you create.

The gist is:

• That they created screenshots (in photoshop) of their not-yet-existent application so they could walk through the functionality and workflow with potential customers.
• According to the feedback they gleaned through multiple meetings, they refined their screenshots.
• They didn’t start writing code until they had two signed Letters of Intent (a non-binding intent to purchase, with some stipulations), which were negotiated during the third meeting with potential customers.

The Letter of Intent is an attempt to weed out those that won’t ever purchase your product. But really, if you’re able to_ actually land 3 meetings_ with a prospective client that gives good feedback for your product, it’s a good day and the LOI might not be necessary.

One might not think so, but I imagine an LOI would (and should) be quite enticing to customers and not just the software developer. Especially so if the LOI provides the customer with free use of the app until some date, which is akin to a demo or a 30-day money-back guarantee. They’re very enticing.

Is there a case where a customer would invest the time to give feedback, only to balk at forking out real money? Maybe if they thought all along that they would be rewarded for their efforts with free use of the product. If this is the case, then the LOI didn’t do it’s job. The LOI should clue them in that what you want are paying customers. So if they manage to hold on to the hope of a freebie for that long, I smell miscommunication.** **Or maybe the customer signing the LOI is super generous and merely want to help you out … possible, but not likely. And really, I imagine feedback from this type of person might do you more harm than good. You should be soliciting them for feedback in order to create something that people can’t wait to pay you for. And I guess if you can’t find anyone to participate in this sort of feedback + LOI arrangement, then maybe you’re not solving any real problem.

From the article:

“The LOI was also useful as we leveraged it by approaching the competitor of one of those who signed by simply letting them know that their competitor will be using our app.  They returned our cold intro email within 8 mins.”

This is an interesting approach too, though I’m not entirely comfortable with this because it seems alarmist, as if you’re saying:

“Your competitor is going to have a leg-up on you, what are you going to do about it?! Of course, if you phrase it differently, it might be more ethical. But I suspect you shouldn’t mention that a competitor is involved at all.

I see nothing wrong with telling the prospectives that the app is “in development” even though you haven’t written any code. I consider spending lots of time getting the whole user experience right to be equivalent to throwing together a prototype that’s nothing more than a demo of your app. Prototypes are meant to be scrapped and rewritten. I guess you could still argue that you should be writing real, production code from the start. So hey, if you enjoy backtracking and reworking things repeatedly as requirements change, go ahead.

Quoting the article:

“Right now, the app itself is pretty ugly, a bit buggy and slow — and doesn’t even do a lot.  It is borderline embarrassing.  Don’t get me wrong, it does the few necessary things.  BUT it definitely does NOT have the super-duper-hyper-ultra-cool Web 2.0 spit and polish about it. Interestingly enough, our ratio of positive comments to negative comments from actual users is about 10 to 1.”

This speaks to the success that can be had from getting customer feedback early on and I assume it also says they implemented the “requirements” correctly.

Another quote:

“The LOI was designed to give us hard, non-bullshit-able feedback instantly.  Too often people will affirm your idea so that you (or they) can save face, which BTW is a form of well-intentioned and socially acceptable deception.  This is why, IMHO, friends, wives, and significant others are probably not good people to talk to about your idea.  At the end of the day, no one knows if the idea is any good.  The market will tell you.”

Unfortunately, nothing is 100% non-bullshit-able. But it seems you could get close to 100% with the tactics they used. Not just the LOI, but:

• Three meetings
• The showing of continuous progress/refinement
• Making customers feel like they have a say
• Making sure you’re building something that benefits them
• Making sure they’re aware that it will.

Are there any other missing pieces?

This is a question posed on Hacker News regarding the article:

“If I were one of your prospects, I would never sign a letter of intent based on drawings only. I’d make you come back later with something, anything I could play with … Come back when you have something real to show. Until then you’re no different from any other poser.”

This is no doubt something a programmer would be concerned about. But this seems irrational to me. A programmer should know the value of good up-front design, even if that’s not their preferred method of development. I wouldn’t hide the fact that you’re dealing with screenshots from this type of lead. But if they’re still turned off, place this person in your second-wave lead list, and contact them once they can be convinced of legitimacy.

Moving on

The newest news is that I’m no longer working on my storefront software. If I could get back all the time and energy I spent on the project, I’m not sure that I would, because I’d no doubt make the same mistakes elsewhere, on another project.

Of course, some post-mortem advice is product-specific, but here’s what I’ve learned and what I plan to look out for in the future.

1. Never underestimate the breadth and depth required of an ecommerce product.

2. Never go it alone in trying to compete with teams of people. The best abstractions and architecture won’t give you enough of a leg-up. Playing catch-up is still playing catch-up.

3. If your innovation makes up only a small piece of the pie, don’t waste your time making the rest of the pie. Be smart and stand on someone else’s shoulders!

4. Don’t get bogged down by ideologies about tools and architecture if you are not selling tools or architecture. I spent a lot of time creating my own abstractions, refining my tools, tweaking my architecture, because I thought they were better. My tools and abstractions have no user base to speak of so they were useless as an enticement to customers. I was trying to kill two birds with one stone:

   “See, my tools are great .. look at the robust application I built with them! Do you want to buy my product?” It is possible nobody was enticed because I SUCK at taking a product from prototype to “this apps looks great, functions great, I gotta have it!” If you don’t have that quality, find someone that does, or find a product you can make that doesn’t require this quality, or stick to pay-by-the-hour software development.

What were my innovations?

Here’s where I spill the beans. Briefly.

Layers on top of the core

All base functionality resides in core classes. Developers can make their changes in classes that extend the core. If you need to customize the logic that does X, implement your own methods that are involved in doing X. This extensibility was baked in from the start.

Every bit of text can be multi-lingual

The product table, which contained non-text data, was accompanied by a productTranslation table. Fields:

id, productId, languageId, title, description, ETC Repeat this structure for product options, categories, stores, and so on.

Product option combinations

A product can have any number of options (small, red, medium), which are grouped (color, size). Every combination of these can have its own price:

Small, red shirt: $15 Small, blue shirt: $14 Medium, red shirt: $14 Medium, blue shirt: not available

Tables: option (“Small”, in the “Color” group), option_combination (joins option to combination), combination (holds the price)

The logic required to make this all work was very tricky, but now it’s stable and robust. Alas …

…….

That’s all folks. Thanks for reading. And as always, feel free to contact me with questions, or if you want to give me money.

Another Exposé

Self-doubt has struck again. I’ve spent more than two years building this “thing”. But please don’t tell anybody because it’s a little embarrassing. Why?

• Because you often hear 6 months as the longest amount of time a startup should spend on a project for it to be considered “worthwhile”. I’ve spent more than 2 years. 37signals suggests an even shorter turnaround time of 1-3 months.
• Because I don’t have a network of people lined up to buy.
• Because I haven’t worked out exactly how to find the people that need what I’ve built.
• Because sometimes I wish I’d spent my time working on something more original.

At first I didn’t know what I wanted this product to be. Initially I thought about making a “set of reusable ecommerce components”, but what the hell does that mean? And how would that work, exactly? I don’t know. Eventually I decided I wanted to tackle multi-lingual functionality, and allow products to have an unlimited number of options that affect the product’s price.

Once I came up with a way to enable 100% multi-lingual coverage on the storefront as well as in the administrative area, and a way to support flexible pricing rules, I figured I might as well roll my ideas into a full-fledged shopping cart product. It seemed like a natural thing to do since it was inspired by frustrations with existing shopping carts. But what I probably should have done was find a simpler way to make money from my solutions. Something that didn’t require re-inventing a huge piece of software would have been ideal.

It might be possible to offer standalone components that can be plugged together to build a more feature-complete shopping cart product, but that’s tough work. Or maybe I could somehow package my multi-lingual functionality into something others could use for their websites and web apps. Either one would certainly be more niche, but probably not any more marketable than what I’ve got right now. Some combination of both is what I’m still searching for.

Here You Go

Caterina Fake included a quote from a friend on her post about Hunch. It goes like this. “If you launch something you’re not at all embarrassed by, then you’ve waited too long.” Hunch is a free web app, not a commercial product, so that advice probably doesn’t apply to what I’m doing. And no doubt, the Business of Software forum advice-givers would advise against what I’m about to do, but I’m going to do it anyway. What am I about to do? I’m going to post a public demo of my shopping cart software…

The product doesn’t feel ready (I’m a constant tinkerer) and it doesn’t look the greatest. You probably won’t mistake it for shit based on the design alone (layout, colors), but it still has a slight odor.

I’ve written a few blog posts saying “I’m still making progress” and “something visible is coming, hang tight”, but I don’t want to do that anymore. I want feedback. I want to give people the ability to decide whether they’re interested by giving them something to look at. Text flying solo will always fail to persuade and entice.

So check it. I set up an admin area and 1 styled store. The password to each is “yessir”.

Be constructive with your feedback. - Rhymenocerous