Ship It on the Side

Well, this is what happens when your software startup is no longer a side job and, honestly, you just don’t have the passion for your blog. After weeks of business planning, marketing, and development, the blog and podcast has been neglected. I see that there are several readers who come from time to time to read and listen to our posts, but sadly, there won’t be anymore.

Yes, we’ve decided to stop.

The Ship It On the Side blog will stay around for the forseeable future since the podcast subject matter is pretty timeless. But we’re not likely to add any new content.

Thank you for listening, reading, and leaving comments. If comments are posted I’ll be notified right away and answer. Don’t hesitate to make your voice known.

Just remember, we’re still building and growing, we haven’t quit. This is not the end of something, but the beginning. So you do the same. Keep going. Keep coding. Get that project done, published, and start marketing. Someone out there wants what you built.

Oh yeah, last thing (you see I’m into long goodbyes): don’t worry about competition either. Twice during the development of my latest project I have seen direct competitors show up: both of them offering what I’ve been slaving over FOR FREE. So, I’ve just redoubled my efforts, searched for holes in their offerings (which is not hard since anything that doesn’t work well for their “customers” is chalked up to: “well, it is free, you know.”) and made my product much better in the process. You do the same. If you see direct competition that means there is demand for your product. Unless that competition blows your doors off, you’ve got a fighting chance.

So that’s it. My last line of advice, un asked for. Take care.

Peace.

It came down to two people: Marius and rkotter. Both did everything the contest required plus some. It was a tough decision between the two and in the end we had to resolve the duel with something masterful and innovative:

Flipped a coin.

OK, so it’s not so innovative or masterful, but it was quick and painless.

Marius was heads and rkotter was tails. The coin was a penny (because that’s what my wife had in her pocket at the time). The penny was flipped into the air over an oak hardwood floor (just to keep things even.)

Tails.

The winner must contact me via email within 10 business days. Just send an email to shipitontheside.com to the user name curtis. Include your mailing address.

The winner of the $300 Projector will be announced tomorrow after business hours. The winner will need to claim the prize via email within one week.

Click the link at the top of the page for the giveaway of a Super Sweet 3M Micro Professional Projector. Here’s a picture of the very one you’ll get! Just follow the simple rules and we’ll enter you in the drawing.

Click for a bigger picture

For your convienence here’s a link to the 3M Micro Professional Projector Giveaway page.

This picture makes me giggle uncontrollably.

courtesy of Inspired Startup

Your software startup will face a ton of obstacles and if you don’t plan for them, well, think of it this way: you might gingerly hurtle the first few obstacles if you’re lucky. Then, when you’re not expecting it, BAM, you’ll get hit with a lawsuit, or run out of money because both cars broke down and your youngest child got sick enough to go to the emergency room (on a Sunday at 3am). Or all of those will happen at once.

If you don’t at least ask yourself a few simple questions like:

• What if nobody wants what I’m building?
• How do we let the world know we exist?
• What if my web designer (or architect, or little brother) flakes and stops working in the middle of the project?

Then, when you least expect it, BAM… and, if someone takes a picture, I will be giggling uncontrollably.

Download the show (MP3)

Show Notes

Martin is back! At least for this show. We’re giving you a preview of our upcoming book, Scoop - An Investigative Approach to Defining, Creating, and Selling Your Software.

This is a very exciting show and we hope you love it!

September of 2008.

Bailouts didn’t mean a thing to the masses until September 2008. All at once we saw the rapid decline of the stock market. We also started to hear a steady drumbeat of bad economic news that has gotten louder and louder. Every single day there are reports of job losses and layoffs. The unemployment rate is soaring. And everyone is scared.

Or are they?

Take a look at this graph:

This is a graph of the number of visitors to Monster.com from the month of September until now. If you don’t already know, Monster.com is the number two online jobs website on the Internet. Notice how the numbers continually dropped after September? This is not an intuitive conclusion. From the looks of it, while jobless numbers rose jobseekers seem to drop.

The number one jobs search website is Careerbuilder.com. Here’s it’s graph:

Ahh, there we are. While, strangly, the number of visitors drops steadily after September, they start to increase sharply in January. So what happened in January to send folks online looking for jobs in droves? Fear. Or rather, the Politics of Fear.

So, what’s the point anyway? You cannot make decisions by what the news or politicians say. You must decide for yourself whether you will succeed or fail.

Through perseverance many people win success out of what seemed destined to be certain failure. Benjamin Disraeli

So keep working on that software startup. Keep designing. Keep coding. Keep looking up. Look at the guy in the picture above, he’s still walking!

In his book, Outliers, Malcom Gladwell says that anyone can become an expert at anything if they spend about 10,000 hours doing it.

“No one—not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses—ever makes it alone“

Well, I’ve spent at least that long doing… stuff… that, while I’m probably an expert at it, no one would care.

So here I am, marketing an upcoming online software app (FlowerPot) using a blog and podcasts. I’m neither a writer nor ‘blogger’. I’ve run through a bunch few techniques that are supposed to get traffic to your site and gain linkbacks. Every SEO expert on the planet says you must have LINKBACKS!! And while doing all this stuff something is becoming abundantly clear to me: I cannot write. I’m a teriffic typist and a pretty decent reader; I’m even an OK storyteller, so I’m told. But writing? Ech.

This site has grown pretty quickly. We’ve got a pretty steady, and growing, stream of repeat readers, but I WANT MORE, dagnabit!

So I went to a few sites for inspiration, or to at least help with finding something interesting to say. Do you know what I found? The blogs with the most traffic have at least one exceptional writer. Read Fake Steve Jobs list of “Greatest Hits”. They are hilarious, plain and simple. I doubt that I’ll ever be that funny.

My lovely wife says the same stuff to me that I say to her: “Just keep at it. You’ll get better at writing.” We’ll see.

I think I’m going to take a writing class.

Download the show (MP3)

Show Notes

You’re going to invest a lot of resources into building your software startup company. So you want to be as confident as possible that this software product you’re building will sell, and sell well. It does happen, however, that we get heavily vested in a software offering only to realize that:

1. There really is not market for this thing (say, a desktop calculator that’s 10 times faster than the one that comes with Windows! – who cares????),
2. You’re just not that into it (in other words, you’re only only only doing it for the money—bad idea, cause you’ll run out of juice, trust me.), or
3. It’s too big for you (say, you’re going to build a better browser from scratch—that’s a tremendous undertaking).

So, this podcast tells you what you do to pick the winning offering. Enjoy listening.

Links

United States Department of Labor

InfoUSA

List of Giant Companies You Could Buy for $1 Trillion

Here’s a list of 10 companies that could be bought with $1 Trillion. According to the market capitalization of these huge companies, if you added them all up they would be worth $995.42 billion. That means that, after buying all of these companies there would be $4.58 billion left over.

The Stimulus Bill isn’t stimulating anything.

Go here to see how you can take 5 minutes to help stop it.