Phil's Development Journal

2009-10-06T21:33:00.002Z

Woman's Day

BudgetSimple (and myself) were mentioned as one of the top websites for saving you money in this month's issue of Woman's Day magazine! On newsstands today :).

2009-09-21T12:11:00.002Z

Facebook Advertising

Just on a lark I tried out creating a page for my business (BudgetSimple) on Facebook. The experience is very interesting. The concept is that instead of just providing a link you create a way to express their use of your product by "Becoming a fan" of your company. Facebook also offers a very simple "AdWords"-like way of advertising to the Facebook community, where they can not only visit your website, but also rate the quality of your ad or become a fan.

I have not had phenomenal success as yet with this form of advertising, but one thing that sets it apart from Google is the demographic data you receive. Unlike Google, Facebook knows every last detail about a person, including age, sex, etc... and provides you a rather nice breakdown of this. Of course it's probably skewed by the age generation that uses Facebook, but even my 60 year old father is on Facebook at this point so it's probably not that far off. Definitely worth a try if you are an mISV looking for new creative advertising routes.

2009-08-20T12:06:00.003Z

Pretty much the worst way to start your day is to find out that AdSense, which makes up a large portion of your business is randomly not showing. As bloggers like Patrick know, getting in contact with Google when they mysteriously wave their god-like hand at you is almost impossible. Luckily I know people who physically work in the AdSense dept so hopefully I can get a real human being to tell me what's going on (I've received no mail from Google).

2009-06-09T12:05:00.002Z

New AdWords Interface

I'm pretty unimpressed with the new interface, I don't really understand how to use it, and it's so AJAX to the max that when my connection was running slow everything started breaking. How do others feel about this new interface?

2009-06-01T04:14:00.003Z

Changing Business Models

It's as usual been a long time since I've posted so I figured I was due for an update. I'm still around and working hard on two main projects. The first is BudgetSimple, which has continued to grow as one of the most popular free online budgets in the net. Since the big 2.0 upgrade that made the project "AJAX to the max!" I've been working on a 2.5 version that should monetize some of the interest in the project, while still keeping my goal of providing a useful free budget.

Besides that, Used Cars On-Line is undergoing a slight change in business models. Since it's inception as one of the first sites for used cars on the Internet in 1995, it's been exclusively for cars "for sale by owner". While I always thought this was a great little niche, Craigslist pretty much cannibalized what small market segment there existed for people who didn't want to buy from dealers. I know many people don't mind buying from dealer and in fact some people only buy from dealerships, so in the coming weeks I'll be offering dealer feeds in addition to FSBO ads in hopes of growing interest in the site. There is always considerably more dealer inventory out there then private owners, so this requires a pretty substantial update in terms of search on the site. I'll post again when it's live to get the software business community's feedback.

2009-02-05T13:06:00.002Z

New Version, bad dreams

After about a month and a half of beta testing, I did a violent switcheroo for users of BudgetSimple on Sunday. I love the new version of the site, and there has been positive feedback as well as some negative feedback for the dramatic change. I wish there was a way to ease people into the new version, but the difference between the original one I wrote in a weekend, and this one which I spent months on is dramatic.

Oddly, I had a dream last night that Google was making an online budget app... it's interesting to subconsciously worry about competition for something I make no money on.

Used Cars On-Line is also experiencing a large uptick in traffic, I guess I specialize in sites that are popular in a down economy!

2008-10-16T12:17:00.003Z

I decided to enter back into the world of Apple yesterday, by purchasing one of the new MacBooks (I was the biggest Mac lover from 1992-2000). It was basically my first time in the Apple store as a consumer, and I had brought 3 other friends in with me that wanted to buy MacBooks. Let me say I was a little underwhelmed.

Apple basically had $8k in sales right there ready to be purchased, but we were told that they would't sell any MacBooks without a personal shopping appointment. I was pretty much ready to give up right then and there because the whole idea of needing an appointment for them to scan a box at the register is ridiculous. Especially since there were plenty of "geniuses" around that could help you buy anything else. So reluctantly I made an appointment for later in the day.

And when I came back for my appointment....they were sold out of the model I wanted.

I think that pretty much ends my short time as an Apple Store customer.

2008-04-08T11:52:00.002Z

From the "You Gotta Be Able to Take Hate Mail If You're On the Internet Dept"...

For some reason this email cracked me up this morning. I get things like this every now and then:

So far as I can see, this is the most miserable site on the internet. How would I go about looking for ads for Toyota Siennas within, say 1200 miles of New Mexico?

Most miserable site on the Internet! That's pretty impressive IMO!

2008-03-28T01:59:00.002Z

Lesson Learned? + New Employee!

Ok, so like a year ago, I announced that ChimSoft was finished...but I still left the website up, and heck, I wouldn't turn down someone that wanted it. But I did zero marketing, and zero development during that time. People however, kept inquiring about it and purchasing it. So far this year I've sold more of ChimSoft then ever. Up until now, I'd even been turning down tons of sales because people insisted on talking on the phone, and it just wasn't worth it to me to deal with phone sales and support.

So...I've decided to start supporting and selling it again, with a twist. First, my partners in SearTech wanted to shut the company down, they had no interest in continuing with ChimSoft or putting the time in. So we agreed that my mISV would buy the intellectual property and SearTech would go away. So sometime this month ChimSoft will officially be a 2see Technology product.

Ok...but these people want phone sales? Yeah. So now I have 3 products to support, and it seems like phone sales and support would be useful for all of them. So my wife is officially a 2see Technology employee now! I'll be launching the 800 number by the end of the week, and hope this will help all business grow and provide better support for customers, as she will also take on email support.

This blog address is not really relevant anymore, so I'll probably be moving it, and lets face it, I haven't been the best blogger as of late. I saw something about the mISV "class of 2007" recently, and it's hard to believe this blog has been around since 2005, time really flies!

2008-03-04T03:41:00.002Z

New House/Corporate Headquarters

On an un-mISV related note (but hey Real Estate is business), I recently purchased a pretty house in my new home of Pittsburgh

A positive for my mISV, this SFH in the hip part of the city cost much less then my small townhouse I had in the suburbs of DC :)

2008-02-03T17:33:00.000Z

Walking down the cost of AdWords

So January was my first experiment into the mISV world of advertising through AdWords. Technically I had used these previously for ChimSoft, but clicks for "chimney sweep software" cost me almost nothing, and I was already number one for all of my search terms.

I began the month somewhat confounded by AdWords. I put in 5 and 10 cent bids, which Google estimated would give me some clicks for, and yet never would I get any clicks or impressions. Google told me to up my bid. So I upped it to 20 cents a click, and still they told me to up my bid. It was looking like AdWords would not be a feasible source of advertising for budget software.

So just to see it work, I upped my price per click to 50 cents! Sure enough, this got the clicks rolling in, but obviously I was hitting my meager daily budget by about 9am each day.

I then tried some new keywords, but kept the original ones running at 50 cents a click for a while until my click through ratio was quite high. Then I decided to start lowering the cost per click. 45 cents got me around the same amount of clicks. 40 cents started getting more more clicks for my budget... I kept this up, each day lowering the price I was paying per click. Until I was finally down to 10 cents per click, which was basically my original bid. The difference now however, is that I was receiving tons of clicks. My overall position was slightly lower then when I was at 50 cents a click, but my impressions and total clicks were significantly more.

I believe what happened here is that Google had assigned me a high quality score based on the CTR at the higher price. Since my ad was "valuable" I've then been able to take the price down significantly. This may be a helpful tip for those who are continually told by Google to raise their bids. We'll see how it does this month.

2008-01-20T21:23:00.000Z

Vista

I finally upgraded my primary development PC. I decided to get the most expandable PC that would last me quite a while, so I opted for a Dell XPS. The only problem with XPS is that they only come with Vista. That's fine I thought, I could use a Vista system to test with... this is the future of Windows.

Overall Vista isn't as bad as people have made out. It is EXTREMELY frustrating to use out of the box, for those that are long time Windows Power Users. Just getting it to find a WinXP share on the network from my old PC took forever. Everyone whines about the parade of warnings, but with one click UAC is easily turned off.

The biggest problem I had with Vista is that Visual Studio 2003 (my primary dev environment) does not run on Vista. I think I had heard this, but didn't remember. So this weekend was spent upgrading to 2005 (which I preferred as a dev environment anyway), and changing my installers to check for .NET 2.0. I think .NET 2.0 now is at least as installed as .NET 1.1 was when I started ChimSoft, so I'm reasonably comfortable requiring it. Also 2.0 comes pre-installed with Vista.

So my planned 1.1 release is a little delayed, but I hope to have it out by the end of the week. It's the first release that had some "tricky" problems to solve.

I've also been playing with AdWords, and see why people obsess about this so much. Is it better to have 11% CTR on a cheap keyword, or 3% CTR on an expensive keyword? I'm trying to find the right balance of clicks to money spent, with conversions being the major factor.

2007-12-29T02:27:00.000Z

First Sale!

I'm not sure I really expected a sale until after New Years because:

a) Version 1.0 doesn't do that much
b) No marketing yet besides some small AdWords tests.
c) I just noticed some bugs that could really put off new users
d) It's Christmas time, so no one is buying.

But on Christmas Eve someone bought the first copy. I'll take that as a promising sign given the above facts.

I'll be working hard all weekend to try to market the New Years Resolution angle and fix some of the small problems, and hopefully get out a major feature or two.

2007-12-15T17:06:00.001Z

Released!

Well, technically I released version 1.0 of BudgetSimple for Windows last Sunday night. But being the bad blogger that I am, I haven't found the time to post about it. I decided to just release early. It didn't have quite all the features I wanted, but it seemed pretty bug free and functional, so I figured I might as well get the search engine juice flowing, and start getting feedback.

I started by just adding a link from BudgetSimple.com, and then sent an email to the top 20 most frequent users of the online version. From there I gathered my list of over 5,000 BudgetSimple users, and emailed some of those that stopped using it a long time ago.

To get feedback/bug testing, I approached it like this. Everyone can download the trial, and if you want a free copy, just write back with any feedback at all. I figured only people who like the software will bother writing back, and plus they would give me hopefully valuable feedback.

I've emailed about 2% of my users to far and I have to admit the results couldn't be better. Quite a few people took me up on my offer, and had great things to say about the new version. A few people reported bugs, and did a really great job about helping me track them down. Compared to Chimney Sweeps, this group of users is much easier to work with. It seems most of BudgetSimple's users are mothers, people with debt, and housewives. Which is a pretty broad spectrum of people, but it's a group you might stereotype as being computer illiterate, but so far every user has been very savvy and helpful. I've ended up releases 4 minor bug fix releases. I plan a minor feature release in two weeks.

I also started an AdWords campaign, just to test the water. As I posted over at BoS, it didn't seem like it was working at all, but now I think Google's display is just broken. I can see that I am getting impressions and clicks from my Account Snapshot, but the campaign pages still show zero impressions. This weekend I hope to get the BudgetSimple blog back up and maybe have a nice post written.

I also put out a PAD file. I found this to be fairly useless in the past, but I have a feeling I just need to play with it more. And yes, I've already won many awards from the download sites ;P.

If you want to try this early version, and get some free budget software, you are welcome to download it yourself, and feedback gets a free license! :)

2007-12-05T12:40:00.000Z

Update

I've began what I like to call "friends and family beta testing" on the desktop edition of BudgetSimple. That means it's pretty much ready to go to a general audience, but I want to make sure there's nothing horribly wrong with the program, so I have people I know, but who may not be interested in the software, install it. A couple of bugs and suggestions have been found so far, but it looks like I'll be ready for a first round of beta testers this weekend.

Those of you following the schedule may notice that's about two weeks beyond my original goal. Luckily there was no real reason for my goal except a month seemed interesting. I do find that software projects are usually easy to complete the first 80%, and then the last 20% drags on for a while. I think this is probably because developers do the easy or fun things first, and then take on the big challenges at the end. I've made sure to drop anything for this version that I thought isn't absolutely essential for version 1.0. It kills me to hear the stories of people taking YEARS to write their 1.0 product, but then again they are usually writing much more complicated software.

This week I added the least important "Must have" feature to the app, the license key system. I spent about an hour on it, so obviously I'm not too concerned about cracks, I just want to motivate people to buy the software. I don't believe most people are capable of finding cracked software, and if they do, I'm happy they can balance their budget and maybe be able to buy something in the future ;).

I expect the beta test to take about a week, during which I should start on the website, and e-commerce portion of things. My absolute drop dead goal for this to all be working is Christmas. I have a feeling a lot of people make New Years resolutions about having a balanced budget.

2007-11-28T04:39:00.000Z

Micosoft and UI Standards

In my last post I talked about how school doesn't really teach "How to make a Windows Program". Microsoft has however done extensive usability testing over the years, and has laid down many documents explaining how to make Windows programs use those standards, so that anyone who uses a Windows application has a familiar feel.

Oddly, Microsoft's latest app, the Zune player, seems to copy a little too much from Apple. When Apple first started creating iTunes for Windows, they made it look and act like a Mac app (but not in a good way), and it was absolutely horrible and confusing to use on Windows. The first Zune player that came out was refreshingly easier to use then the early versions of iTunes. However, the latest incarnation, while pretty, doesn't seem to adhere to many standards of Windows:

Where's the title bar to click and drag here?

And don't get me started on IE7 with it's "Menu in the middle".

The point of this post is when it comes to Windows applications, don't put beauty over function. If you want your app to be accessable to all users, keep it simple, make it feel familiar, and then gussy up the things around it.

Here's the latest dev shot of BudgetSimple btw:

Hopefully it's starting to look a little better. The positioning isn't final at this point. The main screen is very specific in it's purpose. I don't expect to make help files for version 1.0, so I'm trying to make everything easy beyond explanation.

I've started using FogBugz OnDemand for this project. It's much easier to keep track of your thoughts and have a sense of accomplishment if you write down something in FogBugz as soon as you think it, and resolve the issue when you take care of it. My only complaint is FogBugz runs a little slow (don't know if its the connection or my slow old laptop choking on the ajax).

2007-11-25T22:34:00.000Z

Tools I'm Using

Well the mISV challenge is chugging along. It did get derailed by the Thanksgiving holiday, so I'm a little behind schedule. I still plan on starting the beta test this week.

To keep this interesting though, I thought I'd detail what I'm using for this project.

First, I'm using C# with Visual Studio 2003. Which kind of contradicts some earlier posts of mine that suggest using VB.NET for speed of development, and the latest version of .NET, because people don't mind updating. While I mostly still agree with those points, I'm semi limited in my current dev environment until I move, and I only have VS 2003 on this computer. I don't really need any of the .NET 2.0 features for this project, so using 1.1 will result in less downloads for my users. However, C# is much more fun in VS 2005.

To keep things simple, I decided to use Patrick's idea for Drop-Dead Simple Updating for my updates. In ChimSoft, I used a nifty Web service I made that determined if an update was needed, but I decided to get even more simple for this one. Although I probably will eventually make the updater more complicated.

Although it's just me developing by myself, I am using Subversion for source control. It's amazing to me how some people still don't quite get how important the concept of source control is.

I'll probably be using the Infragistics graphics package I bought for ChimSoft, as well as the pretty nice icon pack I received as well.

Stay tuned, hopefully tommorow I'll have a beta out there!

2007-11-20T04:33:00.000Z

How do you design a Windows App?

Ever since I was in high school, all I really wanted to know how to do was write the programs I use on my computer (back then it was games). So I went to school for Computer Science, and you know what, not a single class showed me how to write a Windows program.

Eventually, after a lot of searching I found some stuff online and some books that showed me how to write programs for Windows in C++ and MFC. I remember spending a whole weekend or two cranking out C++ to produce a crappy Blackjack program. Well now, I could probably make that same program in about 3 hours with C#, but still at no point in my professional career was I ever shown "how" one should make a Windows app.

So here I am making my third windows app (second that I'd be putting for sale), and although I've become better aquainted with the standards and ways of Windows apps, I still probably don't do things "the right way". So here is how I set about making my app.

First, I think about the design. What's going to power the app? Will it need a database? What's the general look and feel? Once I have a general idea about that, I start dragging controls onto a blank form to get a basic feel for the app. This is what I had around Tuesday of last week:

Ugly as all heck, but most of the functionality is actually there. It probably even looks worse then your typical windows app because I am trying to maintain a consistent UI to the current website my users are used to. Keep that ugly look in mind on Friday when I show the screenshots with the UI prettyfied.

So once I have the basic layout, I start throwing down all the code. I get the app doing all the features I want for version 1.0. I'll make sure to add in some basic error checking, but its still pretty much bug filled.

Once the program basically works, I go back and make it look pretty. Now it's starting to feel like a real application. At that point, I'm motivated enough to really starting hitting it hard for bugs. The last two paragraphs should all come together this week.

2007-11-19T04:22:00.000Z

Back in Action

Well the Internet is all happy and working again here, so I'll try to post regularly this coming week. As I mentioned in my last post, I've got the basics working in BudgetSimple - Desktop (still need a good name for this). I didn't do any developing from Thursday-Sunday, so it hasn't progressed much from there, however since I was ahead of schedule I don't think that will hurt my goal of a beta by this weekend any. Thanksgiving may hurt it being a successful beta, since many people may be away from their computers, but hey it's also that time of year that people realize Christmas shopping is making them broke! I'll post some screenshots of my progress tomorrow, and hopefully get some serious developing in tomorrow night. Unless Maryland upsets UCLA...

In other business news, it appears AdSense is finally taking it's Winter hibernation. Perhaps due to Global Warming, I was continuing to get my summer month eCPM on my used cars site into November, and was making record profits for this time of year, however it appears to be going back down again. Also, sometime back I spent considerable time reworking the site to be more search engine friendly. I added a site map and started using mod-rewrite to make every page have it's on URL. Turns out it was only working this way when you searched via form, which of course Google doesn't do. And every page had the same title.... so I fixed all that this weekend, and hopefully PageRank will jump up a little.

2007-11-13T22:29:00.000Z

Slight Road Bump

There is a little problem I encountered with my "MicroISV Challenge 2007", my Internet at my new place stopped working. I almost wrote a post about how awesome Verizon is for UPS'ing me a DSL modem in 2 days, and I plugged it in and it worked. I was on the Internet all weekend, and then Monday evening I came home to no DSL. I called Verizon and because my "official date" is Nov 16th, they can't do anything to help...I'm like "clearly it physically works, just turn it on and bill me!". But whatever.

Luckily this project isn't a web app, and I am still well on schedule if not ahead of schedule in my development of BudgetSimple's desktop edition. It doesn't look pretty yet (and probably won't til week 2), but it does almost everything the online version of BudgetSimple does already! So unfortunately I probably won't be providing the daily updates THIS week (I'm at a Panera currently...glorious Panera with their free Internet).

2007-11-11T22:39:00.000Z

The Great MicroISV Challenge 2007

I recently mentioned my move to Pittsburgh to begin a new job. I also recently mentioned that I plan on developing a desktop version of my popular free online budgeting program. I've decided to combine the two events into something I'd like to call "The Great mISV Challenge".

Similar to short time table Patrick had when he created his Bingo software, I decided to use the situation I'm in currently for some hard core developing.

The challenge is this: Starting tonight, I will begin developing version 1.0 of BudgetSimple - Desktop (coming up with a better name may be part of this). I'm literally staring at a blank Visual Studio window now with nothing written. My goal is to have version 1.0 out and selling in exactly one month. I'll lay out my schedule in a little more detail later in this post.

Why do this now and in this way?

One of the caveats with moving to Pittsburgh is that I still have a house to sell in the DC area, so I'm temporarily renting in the city. This means a couple of things, first my wife and friends are not here, so my time is my own, I'm currently living a spartan bachelor life, so if I stay up until 2am eating Potato chips and drinking Jack Daniels to get this done, no one will care. I also have no chores for the most part since I'm in a bare little apartment. My only current time sink is playing soccer once a week. Another nice thing about my new job is that it's a 10 minute WALK to work, so even if I put in a 10 hour day, I still have tons of time to work on this project.

All of this will of course change as I get into the thick of things at work, our house sells, etc... So I think this is a great time to bang out this project, while at the same time hopefully providing some more interesting blog posts to this recently sedentary blog.

How exactly do you plan on doing this in a month?

Well actually I plan on doing it in two weeks. One nice thing about this mISV is it's not entirely from the ground up. I already have over 5,000 users of BudgetSimple that can potentially be beta testers. I hope to have a beta in their hands within two weeks, leaving the other two weeks for bug fixes and marketing. I also have a general idea of the functionality and a lot of the code to make it happen. I also have lots of tools left over from my other mISV project (which took a year to develop if you're looking for a good comparison), so the expenses should be minimal as I already have icons, IDE, obfuscators, etc...

What are the biggest stumbling blocks you see?

Well, the biggest is the actual selling of the program. Sure BudgetSimple is the #1 search result for a popular term on Google, but unfortunately that term is "free online budget". This program is neither free nor online. There are lots of people making budgeting software that cost money already. I hope to draw in users of the free BudgetSimple with a more powerful offline version (that will also integrate with the online one).

Another big stumbling block is my current development environment. I'm going to do this almost entirely on my laptop. While that laptop is awesome for travel (being a 3lb tablet PC), it's specs are really weak (the laptop is the first gen tablet pc from like 5 years ago), so I could see myself being able to run a few laps around the block waiting for a build.

OK so what should we expect here?

Tonight I will work almost entirely on the design of the program, by Monday the basic look and structure should be there, by Wednesday it should have at least the functionality of the current BudgetSimple. And by the end of the week it should contain some of the newer features that people have requested. The following week I'll work on upgrading the online version, and get the synchronization of the two versions worked out.

Any questions, doubt, etc? I hope to post at least once a day to update the status of everything, wish me luck!

2007-11-08T01:17:00.000Z

.NET Download Size

I'm surprised I still hear this as such an issue on the software boards. It is of course not ideal that most Windows PCs are not running the latest version of .NET, and that your 3MB app will require a 25MB download for someone to use it.

But when I sell/sold software to Chimney Sweeps, despite sweeps being one of the least tech savvy audiences, I never once heard a complaint about this.

iTunes, arguably one of the most popular pieces of software out there, feels the need to update with a 60MB install every two weeks.

.NET in my opinion, is one the things Microsoft actually got right. It does stink that half the people who download your product will get a larger download, but 25MB is really nothing these days. Especially when given the productivity gains.

I bring this up because I am going to begin work on the desktop version of BudgetSimple in the coming weeks. I again evaluated other potential development platforms, but wanted to learn from my own past and go with what I know.

Whatever framework you want to use will make little difference to your customer. Just make sure you make it seamless. So make your installer automatically download .NET or Java.

2007-10-29T17:54:00.000Z

It's been a while since posting! A large reason for that is I recently took a job with a very cool tech startup in Pittsburgh. So with all that going on, and getting ready to move from DC, etc... I haven't had a great deal of time to dedicate to my mISV besides regular maintenance. However, once the move is complete, I think I'll find myself in a much better position to dedicate more time to my mISV.

Real quick, why Pittsburgh? Well DC has a smoking hot tech scene, but unfortunately 98% of the companies out there do government contract work. Living in DC all my life, I've had way more then my share of work relating to the government, and even though they all pay really well, the work is boring. Pittsburgh isn't famous for it's tech market, but what tech is happening there is very exciting. With Carnegie Mellon University fighting MIT for the crown of best tech school, there are a lot of interesting startups in the area. Google and Microsoft are both recruiting hard core. But after four years of government work, I wanted to work somewhere without a huge bureaucracy.

One of the other cool things about Pittsburgh, is it's one of the few cities (if not the only one) on the east coast to feature all the "special" features of Google maps, including the street view, where you can virtually walk the streets of the city. And the public transportation mapping mode, which takes all the mysteries out of traveling by bus.

So the corporate headquarters for my business is relocating! But there are some exciting things on the horizon. First, I will finally market Tripzard and polish it off some. Next, I plan on expanding on the success of BudgetSimple by making a cheap downloadable version. It won't be free like the web version, but I still plan to make it reasonable. Also, although I've argued in the past about going fulltime on my mISV, the super low cost of living in Pittsburgh certainly makes that all the more a reality if I decide to do that.

2007-09-14T13:40:00.000Z

Tripzard Logo

Once again, I can't recommend enough www.logodesigncreation.com's work. They turn around ideas quickly, and make modifications with no hassle. Since Tripzard is my fun hobby, I wanted the logo to be fun too, and not professional looking at all.

Here's the final one I decided on:

I think it goes with the color theme I wanted, and it implies the travel/wizard idea I was going for. The semi-subtle lizard shape in the globe comes from the fact that some people were hearing "Lizard" when I said TripZard. So I think it's funny to keep the confusion going ;).

2007-09-10T15:12:00.000Z

Preview of My Pet/Hobby Project

Well, I keep stalling on the release of this project I've been devoting a few hours to a week for the past few months. It definitely still needs some work, but I thought maybe giving a preview of the idea here will motivate me to finish it up.

Not listening to my own advice, I decided to work on this project using PHP, which I've used maybe a 10th as much as .NET languages. The thing I love about PHP is that it's lightweight. The laptop I typically travel with is one of those 3 pound tablet PCs, which is great to travel with, but not so great to compile a program with. Visual Studio barely runs on the thing. The thing I don't like about PHP is that it's not as organized/readable as C#. It's much more natural to be object oriented with C# since the code is removed from the design. But I love that it's lightweight, and all you need is a text editor.

Ok, so onto the project. I love to travel. I love Geography/Geopolitics (I even double majored Geography in college). After ChimSoft, I really wanted to work on something I enjoyed and understood thoroughly. Sometime last spring my wife and I were trying to figure out somewhere we could go on vacation. Oddly enough, there is nothing/almost nothing out there on the web that will recommend a place for you in an unbiased way. Almost every site assumes you know where you want to go first. Well, most American's knowledge of world geography is limited to "The Iraq", Cancun, and Punta Cana. So there are all these really great places to vacation that no one even considers.

Well that was the idea I had going into this project. I would dig up a bunch of potential vacation spots from around the world, and make a wizard to help you figure out where you should go. I was particularly inspired by a site called FindYourSpot.com, that I stumbled across a few years ago and thought was neat.

By far, the hardest thing to do was research all these places, get unbiased opinions, and make some sort of rating for that place. I'd say the research behind this took about 80% of the time, and the creation of the site took the other 20%.

So please check out the site, http://www.Tripzard.com, and let me know if the results "feel" right.

I've found the results from family members have been pretty good so far. Adding more content is the next step. Right now almost all of the text content is a excerpt from Wikitravel, which isn't the most reliable of travel sites. Most of the pictures are actually photos I or someone I know have taken, and any other ones were from stock photo sites with the author's permission.

How does this idea make money? Currently, the only way it does is via the Flight/Hotel referrer links on each page. It may never add up to more then chump change, but entire companies run off these type of referrals (kayak.com and tripadvisor.com).

Version 2 will allow users to suggest their own destinations and the site will then provide my recommendations vs user's recommendations. Feel free to let me know any other ideas you may have to improve the site, and what you think of it in general!

2007-08-08T01:40:00.000Z

Launch Pending!

Well I've been MIA, because of my previously discussed travel this summer. Also I'm the captain of my soccer (football) team this season, so our quest for the DC cup has detoured what little time I do have on weekends and evenings.

As I mentioned a few months ago, I'm currently working on two products. One is super fun for me, but has iffy money making opportunities. The second one is a serious business product that I am working on with a partner. This second one I may never mention here, because I know it is of no use to anyone that reads this blog. That idea is the one I feel more confident about making money. But the pending launch this post about is about the fun first idea!

I'll give you a few teaser hints about the idea.

1) It's a website, not a downloadable product... and thus is free to use

2) It's related to travel. Ideally this should have been launched before the summer travel season, but I just didn't have time. Version 2 should be in time for next summer, and we all know that's when the real magic happens.

3) This isn't just an AdSense based site, I feel it has some real money making potential.

4) As far as I can tell, nothing like it currently exists, but I'd bet almost anyone who travels could use it at some time.

It's currently "feature complete", and I'm just cleaning it up. I'm shooting for the end of the month, so wish me luck!

2007-06-26T02:06:00.000Z

Wikipedia is the Internet Take 2

Lately I've come to a realization. Wikipedia is what the Internet originally was back in 1994 when I got onto it. Lots of nerds with too much time writing about things they care about. I've had that same feeling I had back then when I "surf" Wikipedia. I find all sorts of useful information, and follow link after link (despite not always having the best way to search the information) going down all sorts of trails of interesting information.

Google is absolutely useless for finding useful information these days. There is no way to search on a product or brand name without getting a million results trying to sell or review something. You have to be a real Google kung fu wizard to find out non-biased research information.

Wikipedia is the exact opposite. You search for something, ANYTHING, and there is more content then you could ever imagine about the subject. And despite all the bad publicity and criticism (I used to be it's biggest critic) the data is almost always accurate and not defaced! A coworker has a plugin for Firefox that split screen's Wikipedia with Google whenever you search, because let's face it, lately the most relevant link on a subject is almost always it's Wikipedia article.

More then research though, Wikipedia has gone on to become a tome of information about anything trivial, my favorite being sports. During the recent CONCACAF Gold Cup Soccer (Football) competition, due to the complete lack of interest of soccer in America, it was impossible to find good English language results. Even the Gold Cup's "Web Site" had "Coming Soon" type stuff instead of results and brackets. But not Wikipedia. Wikipedia had every score of every match, updated instantly after the game ended (who are these people editing this stuff??). It also link to the controversy, and every team name linked to it's own Wikipedia article where you can find out when the Canadian national team got to the World Cup (Round 1 in '86), and all sorts of other sports trivia that's literally impossible to dig up on the Internet. I even recently found a schedule of pick-up soccer games in the DC area on Wikipedia!

From Wikipedia, all sorts of other Wiki's have popped up...my second favorite being Wikitravel. Again, I find the data I'm looking for a lot more handy then Foder's or Travel Advisor or any other commercial site. What does this mean for the future of the Internet? Well, just as Google's plain, effective search engine stole the thunder from the big ad-covered boys, I think Wikipedia and other non-advertising Wiki type data could easily replace Google. Although this is probably a long way from happening.

The reason I say this is that just the other day I was having a conversation with some coworkers (non-programmers, but people in IT who should know better) about Wikipedia, and they said "Oh i saw something on dateline about that, isn't that the site where people make stuff up?". Which I guess is better then their complete lack of awareness of Flickr.... It's unfortunate there has been such a disinformation campaign against Wikipedia.

Try making it your primary source of information for anything over the next week (Medical symptoms? Forget WebMD, try Wikipedia. Breaking news? Screw CNN, try Wikipedia). It's amazing how it can basically replace any other informational site.

2007-06-21T21:35:00.000Z

How Not to Use AJAX

Yahoo! Weather used to be my go-to place for weather information. Even though it gets it's data from Weather.com, I like the speed and simplicity over Weather.com's ad filled interface.

Well the tides have turned. Yahoo! decided to implement AJAX on it's search bar for weather. It looks like this:

The whole point of AJAX is that it SAVES you time. But there are two things to notice here. First, you have to type in the city and THEN click "Go" (it doesn't just come up like intellisense). Next, you'll notice that it orders the results by country. So even though more people searching for "Rome" are probably looking for the one in Italy, I get all the Rome's in the USA first (there's like 10) and then the one in Italy, which is provided with a cryptic Italian state and country code. THEN I can click on the one I want and it brings me my weather. In Theory. For some reason though, the AJAX list kept giving me the wrong city. I'd click Buenos Aires, and it brings up San Cristobal. Don't even think about just typing in an area. Unless you have the exact city it doesn't work.

The other annoying thing about Yahoo weather is it doesn't keep the weather search bar at the top...instead it has the news(??) search bar. So even though typically I'd check the weather for where I am, and then where I'm going, I have to use the (gasp) back button to get back to a search.

Ironically, now Weather.com by NOT using AJAX is a dream to use:

You use an old school form to just type in the word Rome...it brings the most likely result up and you click it. Bing bam boom. Takes about a third of the time of the Yahoo AJAX nonsense.

Don't use technology for the sake of technology!

2007-06-15T22:25:00.000Z

Perhaps the LAST thing you should worry about when starting a company.

When hanging out on the Business of Software discussion boards, there are quite often posts that go like this:

Hey all, I just got the idea to design a piece of software that will revolutionize the industry. I just signed up for an LLC, so now I'm wonder what dev tools you recommend to make my first million?

Perhaps because we live in a world with way too many lawyers, I continually see people register an LLC as their first step to starting a business. I think some people do it because they think a company needs to be registered to be "legal" (ie exist). But most people presumably do it so "they don't lose their house".

OJ Simpson proved today that having an LLC doesn't protect anything.

Many people register LLC's before they write a single line of code out of this fear. This is partly because of the FUD spread (presumably by lawyers) that the second you try to sell anyone anything, a bunch of frivolous lawsuits will come at you left and right. I hear radio ads saying 1 in 4 companies will get sued in their lifetime.

I really believe this fear is unjustified. First, many of the stats about lawsuits come from the old school traditional brick and mortar land that have more then one employee. When you are selling groceries or operating a restaurant, there are many things that can happen that would prompt lawsuits.... food poisoning, people slipping on the floor, wait staff assaulting a customer, discrimination, etc...

Think about who would sue you and why. You are an average middle class person throwing together some code for a few hours after work, and you have not sold a thing. What would anyone possibly sue you for? The only thing I can even conceive of is patent infringement or some other intellectual property theft. Now lets say you start actually selling the software, now what can they sue you for? Assuming you are selling the typical trivial desktop software, not nuclear power plant management software, there is not much you could get sued for above and beyond the cost of the software itself.

"Yeah yeah Phil, but you don't know...people love making money off lawsuits, they'll say your software deleted their million dollar project file!!!".

Fair enough, but people that sue others usually actually want to make money. Lawsuit trolls are not going to waste their time to sue an individual making $60k a year just to get a few thousand dollars out of the equity of your condo. And if your software really is capable of doing major damage, you need insurance, not just an LLC.

The usual argument to this is that it only costs $100 bucks to fill out some form at their state government, and you can never be too safe. That is kind of my point. I like when geeks are so paranoid about lawsuits and then are too cheap to actually pay a lawyer to form this entity that is going to protect them. As you can see from the link above, having a legal entity selling your software is not enough to protect you.

If you really cause enough damage that someone can sue you for hundreds of thousands of dollars, any judge will happily pierce your corporate veil. If you are a one man show running an LLC, where dollars pass directly unto you, and you are the sole person that developed the software, it is quite easy to still go after your assets. I've seen it happen. Is your LLC property capitalized? Do you have regular board meetings with yourself and take minutes, etc? Are you up to date on your property declarations?

Sole-proprietor businesses have been around for years. If you are starting a new software business there is no reason to even waste a dime or a thought worrying about your business becoming a legal entity.

Now I am not entirely discouraging you from registering your company. There are many reasons where an LLC would protect and owner, and where you are likely to be sued. If you have partners you should definitely form a legal entity. If you have any employees, same deal.

Beyond just registering an LLC, you should really contact an actual lawyer if you are seriously worried about getting sued. Are you sure that boiler plate EULA from nolo.com will protect you? You should also get insurance. Even if you are an LLC and have organized it well enough to "protect your house", do you really want all of your company's assets to be liened on? If you are properly insured, they will usually be the ones a plaintiff will go after. They will fight your court battles to a certain point.

Don't worry about seeming official. Get the important parts done. Finish your software. Develop a marketing plan. Beta a copy or two. Then properly get your organization together.

PS - I am not a lawyer, please don't sue me for giving you bad advice!!! ;)

2007-06-09T13:50:00.000Z

What I've Been Up To

There's not a great deal of news to report here. Similar to last summer, I've been traveling a lot, some for work and some for pleasure. Over the summer I will be in Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, Vermont, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Boston, Louisville, Ottawa, and hopefully South America in November.

Luckily all this travel gives me plenty of time to work on my next project, which I'll give a hint has something to do with travel! I plan to have something for beta testing by the end of the summer, although my original goal was the beginning of the summer.

2007-05-17T22:33:00.000Z

My New Favorite Project Management Tool

Well, it's really more of a Knowledge Base/Project Management tool, since I'm sure the project management purists out there will cringe at this idea. But MediaWiki just replaced Basecamp as my "quick and dirty" project management tool. If you haven't used MediaWiki yet, it's basically just the engine that Wikipedia runs on. It's extremely easy to setup, and uses the common Apache, MySql, PHP framework.

I originally started using Basecamp because I just wanted a simple, fast way to keep track of the general status of various parts of a project (And because I wanted to experience the hype). It worked well for that, but frankly it's lack of features kept me from doing very much with it, besides using it as a fancy task list. I considered FogBugz, but I find the program horribly ugly to look at, and difficult to do simple tasks (it's also much better at tracking bugs, then being a "project management" tool). I even briefly flirted with making my own project management tool, but it seemed like it's been done way too many times, so I decided to take a stab at the Wiki world.

The thing I love about it, is that it's so dynamic and flexible, yet easy for people with low technical knowledge to use. Granted, the scheduling part of project management is not going to be here (but it can be...it's open source after all!). However, programs like Basecamp don't exactly perform traditional project management features either. But if you need to do things like track bugs, milestones, statuses, etc.. all of those can very easily be added to your Wiki.

I'll be honest that I really didn't see the value in Wikis for businesses at first (the upcoming FogBugz wiki integration still kind of mystifies me). And I was especially scared that MediaWiki would be extremely complex, since Wikipedia must be pretty powerful, and so tried several other Wiki packages first. I used one for a while, and I kept feeling like it was missing features, so finally I gave MediaWiki a try. To my surprise, it took me under 10 minutes to get it up and running.

At first, I just wanted a place to store notes from meetings at the day job that anyone could view and modify. Then I found myself adding supporting documentation for projects that were discussed, soon a knowledge base was forming, with code snippets, class diagrams, and To-Do lists. One great thing is how quick it is to add something, and how great MediaWiki's versioning/revision control is. But the best part is how pretty everything looks. Links are generated from articles that can quickly and easily be sent out for all to peruse and edit. Unlike Basecamp or Fogbugz that are more locked down. And everything is linked so nicely together. You can gussy up meeting notes by cross-referencing everything to other articles in the Wiki.

Anyway, if you havn't tried using MediaWiki in this way, I suggest you give it a try. It's had surprisingly high adoption among the non-techies (they logged into Basecamp once, and then never again). And if you need somewhere quick and dirty to keep track of your project, I think it's great.

2007-04-29T20:01:00.000Z

Something That's Tricky...

Well it's been almost a year since BudgetSimple was launched. Since then thousands of people have signed up for the service, which a smaller percentage becoming regular users. I honestly haven't put more then maybe 2-3 hours of development into it since it launched since I've been busy with so many other things. BudgetSimple was my first "freebie" idea I've put out there. The service is free, and I don't even have any ads or anything to monetize the traffic.

I believe because of that altruism, the emails I get from BudgetSimple are absolutely the best. Anyone that's had a product out there knows you get some rather nasty customer support emails every now and then. I've found a direct correlation between the nastiness and the price people are paying for the product :). So I get these great heartfelt emails about how I'm helping so and so out of debt. And despite some of the glaring features missing from the early BudgetSimple, people are almost apologetic when reporting bugs that are really stupid on my part.

So now the service is out there, and in fact it's the #1 hit for "free online budget", a search that's valuable enough that a bunch of people are paying for AdWords on the topic. All this traffic and popularity are somewhat tempting... lately I've been considering making some sort of premium service, but it's almost a catch-22 because it's obviously popular for being free. Anyone out there have an opinions on the topic? It wouldn't take too much work to make a premium service, but I don't want to give up any goodwill, especially when I'm already busy with other ideas.

2007-04-23T21:50:00.000Z

Unlucky

Well I got the official announcement today... despite standing in my first Web 2.0 queue for tickets, I'm in the unlucky 2.7 million or so people who didn't end up winning any of the tickets to Eurocup 2008. If anyone knows someone who wants to transfer their remaining guest Tickets for my personal use at a cost no greater than the face value of these Tickets plus the invoiced pro-rata Administrative Charge or Service Fee and also wants a large cash Christmas present from me... holla.

2007-04-14T19:42:00.000Z

The Wide World of Web Apps

Well, as I mentioned before, my next application will be a web app. Web applications have kind of a bad rap around the mISV community (which seems to mostly be desktop app folks). This could be because people like Paul Graham have recently been saying that Microsoft is dead because there is no need for Windows applications anymore. I don't think there needs to be any bad blood between desktop and web app developers at this point. While many many things lend themselves better as web apps, some things just make no sense to be anything besides a desktop app. I think the future is a combination of the two (online storage with offline functionality).

I think another reason web apps get such a bum rap is that all of the "popular" ones are things that have no clear profit angle (besides advertising), such as social networking sites. Or there are apps like Basecamp that just come off as too simple. But most of the really profitable web applications don't fall under either category, and are decidedly unsexy.

1) Consumer web app - Examples: Flickr, MySpace, FitDay, BudgetSimple. When people say there is no money in web apps, this is what they are thinking of. 90% of Web 2.0 falls into this category. The applications can be used by normal people, often have no cost associated with them, and sometimes have advertising. I really do believe that people are not yet ready to buy online applications. For example, Andy has some Web 2.0 wedding planner competition. Google recently has came out with spreadsheet and word processing software. Sure, these offer some benefits over traditional desktop software, but none works as well as the desktop versions.

And it doesn't seem your average joe is ready to "buy" software they can't hold in their hands. If you make one of these types of web apps, get ready for lots of competition, count on a revenue stream that is entirely dependent on advertising, and pray you can launch TechCrunch and 37Signals type publicity.

Pros: When these go well, they go VERY well ($$$$ buyouts)
Cons: Like winning the lottery, quality doesn't matter as much as marketing and luck. In the meantime, you are not making money.

2) SaaS - Software as a service. Examples: Basecamp and Salesforce. They offer many benefits, such as always being up to date, instantaneous bug fixes, and (presumably) guaranteed data protection. Instead of being tied to a laptop, you can access your application and data anywhere. While the revenue stream is clear here, businesses are the primary people who would use these, and I think it's limited to only small businesses at this point in time. Large companies want internally hosted applications, and don't trust others for sensitive data, and if the application is down, heads will roll.

Pros: Customers must purchase your software every single month, creating a reliable revenue stream. Fixing bugs is easy as everyone gets the latest version.
Cons: You will not sleep, wondering if the servers are up. Selling these to consumers is difficult, selling them to corporations also may take some work.

3) Shrinkwrap web apps - Examples: Fogbugs, HelpSpot. This is the least popular arena of web apps, which is a head scratcher. These types of applications have all the benefits of a hosted web app, plus all the performance benefits of a desktop application, without complicated deployment schemes. I have seen completely unknown web apps like this sell for $300k per customer, with $100k a year support contracts. If you ever think web apps can't be profitable, email me and I'll tell you about the horribly designed web apps I see making a mint in this category.

Pros: Ease of deployment. Corporations love not having to install software on every single desktop.
Cons: Similar negatives to Desktop apps in terms of debugging problems, keeping people up to date, etc. Language and platform matters a lot more here.

So which one am I building? Based on my descriptions above, you would think it's certainly not #1. But you would be wrong. I'm actually working on two projects right now. The one I am really enjoying is the consumer app that has sketchy revenue prospects. It's an idea that I think is really needed, yet surprisingly does not exist. There are some clear ways to monetize it, so it's not quite as much of a long shot as MySpace.

The other project I am working on falls under category number 3. There is existing competition in this arena, but there is literally only one competitor, and their product is horrible. But because they hold a monopoly, they feel no need to improve their program. This is in an area I know very well, and this is the more likely of the two projects to actually make money.

2007-04-01T17:14:00.000Z

This has got to be an April Fools joke...

Dogs trained to sniff out pirated DVDs. It's reported by a real news service, but come on.

2007-03-28T02:38:00.000Z

That about sums it up for the Lessons Learned Series.

I could think of lots of other little lessons learned, but nothing worth writing a full post about. Some of those are:

Provide a Demo of your software!

You might as well put your prices in the open, it will save everyone some time.

Don't count on anything any customers, vendors, etc... say until it's actually delivered upon.

Hold off on forming the corporate structure until the absolute last minute (right before you put your product on the market). People have an irrational fear of getting sued. No one wants to sue someone who has zero revenues.

You probably won't know what your software really needs to do, or who your target audience is until your software actually hits the markets. We assumed middle aged males (95% of chimney sweeps) would be our primary customer. It turns out their wives/office managers are the people that understand software. Some of the features we thought would be the most killer (chimney scanning integration, mapping, route planning) ended up being the least used.

If you just ask potential customers if they want such and such, they will always say "yes". Ask what their problem is, and create a solution around that.

When it doubt keep it simple. If you think it's simple, ask three people; your significant other, one of your parents, and a teenager to try the function. If all three can figure it out without any help, it's probably simple enough.

Speaking of... no one reads the manual. Ever. Frankly I wouldn't bother to even write one, except that people expect it. We had a giant manual and help file at first, but what worked better in the end are lots of Wink demos.

Thats all I can think of. If you have any questions about the experience, I wouldn't mind answering them. If you don't want to post a comment, feel free to email: phila at seartech.com

2007-03-25T13:59:00.001Z

Lessons Learned #4

Paul Graham says he will not fund startups that don't have a partnership. His argument is that if you can't convince at least one other person about your idea, then it's no good. I think Paul Graham may live in a different world then myself. For some reason, if you have technical skills, people are falling over themselves to partner with you. At my Christmas party for friends and family this year, I looked around at everyone at one point and realized every single (male) person at the party had either approached me with a business idea, or I had approached them. Maybe it's just my friends?

Anyways, there was a time where I was flattered by this, and would almost always indulge someone in their business idea. My business ideas are often somewhat narrow in focus, so when someone comes up with a crazy idea in an area I don't know, it sounds like it could be genius. So if I'm not working on something else at the time, what would it hurt?

The problem is, while many people dream about their business ideas and picture themselves getting rich over it, most people really don't want to dedicate the time it takes to getting a business going. Even when I do 98% of the work, and just ask them to approve or brainstorm with what's there, most people I've worked with found that too much to handle.

Now, the above paragraph doesn't necessarily describe the partnership I had with SearTech. Going into this partnership, we had a total of three people, me, my friend and the chimney sweep (who is also kind of a family friend). People tell you that you shouldn't go into business with family and friends, and that is not necessarily true. There is just a trade off that has to occur. There are always going to be conflicts in a business, where with a stranger you can supposedly just yell at them or "fire" them, but with friends and family you'd have to make a choice between the business or the friendship. Honestly, I think this is a benefit. It makes you evaluate how serious the conflict is, and forces compromise. I would never pick a business over a friendship, but if your the kind of person who might, you may want to stay away from this route.

So first, let me emphasize the good things about this partnership, and partners in general.

1) You have help! One thing that really sucks about being a one man show is that you can't really take a break or have a vacation. How liberating is having your own business if you have to check email while in the Caribbean? With partners, someone else can mind the store.

2) You have someone else to motivate you. Often I would get down on things when I was pounding away by myself, but whenever we would meet I would be renergized and full of vigor. Having someone else in it with you helps a lot.

3) Shared expenses. You don't have to output as much of your own money if you have others helping. Of course you don't make as much either...

4) The company. I imagine working all by yourself can get quite lonely. Being able to go to conventions with my partners was great, we had a blast wherever we went, and it's nice having someone to sound off with.

Of course there are trade-offs. The negatives I see with partnerships are:

1) The most obvious is that you share the profits equally. Which means every extra person equals less money for you. This wasn't a big deal for me, because although it sounds cliched I'm not really in it for the money. But it's almost impossible to guarantee everyone works as much as their share, so this causes friction with many startups. Make sure when you are taking on partners that they are really adding something to the mix.

2) Many early startups I see on the mISV boards are obsessed with the idea of "the sales guy". That illusive person that can sell sand to the Arabs, and ice to the eskimos. One thing I've learned is that there is nothing magical about the sales guy. Some of the best give a hard sell that results in more support for you to provide. I found I could sell as good if not better then others. The key to sales is confidence and building personal relationships. My chimney sweep partner was able to build quick bonds with other sweeps that gives you an "in".

3) If someone hasn't started a business by the time they are in their late 20s, they are not the business type in my opinion. I started by first business when I was 15. Most other people that work out well in startups have that entrepreneurial spirit that causes them to work until all hours.

So whats the overall lesson learned? I think it's good to have partners, but not strictly necessary. Any future ventures involving partners, the partner must have technical skills as well and hopefully complement me and vice versa, so the contribution is clear. They also must have had their own reasonably successful business in the past, and have a very clear dedication to the idea at hand.

2007-03-22T19:36:00.000Z

Lessons Learned #3

This lesson is about marketing. While all the other lessons so far have been about what I have done wrong, this one is actually something I did right for the most part, but it's still an important lesson for any other new mISV's out there.

The big thing these days in the ISV community is to throw a product together and market it with almost no money spent. Just some Google ads, SEO, and splogging. But what if your audience isn't looking for you? Or what if they don't read blogs or discussion forums? I knew from the start that I wouldn't be able to just sell ChimSoft via Google AdWords or email spam.

I of course did use AdWords and SEO. My AdWords expenses are usually under $10 a month though. This is partly because of the low number of sweeps, partly because of the low competition for my keywords, and partly that I'm the number one organic hit for almost anything "chimney sweep software" related. That said, almost none of my business has came through Google.

First, I started out by contacting Chimney Sweep suppliers. In the industry there is one huge supplier that has maybe 80% of the marketshare. Then there are maybe 5 or 6 other decent sized ones that pick up the rest. I contacted all of them to see if we could carry their parts catalog in our program (hey free advertising!), and if they were interested in reselling ChimSoft. Only one company, which I'm proud to plug, Lindemann Chimney Supply was cutting edge enough to see the value in this. When I contacted Lindemann, immediately they provided me with a digital catalog, and discussed some other options. Unfortunately all of the other companies were less forthcoming. Many of them wanted an exclusive arrangement, or would just blow me off. Some promised they would deliver a catalog, only to never follow up. Reseller agreements were discussed with some of the companies, but nothing ever came to fruition.

Next, we scheduled ourselves for the two biggest sweep conventions. These were absolutely invaluable in terms of publicity. This is where most of our sales came from. Don't expect them on the showroom floor (although that did happen), but make sure to take business cards from people and give them yours.

Finally, word of mouth was another great way to market to this community. Many people would call us because they heard about us from someone else (often the suppliers would finally return our calls when a customer mentions us). All of the above are examples of how you must step beyond the comforts of the online word to sell a product sometimes. Is it a lot more expensive and time consuming? Yes. But if we had not done these other things, I doubt a single sale would have occurred.

For my next project though, I really don't want to go after this audience. I want to work with customers who check their email at least once a week if not daily (half the people on our email list would return with a "quota full" error). I want customers who understand the web and are comfortable making a purchase without a phone call. Make sure you figure out which type most of your customers are when you begin to market.

2007-03-22T01:53:00.000Z

Lessons Learned #2

The next biggest thing I got out of this product experience is, be careful with market research/pricing.

Originally the plan was to make software that could be sold to all "service industries", you know, those guys in the white vans that do all the dirty stuff we can't do. I mean, they all basically do the same thing? That was the thinking at least. First we would use chimney sweeps as our test market, have them give us all the feedback early before we start dealing with plumbers and electricians.

People talk a lot about market research, but I have yet to really find a good guide on what you should do. I think because a lot of it is just intuition and experience. This is where working on something you know well comes in handy. For example, Ian worked a lot with Help Desks, and Patrick was a teacher. I on the otherhand, have never been a chimney sweep, or any other type of service professional. In fact, I just paid someone to fix some drywall in my house, which could quite possibly be the easiest home improvement project out there, that's how far removed from the service industry I am. But, remember I started this with two partners!

The big partner with me was the guy that had the original idea, and was a chimney sweep. I'll go into Partner lessons learned another day, but for now I'll just say that how I did my market research was based a lot on him. My experience in the retail end of the software industry had been with two companies, one sold software for court reporters (which would seem like an even more obscure niche) and the other sold web apps to enterprises. The court reporting software sold for around $4500. The enterprise software sold for an average of $30,000 a year. So thinking of selling software for $19.95 is frankly depressing to me. Of course there is no good reason for this thinking, because if you sell 2 copies an hour, your making some decent scratch, but I was definitely used to the big sale.

I knew from the start ChimSoft couldn't sell for $19.95. At that rate if every single Chimney Sweep in the world bought a copy, that might pay my mortgage for a month or two. So here is my super secret market research technique:

1) I asked my partner how many chimney sweeps he thought there were in the USA. He said his certified sweep number was 5 thousand something, and he knew they were consecutive and that they started issuing them in the 70s, therefore there must be around 6,000 certified sweeps out there.

2) If there are 6,000 sweeps who received certifications, you have to figure at least half are dead, retired, or gave up, leaving 3,000 active certified sweeps.

3) Most sweeps are not going to get certified. It's expensive, and time consuming. We'll assume 1 out of every 4 sweeps is certified. This gives us 12,000 chimney sweeps in America.

4) Now, some people will take that number there, multiply it by $100 and start shopping for a retirement villa. But this wasn't my first business. I knew at BEST I'd ever sell to 2% of the entire chimney sweep market in a given year. So best case scenario we are talking 240 sweeps a year.

5) Now we pick a price. I started this way. "How much will this need to make a year in gross sales to make it a worthwhile business?" I'll say $300,000. So in the absolute best of times the business should be making $300,000 a year. (Keep in mind that I was not in the mISV community at this time, and also that I have two partners, and no huge desire to quit my job, so a low ball $25k wasn't going to cut it for this).

6) So when you put all that together, assuming you have the best scenario of 240 sales a year, to make $300k, each unit must be $1250

7) Ask the customer if they will pay $1250 for the software

What? $1250 for a stinking piece of software? From chimney sweeps? Well, the thinking wasn't that crazy. We debating the price a lot, but the chimney sweep partner continued to point out that we were not selling to individuals, but in fact businesses that can deduct on their taxes, etc.. Chimney sweeps also have been proven to pay big bucks to help their business as most own $4,000 chimney scanning cameras. Heck, our software can replace most of the functionality of that camera and it's only half of the price.

It's hard to say that this price point was bad. We went to our first convention with a price tag of $2000 for the software. There were a few sales at this price point, and LOTS of interest. We talked at great lengths with people who hemmed and hawed about the price, and continued to keep in contact with us through email, phone calls, etc... Could we have gotten triple the number of sales if we priced at $300? Probably, but we would have ended up with less money. In hindsight, I think I would have rather had more users spreading the word of the program then the actual cash.

So what was the problem with all this thinking? Sounds like it was priced about right (amazingly, considering my "numbers out of my ass" market research method). The problem was that the number of sweeps was VASTLY overestimated, despite my huge cuts. A year or so into the project I was talking to the sweep partner again, and he mentioned something about there being 2,000 certified sweeps. Somehow we had gotten confused or miscommunicated or something, but that original 6,000 number I was working with was actually 3 times the reality.

Now that I've been in the chimney sweep world for a while, I think the true estimate of active sweeps in the country is somewhere around 2,500. Again, that number is basically coming from intuition and estimates. And while they will spend $4,000 on a camera, they do this because they can charge $400 more per sweep to use a camera. And the camera can find $3000 of work to be done. There is a direct link to them between profit made and money spent. Most service industry folks still do not see software this way. Unfortunately most chimney sweep businesses also do not have a lot to spend. I heard a lot of comments at conventions about how the whole industry is suffering, so I had a lot of sweeps asking me for financing plans. I just could not do this, if you've seen my BudgetSimple philosophy, you know I hate debt. So at $2k, the price was too much for a poor chimney sweep, and the big chimney sweeps didn't want to pay $2k X 8 vans + 3 office computers. Once dropped to $300, sales increased, but alas, based on the number of sweeps out there, it's just not enough money to motivate me.

Why not continue the original plan though? Sell to plumbers, etc? Well, ServiceCEO is doing just that, but the program becomes too complicated for most of the end users. I started to do it with ServiceGadget. Unfortunately, you really have to learn and market to each of those industries differently. Not being able to use the product myself, I didn't have a great deal of interest in this prospect after spending 2 years on ChimSoft. I have too many other ideas that I am really excited about.

Also, don't let anyone tell you that as a one man business you can just keep adding products and make more money. Every time you work on a new product, you take your "eye off the ball". As a one man show, you can only physically (and more important mentally!) dedicate to one product at a time. So when I'm working on ChimSoft, my other businesses and ideas languish. That's part of the reason I had to have a clean break here, just to free up some mental focus.

2007-03-20T22:15:00.000Z

End of a mISV: Lessons Learned #1

Stick with what you know. I've been working on the web and web applications since the beginning. Almost all of my professional development jobs have involved web applications or their backend interactions, and that is where 95% of my experience lies. So when I started ChimSoft, what made me choose to make a desktop app? Well, as I mentioned before, ChimSoft was originally an application for Automotive shop management. I started the autoshop program as a desktop application because I thought I really needed to learn WinForms to strengthen my skill set. And I had a customer in mind for that app, for whom a web application definitely would not work. Winforms did end up being the right tool for this job. At one point last year, I surveyed our customers about having a web version of ChimSoft. There was unanimous confusion and dislike.

If I had to give a primary reason for ending the development of ChimSoft, it would be the fact that it is a desktop app. For any new mISV's out there, if at all possible, make a web app! Desktop apps allow much more functionality and speed, but they are an absolute nightmare for support. Even with our relatively small customer base, there was always something that was not working on someone's computer. In my "lab" I had virtual machines that ran Win 98, ME, 2000, XP, and Vista with various configurations. I always ran through a battery of tests on those machines before deploying. But still there would be random issues with one person's computer. Norton is a problem. Novell gives a certain problem. Having a certain resolution made a problem. For some reason a 3rd party library breaks on 1/10th of the installs. The installer has a problem. Even though I tested on all of my friends, family's, and virtual PCs, there still were random problems that would pop up that require hours of support, troubleshooting and development. Sometimes after all that, you find out it's another program that's breaking yours. This is extremely frustrating as a developer, because it makes your quality look shoddy, yet a through test really was performed. Next, theres the problem of 50 people having 36 different versions. I had a built in "Check for Updates" feature, but few people explored this on their own, and I did not have it running by default. Since ChimSoft uses a database, keeping this schema updated was also a pain.

The next issue with desktop apps is that I had never done one before! So when I started adding advanced features such as DVR capabilities (To record chimney scanning video), or I was working on the interface, I had no original code to draw on, or interface experience. The result is that the ChimSoft interface has been rewritten several times to be the most usable. One positive of this is that because I did not have a "real windows" app to draw on, most of the reason people buy ChimSoft is that it is so much easier to use then the competition, who look very much like your typical programmer-design Windows app.

BTW this is not meant as a volley in the Web app vs Desktop app debate. I still think for this specific type of software, it MUST be a desktop app. All I am saying here is that I am not the best person to be working on such a thing, and I wouldn't doubt a "real" Windows app developer would enjoy working on this a lot more.

2007-03-19T21:46:00.000Z

Death of a mISV

So often we see the launch of MicroISV's in our little community, only to never hear from them again. Sometimes they will post some numbers about slow sales, or they just disappear. Well, this post is to announce the end of development (for me at least) on what was originally the primary focus of this blog, ChimSoft - software for Chimney Sweeps, my first "official" venture into the world of mISV.

There are many reasons why I am ending development on ChimSoft after two and a half years, and I hope to make an informative series of blogs on some of the lessons learned during the process.

Because the above is just a super tease by itself, I'll summarize the reason for ending development at this time, with a little backstory. If you've been reading this blog, you know I have other ventures outside of SearTech/ChimSoft. The longest and most successful being my used car classified site, Used Cars On-Line.

I created Used Cars On-Line, it was in 1995, when web apps were definitely NOT the thing (to most non-geeks). Since I live in opposite land, ten years later as 2005 started, and right when Web 2.0 was it's hottest, I decided to take on my first desktop application: ChimSoft. It originally started out as management software for Automotive Repair shops, because I couldn't believe in the 21st century I still received hand written (or dot matrix printed) invoices from 90% of the shops I went to. My friend saw this app, and realized it was just what he needed for his Chimney Sweep business, and I believed that with little effort, it could serve both markets (and the entire service industry).

I really enjoyed working on ChimSoft, partly because of the reactions I received when I told people I was making software for chimney sweeps. You would think by their reaction I said I was making software for cats to do word processing, and that I was crazy because chimney sweeps don't need software, after all, they have Mary Poppins.

Ironically, that has little to do with why I am ending development. There is a demand for good chimney sweep software. Sure, I don't receive the number of downloads that Andy does, but being the only chimney sweep software out there is filling a much needed hole. Conversion rates were close to 80% when I went to a cheaper price model in January. The only problem is I feel guilty selling software that I can't dedicate 100% to. I don't use ChimSoft, and can't really, in the same way my customers do. Potential customers, and real customers continually ask for new features that somehow have been completely missed after two years of talking to hundreds of sweeps. There is definitely money to be made selling ChimSoft. The problem is that the amount of time it takes to support and develop ChimSoft in comparison to the money/time for my other ventures is far out of proportion. And I don't believe there is enough money in ChimSoft for me to dedicate fulltime to it.

As I mentioned, I hope to do a lot more posts on this topic in the coming week exploring lessons learned, but in the meantime I need some advice. Do I continue selling the software, but just "CityDesk" it (stop active development). Or, do I simply close down shop and attempt to sell it? I would prefer the latter in the hopes that someone else would pick up the torch for chimney sweeps.

2007-03-12T17:27:00.000Z

My Bracket

This time of year is the most exciting time for me sportswise, so forgive the temporary distraction from mISV/technology discussion.

Ok, so I might be a little biased when in comes to college basketball... See my bracket in PDF form here. Battle for Washington DC? Not likely, but it could happen.

For you Europeans/World Soccer (Football) fans, my picks for the winners of the Champions League are: Bayern beats Milan, PSV beats Liverpool, Man U beats Roma, and Chelsea beats Valencia.

2007-03-01T12:45:00.000Z

Thanks to Web 2.0

We now have the technology to "stand in line" on the Internet!

(Still waiting for my Eurocup application to come up...)

2007-03-01T02:18:00.000Z

Why I Love Google

Google's announcement of their free hosted apps is great. Not for the apps as much as the email. SearTech has been a part of the Google Email for Domains beta since around this time last year, and it's hard to think of using anything else now. For the previous 6 years before Google, I had hosted my own email, as well as email for people who needed websites in previous years. This was a nightmare. Although my web and database servers have had more or less 99% uptime (knock on blog), I was always having some sort of problems with email. And the various PHP web mail suites have nothing on GMail. The fact that Google is now giving all this away for free... well it will probably kill a few more small hosting businesses, but it's exciting for the rest of us.

Google needs to up their game though

The Web 2.0 Calendar game has gotten quiet since the sale of Kiko. I would love to just use Google's Calendar, it does pretty much everything I need. But here's the thing. Set an alarm or two in Google Calendar. Now, just open Gmail every day, but not the calendar. You'll never get the reminder! I have to go actually into the Calendar to get the reminder (at least it was this way the last time I messed with it). Open Google Docs And Spreadsheets, and it opens another window. Open a spreadsheet and ANOTHER window opens! To use the Google Office suite I have to have almost double the number of windows of MS Office. Google really needs to make it into a Suite, and not just add links to discontinuous programs in the email.

2007-02-17T15:59:00.000Z

Yahoo Ads

Just a quick note that I experimented with Yahoo Publisher Network ads (Their version of AdSense) this week. It's pays almost identically what Google AdSense does, but the quality of the ads is much lower in my opinion. So I've switched back to Google. Yahoo's interface has some nice features such as telling you what time they last updated your daily total, but overall I don't like the interface as much as AdSense.

2007-02-16T22:51:00.000Z

How Not to Do Customer Service

Not to keep hammering on Ryan Carson, but I'm amazed how many commenters of his recent customer service story actually agreed with his technique. Luckily Ian and Patrick prove there are still some sane people left in the world. Honestly, it feels like stealing if a customer is unhappy with the product and wants a refund. I can't sleep at night feeling like someone "wasted" their money on my product.

I wrote about this once, and my opinion has not changed much. Over the years I've gotten some sizzlers of support emails, some of my favorites being for my FREE used car service, where people tell me to "get some more F*ckin' carz" or complain that the prices people are asking are too expensive. Even with ChimSoft I got an email from a new customer the other day with the subject of simply "this sucks". When you get an email like that, of course you want to lay into them like Ryan did, but it's totally pointless. The customer will just do a chargeback, or even worse, sue you. On the other hand, refund their money and you may get that customer back one day, or even their friend who hears about your great customer service. A quick refund will seldom result in someone making a [your mISV]sucks.com website.

2007-01-31T23:50:00.000Z

Google released earnings today:

Since I've accused them in the past of being able to just take a larger cut of AdSense dollars as the middle man whenever they choose, it was interesting to see their breakdown in the earnings statement:

Google Network Revenues - Google's partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $1.20 billion, or 37% of total revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2006. This is a 50% increase over network revenues of $799 million generated in the fourth quarter of 2005 and a 16% increase over third quarter 2006 revenues of $1.04 billion.

The majority of TAC expense is related to amounts ultimately paid to our AdSense partners, which totaled $916 million in the fourth quarter of 2006.

So Google really only takes about a 25% cut. That's far less then I expected. I assumed they were taking at least 100% of what they pay their AdSense partners, but they seem to pay quite fairly. So what would explain the eCPM (how much Google pays me) dropping so much if their total advertising revenue is rising?

The only thing I can think is that Google is a victim of it's own success. There must be a bigger increase in AdSense websites then there is in advertisers spending. I am going to try Yahoo's Overture (if they ever get around to approving me) and see if they pay more. It's a catch-22 for Google because it seems they can't really pay more, or charge more, so they almost need to encourage less sites to carry AdSense if they want sites to carry it in the first place....

2007-01-31T01:02:00.000Z

FIOS

As I mentioned in a previous post, I had to go back to my arch nemesis, Verizon, to get their high speed fiber optic service. Well I am online now, and I thought I would give it a quick review.

First, the install is very odd. They give you a free wireless router, which isn't that odd, but it's about a foot and a half tall. Odder still, they install a UPS! I asked the installer why I need a UPS, and he said if my power goes out, I can still get on the Internet for up to 4 hours... too bad my laptop battery wouldn't hold out that long, but good to know in a Doomsday scenario I can still check my Gmail.

I originally just had TV service installed, because if I didn't like it, I didn't want to have to mess around with switching my firewall's settings back and forth (I have a hardware VPN from my home network and my colocation facility). I decided to get the Internet later, so the installer told me since I already have the router, they should just be able to "flip a switch". I called, and they told me "no, a tech had to come out on a business day from 9-5". But since they put the SSID and network key, I tried connecting to the router, and can get on fine... so I'm still not really impressed by Verizon's customer service.

Now the speed. I signed up for the low-end FIOS with a 5 mps downstream and 2mps upstream. I did two speed tests from my notebook (over a wireless connection) on the cable connection and FIOS. Here are the results:

Comcast Cable Modem:
Downstream: 902 kbs
Upstream: 721kbs

FIOS:
Downstream: 2972kbs
Upstream: 1473kbs

Three times faster downloading and double the speed uploading, not too shabby for $3 less a month!

I should mention I almost never had any connection problems with Comcast. It was down for maybe a total of 24 hours in the 3 years I've owned this house. Hopefully Verizon will have as good of a track record.

2007-01-16T22:43:00.000Z

MySpace Scaling

Interesting article about how MySpace has scaled as it has grown so quickly (from Slashdot). I'm very impressed at how quickly they could switch from one method to the next. I've seen corporate server migrations take years.

2007-01-16T19:44:00.000Z

The Biggest Money Saver for Bootstrappers

A good article today on MSN Money about The Reason You Are Broke comes at the intersection of two of my interests, budgeting and used cars. It's amazing to me how much people spend on new cars these days. Your typical mid-sized family sedan costs around $25k brand new. If you are planning on bootstrapping your own mISV, I see this as one of the biggest money savers around. Increase sales by 5% or Decrease expenses by 10%, sometimes the latter is easier.

Most people I know that buy new cars tell me the number one reason is they know that if something breaks, it will be fixed under warranty. These people most likely had a used Ford or Mitsubishi 15 years ago and remembered being stuck on the highway one too many times. Others just like that new car smell.

They make air fresheners for the latter, but for the former, that concern is largely illogical these days. Let's assume being budget minded I bought a brand new Honda Civic. They run about $16k. Over a 5-year loan, the payment would be about $350 a month. A few years ago (2002) I sold my Audi A6 and bought a 1991 Honda Civic for $1,200 with 120,000 miles on it. Over the next 2.5 years I put 80,000 miles on that car, selling it just shy of 200k miles. I sold it for $1,700. My monthly payment worked out to be a profit of $20 a month. Ok, but the new Honda Civic would have had repairs paid for out of warranty. How much did I pay for repairs on that junker? A grand total of ~$600. Let's assume though that the engine died, and I needed a new engine 3 times. At $2k a pop, in the end I still would have only paid a third of what it would have cost me for the new car.

What's my point? Sometimes the best way to increase your money made, is to decrease your expenses. Look at how much you are actually spending on things like cars and clothes and decide if the "look" or the "convenience" is actually worth the money spent, and figure out how much harder you have to work on your ISV to get to that level.

2007-01-15T19:17:00.000Z

Why You Shouldn't Start a Business Based on AdSense

Not long ago, I talked about my great success adding AdSense to my used car site. For a while, it was great, the more clicks I got, the more money I made. Unfortunately, starting around September, the relationship between money earned, and ads clicked started to differ wildly.

I made a graph of what's going on (click to see larger):

The red line represents the click trends, which follow the general traffic trends of our site, which is basically a nice Sin curve following the times of year when people shop for cars.

The blue line is what Google is paying per 1000 clicks (it's on a different scale then the other line, scales not shown).

The interesting thing is how it started out with a very close coorelation, but over time has gotten eratic, and now it's simply divergent (The more clicks I'm getting, the less Google is paying??). Assuming all sites in my same category are getting more clicks over all, shouldn't that increase the price for ads? It's sketchy how Google keeps the actual breakdown of price paid per click secret. They can essentially "take profits" as the middle man any time they want, with no way of us auditing. It's their right to do this, but this is why I think it's silly to base a new company on AdSense as I see some doing. How can you possibly anticipate profits when there is no relation to the amount of clicks and the price paid? (The content doesn't really change on my site).

If there is no profit taking going on, is the market for AdWords slowing or drying? It seems like from the point of view of someone paying for AdWords, Google has only increased costs. Maybe I am missing some more obvious explanation for the results above.

2007-01-12T11:40:00.000Z

Update on BudgetSimple

Just to tie up the loose ends on older blog posts, I wanted to mention how BudgetSimple is doing. First, if you remember, it's a free online budgeting tool, so whether a million people or one sign up I make $0. Partly because of that, I havn't had a lot of time to dedicate to it in terms of marketing. In fact, all of the marketing I did was on week one, where I had a blog for BudgetSimple (now killed, again, no time), and a blog post here.

From those two simple actions, the links have spread all over the Intarweb. To date, 1400 people have signed up. It seems maybe 10% of those are regularly active. I've had a few thank you letters, and a few bug reports and feature requests. Even though it's free, I really enjoy that people are getting something out of the software, and hopefully saving more or paying off debt because of it. I also like the subject matter of BudgetSimple (I'm a secret accounting nerd kind of), so I look forward to spending more time on it soon.

Also, the blog has gone purple, to match the city of Baltimore as long as the Ravens are in the playoffs!

2007-01-04T23:49:00.000Z

My Love Hate Relationship with Verizon

Verizon, the phone provider for most of the Mid-Atlantic, has had an interesting relationship with me over the years. I last had their standard phone service 4 years ago, before I switched entirely to cell phone and VOIP. They charged a fortune, billed incorrectly often, and had terrible service. I was extremely happy to have them out of my life.

Until one summer day last year, when the Fiber Optic man came to lay cables in my backyard. "Whatcha doin mister?", I asked. "Laying Fiber Optic cable so you can get FIOS TV and Internet". "Whats that you say? A dedicated 15mbps downstream for the same price I pay for cable? Who would provide such a wonderful service?", I winced at the answer. "Verizon".

I didn't order right away. I hated Verizon, and my Internet speeds get me along OK. Until a friend got FIOS TV. It basically offers all the channels Comcast and DirectTV combined, for less then either of them. Now, they are really selling to my cheap side. So I ordered it. The install date was a month in the future, with an old fashioned service window of "9-5". Great, gotta take a day off of work or Telework for you Verizon, this better be good.

But just as Verizon was winning my heart, I realized that all of my email sent to Verizon.net email addresses was bouncing back. At first I just thought the sender had changed their email address. Then I noticed the pattern. Every single email I sent from a hosted Gmail account bounced back. I tried contacting their Whitelisting service, but they claim I'm not blocked. I havn't been able to get anyone to help me figure it out, and keep getting chain mails. As happy as I am that there is finally someone helping to break the monopoly cable has over TV, why does it have to be Verizon?? If anyone knows what the deal is with Verizon blacklisting Gmail, let me know.

2006-12-30T19:46:00.000Z

ServiceGadget released

This past week I put the final touches on ServiceGadget, the small service business program based on ChimSoft. Luckily when I designed ChimSoft, I always had the idea in mind of being able to use the base code to work for modules of different industries, so now with only one extra step in the code build various features will automatically be added or stripped out. I'm treating ServiceGadget as a traditional mISV/shareware type program which is totally new to me. It will be interesting to see how different it sells since I am using PAD files, and am more reliant on Google AdWords. Both ServiceGadget and ChimSoft are technically 2.0 now, but there are quite a few features/changes I still plan on adding in the coming month.

2006-12-28T11:22:00.000Z

Love Letters From Nigeria

Well coincidentally I was going to post another funny 409 scamster email here today, when I got a comment from an Anonymous commenter in response to my "Scamster Respond" post:

Hi Phil, I was researching the name Marcus Cambell Black and came upon your blog. It is very interesting to me that you found him to be a scammer. I am a US citezen and i was looking for a nanny job and got an offer in the UK by a Mr. Bill Williams, via the e-mail address marcuscambellblack@yahoo.com . He offered to pay 200 pounds a week and would pay for my flight. I have been e-mailing him trying to find more about him and his family. I have asked repeatedly to receive pictures and a phone call from him, but he has been simply sending me the same e-mail over and over again. I finally received pictures, one supposedly of him and his son, the other of his wife and daughter. They both looked posed so i googled them. I found the same picture of him and his son on a stock photo website. I also found it suspicious that he was using the name Bill Williams while he said his family was the Marcus family. (notice on your blog that Mr. Black got the internet from his friend 'williams') If you have any more information on mr. black please post it on your blog and i will check back here soon. Thank you so much for you help!

Wow, what other scams are these people into? Anonymous commenter is lucky to be savvy enough to smell a rat. It's still amazing to me that even though Americans have lost a reported $8 billion, more then the Gross Domestic Product of Mongolia (Here's a good business idea for you Mongolia...), there is still very little effort to actually catch or stop any of these scams.

I have noticed a trend where the scamsters are claiming they are from the UK and using more UK-based email addresses lately (googlemail.com, yahoo.co.uk). I suppose it's possible they are actually based there, but I still see more Lagos IP's then London.

Here's todays fun email:

From: mario_nkay@yahoo.com

it is an insult unto my personalty for you to flag me for a potential fraud.i am now warning that if thi continuesx i wont essitate to call on my lawyer.rthanks alot.JYDE AWESOM

Yikes, please don't essitate! Besides the fact that nothing done by me to block the scam attempts is illegal, and that you can't sue for being insulted (well at least a foreign national can't), I again checked for proof that this may be a scammer...

Again, sight unseen I emailed him from a different email address telling him I would accept his offer, without mentioning any make or model of a car:

jide seyi"

Subject: Re: Your Car

hi,fill but thats not the amount yyou posted on the ads for the car.i would like us to start arrangement based on the price you pasted on the net .thanks alot.
GEORGE ANDERSON

George Anderson is it now? Why does your from still say Jide Seyi? I'll be sure to give him a more fair price, and leave my usual forwarding address of the Secret Service.

2006-12-26T22:33:00.000Z

New Product Name Poll

Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas (unless your Eastern Orthodox, in which case remind me to wish you another Merry one in a week), Happy Hanukkah, or Festive Non-Religious-day-where-the-radio-plays-nothing-but-Christmas-songs.

In my previous post, I mentioned that I am finally getting around to making the version of ChimSoft that is more "generic" towards any service industry. The hardest part has been coming up with a name (because of domain name availability). My criteria are:

a) It should be easy to remember
b) It should be easy to spell/guess the domain
c) There should not already be a product called this
d) If you can search for the name on Google, and little/nothing comes up, thats good.
e) If possible, it should be descriptive (Flarghr! or OortVoo 2.0 wouldn't go over to well with my potential customers IMO)

I've registered the following which meet that criteria... anyone have a favorite (or a suggestion)?

ServiceGadget - Sounds neat, but also makes the product sound trivial
WorkerSoft - Keeps the theme of [X]Soft, but "Worker" sounds rough
WorkmanSoft - More proper version of above?

I also thought of WhiteVanSoft, but evidently "White Van" as a term for service industry folks has a negative connotation, especially in Britain.

2006-12-21T01:42:00.000Z

Change of Plan

When I first started on ChimSoft back in January 2005, I had never heard the term MicroISV. My previous experience in the software world had been at two startups, one that sold Court Reporting software for $5k a pop, and another that sold Enterprise Management software for $20k-100k. So when I heard the idea of software for chimney sweeps, my first instinct was to make it like the court reporting software. On the phone or in-person sales, 24/7 800-number support, price tag that justifies the niche.

Before I started development, I did market research, determined the size of the chimney sweep market, what would be involved in development and support, and priced the product appropriately. Feedback from sweeps I talked to indicated the price was fair, and if it delivered as promised, worth every penny. But from the beginning the plan was never to have JUST chimney sweep software. The market is too small. We planned on making a generic service industry software, with plugins for various niches, like Chimney Sweeps, plumbers, etc... Sweeps still say the price is fair, but the sales cycle is a lot longer then I anticipated. We are one of the best products out there, and try as they might, our customers just cannot find something that does as good of a job, as simply and as straightforward as ChimSoft. So even a year after talking to a sales lead for the first time, I'm still receiving calls about how they want to buy any second, and could they see another demo. Larger companies were buying only one or two copies for their office, while hesitating on the value of the product in the field. I want to make the choice easier.

So...starting todayish...SearTech is officially moving towards being more MicroISV-like. ChimSoft will be available for download, demo, and purchase entirely without talking to a single person. In fact, we are nixing the 800 number. Upgrades are no longer free for a year, and support will be entirely by email. Features that were a pain to implement and maintain, that we thought would be big selling points, ended up being the least interesting of all, so those are gone. It may sound like a much lesser product now, but really we have taken the feedback of our existing customers and potential customers and cut ChimSoft to a mean-lean piece of software. To reflect this, the price will drop to $299. Although the original price of ~$2k was fair, and people did purchase at that price, it required a lot more thought. $2k is a lot for a single Chimney Sweep, and $2k times X computers is a lot for a large Chimney Sweep. We want more people using our product, although I anticipate the revenue to be about the same.

In addition, SearTech will soon be launching the software we always planned to launch, the "generic" service software that contractors, painters, plumbers, or anyone else running a small service business can use. The price of this software will be $199, plus $99 for specific industry modules that will be developed in the future. We are still working on a name for this, if you have any ideas (with a domain that is available) I'm all ears.

The hardest part about making this move is worrying about the people who did pay the higher price in the past. To help ease that pain, first we will provide the support we promised, free updates for a year, etc... In addition, if they have purchased in the past 60 days, they will receive a credit towards ChimSoft support or updates.

2006-12-11T12:13:00.000Z

Browser Stats Update

A feel for what your average (non-techy) web user may be using... IE7 adoption is better then I expected.

Internet Explorer 85.2%
Firefox 11.5%
Safari 2.6%
Netscape .63%

Internet Explorer by version
6.0 81.66%
7.0 17.22%
5.5 .65%

Firefox by version
1.5.08 57.34%
2.0 24.91%
1.0.7 3.92%

2006-12-09T02:09:00.000Z

Remotivated

I hit a temporary lull in productivity lately (no it's not the Wii!), but now I'm back to checking things off the task list. I finally got around to updating the Used Car Maintenance section on Used Cars On-Line for the new look. If you haven't tried it, I would appreciate any feedback you have!

2006-11-28T17:28:00.000Z

My Not So Wee Wii Review...whee!

Having the Nintendo Wii for almost two weeks, I think I am safely in the "cooling off" period, and can write a even handed review of the system. Almost all of the reviews I've seen were immediate impression, glowing reviews. I agree with some, and disagree with others.

I was lucky enough to be able to pre-order a Nintendo Wii, one of the benefits of working in the ghetto (there were still pre-orders available by the end of that day!).

The Brilliant

I knew I wanted a Wii when all the original details came out. The price was low, it came with a game, and it was about game play not graphics. This I had to respect. At $250, you really can't get a better deal on a system. And this is the first time in a long time that in box came everything one needed to get started, built in memory, a controller and a game! I also got Zelda, but more on that in a little bit. It was even backwards compatible so I could still use all my GameCube games and controllers. Backwards compatibility means little to me on PS or Xbox, because those games are about graphics... who wants to play Madden 05 when you have Madden 07? But the GameCube games I own were always just about having fun, so I think they hold on to their playing appeal even years later.

The Wiimote is another "Why hasn't anyone thought of this sooner?" invention. It's just like using a mouse on your TV. For things like using an on screen keyboard, and perusing menus, this feels so natural and quick. Although used incorrectly, the sniper-like aim you need can be frustrating.

The Good

Games are not just about graphics on this system, they are about having fun. One of my favorite games for GameCube was Wario Ware. It featured a minigame that involves four people just jumping rope on a 2-bit display of stick figures jumping rope. I tell you that simple game has caused more joy at house parties then anything Halo2 has ever done. The Wii continues this tradition. With Wii Sports, when you box in the ring, you actually box. You stand up and roll the ball in bowling. When you are warming up with a baseball bat, the bat follows all your movements. Unfortunately, Wii Sports is more of a demo then anything real. For example in baseball, you don't actually run the bases, you either just bat, or pitch. So the games are fun, but really I'm excited to see a "full" version of any of these mini games to really enjoy it.

The online store that allows you to buy classic games is also awesome. You can download and play N64, NES, SNES and even Sega Genesis and TurboGraphix 16 games! The selection is paltry now, but there are more then enough classics to get you started. The prices seem fair to me, $5 for NES games, and $8+ for others. As soon as Dr. Mario comes out, they will make their first sale to me.

The Bad

Ok, so I said I don't care about graphics. That's true. But the Wii looks pretty horrendous on an HDTV. I'm not asking for mind blowing PS3 graphics, but at least support HDTV out of the box! Supposedly with separate component cables you can get up to 480p, but I don't think that will fix many of the fundamental graphical challenges the system has. Wii Sports looks ok, as I think most cartoony ones will. But the "realistic" look that Zelda has looks frankly terrible on my HDTV. Its still a great game, but I do notice the graphics, unlike WindWaker which looked beautiful like playing a cartoon.

The Ugly

The worst part of the Wii by far is the online experience. First, it doesn't come with half the things originally promised at launch, no weather until late December, no news until January, and the Opera web browser is MIA for an unknown amount of time.

While getting it on the Internet was painless (wireless connection built in), using the Internet was so-so. It got on right away to download patches and things, yet it couldn't access the online store because of some unknown error (provided some big error code). After hours of searching the Internet and messing with settings, it turns out the problem was one of my DNS servers was a little slow, and once that was fixed I could get to the store.

Unlike on Xbox Live, where you have a simple gamer tag to provide a friend (mine is ry0ohki btw), the Wii has a not so easy to remember 16 digit number! (email me for mine) I have another friend with a Wii, and we've tried adding each other... first he added me... then I added him... we still aren't connected, but if we do get connected it should be cool. Supposedly you can have the little "Mii" avatars travel from one Wii to the other, even when the system is off (it maintains a low power mode where it stays online, and can download stuff and talk to Nintendo... cool but scary too).

Overall

Overall I'm pretty happy with it. It will be interesting to see the games that come out to make use of the technology. I have to give Nintendo credit for truely creating an "entertainment system" instead of just another pimped out console with bad ass graphics. I don't think it's fair to even compare it to 360 or PS3 anymore, as this is such a deviation, its doubtful we will see many cross platform games that reach Wii too, due to media and hardware limitations. I think a lot of the online accounts of non gamers gravitating to the system are a little over hyped. My wife (who isn't a gamer), enjoys the system, but I still havn't seen her turn it on when I'm not there. On the whole I'd give the Wii a 8/10.

2006-11-18T13:22:00.000Z

Craig needs some cash?

Did I miss something? When did craigslist start having sponsored links in emails?

** CRAIGSLIST ADVISORY --- AVOID SCAMS BY DEALING LOCALLY
** Avoid: wiring money, cross-border deals, work-at-home
** Beware: cashier checks, money orders, escrow, shipping
** More Info: http://www.craigslist.org/about/scams.html

Hello,

My brother want to buy your vehicle,kindly contact me immediately with more pic's and final price for onward transaction.Thanks

Sponsored Link

Mortgage rates near 39yr lows. $420,000 Mortgage for $1,399/mo - Calculate new house payment
this message was remailed to you via: sale-236097977@craigslist.org

Not that anyone blames him for trying to monetize it... but he could get billions of dollars for the site, why mess around with penny-ante inline ads?

2006-11-17T21:05:00.000Z

Program for yourself, not others

This has been said many times before, but I think it really sunk in for me today. The best software business you can start is one that solves YOUR problem. Just today, someone came to me with a "great idea" and the first thing I asked is:

"Well, would you use something like that?"
"Um...no, but I think a lot of people would really.."

That's the problem. If you can't convince yourself to buy whatever your selling, it's going to be hard to create something to sell to fictional future customers. "But I asked my mom and my brother what they thought, and they said it's a million dollar idea". Here's the thing. Agreeing to purchase fictional software is easy. Actually doing it is another thing. That's why market research can be so difficult. People lie. Maybe they want to impress you, maybe they just don't want to be disagreeable, but it's almost impossible to gauge actual future sales simply from asking people if they want whatever you plan to build.

If you look at the successful ISV's out there, almost all of them sell MeWare, as Eric Sink calls it. It's a no lose situation. If you solve your own problem, even with no sales you have something you can use. But there is a good chance other people have that same problem but are lazier or not as creative as you.

When I created my budget program or my used car site, I knew exactly what I wanted, exactly what would work well, and as a result these are both fairly popular. ChimSoft on the other hand is something I designed for others. It was a lot harder to sell version 1.0 because I had one person's idea of what they wanted, and then a few others ideas, but since I personally wouldn't truly use the software, I had to make tough decisions as to what the people actually wanted.

If you don't use your backup solution, or you don't use your handy dandy band-tracking RSS feed, it will be unlikely to work in a way that is useful to others. Marketing can make up for this in some respects, but most likely it will take a couple of versions with real users feedback to get a quality product.

How does this all relate to me? I've decided to try and release the Bug/Feature/CRM/Mailer tracking thing I discussed in a previous post, because this is something that solved all my problems. I know how it needs to work, and even if no one uses it, it's still good for me. And if anyone can think of an ISV that is sucessful without creating me-ware let me know, I'm really racking my brain.

2006-11-10T14:27:00.000Z

How I Do Bug Tracking....and Maybe a New Product?

A recent post by Joel talked about how a customer of FogBugz went through a great deal of effort to get FogBugz working as a Help Desk tool. This thread revealed others are doing essentially the same thing.

As someone who started his IT career out by working at Help Desks, I am baffled how or why people are doing this (mixing bugs in with Help Desk tickets) without going nuts. But I am kind of an organizational freak. It seems like most users of FogBugz are also using it for Project Management, mixing feature requests in with bugs too, which makes OCD Phil weep.

That's part of the reason I have not purchased FogBugz (in addition to a couple of other issues I have with it). I just need different organization. And also, I kind of have my own home built bug tracking system I created a few years ago, which over time has morphed into a combination of FogBugz, SalesForce, Microsoft's beta testing system, and Campaign Monitor.

When I was learning ASP.NET for the first time, I needed some kind of non-important application to learn in. So I decided to create a bug tracker, since the popular systems at the time were not very usable in my opinion (BugZilla being the big one). It's always my sandbox for new technologies. When AJAX, or .NET 2.0 came out, this is where I would learn it, test it, etc...

What's so different about my Bug Tracker? Well, for one thing, it completely separates feature requests from bugs. Feature requests have their own world of properties, such as release dates, versions, files touched, etc.. Bugs need to be more interactive. There is usually lots of back and forth about a Bug, and it needs to disappear off my radar quickly. A Feature basically just sits there until I decide if I will implement it or not. The metrics for features and bugs also need to be completely different. In addition, not all the requests you get are actually bugs. Sometimes people just have a question, and sometimes there is more of a task ("Convert Bob's customer file"), so my bug tracker separates all those categories as well.

When I started SearTech, customer contacts became a lot more important. So I created a basic CRM, that also links in with the bug and feature trackers, so you can see from a customer's record how many bugs and which features they are reporting. When I started beta testing, I needed a way to gather feedback from people. I don't want customers seeing my internal bug tracker and feature tracker, so I created a way to make some of these public facing, and allow people to vote for their requests. This helps me prioritize them. I then needed a way to send out mass emails from contacts in my internal CRM, so I then created a system that personalizes emails to people, and tracks that activity.

When I created the first version of the bug tracker, I stuck it up on my website to see if anyone was interested, of course I knew little about software marketing back then, so just a few random people who visited my website signed up. But now I am wondering if maybe other developers who think like me would be interested in the system I use internally? It's not really related in any way to my other products, but hey it's 90% developed for general use already. But I imagine the last thing the world needs is another bug tracker or CRM.

2006-11-06T18:32:00.000Z

Vote Tomorrow

If are are in the United States, be sure to get out and vote tomorrow.

I encourage you not to blindly vote along party lines. Get informed about the candidates in your area. The League of Women Voters has a very good guide. Local elections are more important in many ways then Presidential elections. These are the people that have a real effect on your crime, taxes, education systems, and infrastructure.

If you hate all the candidates, abstain, write-in or vote Rat, but at least participate in the system!

2006-11-04T15:17:00.000Z

New Site Design

A few months ago I mentioned that I was planning a major redesign of Used Cars On-Line. Well over the past month or so I've been converting most of the code to .NET, adding a few improvements in terms of image viewing, and spam prevention. Over this weekend, I made the biggest switch, to a completely new look.

Before

After

I told my friend who I had do the design that I wanted something "Web 2.0", and I didn't want to give any input at all, because artistic design and I go together like oil and water. I figured the further I stayed away from it, the better it would look to most people. I'm pretty happy with the end result. It also completely validates to W3C standards, is 508 compliant, yet still keeps the general functionality the same.

Let me know what you think (I am still putting some finishing touches on it).

And to reminisce, here are some designs from the ancient past (they look extra bad since Archive.org doesn't always keep all the old images):
1997

1999

2000

2002

2006-11-01T22:20:00.000Z

Job Boards Gone Wild!

Ok, it was cute and cool when 37Signals came out with their job board. Hey, jobs focused to people who appreciate 37Signals way of thinking... that makes sense! But then others realized, wait a sec, they are making money hand over fist for doing almost nothing at all! I can do that too! And so Joel came up with a job board, TechCrunch came up with a job board, DailyWTF, and now even Slashdot. I'm sure it's only a matter of time for Gizmodo, Engaget, digg, and any other tech blog/site out there to add it's own job board.

The problem is that these job boards no longer provide any value at all. You see the same jobs cross-posted already, and as they gain attention, this will only happen more. Tech people arn't really finding jobs that are posted by employers that think like Joel, or think like 37signals. Employers arn't really targeting any one audience apparently, since they post on multiple sources. And presumably the end user here is a job seeker... how has this made his/her life easier? Instead of just hitting Monster.com or Dice.com, there are now 5+ boards to visit.

Not only that, but there are so few postings for individual cities, that if I were looking for a job in say, Chicago, IL there are barely any at all. So what seems like a lot of jobs is an illusion, because most people are not open to moving anywhere in the world for a job. The quality of postings is no better then Monster.com, and in fact the text is usually just copy/pasted from some other listing. At least Joel added the Joel Test, although this is optional which is unfortunate.

As an employer, I would also be let down by the recent numbers Joel posted. ~300 people looking for jobs in DC? I don't know how that compares to Monster's audience, but it seems kind of low to me. The odds of getting more then 5-10 applicants seems very slim. Of course presumably you'll get a higher quality applicant, but then again, the people who apply are the type of people who read forums during work and look for other jobs in the process.

What's my point? Just that it seems like the only people benefiting from these boards is the blog owners. There's nothing wrong with that, but it would be nice if they tried to add as much value to the job postings as they add to their blog postings.

*Free mISV Idea*
Hopefully someone will come up with an aggregator soon, and maybe a way to rate employers and jobs. It would be interesting to see people's results from various job postings, and maybe who previously worked for the company.

2006-10-27T13:14:00.000Z

Browser Stats

Now that FireFox 2.0 has been released, time for a another Browser Stats check to reveal what your typical non-tech is browsing with...

From Yesterday:

Internet Explorer: 86.64%
Firefox: 10.51%
Safari: 1.74%
Netscape: .47%

Internet Explorer Types:
6.0: 93.61%
7.0: 4.38%
5.5: .55%

Firefox:
1.5.0.7: 73.68%
1.0.7: 8.27%
1.5.0.6: 3.76%
2.0: 3.01%

2006-10-23T15:15:00.000Z

What are the odds?

I'm not sure if they assign 800 numbers based on company name, but ever since I got an 888 number for SearTech around this time last year, I've had countless calls from people who are looking for Sears Technical support. Evidently the southern region of Sears hardware support used to have my 800 number, and someone there still has the number in the system to transfer people. So I get an unbelievable number of angry people who have been sent around their phone system... and of course they don't believe since I answer the phone as:

Me - "SearTech, this is Phil"
Angry Sears Customer - "Yeah, hi this is the FIFTH time my refrigerator has broken and I can't believe how many times you guys have transfered me around and..."
Me - "Actually, let me interupt, this is SearTech, not Sears Tech."
ASC - "That's who I'm looking for, because my #$%^%# Fridge is $##%5.."
Me - "No no, SEAR TECH, we make software..."
ASC - "Well, can you transfer me to the right number???"
Me - "Um...no sorry."
ASC - "$%$#%$!@"
-click-

What are the odds that SearTech gets Sears Tech's old number?

2006-10-20T12:01:00.000Z

Browser Stats 10/20/2006

I feel my used cars site is a good cross section of the Internet browsing world at large. It gets a lot of hits, yet not all of them are tech people. Everyone searches for a used car at some point. Because of this sample, I thought it would be interesting to start posting browser usage stats to see how IE7 gains.

Looking at the whole month of September (Things below 1% not shown for the most part):
IE - 87.39%
Firefox - 9.31%
Safari - 1.73%
Netscape - .83%

Of IE:
6.0 - 96%
7.0 - 2.21%
5.5 - .71%
4.01 - .03%

Looking at ONLY yesterday, since that is when IE7 was released:
IE - 86.67%
Firefox - 10.82%
Safari - 1.2%
Netscape - .65%

Of IE:
6.0 - 95%
7.0 - 3.23%
5.5 - .58%

2006-10-19T22:46:00.000Z

Love Letters from Nigeria

My new favorite 419 scam letter:

I am interested in your car advert listed for sale,pls email me
back at your earliest conviniece your last asking price,the area for
the pick up immediately the payment has been made and lastly the reason
for offering it for sale.
I will wait to hear from you soonest for me to have bes confirmation concerning the car i have to send someone there to test and ship it for me.please i need better job from you,am sorry if am too demanded i have to coz have fallen into many trash before ,plz i dont want that this time arround.
regards
Tony Finesse
tonyfinesse01@yahoo.com

Kind of typical boring scam letter until the last three sentences...

please i need better job from you

Wait... I thought you were buying a car from me?

am sorry if am too demanded i have to coz have fallen into many trash before ,plz i dont want that this time arround.

What? This poor gentlemen obviously has bad luck, or very bad balance, because he has fallen into trash many times. Poor little bugger.

Actually, I can't help him, but evidently eBay can:

2006-10-19T00:35:00.000Z

Paul Graham's latest...

Paul Graham makes some great points in his latest essay, about the top 18 mistakes that kill startups. Hopefully it's not actually ordered in terms of importance, since the list starts out in typical "Paul Graham made it up" style, but ends with some really good points.

Let's cover them one by one.

1. Single Founder - This is just silly. He argues that a single founder means you couldn't get anyone to believe in your idea. How about this... I don't want to share revenues with a buddy just for the sake of having a partner? He's not completely off base though. No one is 100% well rounded, and having a partner that compliments your bad points can be a good thing. In fact, if you look at the successful partnerships, its usually "one business guy" and "one tech guy". But if you grab another tech guy, and you are techy too, I think the partnership is more likely to end in fighting then success. Either way, I believe you can succeed as a single founder.

2. Bad Location - I've covered this in previous posts, but again Paul reveals that he lives in the Paul Graham snow globe. Let's look at his ranking for top startup towns:

"Silicon Valley dominates, then Boston, then Seattle, Austin, Denver, and New York. After that there's not much"

Boston??!!! The number two?? Are you joking Paul? I know you live in Boston, but give me a break! In fact, outside of the Y combination companies, I can't think of a single startup from the Boston area. I can think of quite a few from Seattle and Austin though. New York seems like an odd pick too. I think in terms of startups per capita, New York is not a very big one. I know of a lot more startups in the DC area then Boston and New York combined. He uses Chicago as a counter example, yet I can still think of at least four tech startups from Chicago, and still zero from Boston.

Bad Location will not kill you. If you want Venture Captial, it helps to be in an urban area, but if you are a mISV, it really doesn't make a difference where you are, and I know quite a few successful startups in the boring suburbs of Maryland.

3. Marginal Niche - This is a good one. I have experience with this one. Chimney Sweeps are an extremely marginal niche. You will never retire selling entirely to Chimney Sweeps, I realized this from day one, but the plan was and still is to expand from Chimney Sweeps using the basic ChimSoft engine.

4. Derivative Idea - Paul...seriously. Where is your evidence here? Most of the BEST startups come from Derivative ideas. Google. Microsoft. Sun. Oracle. FogBugz. All of these companies made a better version of something that sucked. Better to improve an existing market then try to create your own.

5. Obstinacy - I probably would have had to look that word up...but yeah, don't be too stubborn to change your plan mid-course. Especially when it's your first company. I have NEVER gotten it right on the first try.

6. Hiring Bad Programmers - No argument or praise here... certainly this is more important in your early hires then your late hires.

7. Choosing the Wrong Platform - Ironic from someone who wrote a web based store in Lisp... ;) ... This is only a problem if you cannot handle your platform. Users have no idea what platform you are using. Reddit started in Lisp and MySpace started in ColdFusion, but neither of these mistakes KILLED the startups. If you decide to write a new web CRM in C++ instead of Ruby On Rails, ensure you can make the switch when you need to

8. Slowness in Launching - Here is where he starts to hit his stride. I've known quite a few developers in person that just NEVER get around to launching. Don't be afraid! Launching your product, even if you don't think it's complete gives you such motivation to improve it or at least move on.

9. Launching Too Early - No personal examples of this, but I've certainly seen company's rush a half assed product to the market only for it to be quickly forgotten (*cough* 80% of Google Labs *cough*).

10. Having No Specific User in Mind - So true. Usually when people come to me with brilliant business ideas, this is where I punch a hole in their plan. "Well, WHY exactly would someone pay our company $50 to place an add for a yard sale when CraigsList is free? Who are these people finding us?"

11. Raising Too Little Money - No comments here, I don't think this is KILLER, but it may make the difference between you being Google vs you being a much smaller company that still does alright.

12. Spending Too Much - Should be obvious, but some companies go nuts hiring people and building infrastructure while forgetting about the core business.

13. Raising Too Much Money and 14. Poor Investor Management - No comment here either, good points.

15. Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit - Another mistake early startups make... pay attention to what a user wants. If you yourself would not buy or use your product, maybe you are not alone?

16. Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty - I have this problem, and I think it's what kills so many startups. You must put yourself out there and be bold about getting sales contacts. Google AdWords won't work for every business, being social and selling are very important differentiators.

17. Fights Between Founders - Right...see my counter to point one. Don't start businesses with friends.

18. A Half-Hearted Effort - Pure gold here. I've seen so many people and startups give up if their product doesn't succeed in the first month. Things take time. Things take hard word. Occasionally companies get dugg on their first announcement and go public two months later, but occasionally people win the $200 million powerball. Don't play those odds. Figure out why your product isn't selling and improve it. Don't give up unless you have exhausted every possible avenue. Hard work is underrated these days.

2006-10-18T01:46:00.000Z

Why I hate Peter Norton

Actually I don't hate Peter, but come on what programmer puts a picture of himself on the program's box? Really, my beef with Norton today is Norton's Internet Utilities. Customers started complaining that there was no link to view their ads. I didn't know what was going on, and when I got screenshots that physically showed the link missing I was really shocked. Even though the same browser was being used, a link was literally not there!

Finally after getting the HTML source from the customer, I saw some bizarre JavaScript on the page that wasn't mine. Well this explained it. Because the link to the ads was called "AdView.aspx" Norton blocked them. Argh. So I guess the moral is, beware using the word "ad" on your website. I guess I'll have to purchase Norton now just to test all my websites in now.

2006-10-15T22:11:00.000Z

If you want something done right...

The coolest thing about being a developer is if some application doesn't work the way you want it to, you can take matters into your own hands and fix it.

I had been using Yahoo! Autos maintenance for years now (maybe since 2000?). It used to be semi useful back in the day, and would figure out when you were due for an oil change and remind you. But then that stopped working, and they redid the interface, and ever since it's been horrendous to use. I saw they were hiring for that area a few years ago, so I assumed a web 2.0 makeover was on it's way, and I kept using it.

But still nothing has happened. After changing my oil this weekend I thought, jeez, this application is so simple, I am going to make something better myself. Since I have a car related website, I figured others who are as anal about car maintenance as me may want to use it too. So I spent a few hours this weekend throwing together a quick CRUD web app that already works better then Yahoo!. I still have a bunch of things I want to do before I release it to others, but in a matter of minutes I was able to get my auto history entered, and I'm quite pleased:

I hope to have it out by the end of next week, if you are interested in testing it, let me know. Security is always my biggest concern with apps like this... I spend probably 50% of my development effort thinking of scenarios where people might hack it.

2006-10-09T18:57:00.000Z

New Home

A while back I was looking for a new place for my servers to live. Well I found a place, and today the move went off without a hitch.

The new hosting facility it much better then any previous ones I've been in, since it appears to be jointly ran by Lockheed Martin, and hosts government servers. After seeing the huge redundant generators and 3 story cooling towers with gravity fed water tanks I was pretty much sold. There is so much redundancy in this place, there is a good chance you will still be able to buy chimney sweep software and used cars if DC gets nuked. There's even 24/7 security in case you were thinking of physically unplugging my hardware.

My parting thought is that if I ever get my hands on the person that writes the interfaces for Netscreen/Juniper firewalls, I will rip them limb from limb.

2006-10-08T18:13:00.000Z

Have you had your chimney swept this year?

I get a kick out of telling people I make software for Chimney Sweeps. The first image that comes into most people's minds is Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins sitting there with a laptop. The truth is that Chimney Sweeps in this day and age are more like high tech inspectors then black lunged dredges from a Dickens novel.

Oh they still sweep chimneys, although it's usually done with a combination of brushes and vaccumes. Some even still dress up like the old time chimney sweeps. But they do a lot more then that. Today most chimney sweeps are equipped with chimney scanning cameras. These little robot-like devices can be sent up your chimney and reveal cracks and other fire dangers that would not be visible to most humans with a flashlight.

When a chimney sweep sweeps your chimney, they will typically give it an inspection as well, checking dampers, draft, and other fire dangers. Every year people experience chimney fires, and others die from carbon monoxide poisoning. Regular chimney sweeping can help to prevent both of these things.

With energy prices high, chimney sweeps can also help you insulate an area of your home that can leak lots of energy. They can install high tech flues, reflectors, and dampers to help you save more energy, and increase the amount of heat you receive from a fire.

I get my chimney swept once a year, have you had yours swept lately? If you live in the northeast I can probably recommend someone in your area, if not, be sure to check The National Chimney Sweep Guild's or the Chimney Safety Institute of America's websites for a certified sweep in your area.

Of course, if they are not using ChimSoft yet, feel free to give me a plug ;)

2006-10-05T23:16:00.000Z

Reward Yourself

For the other MicroISV'ers out there, if you are making $100 a month or $1k a month, remember why you probably started your business in the first place, to have fun! It's important to reward yourself in some way, or the stress will build and you will burn out quick. Set a small goal for yourself, and if you reach it, give yourself a small reward.

For me, I had always promised myself once I reached a certain level of earnings I would buy something I dreamed about as a kid, season tickets to by alma matter, University of Maryland Basketball. They are perrenially sold out, and season tickets go for a fortune on eBay. I finally got some this year, and not only will it force me away from the computer for 20 games, but it also reminds me why I am spending time on all this in the first place!

2006-09-29T00:41:00.000Z

The Revitalization of Used Cars On-Line, Part 2 of X

OK, I have something embarassing to admit. I have been making a huge PageRank mistake over the past 5 years or so, all because of a superstition.

When I first moved Used Cars On-Line to a dynamic/database driven site, I put everything but the root index under the 2see.com domain. We used this domain for individual premium ads, so that one could have a classified address with it's own web address (http://2see.com/DBMD001), which was pretty high tech back in 1997. So 2see.com was the address I gave my dedicated server, and I left the AUsedCar.com domain hosted at a third party hosting provider. So everything that needed to be driven by the database had to point to 2see.com.

Why didn't I use subdomains (ex: blah.ausedcar.com)? No clue. I don't think I appreciated the negative effect using two domains would have on my PageRank (which is pretty decent, and a 5 currently). Why didn't I move all of AUsedCar.com over to my dedicated solution? Well, Yahoo was my host (originally Simplenet for the really old school folks out there), and at the time, we were ranked #1 on Yahoo under the search of "used cars". Perhaps believing in a conspiracy, I thought that maybe my high ranking in Yahoo was in part due to the fact that I was local. Perhaps ping times, or just a Yahoo IP or something was helping my rank. After all, MSN is the only major search engine that doesn't show my site in the top 10-20 under the common search terms... could that be because the OS AUsedCar.com was on was Solaris/Apache?

Fast forward to 2006 and Yahoo makes up only about 10% of the traffic driven to my site. But I still never got around to switching the domain. A real eye opener happened during this redesign when I did a "site:ausedcar.com" query in Google. Only 6 or 7 pages came up, and 3 or 4 of them were not even current. Argh! Google doesn't know that 2see.com is my site! It must think I'm a link farm! Well I set about changing that right away. Tonight half of the DNS servers out there are showing AUsedCar.com as one unified site. Hopefully this will increase PageRank. More on the continuing changes that are underway in future posts.

2006-09-23T17:31:00.001Z

Scamsters Respond

Last week, I revealed a new technique I was using to combat spammer/scammers from contacting my customers. Studying the trends over the week, I added a new addition which actually prevents them from sending any emails once they reach a certain spam threshold. Well, the scammers are not too happy about not being able to send their emails. I got this nice letter from marcuscambellblack@yahoo.com :

you said i have being flagged for scam which is not too good.i am never a scammer and i am preety unhappy at that will you just let me know why on earth will you do such.
thanks

Uh oh! Well with that well written english I thought perhaps my filtering scheme was not working well, so I decided to test Mr. Cambell. I sent an email from a random email address I have (which does not have a car for sale and does not mention any details about the car):

Hi,

Yes my car is still for sale, my final price is $2,000.

-Phil

Well, what do you know, without even knowing the make or year of my car, and indeed never contacting me about any car, he wrote this nice letter back:

Hello thanks for the response.my name is dr. marcus cambell black and i am a british citizen.i am a car dealer and i was introduce to the internet market by my friend williams.i intend buying your car and ship it here in the uk and i will resell it to people who are in need of it.we basically sell this cars to people who live here in the uk and prefer to ride on the left hand drive car as you have in your country and i am sure you know that here in the uk we ride on the right hand drive.therefore,i will want to know your fanal price and i will want you to give me assuarance that the car is in good condition or better still tell me all about the car and your prefered method of payment.i need this car as fast as possible because i have check it well on the web and i will want you to act fast on it.
thanks for your anticipated cooperation and hope to hear from you soon.
I must confess,i need this car.
thanks

Sure you've never scammed Mr. Cambell, sure you havn't. So the scam prevention is working well so far.

2006-09-19T10:31:00.000Z

Appropriate FoxTrot today:

2006-09-17T16:54:00.000Z

Operation Scarlet Letter

The only problem with having multiple projects as an ISV is that some of them will always get the short end of the stick in terms of your attention. Sometimes this is OK, it helps prevent feature bloat, and it lets you devote more time to new ventures. In my case, my oldest project Used Cars On-Line had been on my back burner. The last redesign was 3 years ago, and it still used old ASP. Despite the site having a significant POTENTIAL technology advantage over the competitors (since it's just me in the company!) the tech of the site had lagged behind the times. So I have began a major redesign that I will share over the coming month.

I looked at two of the biggest problems, 1) Usefulness of site to buyers and sellers. I'll get back to this point in another post, but the main point of today's post is the #2 problem. Scamsters.

If you put up a classified ad anywhere on the Internet, you will get bombarded by scams, especially with used cars. You would think the scams are obvious enough that most people are aware of them now, but my audience consists of a very diverse group of people who may not be that tech savvy. I was constantly getting angry emails from people that had been scammed or were wasting their time interacting with scamsters.

A couple of years ago, my solution was to log every IP address, watch for patterns, and then block the IP range at the firewall. I noticed trends like anything from Nigeria was usually a scam, so I blocked entire parts of Africa and Asia. After all, my site is targeted only to US customers. Unfortunately, this STILL didn't solve the problem. The scamsters began using AOL IP's or USA based proxies or satellite providers... so they still got through. And later I found that parts of Australia and Japan have been blocked too!

So now everything is unblocked. But how to stop the scams? My solution is what I call the "Scarlet Letter" approach. Every initial email to a customer must now go through my system. When that happens, an IP and email used are logged. The header of the email to the customer contains a link to report the buyer as a scammer. If a report is filed, that IP and email are flagged. If either is detected sending an email again, a cookie is set on the scamsters computer, and a warning attaches all emails he sends alerting the customer to be especially careful of a scam. So to get around this scam detection now, a scamster must change their email, their IP, AND clear their cookies between each contact. I think this will be enough to prevent most scamsters from circumventing the system. I'm also going to copy myself on most emails for the time being to see if I can detect enough trends to perhaps add a bayesian filter to help the process. I'll also be flagging scamsters myself.

Anyone see any problems with this approach that I may be missing?

2006-09-12T10:41:00.000Z

Yahoo Maps Beta

Wow, I just discovered the Yahoo Maps Beta. Yahoo Maps had always given better directions then Google. For example, one time I mapped a trip from Baltimore to New Orleans, and Google gave a route that took 4 hours longer. Also to get across town it always has me taking this weird collection of highways, where Yahoo gives you the shortest, most direct route. But Yahoo wasn't AJAX, and that's just painful after Google Maps.

Well, not anymore! Not only is their map AJAX now, but it has updated satellite photography (my house is clear, not a blur now!), real time traffic info (looks like a tractor trailer jacknifed near my exit), and all the other features that Google Maps already had. It even starts the map at a location based on my IP! Only weird thing is the zoom control, I prefer the zoom in to be at the top, and the zoom out to be at the bottom.

2006-09-09T16:42:00.000Z

Web 2.0 Conference too good for me

Alas I did not get an invitation to the Web 2.0 conference, I suppose a GREAT developer would have had connections ;). It looks like I'll probably be going to Refresh 06 instead. Any better conferences going on this fall?

2006-09-06T22:09:00.000Z

Regular Ol' Developer

Over at Joel On Software, Joel is again talking about the best way to get Great Developers. Lots of people chime in about how they themselves are great developers, or their tips and tricks for getting great developers. It's articles like this that make me feel a little left out, because I know by Joel's standards I am not a great developer.

Joel goes to the top Comp Sci schools and writes personal letters to the top students in the department. I went to a decent Comp Sci school (U of MD), but was certainly no where near the top of the Comp Sci department. When I went to school I was extremely disappointed with the Computer Science program. C was great, C++ was better, but then we got into binary search trees, discrete math, big O notation, linear algebra, and calculus 3. BORING. I just wanted to know when we'd get around to writing Windows and/or Macintosh programs. You know, the kind REAL people used. Later, of course I realized that Computer Science was supposed to be a science, and there really was no course of study that taught how to make business programs at my college.

Joel says GREAT developers only ever apply for maybe 3-4 jobs ever. Well, this is my 5th IT job, and I plan on working more before all is said and done. And yes, I've actually had to apply for jobs. KC tells me that all the GREAT developers already have connections, or are gotten jobs through other secret channels. Well, I have a lot of connections, but maybe because I live in the DC area, most of my connections work at jobs that sound much worse then anything I've worked in. And of course during my last job search (after the .COM company I worked for went under), there were few positions open ANYWHERE. It's doubtful I'll resort to connections for my next position.

But hey, I'm not GREAT or the BEST and I'm happy with that. I don't believe being a great developer has any impact at all on your success in life, business or development (ok maybe it's worth 15% or so). Take 37Signals for instance. They are hardly developers at all! None went to Harvard and got a special letter from Joel as far as I can tell. But they are perhaps making as much or more money then FogCreek (they have considerably less overhead). I've know a few GREAT developers in real life. They don't make much more then my base salary, and less overall when you add on the mISV stuff. Their jobs are not exciting (to me at least). Sure they are working on the programming for the heart monitor that may save my life one day, or the targeting system for a missle that may blow up China one day, but in the end, it's just a day job they still have to report to with shirt and tie on.

What makes 37signals succeed? Why arn't the great developers rich? What would I be looking for if I were hiring? A couple of things.

1)Ambition
2)Ability to learn and adapt quickly
3)Creativity
4)Able to handle stress well
5)Experience
6)Be well rounded and fluent in customer service

Joel has these things. That is why FogCreek is sucessful. The high end developers are simply more tools to achieve that end. I don't really know much about any of them, but I'm sure they are creative and learn quickly. But according to Joel, no one has ever quit FogCreek. That shows a lack of ambition to me. How can you graduate right out of school and work for a company without knowing what else is going on out there? If you are a top 10 developer from Yale, shouldn't we have you working on unlocking the genome or something? They are not experienced. They only know of the world of development that Joel provides, which seems fairly unique and specialized.

Because I've had a couple of jobs, my skill set is pretty well rounded. Besides being a programmer, I've been a PC tech, a network engineer, a help desk guy, a lab tech, delivered pizza and even worked in a warehouse. So while a superior developer at work is waiting for the network guys to figure out what's wrong with the server, I can fix it myself. While a great developer is talking condescendingly to an angry client, I can get them to laugh. It's little things like this, being well rounded and ambitious that I put a premium on.

From my experience recruiting, and working at a wide range of jobs, I really believe the best employees are those that meet the six criteria above. Someone may not be the best developer, but if they are creative and ambitious, I'd bet on them to solve a problem as well as one of the GREAT developers (perhaps just not as elegantly).

Well, anyways... that's my random rant on the subject. Hopefully there are other "non-great" developers like myself out there.

2006-08-30T10:23:00.000Z

Extracurriculars

I've recently started taking the Dale Carnegie Course. If you have not read "How to Win Friends and Influence People", basically the point of the course is to reiterate certain simple things you can do to make yourself more likable, confident, and persuasive. All of which are extremely important traits to have when running a business. I highly recommend it to anyone, at the very least you should read Carnegie's three books. I will try to make a post or two on the really important points.

Also, on the fitness end of things I've gotten myself signed up for an Adult soccer league. Scary, since I have not touched a ball since high school.

2006-08-26T13:29:00.000Z

Keywords

Studying Google Analytics this morning for my used cars classified site, it appears in the last month, no less then 1376 different combinations of searches brought people to the site. The most bizarre ones are searches for completely different domains, like "www.unusedcar.com". I'm not sure which search engine would return my site as a valid result for that. Also completely unanticipated are the number of slang words people use to search, like "looking for dirt cheap cars", and perhaps as a factor of the large amount of hits I get from ask.com, "what web page can i find cars for sale only by owner". When I first started the site back in 1995, before anything about SEO was known, the only thing I thought to search for was "used cars". That is still the most popular way to get to us, but it only makes up 17% of the total.

I was able to get in on the first round of Google Analytics last November, but I would have killed for something like this ten years ago, when everything with search engines was superstition, and a change in meta tags could result in a huge drop or gain on search (before Google came around).

2006-08-22T12:42:00.000Z

Impatience

Back from Chicago, which will probably be my last vacation for a while based on the amount of backlog I have... amazing how much piles up over four days now.

Just wanted to chime in on the whole Kiko thing. I won't even bother linking to the auction and the various points and counterpoints because there has been so much written about it at this point. Kiko made the mistake that most "failed" businesses make. No, it wasn't lack of revenue that killed Kiko. It wasn't a bad product that killed Kiko. And it certainly wasn't Google that killed Kiko. It was impatience.

In this 24-hour news cycle, buy-now, pay-later world, people expect results immediately. Throw a product or business out there, and if it doesn't succeed immediately, throw the idea out and start over. I'll clue all the potential entrepenuers reading this blog into a little business insight.... most businesses are not sucessful immediately. Get rid of the idea in your head that your business will get Dugg, and you'll be going public by December. It's very very unlikely to happen.

I havn't really gone into my background of how I know anything about business, but I come from a family of entrepeneurs. My grandpa started a printing business back in the 50s with a friend. They barely scraped by, just paying the bills for years, until the 70s when the business took off and they were rich (The business then failed in the late 80s, more on that some other time). My dad had a sign business in the 80s, which my step-mom then took over. They did vinyl for vans out of a barn for years before they landed a few medium contracts, and then huge contracts like the Baltimore-Washington International Airport, the National Aquarium, and almost every public school in Maryland.

Google took at least 4 years before it gained momentum. FogCreek had to do consulting for years, 37signals did web work for years until they found their niche. Microsoft made software for a hobbiest computer for years before they moved the Redmond. My own used car site took 3 years to get popular, and 6 years to turn a serious profit. Show me a sucessful business, and nine times out of ten, there is a momentum curve to it.

If you are not ready invest several YEARS in your business idea, don't bother. If you are just waiting for the one get rich quick idea, you're better off playing the lottery or putting some money on red. Why is this? Well, some people don't trust new businesses, they want to see you around for a few years. But mainly, there is this mysterious momentum with a company, where at some point you'll reach a critical mass and orders will come flooding in. Usually this is because you have a REPUTATION, not because 1000 anonymous people "dugg" you because you have some cool AJAX effects.

Anyways, what could Kiko have done? Well, I seriously almost considered putting in a bid for them, except that A) I don't want to mess with rails, it doesn't work with anything I have going on B) I don't have time to mess with making the money back, even though I'm convinced one could.

The bottom line is that Kiko was too lazy to turn a profit. They clearly hoped to get bought out, which is again much less likely then hitting red in roulette (or even hitting a number exactly). But they had lots of users, lots of hype and lots of traffic. They themselves admitted they were distracted. But they were one of the first on the block, and the presumably still have decent traffic. They could have at least broken even by offering a premium service, or even better an API. What about a Kiko component, so other web based software companies can include a cool web calendar easily? Advertising? Sure. But it would have to be from a channel that pays up front, instead of the new fangled cost-per-click model. Or even just use Kiko.com to plug some new product idea that actually has a revenue model.

The bottom line is, if your product is not making millions in the first month, that DOES NOT MEAN IT IS A FAILURE. I believe almost any product can make money somehow, it just takes hard work. If you thought your idea was great originally, what has changed that? Don't give up on your business until you have tried everything (no matter how tedious, expensive, humiliating, annoying, etc...) to get it to succeed. Give it at least three years, not three months.

2006-08-17T23:03:00.000Z

Homeless Again

Well, yet another Colocation company goes under. This is the third colo I've used that's gone out of business. I'd like to think they can't make their profit margins with the huge amount of bandwidth used by my sites....

If anyone can recommend a Colocation facility in the Baltimore/DC area let me know. Preferably under $200 per U of rack space, with unlimited or reasonably priced bandwidth.

2006-08-15T22:24:00.000Z

Updates

Travel
Ok, so I said I wouldn't do any work last weekend, but I guess I'm not doing any work this weekend either, since I'm going on a last vacation for the summer, a quick 4 day trip to Chicago. It's the only major US city I haven't been to yet. It's a weird city because it was in every movie of the 80s, but seems to have disappeared off the map since. Everything is about NYC these days. This trip also makes this my most traveled year (if you don't include my cross country drive after college). Between day job, SearTech conventions and vacation, this year I've been to Mystic CT, New York City, Louisville, Burlington, Lansing, Pittsburgh, The Adirondacks, Reykjavik, London, Oxford, and Paris...and it's only August.

BudgetSimple
I still haven't gotten around to doing any marketing for BudgetSimple, yet it started getting a bunch of traffic this week as links spread from the tech community, to the freebie community, then to the mommy community... It's an interesting study and I may do a more detailed display of how it's making its way around the internet. Hope anyone who signed up is enjoying it. I'll be adding a few more needed categories and taking the beta label off. I think it's irresponsible to leave a beta label on things forever, I don't mind taking responsibility for my bugs.

Gaming
All the talk lately from Andrey and Benji of making games got me vaguely interested in finishing the game I started two years ago, but its doubtful I'll have time to finish this year. I guess I could open source it as one random person wanted, but that kind of takes all the fun out of it, doesn't it? The Xbox 360 dev kit is also of great interest to me, and perhaps to MicroISVs.

SearTech
ChimSoft is still chugging along, version 1.6 is under development, hopefully in time for the busy season for Chimney Sweeps in the fall. I am off pace for my ambitious sales goal for the year (goals that are easy to meet are called tasks in my book), but hopefully the fall will make up for it.

AdSense
My experiment with AdSense is past the experimentation phase and is just plain old income at this point. Day to day earnings are extremely inconsistent, but the monthly earnings have been about the same.

2006-08-12T17:28:00.000Z

AFK

It's important for MicroISV'ers to get away from the computer every now and then to rest the ol' retinas. With absolutely beautiful weather in Maryland this weekend, there won't be much programming done since I'll be on this:

If you're stuck or just getting burnt out, get away from the computer for a little bit, it helps!

2006-08-09T10:28:00.000Z

Google blames click fraud consultants for click fraud

Interesting article on the AdWords blog: Troubling findings on how some third parties detect click fraud.

With the somewhat exaggerated title of "troubling" findings, it seems to argue that the way click fraud consultants are estimating clicks is a large part of the problem, and that click fraud numbers are highly over counted, because of the methods they use. After reading this, and the third party paper that was written in response to the lawsuit Google recently settled, it seems both sides are to blame here. I don't think click fraud is as wide spread as some say, but it is definitely more of an issue then Google indicates, and I believe there is still more they can do. The easiest way for us to know the real numbers is for Google to release more of their data, which of course they will not do.

2006-08-06T19:37:00.000Z

C Dull

Way back in December I wrote this post about why I chose to use .NET for ChimSoft, and how I am using Visual Basic .NET. I didn't really compare and contrast C# vs Visual Basic except to say that it seemed most people were picking C# because it's "more manly".

When I first started transitioning to .NET, I learned most of the ins and outs in C#, but because of our architecture at work, we used Visual Basic .NET. VB.NET kind of became habit, so I used it at home, but I took it for granted that C# was pretty much just like VB.NET, except slightly different syntax.

Well, I hadn't really touched C# in detail for a while, so I felt I was getting a little rusty with it. Plus everyone and there mother was using it, so I wondered if maybe I was missing out on something. I WAS missing out on something it turns out, a world full of headaches.

I should mention first that I was raised learning C. It was the first language I learned in high school (we didn't have programming classes, so I took an independant study where I just bought a C book). From there I moved on to C++ in college, with a touch of Java there at the end. So I'm more then versed in the "tough" languages, and Joel's pointer arithmetic test doesn't seem like a big deal. But I must say, I have been extremely spoiled with VB .NET.

Switching back to C#, suddenly I have to worry about case sensitivity again, int's not implicitly casting to strings, and arrays that have to be explicitly sized! Classes that don't allow optional parameters, properties that don't allow a parameter to "get" besides an index... it turns out C# is dramatically more different then Visual Basic .NET then I remembered.

So, I was originally going to develop the next SearTech app entirely in C# (despite already having a ton of code to draw on in VB... i know), but now I'm reconsidering. It's taking me 4 times as long to develop anything, and I can probably cut that down to two once I remember to use all the C# particulars, but there is still extra code involved in casting, and different properties from library functions etc... C# makes me happier from a nerd point of view with it's strictness and curly braces, but from a practical point of view I gotta ask why it seems most people are using C# when there seems to be a "shortcut" done for you in VB.NET. Is using a non-embarassing language that important, or am I missing some great thing about C#?

2006-08-02T21:55:00.000Z

Spam from the future?

So I've been getting an awful lot of bizarre spam lately on my Yahoo account (the one I use for any public asking sites). It looks like this:

Note two things:

1) It's completely unreadable, meaning it's either there just to fill my inbox, or it's in another character set... my email address does sound vaguely japanese?
2) All of them are dated January 18, 2038. Maybe this is just so they float to the top of the box?

Alternate Theory:
Perhaps future Phil, in a post-apocolyptic war that sees China winning, and a banishment of the english language, is urgently trying to warn me about something.

Alternate Theory 2:
Spammers in the future, thanks to a ban on net neutrality, purchase the highest speed connections, which send spam faster then the speed of light, resulting in spam accidentily being sent to the past.

I'm pretty sure it's one of the alternate theories. Luckily Yahoo catches 100% of this. Let's see GOOGLE filter spam from the future.

2006-08-02T02:54:00.000Z

Microsoft, why must you suck?

So it appears Microsoft decided to roll out live.com tonight to MSN Spaces. Maybe the damage goes further then that, but it's the first thing I've noticed. Live.com, for those who are not familiar is Microsoft's answer to Web 2.0. It's super super Ajaxified(TM) but provides little more power and much worse speed. I'm on a cable modem with a 3 ghz computer, and everything that has anything to do with Live.com has ran slow for me. I thought maybe just because it was under development, but no. Microsoft's new Live maps are a pretty good answer to Google Maps, except that most of the Satellite data is out of date, and it's much slower then Google maps. Live.com the search engine has some neat new tricks, but since it doesn't bring up Used Cars On-Line anywhere near the top of the search results for "used cars", unlike every other search engine, it must suck.

Well, I could pretty much avoid those things in the past. But now they've gone and applied live.com to MSN Spaces. There are not MANY great blogs on MSN spaces, but there are a few I read, the best being The Fat Cyclist. When I launched the blog for BudgetSimple, I decided to try MSN Spaces, it was clean, it was easy, it was fast and it just worked, which is much more then I can say for Blogger. It had a major drawback in that only people with Microsoft Passport accounts could comment, but whatever.

So now they've live.com-ified everything. Let me whip out a screenshot of the beauty of it:

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe they are still rolling this thing out. But it is slow as hell, and looks terrible in Firefox.

Edit: They evidently still were rolling out. In my day that's not an appropriate rollout window, but maybe they are following the Google model all the way ;). It looks better now, but still a little unecessary.

2006-07-28T20:29:00.000Z

Where is the High Tech?

In response to Paul Graham's essay: How to Be Silicon Valley.

Paul Graham basically says it takes two things to make an area Silicon Valley, money, and nerds. He says money goes where good weather and cool people live, pointing to New York, Boston, and Silicon Valley. And geeks go where top comp sci schools are, again pointing to Silicon Valley and Boston. Plus geeks like to have good public transit, a great social life, and friendly people.

His whole premise is based around the world of Paul Graham. Paul Graham likes cities. Paul Graham lives in Boston. Paul Graham likes public transportation. He then kind of draws all his conclusions around that world. One of the first problems with his premise is that Boston is not a Silicon Valley. It seems to have a decent amount of tech jobs according to Monster.com, but I don't know if I can think of a single big start up or tech company from Boston.

He notices a couple of big holes in his theory like LA and NYC, but quickly writes those off as "too mainstream". I don't know if i've ever heard a nerd reject a job because a city is too mainstream, and many nerds I know wish NYC was a better place for startups.

He seems to miss the obvious fact that Seattle is a tech center, not because of U of Washington or Seattle itself, but because of Microsoft. If Microsoft had stayed in Albequerque, I get the feeling New Mexico would be more of a tech hub. Paul Graham, and Joel Spolsky both assume most programmers want to live in a big city. That may be true with kids straight out of college, but what about older people or more introverted people? Can there be a startup in say, Burlington, VT or Madison, WI?

It seems to me the reason most tech hubs are where they are because of a large company's presence there. Microsoft goes to Seattle, gets big, and then groups of the original members form their own companies, that have their own sucess, who's members then create their own companies. AOL goes to northern Virginia, and original team members go on to form thier own Northern VA companies.

But does it matter where you start your business? In these days, where person-to-person contact is less necessary, I don't think so. I think the factors that do matter are time zone, and cost of living. These two things are the only factors that really effect a small IT business's bottom line. If you have a business based in Honolulu, you're recruiting efforts may bring in some great people, but the overhead to your business and the weird hours your support folks have to work may effect how well you do. Some of the other things Paul mentions are favorable tax codes. This would make Las Vegas or Delaware a prime place for IT startups, but that doesn't appear to be the case. In fact Massachusetts, California and Washington have some of the least friendly tax codes for small business.

Location may matter a little more once you start trying to recruit people. But then, it will matter what kind of people you are trying to recruit. Joel Spolsky seems to want only straight out of college programmers. Perhaps these are best suited to be trained in his business practices, are more likely to put in longer hours etc.. Young people generally like big cities and don't mind renting a 1-bedroom with 3 other people. But will those programmers stick around when they are 30? Or will they form their own companies in Connecticut? It would be interesting to me to see a company market their ruralness to lure in developers.

2006-07-26T22:03:00.000Z

.Crash 2.0?

Dharmesh Shah has an article up today about Web 2.0 and it's scary similarities to the first .com bubble. What I am wondering is are we about the repeat the "cleansing" process of the first .com crash?

I am seeing a few of the signs... the Nasdaq is flirting with going under 2000 today, Amazon.com had a single day drop of 22% today after reporting earnings, repeating Yahoo's similar 20+% single day drop a few weeks ago, and Microsoft's wipe of 30 billion off of it's market cap in a single day a few months ago. Many tech stocks are around their 52 week low. Yahoo dropped on things as silly as their new search engine being delayed a quarter, as if Yahoo releasing a new search engine will have any realistic impact on earnings in the short term.

Some people argue that most of the 2.0 businesses won't go under this time because costs are so low, and at least they are not going public. That's true in theory, but people forget what negative sentiment does to the idea of small business. I remember after the last crash all I wanted was a steady job, and of course now I'm back on the Startup bandwagon. What do you think? Temporary lull or big time crash? If you are in the lull camp, buy YHOO stock now, its a steal!

2006-07-20T12:56:00.000Z

I really hate blogger. Now my rss feed seems randomly blank. Any other free blogging services out there? MSN Spaces is decent, at least from a programming point of view, but has it's own problems.

2006-07-20T10:24:00.000Z

Well I'd been going back and forth on this in my head, but I've decided to release my latest pet project to at least my blog viewing audience. This is completely non affiliated with SearTech, and is something i've been working on in my spare spare time for the past month or so.

For the longest time people have been bugging me to get a copy of my wife's budget. She is the Queen of Excel, and has made a kick ass budget that tells where every dollar we spend goes, and can even figure out if the escrow on our mortgage is off by a single penny. It tracks Net Worth, freedom funds and all sorts of other complicated gobilty gook (sp?). Anyways, it's too complicated for most people to use, but EVERYONE I know at least WANTS to do a budget, so I figured i'd put on together and make it web accessable. The result is BudgetSimple (http://www.BudgetSimple.com).

I still consider it beta and forsee lots of things changing on it over time, but since I got to this point i've been kind of stalled and figured more feedback from strangers might be helpful. Hopefully some of you can use it. I couldn't believe it when BenjiSmith posted his second idea as Budget Buddy, as I had just finished the first rough version of this at the time, and actually had BudgetBuddy as a working name (Domain is taken)! Hopefully that's not what he'll choose as his business, because I promise I didn't copy.

Also I should mention that I am offering this completely free. Forever. For all Premium, Plus, Super Duper versions. I'm really too busy with all my other projects to try marketing this, and besides there are already plenty of pay budgets out there. That was the main problem I saw. Either a budget cost money and was slick (too slick), or it was free and sucked. I hoped to make a decent budget and offer it for free, because I personally believe people in America need more savings, less bling, and much less debt. It's in our national interest. So as long as this isn't drawing crazy traffic I plan on keeping it free. The only forseeable revenue I may add would be targeted TRUSTWORTHY ads, kind of like The Deck does. I wouldn't want Google Ads, because they serve up all manor of sketchy stuff, and I'd feel terrible if someone used my program to try and get out of debt but winded up with some shady debt consolidation company...

Anyways, I'd love your feedback, the final thing I should point out is the primary goal here is simplicity. It will not link to your bank account. It will not do your taxes for you. It purposely rounds off to the nearest dollar. My idea of internationalization was not using dollar signs anywhere. Simple simple simple was my goal here. It WILL track where you spend your money. It will also help you track your debt progress, your savings, your goals, and even has some neat calculators for figuring out debt strategies. There will be more coming such as vacation budgets, small business budgets etc, but I hope to always keep the basic program simple. Hit me up at ryohki98ATyahooDOTcom if you have any suggestions.

2006-07-16T17:51:00.000Z

Two Approaches

It's been interesting to me to read all the hype behind Google's products lately. Everything that comes out is a XXX-killer. mISV's freak out, Microsoft freaks out, "Google will destroy our business with its free product!". The only problem? No one uses these products. No one knows about these products. Ask ten non-techy people if they've used Google spreadsheets and see if they don't look at you as if lobsters are crawling out of your ears. Do you know how few people even use Google maps? In my opinion, this is probably the best product Google has ever made, and yet people still use MapQuest (What's taking them so long to switch to AJAX btw? It doesn't seem that difficult...). Gmail is growing slowly, but still is way way behind in use compared to Yahoo, MSN, Juno and AOL. Google finance is not even a glimmer in the rear view of Yahoo finance, and Google news is also unknown outside of the tech community. But a large majority of the searches on the Internet are performed with Google, why arn't these products taking off? Clearly the answer is advertising. Google refuses to plug their products on their front page like Yahoo does.

One of the best examples of this is Google Answers. Two years ago or so Google launched Google Answers. The premise was that you could bid for a researcher (selected by Google) to answer a question for you. It could be virtually anything. If the person gave an acceptable answer, you paid them, and Google got a cut. The only problem is, after the much hyped launch (in the tech media), even Geeks forget about this service. Google answers is almost as obscure as any other random site on the internet. Just recently, however, Yahoo! launched Yahoo Answers. The difference? Well, anyone can answer the question, and it costs nothing to users. But the real difference is that Yahoo promoted this service big time. They even have guests like Bono and Stephen Hawking asking questions. Overnight, the site is already filled with more helpful answers then Google Answers has had in two years. From mundane things like "How do I make my Hydrangeas grow blue" to "Where should i live in Chicago" there is wealth of random people answering these questions. The biggest difference is that Google has some paid person that is always going to provide an intelligent answer, while Yahoo lets any of the unwashed masses throw their two cents in. But in the end, the question asker can pick the best answer, and that will remain at the top for future searches.

Another great example is Google Video. It could have been the next great thing, but again, YouTube trumped it by allowing a more open system (Google has to pre-screen every one manually), and by marketing, YouTube now far outstrips the popularity of Google Video.

My point? My point is that once again, marketing is everything. Google has created for itself quite a few catch-22s. People like Google because it's simple, but the simplicity keeps it from leveraging its traffic. So mISV's really should not fear when Google comes out with it's next product, because outside of the tech community, Google is just search. Once the initial hype fades away, very few of their ideas seem to survive.

2006-07-14T20:10:00.000Z

Old School Typing Speed Test

http://labs.jphantom.com/wpm/

I don't think i'd done one of these since I applied at a temp agency in college. I got 107.94 with two mistakes on my first try, how about you?

2006-07-14T01:09:00.000Z

Don't Quit Your Day Job.

So often this question comes up on the BusinessOfSoftware discussion boards. "Should I quit my day job? I have X great product, but I'm having trouble getting it out because I work X amount of hours a week. I'm pretty sure if I can devote my full day to it, i'll get it to launch soon."

Well... first lets go over the advantages of a mISV over a traditional business.

1) Cost to launch business extremely low. Varies from $5-2000 depending on how incorporated, insured, server setup you decide to go etc...

2) No physical presence necessary

3) No physical marketing necessary

4) No salarys to pay

5) Risk extremely low, if you make $10 or $10,000 you still have your day job. Growth can occur slowly.

All of those basically relate to number one. Now if you quit your job, how does this change the MicroISV equation?

1) The cost to launch is now the money you make from your mISV minus the amount of money you would have made at your job. So even if your mISV is a huge sucess, if it takes 3 months to develop, and you make $80k a year, you've lost $30k in salary to start your business. Just to get dollar one. You may also need to eat into savings to pay the bills, add that to the startup costs.

2 and 3 don't really change

4) You now need to pay your OWN salary before you pocket a single dime. Even if your signficant other/parents support you, you're still $80k in the hole from where you started.

5) Risk is now extremely high. 90%+ of businesses fail. Your idea for a Web based stop watch may not look like such a good business plan when your out of savings. You are now in a sink or swim situation, if your business isn't profitable in say 3 months, you may have to shut down. What if month 4 was where your business would have taken off? I can tell you that the 10% that do succeed usually don't do it by their 3rd month.

I also think the idea of being able to get more work done by quitting is largely a myth. If you don't have the dedication to put in an extra 40 hours a week for your mISV while your working a job, it's unlikely you'll be able to be more productive with the stress of the above added to the mix.

To me, the idea of a mISV has always been about low risk, low investment, with either the additional pocket change or the ability to work for yourself being the end goal. By quitting, you're no different then a traditional business. Given the above scenario, it could take basically $50k to make your first dollar. If you invested that in stocks, you have a much higher probability of making a profit then with your business. You could take a $50k loan to startup a traditional retail business and probably still have better odds of making a few bucks or breaking even.

Cut back in hours, take a vacation, find a job that requires less of you. But don't quit your job until your mISV can survive without it.