Ship It on the Side

We will have the Giveaway Link on the site very soon! We’re giving away a 3M Micro Professional Projector!

It’s not hidden, it just not there. And you’ll know it when you see it.

And an exciting new podcast tomorrow!! You won’t want to miss this one!

Subscribe to the podcast either via RSS or iTunes.

Software startup guys (and gals, I presume) have a real tendency to get distracted. You are idea people and you tend to have lots of energy. So trying to build a software startup as a side job is especially challenging.

For example, my day is broken up into two parts: Technical work and Entrepreneurial work. My day typically begins at 5am with writing ASP.NET software which includes javascript, CSS, HTML, and C#. This has nothing at all to do with entrepreneurial stuff.

The second half of the day begins around 2pm. This time is for doing marketing, writing blog posts, podcasting, or working with business partners. Again, it’s pretty intense work that has nothing at all to do with software development.

Without some method of getting focused quickly one of two things can happen quite easily: 1. Only one kind of work gets done (bad), or 2. I’m working late into the night (very bad). The first is hell on the startup; the second is hell on the family, and we cannot have that.

So here’s the steps I take to get focused quickly to get everything done:

1. Eliminate all Realtime Status Updates — Make all of the following go away:

• Email
• Instant Messaging
• Twitter
• Anything else on the desktop that can update you about what’s going on in the outside world.

2. Write Down What You Plan To Do FIRST– Write just enough detail so you can focus without stopping. It is vital that you do this before you start working so, if you need to look up something online, you can do it quickly and get right back to work.

3. Set a Time Limit — This is a biggie and works wonders. When I do this it makes me stop analysing, researching, and planning and get to work. It is amazing what placing limits on yourself can do. If you have to, use a stopwatch. Set it for, say, 2 hours. Decide to get up and walk away when that watch goes off no matter what. It’s hard the first seven times. But on the eighth time it gets easy. Trust me. Get up and walk away even if it is for two minutes and you have to come back and shut the computer off, or whatever you do to stop working. Walking away helps me because I usually need about a 2 – 5 minute “cool down” period before stopping any particular work. So set the watch and GO. Start working as fast as you can.

This routine takes practice but, if you give it just seven days, you have so much momentum you’ll never want to go back.

Good luck and happy executing!

Listed here are podcasts that focus, at least partly, on ASP.NET. You might find these interesting. If you know of we missed let us know in the comments.

.Net Rocks! – by Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell. .NET Rocks! is a weekly talk show for anyone interested in programming on the Microsoft .NET platform. The shows range from introductory information to hardcore geekiness. Many of our listeners download the mp3 files and burn CDs for the commute to and from work, or simply listen on a portable media player. 

Herding Code - Herding Code is a weekly podcast with K. Scott Allen, Kevin Dente, Scott Koon, and Jon Galloway.

deep fried bytes - The show discusses a wide range of topics including application development, operating systems and technology in general. Anything is fair game if it plugs into the wall or takes a battery.

ASP.NET Podcast - This podcast is geared towards developers with applications that scale to a large amount of data and users.

HanselMinutes - Hanselminutes is a weekly audio talk show with noted web developer and technologist Scott Hanselman and hosted by Carl Franklin. Scott discusses utilities and tools, gives practical how-to advice, and discusses ASP.NET or Windows issues and workarounds.

Polymorphic Podcast – An ASP.NET prodcast hosted by Craig Shoemaker (no relation to Martin) with interviews with industry luminaries and information about high-performance ASP.NET.

Alt.NET Podcast – A podcast that covers ASP.NET, jQuery, Ruby on Rails, Object Databases and move. Listen as Rob drops names and show just how popular he is.

Show Notes

1. Innovation and Entrepreneurship – by Peter Drucker. I don’t know if this guy was right about everything he said, but he sure does know business. The choice was between this book and his tome, Management. Management is a great book that will teach you a TON about the actual running of a company… once it is off the ground. It will teach you about growing and hiring and building teams and a bunch of other stuff about an existing company. If you’re serious about growing a sustainable company that will last more than a generation, Management is required reading. But, if you want to get into the meat of innovation as a systematic discipline, and innovation can be systematically done (look at Apple, Microsoft, and Intel) then Innovation and Entrepreneurship is where you start.
2. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People – by Stephen Covey will absolutely change your life. The very first chapter is the most profoundly revealing chapter in the whole book. This is where Covey tells the story of how he came to write the book. It’s fascinating. Seven Habits will, in a masterful way, get you to take stock of what is important to you. You’ll be surprised at what it is, and to take those things and zero in on why you should succeed. It will help you family and relationships… everything.
3. How to Build The [Your Name Here] Sales System – by Gil Wagner of honestselling.com. This is a book that is truly a hidden gem. I’ve never met anyone who has ever read it. I have read many sales books and, of them all, this one is the best, period. It is the very best sales book for Engineers. By the way this book is FREE.
4. Don’t Make Me Think – by Steve Krug. The subtitle of this book is “A common sense approach to usability.” This book is a classic. It is both an introduction to usability and a how-to for building a user interface so that real people can use it. The book starts off with the question/statement made by the author: “People often ask me: What’s the most important thing I should do if I want to make sure my Web site is easy to use?” The answer is simple. It’s not some rule about how many clicks away the info should be, or “speak the users language”, or even “be consistent”. It’s DON’T MAKE ME THINK!
5. The Art Of The Start – by Guy Kawasaki. Read this book first. This is the treatise for startups. Guy is the startup guy’s startup guy. Somehow, in a book of roughly 250 pages he manages to tell you everything you need to know about positioning your offering, pitching, how to avoid a BS business plan, and how to get money or funding. Read it.

Links

• Blog.GuyKawasaki.com – go and read the guy who introduced the Mac to the world. Enuf said.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch is going on sabbatical.

Getting covered on TechCrunch, especially by Michael Arrington, and even more especially, getting covered favorably by Mike, can change your life… or at least change your startup.

Well, it looks like some European entrepreneur, who wasn’t covered by TechCrunch or Mike Arrington has decided to spit on him… literally. 

Read for yourself.

Simply harness all those tweeted links and charge for them. They can do this in two ways:

1. Only allow http links through certain accounts that are paying for them. They can charge on a per-link, per-click, or subscription basis (or all three).

2. Create partnerships with sites that receive, or would receive, significant traffic from Twitter. For instance, a partnership with TwitPic would result in “free” links to TwitPic.com tweeted by Twitter users. TwitPic would pay for the traffic coming from Twitter and everybody is happy.

Twitter was just valued at $250 million. That was way too low.

Word is they shopped that valuation around to a some VCs and were turned down more than once. No problem. If they do play their cards right the valuation for that company will increase 4x, at least. What should they do?

First they should realize that Twitter’s real value is as a marketing platform for the entire Internet. Every blogger, sycophant, and social media butterfly is tweeting and retweeting links left and right. Ever heard of TwitPic.com or TinyUrl.com? Those companies are very young and grew very quickly for one simple reason:

Twitter link traffic.

The click through rate for Twitter links must be astronomical. TwitPic.com and TinyUrl.com (as well as many many others) have benefited from the tremendous traffic going through Twitter’s servers. TwitPic.com, for instance, seeing 1.8M hit per month, worldwide. Without Twitter most of these sites just don’t exist. And here is where Twitter becomes a billion dollar company.

Even if ev and jack already have another idea for income they should implement this one.

Consulting gigs welcome.

About 3pm today Scott Guthrie announced the release of ASP.NET MVC RC 1.0. This marks the end of major changes to the ASP.NET add-on framework and allows developers to confidently begin writing and shipping software with it.

Look out Ruby On Rails.

This is a totally random post, but I found it over at Small Business Labs and thought it was funny.

There are three mistakes that, if a software startup makes, will cause certain failure. As an entrepreneur with a few companies under my belt I have made all of them, even in the same company. So I can tell you from experience, any of these will take you down.

1. Stupid Hiring – Friends and family make terrible employees, unless you’re extremely lucky or have the kinds of friends and family relationships that can withstand contract execution. Hiring family members to do things like answer the phone might work, but for the stuff you need to get your company profitable like software development, sales, and business management, don’t do it. You’ll have some difficult decisions to make as it is. The ability to hire AND fire well is a skill you’ll have to develop and firing friends and family just doesn’t go well. Again, unless you’re either extremely lucky or have a such a superb repiore with your buddies and siblings, making tough business decisions just doesn’t go well.

On the same note, another stupid hiring decision you don’t want to make is hiring inexperienced developers for your critical project. Yes, if you can bring in an intern from the local university. It could work out if the intern is ambitious, highly skilled, and humble (hard to find in a college student). You’ll need a developer on staff who can mentor the intern, or you’ll just waste a ton of time training someone that doesn’t produce anything for your company. Your time is too valuable in the early days to spend bringing someone up to speed on critical functions.  Stick with experienced software developers who have shipped software on a critical schedule. Make sure that they left their past bosses and managers happy. They will cost more (much more sometimes) but they are worth every penny.

2. Trying to Look Bigger Than You Are – As with Stupid Hiring, many software (and non-software) startups have fallen into the trap of trying to look like a big company. The thinking goes like this: no one would take a one or two-man show seriously. Well, it depends on who you’re trying to reach. Selling software to a large corporation may require manpower resources that you don’t have. Larger companies are averse to taking risks with critical software purchases and if you look too small they will likely pass you over. However, I have sold some serious enterprise-level software to a large organization, when we only had two people total. We were the only company that had this software for one thing. We also a partnership with another company to provide support. The latter was critical. We never would have sold that software without a strong support partnership. It is stupid to take on a project that will fail. While there’s nothing wrong with stretching yourself and your resources to land a big fish, trying to do the impossible just doesn’t make sense.

Also, building a big corporate looking website with 3-5 pages total is stupid as well. It looks shallow. Using the words “we” and “us” all over the place will just make you look like you’re trying to be deceitful. Nobody believes that there is a “we” or an “us” when there is only a “you” trying to build a company as a side job. It just blows your credibility, and is more likely to keep you small by scaring away the real customers who would want your product. Besides, someone from a large company might recommend you to a friend or a smaller subsidiary company, so long as the website doesn’t blow it trying to seem like something it isn’t.

Don’t waste your money trying to look big. Be professional, yes, but anybody who cares how “big” you are will be more trouble than they’re worth. Trust me on this: there are some customers you just don’t want. I may write about that later.

3. Forgetting to Make Money – This is a biggie. Yes, you’re trying to change the world, save the whales, or make an Impact on Society. But if you forget to be profitable you fail. This will sound pretty harsh, but it’s true and you might as well understand it sooner rather than later: nobody, nobody cares what your goal in life is (except for your Mom). We all care about what’s in it for us. Period. And if you forget that you’ll struggle to make a profit. Creating a software startup can be about many different things besides making a profit: these are your personal or company goals. But your company had better be about earning more revenue than it spends or it will cease to exist.

There are so many hobbyists hoping to sell some software package that they created. Some of that software is quite useful, attractive, and well designed. But the developer will have to invest some resources (time, money, or both) into marketing and selling that software package. I’ve talked to many many software entrepreneurs who have built great products that haven’t made a dime. When I ask them the fundemental question, “who’s your customer?“, they balk and cannot answer. Most of them have never even considered the question, and few even try to answer the question. They just go back to tinkering with their creation; perfecting this genius product that will never ever make them a penny. Don’t do this. (listen to episode 3 of the podcast for more on “who is your customer”).

Learn how to market and sell. It is absolutely fundemental. Learn how to give a presentation. Learn to be persuasive. Aquiring the art of persuasion will help you to build a team of enthusiastic customers and employees. With it you’ll grow your company, and if you get good, you’ll grow it fast.

So don’t make these three mistakes. You’ve been warned. Ignoring this advice will likely cost you your company.

Be smart, not stupid.

Download the show (MP3)

Got an exciting show for you! Today we’re continuing from last week doing things a little different.  We’re talking about the Business aspects of building your startup on the side.

This time were talking about The Entreprenurial Crisis Matrix.

Click on and print the image below. It will make this software startup podcast even more enjoyable.

The Entreprenurial Crisis Matrix

Links

Harnessing Entrepreneurial Manic-Depression – Here’s a post by Tim Ferriss that has a similar idea. Essentially he is saying (by way of a guest writer) that it is completely normal for an entrepreneur to suffer manic and depressive states. That would explain to me wife what the problem is! I’ll also recommend Tim’s book, The Four Hour Workweek for its great ideas on trimming away time wasters and getting your productivity up. The premise of the book is that if your productivity is high enough you can work less. It’s true!

Book: The Psychology of Sales Call Reluctance – by Dudley and Goodson. This is a book I highly recommend for jumpstarting out of the grip of fear. It happens to the best of us. We start off with tons of enthusiasm, rush into a thing with all the greatest enthusiasm and then… we start to realize… this is going to take some work… or, this may not be the greatest idea in the world after all. This book, on the surface, deals with the difficulties that sales people have with making sales calls, but let me tell you, it is a real eye opener for any startup entrepreneur. See, I have found nothing quite as illuminating as doing cold calling in sales. For me it was terrifying. I called friends for support, bugged my wife about it, lay awake at night, all kinds of stuff, all because of some issues dealt with in this book. It is not a self-help book. Self-help rigmarole is the last thing you need when your company is on the line and you need to bring in revenue—and there are no customers or prospects in sight. I’ve been there. I’ve lived on credit cards. Check this book out if you get to the Conscious Incompetent stage and need to get rolling again.

Book: The World is Flat – This is the seminal book by Thomas Friedman that, though it’s simplistically wrong on some things, nails the fact that we are in a global economy and explains just what that means to Joe the Plumber and the rest of us.