September 7th, 2010

Seth Godin and why I love WiredTree.com

WiredTree.com is my hosting company. I love them so much I’ve sent them cupcakes. They’re thorough, friendly, and accommodating.

Seth Godin recently wrote “Your attitude is now what’s on offer, it’s what you sell.” He couldn’t be more right – in so many words, customer service is now how you get and keep customers. Not products, and not features.

Here’s a recent example of WiredTree doing just that:

My account was suspended because one of my sites was hogging too much server power. I got an email about it Saturday night.

I called them, and within 2 minutes was on the phone with the rep who had sent the email. He knew exactly what was going on, explained it to me, and told me my options. And they’re not a small company!

My best option was to upgrade my account. You might think he was “upselling”, but I’d been asking to upgrade for months. They always suggested I wait until I actually needed it, and only after reviewing my account, each time!

Finally, while waiting for my upgrade request to go through, the rep asked me how one of my sites was going, business-wise. He remembered the site! It’s not even on the same account! It might’ve been in my account notes, who knows, but this small gesture made me feel like more than a number, and more than an annoying account holder with a resource-hogging website.

I was pleased. My account was reactivated, upgraded within a couple hours, and I felt like they knew me personally.

I think I owe them more cupcakes.

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August 17th, 2010

MY 3 favorite podcasts for start-up SAAS business owners

TechZing podcast

Congrats, Jason and Justin. You made #1. This podcast is perfect for me. It’s two guys, who pay the bills working for other people (though on their own terms) but pursue their own ideas on the side. We want the same things, we go through the same challenges, we face the same debates, internal and external. They are their own vertical. I listen adamantly.

The Startup Success podcast

Bob Walsh has been a point of inspiration to me for years. Read his books. Now. Then subscribe to his podcast with Patrick Foley. They interview amazing people, drawing out great insight, leading to some of the most interesting ideas.

Startups For the Rest of Us podcast

I’m a big fan of Rob Walling. He runs the Micropreneur Academy, he’s taught me tons of stuff through his blog, and has now written a book I’m waiting to be delivered.  He and Mike Taber run this podcast which answers one question per episode, and it’s usually dead on point.

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August 10th, 2010

Not a designer? Use video to create your portfolio

I have a lot of friends who are programmers, and they often lament how hard it is to show their work to clients and prospective employers. They write code, and it’s not sexy. They contributed to a site’s functionality, but it’s hard to illustrate with static pictures. As a web app developer, I’ve often found I need to be in the room showing a demo to impress people with what I can do. A static, online portfolio of screenshots won’t cut it.

So what about using video? I haven’t seen anyone doing this, but I expect it will catch on. We’re all getting used to video online, and it’s easier than ever. Grab Jing, walk me through a code sample, or a few pages of the web app you built, and put that on your site. Host it on YouTube if you have to. A screencast could be as good as being in the room. It shows the depth of your work, and also shows your audience that you’ve got communication skills.

Coming soon, the video portfolio!

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August 4th, 2010

Making big decisions at 3AM

A big part of running a business, and maybe the scariest part, is stepping into the unknown. Most days I have to make decisions that will affect my business, and my future. A lot of the time I’m making those decisions based on the best advice I can get, combined with as much as I can learn about my choices. But I’m left with a feeling of uncertainty. I usually find myself doing research on a big problem for a week or more. I take notes. I let the idea stew for a bit, because I’m apprehensive.

After a few days I get truly anxious, and I struggle with that.  It’s scary. What if I make a misstep? What if this is the wrong decision, and it costs me time, and money down the road? I cast about. i look for alternatives. I look for reassurance online that other people have gone down the same path. I wonder if I can put it off, or do with out it. Can I just use something I already know?

Finally, and for me it usually seems to happen at 3AM, I say fuck it, and click buy. Or sign up. Or just decide. Whatever it is, I finally kick myself in the ass and move forward. Something about being over tired, my brain too muddled to make excuses. Or maybe it’s the quiet so fear seems further away.

At the end of it, we love that a big part of doing what we do is taking risks. We know that most mistakes are recoverable, and then you learn something.

So jump in already!

What’s your 3AM?

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May 26th, 2010

Video from Ultralight Startups “Designing Social Websites”

A few months ago I moderated the panel at Ultralight Startups.  We discussed adding social functionality and behavior to your website.

Here’s the video:

Click here for info about the original Ultralight Startups event.

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May 24th, 2010

Stop pricing your web app like you own the company

One of the hardest things about running a business is setting prices. Even if your product is a web application.

I love that most people launching businesses online are following the freemium model. For the really niche apps that are emerging, this gives everyone the chance to “try before you buy”, and often is actually enough for people to start using the product. It’s smart from a business standpoint, and kind from a customer standpoint.

The mistake I’ve been noticing a lot lately IMHO is the leap to the first price point. I keep coming across apps that go from 0 to $12 or 0 to $20. $20 a month is $240 a year!

First, think about how often most products get used. Something like email, you use hourly. An app that let’s you sign up for events, maybe weekly. But how often do you encode a certain kind of file? Or update your website’s static content? Or have an online conference? Sure, there are people who will do these things daily, and those are your power users.  Great. Charge them through the nose. But when someone’s using your service once a week, is it worth $20 every month to them? Probably not. Because your app is so specific, that one task does not match the entry price.

Second, let’s talk about perceived value. I watch Netflix daily, and pay $15. I could pay less. My email, calendar and RSS reader are all free, and I use them daily, if not hourly. There’s infinite discussion online about free, so I won’t go into it here, but if someone is only going to use your app a few times a month, and the stuff they use daily is free or cheaper, the value to them is skewed. They’re not gong to pay you $24.95.

You know how much time and effort and money you’ve put into developing your web app. It’s worth at least $20 a month to you. You know what? Your customer’s don’t care. If you’re one person, or a company of a thousand, it doesn’t matter. It’s about what your product is worth to your customer.

Obviously, I’m not advocating making everything free. I’m not even suggesting lowering your prices. Instead think about what you could offer the casual user for $10 a month? $5? Could you even charge $5 a month for what you’re now giving away for free? I think you’re leaving money on the table.

Business 101, sure, but I bet you’re losing some customers, or at least losing money, but not charging a little bit for a more basic service.

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May 10th, 2010

My new favorite web app, FollowUpThen, and how it made me love gMail

All the cool kids use Gmail. I’ve had accounts for years, but have rarely used them.  I use my own domains, and when Google finally introduced accounts for business, I looked into it. I’ve always loved the idea of threaded emails. But I find it clunky in Gmail, and the whole app is slow to me. I’ve been using fastmail.fm for years, and because everything is a page refresh, I just open lots of windows. You can do that in Gmail, but it’s not as nice… Anyway, I’ve never loved Gmail. And I had my way of working.

A month ago I finally made the jump. I decided I could be a grown up and revise my email habits. I moved over for techy and nontechy reasons. The techy reasons involve cleaner headers and better spam handling. The nontechy reasons include integration with the other services, and a great address book that syncs with my iPhone.

It’s been rocky, but an okay experience. The plusses and minuses have been about even.  I’ve really had to change the way I think about email and organization, and I struggle with that.

The biggest thing is Gmail uses tags, which I love. However it use them instead of folders, which I find clunky.  You can emulate folders, but it’s just not the same. I lose emails. It freaks me out that everything is in one folder. Some get tagged, some don’t, so emails don’t land in the “folder” I expect them to be in, and then I can’t fnd them.

A couple weeks ago, I had an idea of reminders to help me not lose emails. Okay, I still lose them, but what if they popped back up at the right time? It turns out this already exists, as a really well built FREE service called FollowUpThen.com from Internet Simplicity.

When sending an email, BCC the service when you want a reminder, and it pops back up, on the same thread. If there’s an email thread I want to put off till Tuesday, I’ll forward it to tuesday@FollowUpThen.com, and then archive it. The thread pops back up on Tuesday. Perfect!

So now I worry less that emails will fall out of my field of vision, and subsequently I’ll forget to follow up. I follow up on ideas, conversations, deadlines, invoices, anything. Like so many good things, it’s dead simple, free, and works well.

I can’t recommend it highly enough.

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May 3rd, 2010

User question: Monetizing a content driven site

I received an interesting question via email:

I started a site that’s free, though you must register. So far the only means of monetizing it has been through selling ad space in our digital edition which goes out to all registered users. All articles get press releases, posts on at least 200 linkedin groups, face book, socially bookmarked, digg, Redit, at least 10 others, etc. I would like to be able to increase traffic, registered users, sales and if possible see if there are any other potential streams of revenue.

The site has lots of great content, so here was my response.

It sounds like you are well established (or on your way) as an authority. There are lots of ways to use knowledge and people seeing you as an authority. The three that come to mind are paid, premiere content, books and education.

Look at NetTuts for premiere content. They offer a lot of great, free tutorials on a number of subjects, and then a monthly subscription grants you access to exclusive tutorials. If some of your news or posts would be worth even $10/mo to someone, use that.

You could also (or alternately) take previous posts, polished up, combine them with a few new posts and publish a book. JoelOnSoftware (affiliate link) and 37Signals’ Rework (affiliate link) are a couple examples. Not everyone wants to read lots of separate posts, especially online. Also, if you’ve got a following, people are often happy to “support” by buying your book.

Finally if your site offers some how-tos (I couldn’t tell offhand), you could sell your knowledge in lessons. This is great, especially if there’s a potential curriculum to using the knowledge, or the process of using the knowledge takes months or year. Check out the Micropreneur Academy.

I’m borrowing a lot from great ideas from Chris Brogan, Copy Blogger, and many other s I’m not remembering right now. Did I miss anything?

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March 8th, 2010

Build web apps like you were going to franchise them

One of my favorite small business books is The E-Myth Revisited. It’s a small book, but pretty heady and introduces some great ideas. One of my favorite ideas is that you should build a business like you were going to sell it as a franchise. Even if yre not going to, it makes you think about efficiency, the re-usability of any moving part, and to look at the whole thing without you being present.

I realized this week that we can apply the same principle to building web apps. For a while now, as I build sites, I look at any functionality as a potential library or separate web site. This is 37Signal‘s Sell your By-product idea, but taken one step further and think of each idea as a business idea.

This makes me write cleaner code, do things the right way, take time to abstract things out, and comment better. All this with the idea of making the best possible product (both for the customer, and for the business owner), and that other people will be seeing and working with my code, probably without me being there to explain it.

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March 1st, 2010

Lessons I’ve learned: Never delete anything.

I have learned a very hard lesson.

The quick version is that I wrote a bit of code that, instead of deleting a single record from a database, cleared the table in the database. Yeah, oops. And this script was tied to a button that any user of a web application might click. While this might sound like a great subplot to Lost, it’s terrible for a web site.

Twice. People clicked it twice, and emptied all of our data. I was able to restore a backup once. We lost a lot of hard-earned information.

We all write bad code. Why I’m truly kicking myself is that I elsewhere in the application I’d been using Active/Inactive flags (“Click here to delete this item” marks the “Active” field to 0. “Click here to restore it” marks the “Active” field to 1.) rather than deleting records. I should’ve done this for all of my tables. Why I didn’t was a snap decision while coding, and of course I now regret it.

So I’m determined to never delete anything. Or overwrite it without a backup. For example, in another web app that writes XML files, I’m copying the existing files to a folder with a time stamp before overwriting them.

People talk about how cheap web space is now, and how fast our server are. There’s no reason to ever get rid of data. This holds true for building web apps.

This is a new “best practice” for me. I keep a short list of rules so I will never make this kind of bad “quick decision” again.

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