Planet MicroISV

Keith and I recorded the second podcast, this time with special guest Amy Hoy. (If you missed the first podcast, see here.) We’re still searching for a format which really works for us, so this is a work in progress. Please share your thoughts with us on what you like/don’t like about it.

This podcast was recorded two months ago, largely because Keith and I got too busy to do the editing and post it. We’ll outsource more of that in the future. Of particular note: the 30×500 class that Amy talks about is already started, so if you’re interested in it, sign up for her email announcement (link waaay down on that page) for when it opens the next time.

Major topics for this podcast included:

• why businesses are not price sensitive and how to price SaaS directed at them
• how bootstrapping product businesses with a side of consulting worked out
• the psychology of happiness

Download Links

Podcast link (MP3, 23 MB, approximately 80 minutes.)

Subscribe in iTunes &tc: The feed http://www.kalzumeus.com/feed/atom/ technically includes all posts on this blog, but if you put it into iTunes or your iDevice, it will slurp in only the audio posts. (Have a more finnicky client than iTunes? Try http://www.kalzumeus.com/category/podcasts/feed/ instead.)

Transcript

Patrick: Okey-dokey. You guys want to get started on the formal talking to people aside from the three of us thing?

Amy: Yeah.

Keith: Alright. Sounds good. OK, so we do the intro music [mimics intro music]. We don’t have intro music.

Patrick: We don’t have intro music.

[laughter]

Patrick: This is a third-rate podcast.

Keith: Welcome back to the Kalzumeus podcast and…

Patrick: This is episode two with…

Keith: Episode two, well, 2.5, because we actually recorded an episode two and then trashed it because it sucked.

Patrick: Yeah. This is uh…

Keith: Two alpha? Two Beta.

Patrick: Two Beta. It was an MVP of a podcast and then we shot it in the head because it was not accomplishing customer goals or anything.

Keith: Exactly.

Patrick: And we are joined today by special guest Amy Hoy.

Keith: Hello Amy.

Amy: Hello.

Keith: For our people, you want to do the introduction, Patrick?

Patrick: Oh, introduction, yeah. I’m Patrick McKenzie, better known as Pattio11 on the Internet and…

Keith: I’m Keith Perhac, not at all known on the Internet. Joining us today is Amy Hoy, who is the founder of Freckle and the new product 30×500, which seems awesome. We’re going to have Amy talk about that a little more coming up. Amy, do you have anything you want to add?

Amy: There are a couple more products other than those. [laughs]

Keith: Those are the big one’s that I know of, that I’m most familiar with. And, of course, your blog Unicorn Free, which is freaking awesome, by the way.

Amy: Thanks.

Keith: I was actually… I listened to the 5×5 podcast where you talked about where you came up with the name for Unicorn Free, and were explaining all that. Ever since then I’ve really enjoyed that.

Amy: Oh, well thank you. Yeah. I figure like, I was drunk and I wrote a note that I forgot and there was a Narwhal horn involved. It was a pretty good story.

[laughter]

Patrick: Ba dum bum.

Keith: Ba dum bum. Alright.

Patrick: So, let’s see. So, the 30×500 classes opening up in the near future [Patrick notes: We didn't get this episode out on time, so if you want into 30x500, you'll have to do it the next time Amy opens up the course.] and I feel it’s probably of interest to some people that are listening to this so why don’t you give us the rundown on that for the folks listening at home who don’t know what it is?

Amy: I’d love to, if I can pronounce my own product’s name. Sidebar, don’t name your product with numbers in it. I never can say 30×500 properly unless I do it like that in slow mo. In 2008 I got absolutely sick and tired of consulting, even though our consulting business was doing really well, mine and my husband’s. I knew that I didn’t want to be a consultant forever, I just fell into it because I had these skills.

I knew the way to make money was product. I had been watching 37 Signals from their rise back when they had zero products and were just designers and then they had products and all this stuff and all these people I knew who were starting businesses and were making money not by the hour but by the product.

I pushed my husband to help me make a software service, which is Freckle, which is nearly three years old now. We also wrote, after that, an e-book on JavaScript performance and from there on we built our product empire and weaned away from consulting entirely. During this process I felt entirely alone. There was almost no discussion about this stuff.

I knew what I knew by reading business books, which were not tailored to me, a two person company who was starting on the side. They were tailored to larger business but I was able to extrapolate the advice and apply it to myself. I read startup stuff, most of which was totally useless for what I was doing.

I wasn’t trying to get millions of users, I couldn’t spend money to acquire users, I couldn’t use venture capital, I couldn’t hire the best people. My husband and I were pretty great, but it was pretty much us and we were free.

Keith: You were pretty much stuck between the two worlds, weren’t you? What you wanted was a standard business model, but there weren’t any real books or information on standard business models in the Internet age and what information there was, was for startups and startups generally assume venture capital, which of course you weren’t going for, which is a great role to go down.

Just because you’re a startup does not mean you need venture capital and does not mean you need to do the seven billion users in two months for a free medium app, whatever.

Amy: But the hockey stick. The hockey stick. How do you survive without the hockey stick? I don’t know. In fact, I was anti-venture capital, for me. I feel like a lot of venture capital is quite deceptive, but I don’t begrudge anyone for taking it if that’s what they want to do. I’m like go after the dealers, not the users. I really didn’t want anyone else in-between me and my customers and my success.

I didn’t want anyone fiddling with my stuff. Until 2008, I had not been able to ship a project I worked on for years because management kept screwing with it, whether it was Behr Sterns, well they went out of business, or Limewire, where my CEO was a 12-year-old multimillionaire boy scout on crack. I never did anything for years and I was dying. I was like no more intermediation. No more between me and them. I was like no venture capital.

You’re right, there was nothing really to rely on other than old school business books and what I had detected by working around and following 37 Signals and Mail Chimp and these other businesses. I observed them over the years, lurked. They weren’t writing about it at that time. Even 37 Signals was not writing about their Bootstraps and Proud series. That was not in 2008, that was a lot later. So it was really lonely.

Patrick: Yeah. I start Bingo Card Creator in 2006 and, man, the state of the art back then. I was literally unsure it was legal to actually just setup a shingle on the Internet and start selling software. I tried to get advice from people in our community, which has some issues about things like that. They’re like no, God man. What if someone does a refund? You can get sued. You should never, ever, ever try to get away from the day job and, besides, they own your soul.

Keith: Going back to that a little, as much as we are three people on the Internet giving advice, you should never listen to people giving advice on the Internet.

[laughter]

Amy: Yeah, just us.

Keith: Yeah, just the three of us. I think that’s a very safe assumption. I would preface the “don’t take advice from people” with “random people on the Internet.” Find people who are successful and who are practicing what they preach, essentially.

Patrick: I think that’s life advice as to hanging around with the kind of people you want to be with rather than anybody else.

Keith: Rather than people who scream the loudest, yeah.

Patrick: This goes to picking your community, both in real life and in the Internet. If you routinely hang around people who run businesses, your perception of the world is going to get influenced by people who run businesses, and if you’re routinely hanging around people who will perpetually have a business some day you have a risk of that warping your perspective on things.

Amy: Absolutely. My rule of thumb is also that even if someone has what you want and people ask, “What’s the secret of your success?” and they say, “Hard work,” stop listening. Let’s face it, it’s a lot more than that and if they don’t have the insight or the willingness to share beyond the phrase “hard work” then there’s nothing you can learn from them from what they explicitly try to teach you. You can observe and be the learner and analyze.

Yeah, it really sucked and there were a lot of naysayers. Not maybe quite as serious as Patrick: did because we’re a couple of years later. Honestly, I really don’t listen to people.

Keith: Very good advice. Probably the best advice we’ll get out of this podcast is don’t listen to people.

Amy: Don’t listen to people. [laughs] People are like no, no, no, no, no. I’m like whatever. We started making a product business and it sort of was harder than I thought. A lot of it was easier than I thought, but it was all hard because we were alone. We were doing this on the side with consulting and we had these short bursts with super intense consulting contracts, mostly for Fortune 500 companies or Fortune 50 companies.

Thomas did a lot of JavaScript security and JavaScript performance. We did a lot of these media art installations based around Twitter and other APIs, Foursquare and stuff, for like Pepsi, who was awesome, and all the other people we worked for who weren’t awesome. So these intense projects that paid a lot but they demanded a lot of us.

So we were doing that and trying to build this product (Freckle) and then ship this product and then support the product after we shipped it and add new features and stuff. And it was really chaotic for about a year and a half.

And at the end of 2009, I knew that I could not do that anymore. That’d been nearly a year and a half, 18 months, 24 months almost, of doing this. And I was like, “I cannot consult and do this other stuff anymore. The product’s suffering. I’m suffering. I have to quit. I’m going to quit now.”

We just got this big check from this two-week project that turned into two months of hell. Then I quit, and I thought, “What can I do to help shore up this income?” And I thought, “I know. I can help people who are like me two years ago.” I wasn’t sure if people were into it or not, so I did a three-hour teleconference and invited some people. (Patrick notes: This idea is genius. It’s the MVP of a more involved product.) They paid me, not a lot.

And the number-one feedback was “more,” which I wrote down in my notebook as “M-O-A-R-R-R…” I counted the R’s the other day. I was like, wow. [laughs]

Keith: Just love writing those R’s, huh? [laughs]

Amy: I did. Everyone was like, “I want more.” That was the number-one feedback. So I was really excited, I guess, so I put extra R’s.

And that slowly turned into this three-and-a-half-month-long class that it is today, 30×500. I built the first one with my friend Alex Hillman, who’s awesome, who’s bootstrapped a community and a physical office space, for co-working and a whole bunch of other stuff, in Philadelphia. He’s amazing. He’s been a business consultant as well as stuff, and he helped me with the first version, and then he couldn’t do it anymore, time-wise.

And I flipped all the stuff around and created a community to go along with the class. I say, “created a community.” I basically meant open the mailing list and invited people to talk on it. The students have really created the community.

And so now I have this three-and-a-half-long mentorship program, which includes a lot of kind of mind-bending lessons an exercises that will help somebody get away from what I call “idea quicksand,” where you have a fantastic idea and then you either see someone else already did it or you get depressed.

You’re like, “There’s competitors. Is the market saturated? Can I validate this idea? What if I can’t validate this idea? What if I can’t build the whole thing and it won’t be like I thought it was?” Basically, everyone goes… [makes bomb-dropping sound] It ends in death, and never shipping anything, or shipping things no one wants. And so the very first thing we do in 30×500 is turn that around. I say, “No ideas,” [laughs] for the first month almost.

It’s all about learning about business, about how to come up with an infinite number of ideas, valid ideas which are pre-validated. You don’t have to have the idea then validate it. It’s all about turning the process on its head, coming up with as many potential profitable products as possible, learning to do market research, learning to really sell those ideas to people before you build it, and all sorts of good stuff: marketing, productivity, how to trim it down to a tiny thing you can ship, all that stuff.

The class is all about that, and it’s pretty intense. But we’ve had an amazing wave of launches lately, and I’m so happy.

Patrick: Yeah. People will not be surprised, based on my karma score, but I get most of my news through Hacker News and saw multiple of them on the front page in the last couple of days. Let’s see, there was, oh, shoot, projector, the one that does designer stuff and client stuff. (Patrick notes: I was thinking of PlanScope). I’m sorry, I can never…

Amy: It’s like project management and budget and scope management for freelancers and agencies to use with their clients. The client sees where their money is going, which is a huge problem, as you may know.

Patrick: Right. Yeah. I think you’ve mentioned this before, but there’s… so, a piece of received wisdom in the community, which, I will be totally honest, I have said this many times, is, “Don’t make things for people who are like you, because developers/designers, et cetera, don’t pay for software.”

I think you have an opinion on this as somebody who successfully sells time-tracking management and who just had multiple customers, or multiple, I guess, students from the program launch straight into the designer community and totally kill it. But what’s your opinion on that?

Amy: It’s not true.

[popping sound]

Keith: [laughs]

Amy: My water bottle. That was dramatic! That was my water bottle going, “Pop!”

[laughter]

Amy: It’s simply not true, pop, which is a polite way to put it.

[laughter]

Amy: I mean, if you look around at all these companies that are making so much money off the developer and designer audience like, GitHub, linda.com, Basecamp started exclusively with developers and designers. That was their market. They marketed to people like them, the small agencies and the individuals, and it grew out from there. Massively, it did. But they started with that core audience. That’s how I knew about it. I found out about it on an invite-only design community way back in 2005.

I usually have a whole list. PeepCode, look up PeepCode. Jeff’s does very well. Let’s see, Rueben from Bidsketch. It’s a total one-man operation. He just dramatically increased his prices, and he’s doing fantastically. Bidsketch is all about preparing beautiful, templatized proposals for your clients. There’s so much, FreshBooks, Harvest, all these other time trackers which make way more money than I do. There’s a lot. A lot.

And not all of those are exclusively designer/developer anymore, but a lot of them started that way and they branched out as they grew. But there are a lot of developer-only ones as well. Look at all these apps for server monitoring (Patrick notes: use it, love it) or Rails Screencasts from many different people, not just Jeff. There’s just tons, and tons, and tons of stuff.

So, I don’t know where the idea that they don’t buy comes from because there are products everywhere that are successful.

Patrick: I think it’s partly a projection thing, like, “I don’t buy anything and therefore people like me must not buy stuff.” Which, there are many issues with projecting your behavior onto other people.

Keith: And really, I think there’s also a… so, this is not just the Hacker News crowd, this is not just the Slashdot crowd, this is not just the techie crowd, there are a lot of people. I think the naysayers are the people who have more time than money, is honestly what it comes down to.

Because, honestly, if I had a ton of time, if I was working a nine-to-five job, had a set number of hours a day I worked at a fixed income, at that, and I needed time-tracking software, I would probably write my own on the weekend because I have more time than I have money at that point.

For someone who’s trying to run or start their own business, they suddenly have more money than they have time. Not that they’re making tons of money but because their time is much more valuable because there are so many other things they could be doing.

Patrick: and I have actually talked about this because I need to write my own invoicing software and stuff like that. I finally did not because I thought I could set up an MVP in about a week and take another week to fix any bugs so that’s two weeks of my time that it would take to build just my invoicing software. Or I could pay $20 to $50 a month for someone else’s invoicing software. That’s a no-brainer. Two weeks worth of billable work versus $50 a month. No-brainer at all.

Amy: Absolutely, but how long did you think about buying the podcasting equipment?

Keith: Actually, we just kind of fell into that.

Amy: A lot of people say they don’t buy stuff. They actually buy stuff left and right, they just weren’t paying attention. Not that you bought it mindlessly while you were sleep walking or anything. When you think back in your memory you think when did I buy things? It just doesn’t pop up.

Keith: I’m gradually getting better about it. The podcasting equipment, I was like we need podcasting equipment. OK, done. A couple years ago I started Bingo Card Creator on a $60 budget and when you only have 60 in the budget you get very creative about not spending money, but these days the budget is much more than $60 and I have to sometimes slap myself and say no, implementing this myself is absolutely not the right call.

I was talking to a buddy of mine and asked, “Is there any way I can optimize Redis such that it will use 15 megabytes less of RAM on the server? Then I won’t have to upgrade to the next higher tier of VPS.” He said, “What’s the next higher tier of VPS?” “$20.” “Do we need to have the rest of this conversation?” “OK, OK. I get it, I get it.” Gradually, very gradually I’m starting to get it.

Amy: It takes time. Most people aren’t like you, even developers. That’s fairly unusual. Most of us, especially Americans, we just tend to throw money at stuff.

Keith: I think we’re very much conditioned by living in Japan. It’s weird. Once you get to certain price points, like low price points for some reason people hee and haw over much more than they would decide over something of a large price point. If you’re spending $1,000 it’s easy to spend another $100. If you’re spending $10 or $15 people seem to think about it a lot more.

Amy: It’s true.

Keith: The old president of my company, multi, multi-millionaire (Patrick notes: he is credited with bringing the Internet to Japan, you do the math), he does a lot of donations and stuff to colleges and stuff and he had done this multi-million dollar donation to a college and he had just finished signing the contract and he’s leaving and he goes to a convenience store and picks up a bottle of water and he just goes, “I can’t believe water at a convenience store is 135 yen. That’s just so expensive.”

I’m like you just contributed millions of dollars and you’re complaining about $1.35.

Amy: I think we all fall prey to that one. The other day I was in a convenience store and I realized I needed a toothbrush and I bought a toothbrush and I was like why is this toothbrush $1.75? I’ve been paying like 3.50 each. I caught myself thinking I’m going to buy my toothbrushes there from now on. I was like wait a minute.

Keith: You actually consider should I go to a different store to get the cheaper toothbrush?

Amy: It only passed a moment, I have to say, to my credit, but it occurred to me. I was like come on, Amy. I’ve occasionally thought I should have kept the exact amount, 20 percent or whatever, and I’m like come on, really? Am I even wasting a cycle of my brain on 50 cents?

I’m not like that with buying software tools for business at all, so I think what you said earlier about selling to businesses is totally true, but I think there’s a lot more people who are just not commenting on things who just quietly buy the things they want or need whether or not they have a business.

Keith: This might not be a new thing for the 30×500, but you’re starting to focus more on building apps and things for businesses than for B2C stuff which, as somebody who knows and loves many B2C customers for his Bingo product, is totally the right way to go.

Amy: I like how you used love in a negative way. [laughs]

Patrick: I do love my customers.

Amy: I understand.

Patrick: I love them even when they write I can’t access your product from the blue Googles, only from the green Googles, can you please help me out? That’s still from a place of love.

It’s just from a place of I can do my math on what my hourly is on that versus an appointment reminder where I get to charge a car dealership every month. I’ve had car dealerships say is it 200 a day or 200 a month? I’m like it’s 200 a month and they’re like “Whatever. Either would have worked.”

Amy: That’s nice.

Patrick: In other news, I’m re-pricing.

Keith: The correct response to that is not $200 a month. If they ask is it 200 a day or 200 a month you say a day. If they say that’s too expensive you say then a week. [laughs] Start with the expensive one first.

Amy: You’ve got to capture that customer surplus. You want that.

Patrick: We were thinking about talking about pricing grids. One of the things that you can actually learn if you spend too much time hanging out on the Internet and talking to people about this is that a lot of SaaS companies use the four column pricing grid strategy typically.

I’ve talked to a lot of folks about this one. The one that really prints the cash, usually about 50% of sales, is the one to the extreme right that’s priced at businesses at prices that people think no one can will pay. Say, $250 a month for Wufoo.

It’s just that people who are spending essentially other people’s money, it just comes out of a budget so it doesn’t matter to them whether it’s 200 or 250 or 500. As long as it still only requires one signature or zero signatures it’s whatever it is.

Amy: Yeah. I hear the amount per signatures for an employee generating expenses in a large company is usually around $500. I think under $500 it does not require a signature.

Patrick: That’s consistent with my experience. Anybody who’s doing a SaaS pricing grid where the top price tops out at $20 or $30 should really…

Keith: Rethink what they’re doing.

Patrick: …put anything you need to just get an enterprise level, even if you don’t necessarily call it the enterprise level, and price it at $250 or $500. This is free money. And, oh, goodness…

Keith: So, not even looking at this as a huge business. When people think of business, they think of huge corporations. But even for small companies that are making a good amount of money, let’s say that a company has maybe six people working there that are contractors.

And a good contractor will run you about 100 to 200 an hour, depending on what they’re doing. If a product on the Internet costs you the same as one hour of that person’s time and saves them over an hour a month, then it’s a no-brainer to get that, right?

Amy: And that is exactly why, actually… Patrick, you asked this earlier. I’ve always told people, in 30×500 and “Year of Hustle”: do not sell to consumers. And some people will say, “But I have this idea.” I’m like, “No. You can do it, but I’m not going to support you because you’re going exactly against what I told you to do.” For that reason. For that reason.

You can sell on value to businesspeople. You can say, “You spend $80 an hour on this freelancer. I can save you 45 minutes of their time and charge you $60, and that is a win.” It’s certainly not a loss. I think I did the math wrong; I think that’s exactly $60. But let’s say half an hour of their time for 50 bucks or whatever. No, that’s still wrong. [laughs]

Patrick: We get the general idea.

Amy: You know what I’m saying. [laughs]

Keith: So there is really two places that you can really provide enumerable benefits to your customers. One is saving time. Because a consultant takes time. The amount of money that you save is directly related to how much you can charge, right? The other one is anything that increases sales.

Amy: Totally.

Keith: For example, Visual Website Optimizer prints money for customers. Anyone who is using Visual Website Optimizer is literally printing money with every single test that they do.

Patrick: This is the A-B testing software we often recommend to clients.

Keith: It is so amazing. So their largest for enterprise is “call us.” That’s fine. Their second-largest is $250 a month. OK? $250 a month for increases of sales starting at two percent, five percent, 10 percent, 50 percent. As good as your test can be, that’s how much money you are making with their $250-a-month service. It’s amazing.

Amy: It is amazing. They could probably charge more for that.

Keith: They could.

Amy: Ruben Gomez, who does Bidsketch, I mentioned earlier, he tweeted repeatedly and told me personally how much more money he was making when he drastically increased his prices. And I’ve been nagging him to write a blog post. So I’m going to keep nagging him until it happens, but his story is pretty incredible.

I’m not going to release the numbers because he hasn’t done it yet. You would think that he’s looking at private bids instead of people, the freelancers and consultants. And it worked out so well for him, so well. It’s such a big deal.

Patrick: I think he’s coming to MicroConf. We’re going to lock him in a hotel room in Las Vegas and not let him out until the blog post is written. (Patrick notes: Did not actually happen at MicroConf.)

Amy: Yes. Yes!

Keith: [laughs]

Amy: I vote yes. Let’s do that. [laughs] He’s a cool guy. I like him a lot. So yeah, you were saying more sales, or saving time. And I also think of, people usually go for cost reduction, I think, when they talk about monetary value. But I don’t see nearly as many products being successful for reducing costs, unless it’s extreme, because penny-pinchers aren’t people who spend money.

Patrick: One thing that’s great for software is if you can tell a story. Ultimately, all sales is about telling stories and painting the right picture in peoples’ minds, but tell a story where it reduces the amount of employee labor required to do something, particularly if that either allows them to switch them to tasks that actually generate money or, I hate sounding like a business, but “decreasing headcount.”

If you can successfully pitch to a business that you are going to “decrease headcount,” that is a total win in 99.95 percent of cases. So, Appointment Reminder, my software that does phone calls to the clients of professional-services businesses. I often say that if you have an office manager who costs you $4,000 month, who half of her time is literally talking to people’s voicemail to attempt to get them into the office at the proper time, then spend $200 a month and save $2,000 on salary costs.

One of my more successful clients is saying that, basically, I saved him enough on that to put his daughter through Harvard.

Amy: So you need to raise your prices. There’s that customer surplus.

Patrick: I need to raise my prices. Yeah, I so do. I did something very stupid when I launched Appointment Reminder, and I’ll just tell it to everybody to have you avoid doing it. I launched with the four-tier pricing structure, like usual, and the bottom plan was $9 for a, quote-unquote, “personal plan.”

So my idea was, “I don’t really care about the $9. I just want people using this.” I should’ve wanted people using it at 30 bucks a month for the cheap plan, because the people who pay $9 are, my word is “pathological customer,” for people who are penny-pinching, and they have every kind of support issue that you could possibly imagine, like, “How do I record telephone calls if I don’t have a telephone? Can I log into the website from my Kindle, which doesn’t really have a web browser in it?” Yadda-yadda-dee-da-da.

And they expect turnaround times of two minutes or less to customer-support issues arising at 3:00 AM in the morning.

Keith: I would really like to see someone. I don’t know if anyone has done a blog post about this, about a breakdown of the number of support calls and support messages you have, broken down by which plan they’re in.

Patrick: I will totally bet that it is the cheap-o Charlies who contribute a vastly, vastly disproportionate…

Keith: Like 80 percent…

Amy: Me too. Heard that over and over again from everybody. Also, this is something that you could absolutely do with our upcoming software-as-a-service product, Charm, which is a customer-support and true customer-relationship management tool. Everyone says CRM, they mean lead tracker, which I find to be terribly dishonest. [laughs] It’s like, one, they’re not customers yet, they’re leads.

And then after they are customers, doesn’t help you at all. The only exception I’ve seen is Intercom, which is pretty neat. But they don’t call themselves a CRM, I don’t think. But Charm will let you filter requests by plans or price points.

And so you’ll be able to profile feature requests and issues, specific ones, like, “Please add invoicing feature,” that kind of thing, by which plan or how much your customers are paying you. But also, you will be able to see how many incidents you get from which type of customer. But everyone I’ve…

Patrick: That would be great blog-post fodder if you can get anonymized data for that. Well, it’s not a great idea, but yeah.

Keith: No. I mean, that’s easy to get anonymized data from. You say, “My support numbers are X, and they belong to the lowest tier.” You can use even general numbers for that, I would think.

Amy: Do you mean if you blog about it, Patrick, anonymized?

Patrick: Well. So, I’ve already retracted this idea, but the idea I have now retracted was, oh, you could aggregate across all Charm customers, whether it was the cheap-o plan or whatever that generated the most customer support inquiries. I’m like, “No, that’s a wee bit aggressive.” [laughs]

Amy: Do you think that’s like a cats.jpg moment? Because I don’t really think so. I don’t think it’s a cats.jpg moment.

Patrick: The rational part of me thinks that it’s not a cats.jpg moment, but I think that loud people will perceive it as a cats.jpg moment. Really, this is inside baseball here, so let me tell everyone what a cats.jpg is.

Keith: First of all, yeah, I have no idea… [laughs]

Amy: Sorry. [laughs]

Patrick: So, 37signals said, “Oh, the 100 millionth file has just been uploaded to Basecamp, and it was called cats.jpg.” And they tweeted that out or put it in a blog post or something. And the folks who were worried about the Facebookization of all services were like, “Oh my God! 37signals can view all this data that we’re uploading to their servers, and they’re not treating it in a privacy-conscious manner! Brar!”

Amy: [laughs]

Patrick: So, OK, yes, A, it is totally technically possible for people to view data that you upload to your servers. That’s kind of how it works. And if you don’t trust them on that, you definitely should not be using Basecamp. But it was kind of a tempest-in-a-teapot kind of thing about whether it’s OK to publish that even if it’s a trivial amount of customer data. No one’s business is going to collapse over the words “cats.jpg” getting out, where if it was “letter of intent to dismiss Mary Smith for sexual misconduct.doc…”

Amy: [laughs]

Keith: They might’ve anonymized that. [laughs]

Patrick: Right.

Amy: I don’t think they would’ve put that up there. I think people were more upset over the idea that they were looking at individuals’ accounts. But there’s a lot of apps out there which say how many bookmarks or how many dollars have been invoiced or how many hours have been tracked. I’ve never seen anyone ever complain.

Keith: Complain about that, right.

Amy: I think FreshBooks and Hunch, they all do these infographic-style breakdowns of the data. But it’s totally anonymized, like you said, so it’s totally in aggregate. I can’t imagine. Well, you know what? I’m going to do it with Freckle anyway, so we’ll find out. [laughs]

Keith: The noisy people, the people who are complaining, I think, about the cats.jpg, I mean, aggre-data… [sputters] Aggregate data.

Amy: Aggre-data.

Keith: Aggre-data. There we go, aggre-data.

Amy: That’s great.

Keith: Aggre-data is brought from individual data, right? So if you have source to create the aggregate data, you have the original source data. So there’s really no difference in the privacy, right? It’s not like they purposely were looking at anyone’s single Basecamp to find cats.jpg. They just did, “Query, item number one million. What is name of that item?” Right? I don’t know, like Patrick said, tempest in a teapot.

Amy: How different would it feel if I wrote a blog post on Freckle, which is a time-tracking productivity tool, that said that 30 percent of all hours logged yesterday were overhead hours that are non-billable, versus I said the 100 millionth hour was logged to a project called “Cat.” You know what I’m saying? I don’t think people would care.

Keith: They didn’t even mention the project name, right?

Amy: No…

Keith: See, I think it would be different if you said that. But if you said, “The millionth task that was logged was overhead,” I don’t know how interesting that is. [laughs] See, me personally, that’s perfectly fine.

Patrick: See, this is the reason why it’s a tempest in a teapot. The only reason that anecdote was put into the post anyhow is because it’s harmless and silly and trivial.

Amy: Hilarious. [laughs]

Patrick: And if the 100 millionth item had been a business document, it just wouldn’t have been mentioned, because, A, privacy issues, but B, it isn’t funny. But because it’s stupid cat photos, it’s funny. And, brar, tempest in teapot. I avoided commenting on those threads because I thought commenting would make me dumber.

Amy: [laughs]

Keith: [laughing] We’re doing a whole podcast about it.

Amy: It’s true. I’m sorry I brought it up. [laughs]

Patrick: I feel myself getting more stupid with every sentence that comes out of my mouth.

Amy: Oh, no! I killed Patrick: McKenzie’s brain cells.

Patrick: What were our value-creating topics we were going to talk about…?

Keith: OK, so value-creating topics. Number one was the cat picture that Basecamp…

Patrick: No, that was not on the list.

Keith: Oh, that was not on the list. OK. [laughs]

Patrick: We were going to talk about…so, Amy, your business trajectory has been from one where you were consulting and not really loving it, to put it mildly. Now you’re 100 percent on the products. I started with the product/day job and got quit of the day job as of two years ago this week, which was the second-best decision ever.

Amy: Happy anniversary!

Patrick: Thank you.

Keith: Oh yeah, that’s right.

Patrick: But I kind of got sucked into consulting, starting about the same time I quit the day job, because people threw motivation on my company at me. And it was just hard to say no to the checks. And they generally come from people who are not Fortune 500 companies and have a little less BS associated with it, like the minimum BS that you can possibly have while still taking money from other people, I think.

So I’m pretty happy with that. But in the future, I would love to transition back into 100 percent product. And Keith is kind of at the end of the totem pole. Keith also quit. Like we talked about on the podcast last time, he quit his crazy Japanese day job and now works for consulting clients who are much better. But he also nurses dreams of having a…

Keith: A product and actually creating something of my own, right?

Amy: Yeah. That’s an awesome feeling.

Keith: It is.

Amy: I can tell you, from over here, it’s great.

[laughter]

Amy: Why didn’t I do this three years earlier? Keep at it. It’s worth it.

Patrick: So people have told me that they’re actually interested in how the lifestyle works out. Everyone grows up knowing lots of examples of people who work day jobs, and everyone kind of knows, “OK, you work for about 40 hours a week. You go commute to an office.” You know what the packaged lifestyle deal of working for a day job is, whereas they don’t know what it is to run a product. So, can we just spill the beans and say it’s F’ing awesome all the time?

Keith: [laughs]

Amy: Yeah. [laughs]

Keith: Except for customer support.

Patrick: Even for customer support…

Amy: Whenever I have to touch any other institution, like government or healthcare or banking, I kind of want to kill myself.

Patrick: Yeah, that’s true.

Amy: But it’s no worse than working with marketing people, [laughs] which is what I was doing as a consultant.

Patrick: And we never have to talk to an HR department, which is worth its weight in gold.

Amy: I haven’t worked at company big enough to do that, so I’ve avoided a special kind of hell. I feel very lucky for that.

Keith: [laughs]

Patrick: One of the things that I’m really appreciating this year is I’m getting married in June — yay — and pretty much taking off. I just told my consulting clients that, basically, either get themselves in by the end of May or it’s not happening till September, and just took off the entire stretch in there and will just not be working.

Amy: That’s awesome.

Patrick: I get a lot of people asking me, “How can you do that? The servers are going to burn down in a fiery badness.”

Amy: [laughs]

Patrick: Just verify for me that I’m not insane here. That’s not really how things work, right? These businesses…

Amy: Of course it’s how it works. The moment you turn your head, everything explodes in a fireball, then Godzilla comes out of the ocean. [laughs] Come on.

Keith: This is half-true, especially with Patrick’s track record.

Patrick: That’s not actually true.

Keith: OK, let me put it this way. [laughs]

Amy: Uh-oh. Is there dirt here? Is there dirt to dish? Do we get to dish dirt? [laughs]

Keith: No, no, there’s no dirt. He’s actually blogged about this. Whenever he is fully available, he generally has no support costs on his products, right? I think like, what, an hour of support a day or something like that?

Patrick: Way less than that, dude.

Keith: Way less than that. OK. Maybe 10 minutes…

Patrick: 20 minutes a week.

Keith: 20 minutes a week. OK. Anytime he gets on an airplane, or anything where he has no Internet connectivity, the server goes down. [laughs]

Patrick: This is not actually true. It just happened…

Keith: One out of 10 times. [laughs]

Amy: Just seems like it.

Patrick: It happened when I was doing an intercontinental flight back at Halloween, which is unfortunately the busy season for bingo cards.

Keith: You had another one when you were moving. You were moving and didn’t have phone access for one day, and the server crashed.

Patrick: Oh, God. [laughs] So this is two events in six years.

Keith: [laughs]

Patrick: The key that we were trying to emphasize to impressionable youngsters who are listening to this podcast is that you can step away from the business and it will not consume your life.

Keith: You can.

Amy: Absolutely.

Patrick: People will happily pay you money, even if you’re not working on the product every day, because people don’t care if you’re working on the product every day, they only care what they’re getting out of it.

Keith: The point I’m trying to make is, and what you say is true. 20 hours a week, you can go off and do what you want. People don’t care if you are working eight hours a day on your product, and you really shouldn’t be after you’ve launched to any certain degree. But keep your phone on. [laughs]

Amy: I’m sorry, I couldn’t parse that sentence. You can only not work 20 hours a week and people don’t care? I’m confused. [laughs]

Keith: Sorry, sorry. Did I really say that?

Amy: Yes.

Patrick: The English…

Keith: English? OK. So, as I’m sure everyone knows, we’ve been in Japan way, way, way too long.

Amy: OK.

Keith: So your customers do not care that you’re only working 20 minutes a week, or they don’t expect you to be working eight hours a day, because as long as the service works, they don’t care.

Amy: That’s right.

Keith: And you should not be working that much once your product is launched. However, you should always have your cell phone or some sort of Internet connection on in case things do explode, or someone to watch it for you.

Amy: So, we just took a month off in New Zealand. And then we came back for a week and a half. We’re doing city hopping in the US, San Francisco and Atlanta. And I actually did do email every two to four days, because I wanted to keep up with my class. We had somebody handling front-line support for the two apps.

We did have a server problem with Charm, but we haven’t launched that product publicly yet because we’re still ironing out those infrastructure kinks, right? And so I think my husband actually worked like two hours the entire trip, because he doesn’t have his class that he’s running. And nothing bad happened.

So here’s the thing, right? When you have a lot of customers, something bad can happen, and you can lose a few and you can be like, “You know what? I lost $200 a month of business and I took a month off. Who cares? Who cares?” And you can just gain those back. You come back, you’re like, “I’ll get new customers.” It’s not a big deal.

Someone will always cancel for some reason. It doesn’t really matter. In Freckle, we’ve gone down quite a few times. But it’s a product where you’re not in it all day, and something goes down once in a while. People don’t even get mad as long as you try to get back on and apologize. If it happens in the middle of the night, so be it. I’m not getting up in the middle of the night. No way.

Keith: And this is one thing. I think a lot of people on the Internet think that there is a limit to the number of customers you can have. They always talk about market shares and stuff like that. And talking about market shares when you’re going after big companies or products that need millions and millions of users is one thing.

So Bingo Card Creator is a very good one, because people always say, “How much of a market is there for teachers that need bingo cards?” Right? And there’s, compared to the number of programmers in the world, probably not many. But there are a f-ton, right?

Patrick: “More than I could ever hope to get to my website” is the short version.

Keith: If you were to even get one percent, you would never have to work again.

Patrick: I hate the one-percent math…

Amy: Oh, me too.

Patrick: Just as a comparable for folks, Bingo Card Creator, which is almost like the canonical example of, “Oh, God, that was a poor choice in niche selection, Patrick. Why did you do that?” has over 200,000 users and 6,000 paying customers. So if you think your thing for programmers is going to be more niche than that, you probably need to recalibrate expectations.

Amy: You’re probably wrong, also.

Patrick: And if I only had recurring revenue. That’s another thing.

Keith: [laughs]

Patrick: Recurring revenue, man, that’s the best kind of revenue, isn’t it?

Amy: It is crack, in a good way. It’s crack that doesn’t make you sick. [laughs]

Keith: [laughs]

Amy: And it’s legal and stuff. And you don’t have to inject it. I don’t know. How do you take crack? Stop me now… [laughs]

Keith: [laughs] Our street cred is going down the toilet right now. [laughs]

Patrick: So, definitely, if you have the opportunity to make a SaaS business, do the monthly charge thing that all the cool kids are doing, because it does wonderful, wonderful things for your cash flow. It helps you absorb advertising costs better. It will allows you to have high customer lifetime values without your customers perceiving the service as being expensive at all.

Amy: It’s true, that is a very good point! Recurring revenue is the Holy Grail and I love it. And back to your market share comment, recently, I mean it seems recently but it was like six or eight weeks ago, people were like…someone on Hacker News like, ‘Do people still pay for porn or these other things?’

And you were trying to be like, ‘I don’t know about that but I know people pay for a lot of these other tools, among which what you deem time tracking.’ And then the same or different person, very skeptical is like, ‘People don’t pay for time tracking!’

Keith: All people pay for time tracking! [laughs]

Amy: That’s how I read Hacker News, by the way. And then mentioned me and that’s just one example. In any industry there can be one example which makes money and I had to try them and then go, ‘You know what? There’s at least six to eight companies which make geometrically more money than I do!’ [laughs]

Keith: [laughs]

Amy: And then it went silent, surprisingly. [laughs]

Keith: [laughs] Always does!

Amy: I think a lot of people don’t, they don’t have any clue but they think that they do, about market share. What I hear a lot is, ‘Oh, but that market is saturated.’ You don’t even know what that means. That’s not what you think it means. Saturated means people don’t buy stuff anymore but they do.

If you have a pool that is very popular, has a lot of customers, there’s got to be a significant portion of those customers who are being ill served by that product.

Keith: Right, right.

Amy: It cannot be all things to all people. So someone like us who just needs a few thousand customers to live like a king, can swoop in and serve a segment of those customers, which were created for you by…

Keith: By someone else.

Amy: …this competitor which is allegedly saturating the market.

Patrick: That’s something I’ve been telling people for a while, it’s that competitors are a wonderful thing because it’s an engraved invitation from God that tells you that there’s money to be made in a particular place.

Amy: Yeah.

Keith: And there are always going to be people using your competitor’s products that are not happy with them that might want to go somewhere else. If you have a feature that other places don’t have, and even if you have a combination of features, so everyone else in this space might have the exact same features but they don’t have them in the same combination, you then have a niche of an already proven market share that want the features that you’re offering.

Patrick: We shouldn’t be the engineers here, either . We start talking about feature, feature, feature but we can honestly take something which is feature equivalent or even at less than the feature parity and just market it in such a way that, you know, it actually worked for people who it isn’t working for right now.

And that would itself justify a different business. Like, you know, there must be 500,000 big freaking enterprise project management/time tracking/Sa* , yada-yada things. Freckle doesn’t have to compete with them because you’re addressing just a different market than the kind of folks who want to buy consulting ware from IBM. So even with just a fraction of the “feature set,” you can just say, “Look, it will do what you need to do and get you back to charging your customers money.” Then that makes it a viable option for them, whereas the IBM consultingware wouldn’t be. Who would you consider to be Freckle’s big competitors?

Amy: Harvest.

Keith: Harvest.

Amy: “No Tool At All” I think is our biggest competitor.

Patrick: That is a big one.

Keith: That is a big one, that is a big one.

Amy: It’s huge! [laughs]

Patrick: Folks ask me how I convince people to stop using whatever their business’ scheduling software is and start using Appointment Reminder because you have to have the appointment schedule to send out the appointments reminders at the right time. And the easiest answer to that is, all you have to do is out-compete paper. It’s not very hard.

Keith: Moves people, especially techies, think that there is a solution out there already that people are using in the space that they don’t understand. And one of the things that I’ve seen with my clients especially is, they don’t have a solution other than Excel and a piece of paper.

Amy: Oh, it’s so true.

Keith: If you can beat down Excel you’re winning.

Patrick: Yeah.

Keith: The sad thing is how many don’t beat out Excel, right? [laughs]

Amy: Be careful about that because a lot of… so, I teach my students a lot of different things, one of which is a list of failure archetypes. Type one failures, failures that cannot be resuscitated by more work and marketing and repositioning and all that stuff.

And one of them is a “Cure for Religion:” trying to solve something that people don’t see as a problem.

Keith: Don’t want to see, right.

Amy: Lots of people love Excel and you will never pry it from their cold, dead fingers. Because they friggin love it. So you can be better than Excel and they’ll be like, ‘I don’t care, I’m not interested. I love Excel.’ And a lot of people cannot be reformed by software! [laughs]

Keith: It’s actually funny. My old company, they were having, not cash flow issues but reporting issues on their invoices and monies received and everything. It was taking so long because they were doing it over seven or eight Excel files and nothing was tied together and the sales guys were not reporting right.

So they commissioned me as an employee to spend a month or two creating an invoicing system that would tie back to all their sales and everything and just make it really easy to use.

I got all the requirements, made it all. I thought it was probably the easiest thing to use ever. Everyone said, ‘Oh, this is so easy to use.’ No one used it. [laughs] Like what they would do …

Amy: I think that was worth where that was going! [laughs]

Keith: Yeah, actually the sales guys really like it. The sales guys would put it the data, copy it into Excel and send it to the accounting firm. [laughs]

Amy: Yeah!

Keith: I mean, the saddest thing ever, to have your software simply be a copy paste solution for Excel. [laughs]

Amy: Yeah, that sounds really terrible.

Patrick: I don’t know if that’s sad or opportunity because I have definitely created things where for, largely not in publicly accessible parts of the product but if people say “the workflow requires X at the end of it”. If that is the issue that’s preventing you from paying me a motivational amount of money every month then wham! There’s a button on your dashboard now that exports CSV files. Go to town!

Although that’s an issue I think we’ve all talked about before. Customers, the things they tell you are they reasons they’re not buying the software are generally not the reasons they’re actually not buying the software!

Amy: They’re usually, yes. I find it is a mistake to listen to people. Not just in like, I don’t take their advice, this is different. I watch they do, so the whole ‘programmers don’t buy things’, I see people saying that, meanwhile they pay for like Apple products and GitHub and PeepCode.

And they say it with a straight face when they say it, “I would sign up for your service if XYZ.” And I’m like, “What would that look like? Why do you need that?” And they come up with something that’s so bizarre. I’m like, “Why don’t you do it this way?” And they’re like, “Oh…”

Because when people ask for features, like a client, most of us who are experienced consultants know that you can’t take anything they say at face value. You’ll be like, “What is your purpose?” They’re like, “I need this animated Flash widget, blah blah blah.”

And then you find out they need something really simple, and they just came up with that because it looked likely and they like to sound like they know what they’re doing. But they don’t. [laughs] It’s our job to figure that out and look at what they actually do.

Keith: Customers, businesses, clients, all of them together, most of them have really no idea how their business runs, I think. Patrick: always says that there’s a key number to any business that directly influences the bottom line of sales. And the number of companies that actually know that key number are few and far between, I think.

Amy: What kind of number are we talking about?

Keith: I did a recent re-jiggering of an online registration service (Patrick notes: more natural English might be “a hotel booking website”), and I did some consulting for them, and they were under the impression that 90 percent of their reservations came from the website instead of phone or walk-ins. And they were under the impression that they were having about a 60-percent, or a really high, conversion rate from people who came into the system.

And once we brought out the actual numbers, they saw that there was only 20 percent actually using the website. And of those 20 percent, only, I think, like nine percent actually completed a reservation on the website. And so it’s not that those numbers were necessarily bad, but they had a completely opposite view of the reality of their business, right?

And they had been doing that for five, six years. If they had noticed that five, six years earlier, they could’ve completely changed their strategy, but instead they were poking along because they were under a misconception.

Amy: Right. That’s a pretty big misconception.

Keith: That’s a pretty big [laughs] misconception, I know.

Patrick: That happens over and over again in my consulting career. I’m lucky I get to work with savvy, intelligent people. I mean, hey, they pay me.

Keith: [laughs]

Patrick: They’re all good companies run by smart people, and yet many of them don’t have the infrastructure in place to tell them material facts about the business that you can’t get just by looking at a screen in Google Analytics. That directly influences decision-making about those material facts.

Amy: Right. We tend not to notice what isn’t there. We just work on whatever’s in front of us. We don’t look for the thing that’s missing.

Patrick: That’s an interesting topic. As one business operator to another, what kind of things do you track for your business?

Amy: So, since we last talked, it hasn’t really changed that much. [laughs] We have a lot more… Actually, that’s not true. We set up KISSmetrics, since we track a lot of things now. But we do not have a very good sales funnel tracking, and that’s because we plan to redo the sales page completely. This is my white whale, perhaps, or some other thing that will never get finished…

[laughter]

Amy: …and I should give up on before I become a horrible novel, or something. Because that’s going to happen. But we track a lot of revenue, we track churn rate, we track feature adoption now. But, I’ll be honest, I haven’t looked at it lately. And by lately, I mean the last three months.

We’ve been totally occupied with other stuff. In fact, we haven’t developed, or even deployed finished features, for Freckle for months because of the international move, all the other drama we had in our personal lives, travel, and Thomas getting his immigration stuff sorted out. It’s kind of like your three month vacation, only we weren’t really having fun but for one month of it.

[laughter]

Patrick: Back to a previous topic, because you charge customers monthly, the revenue went up every month anyhow.

Amy: Yes. It did. It did. It went up no matter what. What’s really awesome is that I, a few years ago, got sick with mono for the second time.

Keith: Oh my God.

Amy: I developed chronic fatigue syndrome, which kind of blew. For a while I was so sick I couldn’t do anything. The best thing I could do in the day was to get up out of bed and go to the sofa and watch stupid TV. I couldn’t even watch smart TV because it felt like I was having an agoraphobic attack in a crowd with all the facts.

Literally, I was averse to facts. I couldn’t cope. It turns out that was low cortisol, believe it or not. I couldn’t make any decisions or do anything at all for three months, work wise. Zip. Thomas manned the support, he talked to the one developer who was doing work for us, and it was fine.

Our business grew even when I was on practically bed rest, and that was a really transformative moment for me. I knew we could take these vacations. I knew we could do this stuff. But that was like a, “Holy shit!” moment. Am I allowed to say that? [laughs]

Keith: Yeah.

Amy: Awesome. It was. I was just like, “Oh my…”

Keith: [laughs] We’ve been cursing like sailors the whole time, so…

Amy: Oh, OK. [laughs]

Patrick: You have, I haven’t.

Keith: Patrick: doesn’t.

Patrick: My half of the podcast is PG, his is PG-13.

Amy: Once I felt better and actually had the cortisol to think about it…

[laughter]

Amy: …it was like a sky has opened up, ray of light, choir of angels singing and throwing cash.

[laughter]

Patrick: I love that image.

Amy: It was the best. I was like, “You know what? I can’t be fired. I cannot be laid off. I do not have to worry about unpaid sick leave. I have it made.” I think that’s one of the big reasons that I’m such a tireless promoter of what I call Bacon Business. Products that bring home the bacon, that make money that you sell directly to people who buy them. Not advertising, not marketplaces, not venture backed, because they can change lives.

To get all philosophical for a moment, it’s epic to be able to live this kind of lifestyle. Isn’t it? It’s amazing. I think not enough people promote it in a way that isn’t like, “Oh, well, they’re just super successful. That’s not standard and I could never live like that.” The examples out there are just too lofty. And then there are people like us.

Patrick: Yeah. I know, so I’ve been hanging around with the small software developer crowd for a while and there’s a lot of businesses that might be like Bingo Card Creator in terms of scope, but maybe up to an order of magnitude and more in terms of revenue, just by doing things that you wouldn’t expect that people could do as a full time thing that they’re doing as a full time thing. They get all the benefits of the lifestyle.

It’s like being a rock star minus the groupies. You never have to show up anywhere at any time. Money just appears magically in the bank account. Seriously, guys. For any of you who are on the fence try it. It’s awesome.

Amy: It is.

Patrick: I’ve got a lot of respect for the Silicon Valley startup types and I’ve kicked around doing that myself a couple of times and have been offered motivational amounts of money to do that. “This is awesome!” is something that you will not hear from lots of the folks over there.

Amy: I wonder why.

Patrick: It’s like being a lawyer or consulting like management consulting. There are people the lifestyle works for and there’s people that the lifestyle just does not work for. I don’t know if I could think of anyone off the top of my head who has started their own software business and went full time at it and was like “no.”

Keith: “I want to go back to my nine to five.”

Patrick: “I really want more challenges in life.” That’s something I hear from a lot of people. “Don’t you feel bored like you don’t have enough challenges?” No, I can spin up challenges any time I want.

Amy: No one has ever said that to me. I think most people assume it’s way harder and more stressful than it is, and I understand why. I actually had a short Twitter conversation with Jason Cohen who I absolutely adore. He writes a fantastic blog, A Smart Bear. Before I say this, I want to say that I just think he’s great. I wanted him to speak at Schnitzelconf, but it was just too far for him to go.

He tweeted why do startup founders beat themselves up? It’s like why do hamsters eat their young? They just have to. I was like no. For starters, I didn’t say this in the Twitter conversation, but I used to breed gerbils and none of them ever ate their young because I took good care of them so I feel like I’m sort of an expert on both parts of this equation. I was like that’s not true.

My gist was that people do it to themselves. He said it was easier to be lenient after you’ve had objective success. I said I wouldn’t call it lenient, I call it self-respect. The truth is it doesn’t get easier after you’ve had objective success. I think a lot of people, they actually are worse to themselves after they’ve had objective success because they feel like they have something important to lose.

I know a few people who run businesses like ours, they may be more involved, some less involved, and they feel like they can’t go on vacation, they feel like they have to answer email in the middle of the night, and they do it to themselves. It’s not external. It’s all internal and I don’t think Jason believes me. [laughs]

Patrick: I’m constrained at how much I can say because he’s one of my wonderful, lovely clients, but I’ve heard that feedback from other people who, again, much like Jason I respect.

It is a psychological thing that this is a meme we really need to kill, but I think there’s a deep seeded… zeitgeist. Is that the right word? People are afraid to allow themselves to be happy and believe that success must require a certain quantum of suffering and if you’re not suffering you’re clearly not on the successful route.

Even people who are clearly by any objective measurement successful. It’s kind of a personality thing, too. Jason is a very hard-charging, type A kind of guy. He’s got a ridiculously successful company right now, he’s sold one successful company previously. If you want to look at somebody who’s got it made, Jason has it made.

There’s no external feature that would necessarily need to make Jason feel the need to beat himself up. Actually, something you said to me was very profound, that if there’s ever an issue between you and another person it’s not about you, it’s about them.

Amy: Absolutely. So true.

Patrick: I think that recompiled part of my source code when I heard it because it was just so f’ing true. I find myself quoting that to people a lot.

People have asked me, “You didn’t answer my email. Was it something I said?” I’m like, “Nope. Just an FYI, any time someone does something it’s probably because something that was just going on in their life because they’re in their life 24 hours a day and they’re in their relationship with you for like 36 seconds a day. Just don’t worry about it.”

Similarly, don’t worry about what other people are thinking of you because they’re probably thinking of you a lot less than you think they’re thinking of you. They’ve got better things to do by their perspective. Same with software, by the way. We see our own software eight+ hours a day. We know where all the skeletons are buried. We see every little imperfection. Customers, by and large, don’t care about the little things.

Amy: They don’t.

Patrick: If it makes their life better, great. You’ll have complainers who largely won’t buy it anyhow.

Keith: Especially on the backend.

Patrick: 90 percent of the customers if it accomplishes the big 48 point font promise that’s on the front page of the website they’re good. If it gets better over time, that’s great, but fundamentally they’re good. If it has a bug, no problem. Computers eat things all the time. Whatever. They will say “I’ve got better things to do than worry about it.”

Amy: All those things come from the same route, if you ask me. What Terry Pratchett called being trapped in the dark behind the eyes. It’s just that we go through our lives 100 percent privy to everything that goes on inside us, even if we don’t understand it, which most of us don’t. This has been proven by research.

When we make a mistake or we choose something we have an elaborate reason why. When someone else does the same thing we get really glib and superficial like well, I did this because I made a mistake but he did that because he’s a jerk. It all comes from being self-involved, which is the default nature of humanity.

I think you were saying it’s like a zeitgeist. That was the right word. I think it’s just human. I think a lot of us, especially in Western cultures, we tend to self-flagellate for no good reason. People call it the Puritan work ethic or whatever.

Keith: Well, it’s not just Western. I was going to say…

Patrick: Japan could teach everybody about self-flagellation. (Patrick notes: If I were not talking in real time I’d say “I could have a very long discussion on the degree to which Japan counts as ‘non-Western’ here if you wanted me to.” Side effect of getting a degree regarding that subject.)

Amy: [laughs] Fair enough.

Keith: Looking at it from the Japanese perspective, I wonder how much of it is almost like an arms race. So one of the things that happens in Japanese companies…

Patrick: Oh, God, yes. Oh.

Keith: So, going back to the startup, where people have to suffer. So they have to work the 20 hours a day kind of thing, only four hours of sleep, constantly working, not taking care of their health and stuff like that. There are people out there who only need eight hours of sleep, who enjoy working 15, 18, 20 hours a day.

I’m actually close to that. I love working. And I work much more than I probably should, because I enjoy it. It’s my hobby to be creating things. And I think people see, especially people like that who have become successful and think, “Oh, this person is successful because he only sleeps four hours a day. In order for myself to be successful, I have to only sleep four hours a day as well.” And I think it becomes an arms race for trying to be successful.

And in Japan, there’s a very similar thing with the amount of hours people work. So people think that people in Japan work long hours and they are productive for all those hours. That is the furthest thing from the truth on the planet. They sleep. They clean their ears. I had my coworker assemble a bicycle in his cubicle [laughs] during work hours, for no apparent reason whatsoever.

It’s assumed that, just like in the startup business, there are people who work long hours because they are really good and they are successful. There are people who work long hours because they are idiots and not successful, and it takes them time to do everything. But the longer the people are there, if everyone is there, it’s so much harder for you to go home, right?

Amy: Right.

Keith: If successful guy number one is working 12, 14 hours a day, you think, “Oh, I have to be there as long as he’s there. Otherwise I’m not going to be seen as being as productive as him.” So what it comes down to is a bunch of people sitting in an office for 14, 16 hours a day, only doing about four to five hours of actual work.

Amy: So it’s cargo-culting mixed with social contagion. (Patrick notes:Great line!)

Keith: Exactly.

Amy: Right.

Patrick: And like a massive game of chicken…

Amy: Yeah. [laughs]

Patrick: Chicken or prisoner’s dilemma, I guess, one of them. The first person to decide to go home gets the evil eye. I think that’s part of the startup culture, too, in that, “Oh, you quit after only 10 hours today. You must not want success enough.” We construct our own cultural pathologies, because people don’t have enough exemplars of folks in companies that said, “We worked four, six, eight hours today, and we go home to the kids, and things are fine.” The cultural pathology of overwork ends up getting celebrated.

Keith: We need more Fog Creeks of the world.

Patrick: Fog Creek, the office is a ghost town after five o’clock.

Amy: As well it should be.

Keith: Except on game night.

Patrick: Except on game night. (Patrick notes:Every Thursday. Third-best reason to work there. They’re hiring, go work for them.)

Keith: [laughs]

Amy: So you were saying, Keith, the examples you had were the guy who works 12 to 14 hours and is successful and then the guy who works, I think you said 12 to 14 hours and was not successful.

Keith: Yeah.

Amy: I thought you said lower numbers for the second guy. But anyway, when you said that I was thinking that what you don’t have room for in Japan, apparently, but also not in Silicon Valley, is the person who works five hours a day and actually outperforms the person who works 12 hours a day. And that’s not uncommon.

Keith: Right.

Amy: I have a lot of people who use Freckle who’ve written in to me and said, “You know what I discovered, which is really freeing, is that I actually only get two to four hours of work done at my computer done every day. The rest is dicking around. And so I’m going to spend all the rest of the time that I would waste on the computer going out and playing music or walking around or reading, and then I’ll get more work done in the two to four hours I actually work.” And I think that’s true. It’s backed up by a lot of research.

Keith: Oh, definitely, definitely. And going back to the Japanese side of it, the problem is that when everyone is forced to work 12 to 14 hours a day, you then have the problem of, why would I work smarter? Why would I try to automate my process so that I can work more during those 12 to 14 hours instead of dicking around?

So it’s actually, because you’re in a trapped system here, then there’s no reason to better yourself. But using a product like Freckle, and especially for consultants and people who define their own time, it’s the biggest win you can possibly have. If you find out that you are dicking around on the Internet for two, three hours a day while you’re working, and a time-tracking software like Freckle actually makes you realize that, and then you gain two to three hours a day…

Amy: That’s true.

Keith: Because, as soon as you realize that you’re dicking around, you go, OK, I’m just going to leave the computer. I’m going to de-screen. I’m going to go off, play with my child, play with my friends, go out drinking, get slammed, or whatever you want to do, right?

Amy: Absolutely.

Patrick: This is one of the benefits of doing your own thing. You have social pressure coming from yourself, which always happens, but you don’t have social pressure from other people who can tell when you leave the office. The vast majority of days, I have a two to four-hour peak of productivity, and after that I’m pretty much shot. And since I know this about myself now, I just don’t work the rest of it.

Keith: You probably shouldn’t say that. Your financier probably… [laughs]

Patrick: I will tell this to any client. (Patrick notes: Any clients in the audience? You presumably know I have a sense of humor and can judge my pace of working, having sat next to me for a while. Any prospective clients? Productivity for me tends to be bursty, interspersed with periods of introspection, much like your engineers.)

Keith: That you only work two hours a day? [laughs]

Patrick: This is why I have you pay the week rate, guys, because work gets done, but assuming 480 minutes of equally productive time is not a good assumption for working with me, which you will probably notice as I check Hacker News in the middle of the day.

Amy: [laughs]

Patrick: But, no. It’s funny, though. There’s people who I respect enormously who have found out the same thing about themselves. Four hours a day is kind of the productivity limit, and after that it suffers. I know one friend in particular, and I won’t mention his name because he asked me not to mention it publicly, but the point is that he asked me not to mention it publicly.

He thought people would think less of him if they thought that his business, which is wildly successful, was just a part-time gig. Which, that breaks my brain. Half the reason I do the blog and the podcast and whatnot is to give people examples of there being multiple paths to the cheese of success in life.

Amy: Hear, hear.

Patrick: I wish everybody happiness. That’s kind of like a foundational philosophical thing for me, but once you introduce people to other ways to getting to happiness, which can include not working all the time.

Amy: Or much at all. [laughs]

Patrick: Or much at all.

Amy: That was not a slam on you or anything. I was actually thinking about myself when I said that.

Patrick: It’s no problem.

Amy: Not that I thought you would think it was an insult.

Patrick: I’m lazy like a fox.

Keith: He’s very proud of that. He’s very proud of that. He gets on my case all the time for working too much.

Amy: I thought foxes were pretty brown.

Patrick: I’m going to convert Keith.

Keith: You converted me to quitting my day job, so you might be successful yet.

Patrick: I’m only saying I’m going to convert Keith because Keith is my best friend so the less he works the more time I have to play League of Legends with him.

Keith: And the more time he has to exploit me for his own product development and stuff.

Patrick: Keith, in addition to being my best friend, is also the designer, but I can’t get any of his time because it’s been filled up with client work. Anyhow, what was I saying? If other people are sincerely happy working 16 hours a day in the coding salt mines then bully for them.

But I know because I’ve talked to and met a lot of people who are doing the 16 hour days in the coding salt mines because they think either that’s required to be successful or because they are strongly socially pressured by people that that is the behavior you should emulate.

If you are folks out there like that, if it makes you happy, thumbs up, go for it, but if you’re not truly happy by that then start doing something that will make you happy because there are so many ways to succeed in this. In business, in life, in general.

Amy: Absolutely. You’re not talking about runners up, either. We did not quite hit my revenue estimates for 2011, but we did have $550,000 of revenue and in 2008 we had zero.

Keith: Not too shabby, right?

Patrick: High five.

Amy: I’m sorry, what?

Keith: Not too shabby, right?

Amy: Not too shabby, right. Exactly. I was hoping for 600 grand and we didn’t quite make it, but that was with a lot of drama where we didn’t work for a lot of that year. I had surgery, I was really sick. That was the three months. That was last year. I had surgery. I was out of commission for six weeks then. We had this hiring and firing drama. That year was screwed and we made $550,000. I’m basically retired and I don’t want to be this way forever.

I really enjoy working and I enjoy having impact and I enjoy touching people’s lives with my software and my course, and I do spend a lot of time on my course. 30×500, that is. We could sit on our asses and rake in $550,000 a year and really work just a couple hours a day on average and we could really cut our overhead.

Most of our overhead we spend on developing new features and our new app, Charm. We spent a lot of money on that the last year. That’s because I had bigger ambitions, but I’m never going to work a 40 hour work week. I had this near death experience, basically, with chronic fatigue. I had this priority change. I was a workaholic. No, no more. Now I’m a hippy, but you can be a hippy and earn $550,000 a year if you pick the right product and if you keep at it.

The first year and a half kind of really sucked, but we got over that and now we’re making really good money and it’s not that hard. Patrick, I found out about you because you blog about this stuff because you’re trying to be a positive example and I also don’t understand why the person you know refuses to be named because he’s afraid of being shamed and that’s just really sad, I think, that by telling people you make the world a better place.

I understand why he’s afraid, but I would rather put it all out there and be a positive example because there are so few of them.

Patrick: I think that is one reason, too. Going back to a topic we were just talking about, like you said, we’re not runners up here. How do I want to phrase this? I like celebrating other people’s successes. You guys make more money for me, bully for you. 37signals can buy everybody in Chicago a sports car these days, bully for them. It makes me happy to hear that other people are doing well.

Where is this topic going? Just a life tip for everybody listening, if you compare yourself to other people and think you’re not successful unless you’re beating them by some metric you will generally be less happy than you are if you’re comparing yourself against either where you were previously or what your goals are.

Success, for me, is either beating where I was last year or beating where I thought I was going to be this year. That generates happy points for me, whereas I never really cared about comparing with other folks. I think folks like the friend of mine who success is partly defined as being seen as successful, that kind of screws up your priorities a little bit, although I’m not totally immune to that myself.

That was rambling. I’m sorry.

Amy: Not as much as me.

Keith: I think we’re going to have to close this down because we’ve gotten complaints in the past about us talking too much.

Patrick: This one is only an hour and a half or so.

Keith: We also shot the shit for about 15 minutes so after editing it’ll be about an hour. That’s pretty good.

Patrick: OK. Only an hour. Thanks very much, Amy. Let’s give folks the actionable information with the call to action at the end. If they want to sign up for 30×500 how would they do that? (Patrick notes: Again, you can’t, because it took a while to get this posted. Sorry about that.)

Amy: First you actually have to apply. We’ve been creating more and more successes each time I run the class and I want to keep that turned up, so I want to basically help decide with you if 30×500 is right for you at this time. That application is launching on April 13. That’s Friday the 13th. All the information is on my blog at unicornfree.com.

Patrick: Sounds great. Thanks very much for doing the podcast with us, Amy. It was insightful as always.

Amy: Thank you for having me.

Keith: It was great to meet you and looking forward to seeing more about 30×500 and more Freckle stuff, too.

Patrick: For all you folks in the audience, we’ll probably be doing this again in a month or two. See you next time.

Keith: Depending on when we can all get together with the microphone. All right. Thanks for joining us, Amy. You take care.

Amy: Thank you for having me.

Special Bonus Prize For People Who Read The Whole Transcript

I did a 45 minute video on improving the first-run experience of your software, to increase customer happiness and conversion rates. Some of the folks who have implemented advice from it have already told me that it made them appreciable amounts of money. You should probably watch it. Click here to give me your email address on the right side of the page, and I’ll give it to you free. You’ll also get an occasional email from me about things you’ll find interesting, like e.g. a new podcast getting posted, not-for-the-blog thoughts about software/marketing/etc, and (possibly) a product announcement someday.

Nice message in my inbox, from a reader of this blog:

Hey Alwin,

I wanna thank you for your tips on “How to sell more stuff to your existing customers“.
I followed your advice and, as you can see, got some spectacular results:

I really needed that “do not hesitate to send reminder emails”.
Without your graph and that beautiful second peak I would never have sent the reminder mail. Was nice to see that with another product, other campaign, the impact is similar.
Perhaps marketing is science after all

I’m running my brief semi-annual secret MicroConsult sale right now for past clients and their friends and checking in on how past and recent clients are doing. Two bits of feedback that were the kind of results I like to hear:

“Thank you for the help you provided earlier with the 2 MicroConsults.  It helped me get to the point of quitting my full time job and then adding my first employee. ”
- “Tom Esposito, Founder | bridallive.com .

“A year into my start-up venture I booked a microconsult with Bob. Well I should have done that much sooner! His experience with bootstrapped start-ups is invaluable and the fact that he is willing to share that experience for $147 is fantastic. I ran an established desktop software company for 10 years and like to think that I know a little about the business, but running a one-man start-up is a very different exercise.

Bob is a great sparring partner and quickly pointed out some pain points on my web site and helped to set priorities. He really made me take a fresh look at my messaging and positioning.

If you have a start-up, read his books and book a microconsult, you will earn it back. “ 
-  Edwin Siebesma, MeetingKing.com

By the way, Edwin has some advice for other startups: if you’re building a web service, do what it takes to get it into the Google Web Store. Fantastic immediate uptake and great conversion levels to boot!

You’re reading Results I like to hear about… from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

In his Little Gold Book: Advanced Lessons for Mastering Poker 2.0, Phil Gordon recommends using a HUD when playing online software. He mostly talks of Hold'em Manager, as he in using Windows. For us Mac OS X users, here is how you can set up the Poker Copilot for HUD according to Phil's approach:

I recommend Phil Gordon's Little Gold Book for a good description of how to interpret various ranges of HUD statistics.

 

I thought this would be a good opportunity to run this guest blog from Stephen Kellett of Software Verify, prompted by a note I received this morning… I haven’t had permission to publish the details of the email so I have removed any personally identifiable information. The essence of the question though is, ‘Should bootstrapped businesses come to BoS?’

“Mark

I run a small bootstrapped software company.

We have a samll US team of 2 employees (me & wife, and some part time contractors)  and have a remote team that is full time from India.

I am trying to evaluate if BoS would be the right conference for me to attend given our stage of the business.

My cell is below if you need to reach me.

Thanks
S
213.xxx”

My take, in short – while we try to focus the content of the event on the how, who, why, when and where of growing a successful software business, almost all of the content is incredibly valuable to software entrepreneurs who are starting out on their journey. We have a single customer at BoS – you, the attendee. No sponsors or exhibitors to keep happy. Just the delegates. Of course you can go to ‘cheaper’ events, but we think that people come to BoS because they are able to learn, share their ideas, their fears and ambitions with a  very special group of people. You will find people who are incredibly willing to help a single founder/startup – everyone started out at some point and it is wonderful that so many people are willing to “give something back.”

You can also see all of the feedback from delegates at Business of software 2011 here.

I figured it is a question that a lot of bootstrapped companies will ask so I have tried to answer it with the help of Stephen’s guest blog. Stephen is a single founder and Business of Software regular so perhaps his thoughts will be useful…

“In October I travelled again to Boston, MA for the Business of Software conference. This is the number one conference to go to for folks aiming to create a software business to last the long term. This isn’t a place to come if you want to create a Facebook then flip it and walk away with millions. Nothing sustainable about flipping companies.

Twitter seemed to come into its own at and before the conference. People using phones, iPads, laptops to coordinate who they were eating with and when. #BoS2011 became unmanageable. Mark Littlewood’s advice to use Tweetdeck was well received.

Audience

Its a self selecting audience. They’re all very bright, self motivated. A lot of the people attending run their own businesses, from one man companies to some larger organisations like Red Gate who brought a good chunk of their staff with them. 30 people? 50 people? I don’t know. A lot – more than many people have on their entire staff. I spent Saturday evening with 5 Red Gate people and most of Sunday with some more Red Gate folk. It seems that Red Gate is being quite entrepreneurial with its staff – exposing them to conferences like this and training them for the future. It seems like a much more thoughtful vision for their future than most companies take.

Microsoft had some people in attendance too. The only Microsoftee I met was Patrick Foley, who was brave enough to give a Lightning talk. One attendee had travelled all the way from Romania, using three planes to get to Boston. He was probably one of the youngest attendees too. I spent a chunk of Tuesday evening chatting with him in The Whiskey Priest. Not sure I’d have been that keen to travel that far for a conference at age 25. Kudos.

The quality of the speakers was incredible. I thought Clayton Christensen would be the top draw (I’ve read most of his books, found them really interesting) but as it turned out I preferred the speakers on the second day – Rory Sutherland and Josh Linkner in particular. Most speakers manage to weave humour into their talks. I don’t know if this was planned, opportunist or just something you get good at.

Note taking

I took very few notes at Business of Software. I was just too wrapped up in what was being presented. When I look at my notes its in my typical unreadable “I should have been a doctor” handwriting, with a good chunk of the notes not about the talk being given but about ideas for improving the software process at Software Verification. Its as if being there was stimulating me to take action over what we will do in future. Part of me is pleased with this and part of me is frustrated I didn’t take more written notes.

[Actually, Stephen's notes are pretty good. You can read them all here on his blog - Business of Software 2011 - Mind Food].

The Business of Software goodie bag was unusual – full of stuff I will actually read. Books from some of the speakers. Their talks were interesting, so that bodes well for the books they wrote.

Business of Software Team

The team Mark Littlewood assembled were superb. They were always on hand to help. When I asked them for help with some nuts (I needed protein as the vegetarian food was all carbohydate and had no pulses etc) they to my amazement found some fruit and nuts for me. I expected them to tell me where I could find a shop. Later that evening two of them saw me collapsed on a seat at The Whiskey Priest and came over. They wanted to walk me back to the hotel until I explained I’d be alright in about 20 minutes – when my blood sugar had become normal again after eating (I shouldn’t have had the beer so soon after eating with the noise of the Business of Software band – too much).

As well as the BoS team, the conference centre staff were helpful and courteous. Americans really understand service. So often I’ve had bad experiences in the UK.

Coming home

After the conference everyone had a chance to grab some food, possibly be interviewed by the roving cameraman. He got me. I don’t think I made a very good subject. I think you’re either good at this or not. When asked a question that required a thoughtful answer I should have paused and thought. But no. So a bit of a disaster on that front. I’m sure other people had better things to say to the camera than I did.

I milled around for a bit then a group of us headed off to a local restaurant for some pre-flight food. Mark Littlewood said he’d come and join us, but he took so long he met us on the way back to the hotel. Better luck next time Mark.

[Ha! You got me. We ran a few optional post-event workshops that started at 1.00 pm. They were supposed to finish by 2.30 pm. The last one finished at 4.30 pm and I figured I should be around to see people off the premises... ]

The photo shows (left to right) Krishna Kotecha, Patrick McKenzie, Corey Reid, Patrick Foley, Levi Kovacs, Tyler Rooney.

TO DO List

My notes are littered with TO DO items scrawled done as a speaker sparked something in me. On the plane home, reflecting on the conference, I found that every few minutes I’d have to write something down. In total I have about 4 pages of TO DOs, 1 per line. That’s about 120 items to do or research. All directly from attending the conference. Not all of the TO DO items were new to me at the conference, but the conference reinforced my pre-existing thoughts and coallesced them into an action point.

Conclusion

If I could summarise Business of Software into a few words, it would be “Incredible mind food, stuff to think about for a long time”.

Would I go again? Yes.

Am I glad its on the East Coast of America? Yes. 5 hours out is one thing. 8 hours out another altogether.

If anyone wants to share their experiences in the comments – or via a guest blog, please get in touch.

Recently I had a conversation with my colleague about the performance and primary focus of the Dr.Explain development team. What should go first: the number of new features or the quality of architecture and of source code?

I agree that the number of new functions and features in a software product is very important for attracting new customers and improving customer loyalty, especially in the very beginning.

When you’re releasing a pilot version of your software, your main objective is to verify and test your business idea. Time to market is very important, so you may focus on the key functions and features of your product while not investing a lot of efforts in good architecture design and code quality.

If your idea works and if you are serious about developing your product in the forthcoming years, you’ll probably have to throw out your pilot version and rework it almost from scratch, this time paying attention to code quality and clearness, smart project structure, and scalable architecture.

You Are Going to Live with Your Code and Extend It for Years

Maintaining high quality of source code and of architecture design is a long-term investment. Surely at the beginning it will take a lot of time and efforts, but later it will give you many significant advantages over your competitors.

Our team has been developing, producing, and selling Dr.Explain for 7 years. (It’s a very sophisticated application for authoring help files and online manuals.) Now I’m happy that our team has always adhered to the standards of high quality code and good architecture. Here are some of the advantages that we’ve gained.

Higher Reliability of Our Software

Our software has to provide the highest level of reliability as it’s business oriented, namely meant for creating software documentation. For business users, even a rare bug may cost thousands of dollars due to a loss of important data, inaccuracy, or unexpected delay. While a bug in a video game or media player can disappoint the end user, a bug in a business application can potentially have much more serious consequences.

To ensure stability and reliability of our system and to predict any potential problems, we must have total control over our source code. We need to understand how every function and every operator works. We must have a clear vision of all interactions, data exchanges, and relations among all parts of our application. That would be impossible if our source code looked like a patchwork and was full of “dirty” hacks.

Higher Speed of Development Due to Code Reuse

Our properly organized and documented source code provides an excellent way to boost our team’s productivity as we can reuse common approaches, methods, and functions every time we need it. It has taken us years to iteratively build several problem-oriented libraries and SDKs consisting of carefully tested and organized functions and classes. Now we can often implement a very sophisticated functionality in a new module simply by using our ready-made and tested approaches. Quick and easy access to such common methods saves us many hours of designing, developing, and testing.

Quick Start for New Developers

We have about 1,600 files containing more than 500,000 lines of source code, plus various resource and configuration files. Poorly organized source code would become a real torture for a new developer joining our project. But when we’re hiring new team members, we can significantly shorten their learning curve by giving them logically organized, self-documenting, clear, and readable code. Otherwise, it would take years for a newcomer to understand how to change a single piece of text on some button.

Faster Code Review Process

To guarantee the reliability of Dr.Explain, our developers review all changes made in the source code by other team members. To evaluate the design and implementation of a certain function, a developer must understand what his colleague wanted to write and what he actually wrote. In other words, they must speak the same language, even the same dialect. All of them must follow the same coding standard, rules, and principles. All of them must care about code quality to effectively help each other to move forward. Otherwise, project development would grind to a halt due to conflicts, misunderstandings, and disputes.

Self-Documenting Code

One of the attributes of high-quality code is proper naming and structuring of all its elements: classes, functions, identifiers, and macros. Using a good naming convention enables developers, testers, and managers to work with source code effectively without the need for deep knowledge of its specification, design, or behavior. Team members can easily read their colleagues’ source code, understand its logic, and evaluate its consistency. There is no need to consult secondary documentation sources and therefore to maintain them.

Easiness of Adding New Features, Enhancements, or Extensions

A good software system architecture assumes that its parts are isolated from each other and use only clear and transparent connections and ways of communication. Our source code must clearly represent the architecture of the entire application and show the interactions among all its parts. If a developer understands what functionality a certain structure implements, he can easily modify or extend it without much affecting other parts of the project. All possible ways of affecting other parts are under control as all mechanisms of interaction are identified and designated. This minimizes the risk of introducing bugs into working code.

Easiness and Completeness of Testing

Again, if the application is designed in such a way that its modules are isolated from each other and use only clearly defined ways of interaction, then we know exactly which modules could be affected by certain changes in the source code. Therefore, we can run comprehensive tests on all critical modules and basic tests on other modules. Such tactics lets us minimize the time for integration testing without compromising quality.

Developers Love Their Product and Are Proud of It

The last but not the least benefit of high code quality is a great motivation for our team members. As we keep our project code clear, well-thought-out, documented, and almost bug-free, we know that we do our job perfectly. We respect our users, ourselves, and our work, and we are really proud of it. This is a very inspiring feeling that keeps us together and helps us to develop Dr.Explain and to move forward, to deliver greater value to our customers through our products.

Next time I’ll tell you about techniques that we use to maintain good architecture and to ensure high quality of code.

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So you want to successfully build your startup and that means building systems that get all sorts of work done. If you’re funded, you can hire someone to define all the task, marketing, support, recruiting, planning, agile project management and operation systems you need. If you’re bootstrapping, you are that person.

In that case, let me recommend a task management system I’ve been using every day, all day long for the past several months. Now before you scream your eyes will melt in your head if you read about one more damn Getting Things Done web/iOS/android/paper system, hold on. This app has some crazy powerful good mojo behind it that redefines the game.

The service is Asana. And here’s 6 reasons you should check it out especially for managing all the work you need to define, track and complete if you want to build a remarkable startup.

Reason one: The right people are using it. Twitter. Foursquare. Uber. LinkedIn. Rdio. Nationbuilder. Airbnb. Twilio. That is a hell of a lot of successful, smart startups – too smart to be messing around with anything that gets in the way. And by the way, Asana founders include one of the Facebook Billionaires and they’ve already raised $10.2 million – deep, deep pockets for “yet another task manager” with an extremely high conversion rate (25% of the people who’ve tried Asana stick it with Asana).

Reason two: Takes the friction out of your startup. Email is not your friend building a startup – it’s the evil Nemesis that slows everything down and drags you under. Not so with Asana, and really not so if you’re more than a one person startup. Every task and project and workspace is owned and can be followed and thereafter commented on by any other member of the team. No more emails about and instead of work: just work that everyone in your startup can track, comment and contribute to at the right level.

Reason three: A single System will rule them all. Count up the number of systems you’ll need in your startup: a beta user feedback system, a lead gen system, a business task system, a help desk system, an agile development system, a marketing system, a content strategy system. Then add a few more: a getting equity funded system, a hiring system, a create raving fans system. Each with their own strengths, weaknesses, learning curves, commands. Too many systems!

Instead, Asana can be a killer overall getting work done system, with projects built and used to suit why these tasks are being done. See it in action: here’s short videos of Asana being used manage projects, track bugs, manage customers, recruit new hires. What you get – a single easy system to learn and use – outweighs for a startup having dedicated/custom/overcomplicated/specialized systems. You are not a big fat company – thinking like one will kill your startup.

Reason four: You can haz freelancers. Or contractors. Or vendors. Or whoever you need to give tasks to and get work back from. Asana makes it easy to create workspaces for your core team and the different people in your startup’s life whom you connect with. Or you can invite outsiders to be part of a specific project. Or members of team can follow specific tasks. Being able to define what needs doing, get feedback from the doer, let others track and comment on the item, project or workspace level squeezes out the need for endless email rounds.

Reason five: Secret Ninja Context Powers. A common failing of task managers (I know, I’ve written several) is there’s a primary implied context shaping what you can do and how you can do it. If it’s by Projects, but you need to look at what’s happening by people, tough. You have multiple projects, but you need to tag and focus by tag – good luck. You want to know what you or your cofounders have to do today across all projects – nope. Asana is structured so you can focus by person, you, project, timeliness, tag or any combination thereof. This makes asking key questions (what do I have to get done this week?, who can do graphics?, what projects have must-do this week tasks?, which projects was Joe working on before he jumped ship? – easy to answer and easy to process into action.)

Reason six: They’re not lists, they’re workflows. You can chose to treat a project as a list of things to get done or as a process tasks move through. For example, you can set up areas in your hiring process project so when an initial lead moves to “setup phone screen”, the person who follows that section automatically sees it and is notified of it. Or let’s say you’re a writer who wants to move work from brainstorm to outline to first draft to polish to place as guest post – you can move tasks from section to section, with the right people, checklist and work plan immediately taking effect. Organizing tasks into workflows where you can optimize each step turns death by task list into a system of improvable processes.

Finally, did I mention Asana is blindingly fast, super elegant, has web, mobile and iOS interfaces and is free forever for up to 30 people in one organization? Or the good newborn API, inbound integration with email, outbound integration with your calendar, repeating/reoccurring tasks, file attachment, and plenty of keyboard shortcuts?

Bottom line, you need to be smart about how you create and improve the workflows that will define your startup and corral, oversee and process a huge number of tasks that need to live both on your todo list and on the task radar of others. Asana is being used by several high profile startups to do just that, and scales down to improving the productivity of a single startup founder and is fast, fast and free for under 30 people. Highly recommended.

 

You’re reading 6 reasons to use Asana to build your startup. from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

Giacomo ‘Peldi’ Guilizzoni is the founder and CEO of Balsamiq, makers of Balsamiq Mockups, the instantly-useful, forever-loveable wireframing software. Balsamiq is a tiny, nine-person multi-million dollar multinational, based out of Italy, France, New York and California. A programmer turned entrepreneur, Peldi lives to learn new skills and to share what he learns, be it via his blog, giving public or mentoring other software startups. More at Balsamiq.

John Nese owns and manages Soda Pop Stop. He is devoted to the art of soda pop and supporting the small businesses behind  each bubbly drink, Galco’s Soda Pop Stop features more than 500 flavours of soda at its Los Angeles storefront and nationwide through its website at www.sodapopstop.com. With a mission to supprt small soda makeer , Galco’s motto is “Freedom of Choice” which mirrors Nese’s determination that customers have the right to choose from more than just a handful of mass-produced, big-business selections. You can find out more at SodaPopStop or watch this great video – Obsessives.

In this interview, which concluded the second day of Business of Software 2011 and was followed by a soda pop tasting, Peldi draws from the wisdom which Nese has recieved in his experience and shares it with the entrepeneur community.

Peldi & John Nese – Transcript.

When I was about 8 or 9 years old we went on a family vacation up to a place called happy camp. They had a spring and this water had natural carbonated water. I can remember thinking as a little kid, thinking about that spring and saying, ‘if we could pipe this down to my school, when we turn on the water spickets we can get soda and I could have different flavors of soda. I wouldn’t have to drink the water that I drink.’ I went to work with my father when I was 5 years old. Galco’s itself goes back to like the roots,  is 1897. About 10 -11 years ago a Pepsi cola salesman came in and he said, “I got the best buyer you’re ever going to get on a pallet of Pepsi cola cans. I’m only going to charge you $5.59 a case.” I said, “thank you but no thank you. I am going to send my customers down the street to Ralf’s because they are going to be on sale down there at a $1.99 a 12 pack.” And he says, “Well you can’t do that. Pepsi Cola is a demand item and your customers are going to demand that you carry Pepsi cola.” And I said, “my customers are going to be happy that I was honest with them and sent them down the street. They can buy them cheaper than I can buy them.” And after 2 weeks of really being upset I said, “thank you very much Pepsi cola for reminding me that I own my shelf space and I can do anything that I want.” So I immediately went out and found 25 little brands of soda. I thought, “Gee whizz”, they were still in glass bottles and I put them on the shelf and people would come in and look at them and say, “what are you doing with all those old things that don’t sell?” and when I got to 250 is where you find, you know … So now we have about 500 different sodas.

If you are going to get a root beer, the one that is hardest to find is a Red Ribbon because it’s made with the (?). If you are looking a lemon lime, try the Bubble Up, it’s still made with lemon and lime oils. The Manhattan Special, the company that makes the coffee soda, they’ve been making coffee sodas since 1895, the same family, in Brooklyn, they roast the coffee beans they brew it they bottle it. A little 10year old kid he comes running in he says, “where’s that cucumber soda you made me buy?” and I am laughing. I thought it was funny; a little kid asking for a cucumber soda. You know they don’t drink vegetables. People are saying, ”well you’re here and you’re working all the time”,  and I’m say, “I don’t work, I just play all day long. I come in and play.” It’s flavored water with a lot of bubbles. If I were going to define it with one word I would say, ‘happy’, or ‘smile’. By the way you should taste it, what do you guys want?

People come in here and look around and they say, “Well this is overwhelming. I didn’t know there was this many flavors of soda.” What really has happened is, it’s given exposure to the little bottles that they’ve never had before. We just picked up another independent bottler. They’ve been bottling since 1926, the mother, the daughter and two brother ; bottle. Those floral sodas; the fellow called me “you gotta carry my sodas. I’m from Romania. We still know how to press the rose petals.” And he says, “I’m going to send you samples.” And I said “Oh, OK.” And I am thinking, ‘perfume? Wow! Crisp clean rose soda. The American republic has never been exposed to anything like that ever before.’ We bought the total run. They are not available anywhere else in the United States and so I said, “really, what else do you make?” “Well I have a cucumber, but the problem is nobody will give me a chance.” So we commissioned a run of the cucumber. First lady comes in, “oh, this isn’t what I was expecting at all. This is actually very good.” When the American public has a choice, they are going to buy it, they are going to try it.

The way a product goes in a glass bottle is the way it comes out. Everything is over carbonated in plastic because it starts breathing, and it has a four month shelf life so they get flat as they go along. But when you put something in a glass bottle, I will tell you the caps are so technologically advanced that the way it goes in is the way it comes out, 3, 4, 5 years down the road. Have you ever picked up an old glass bottle?

Spk1: oh wow heavy. That will hold carbonation. The bottles today are very thin glass, and if they have a weak spot in them they will explode if you put too much carbonation in them. You can drop these and they will actually bounce, they won’t break. I mean I drop them and they just pooom! They won’t break. Talk about re-usable?

Most diet sodas are really pretty bad; I mean they just don’t taste good. There’s been a few that have come out. Stewart’s black cherry diet is probably the finest diet black cherry I have ever tasted. There is Jones –has  diet green apple that’s very good. And then there is Sprecher – has a low calorie root beer which has like 11 calories in it. It’s not a true diet, but it’s slow enough if you are watching calories. But other than those 3 or 4 or 5 most diet sodas … Drink less, how’s that? Drink 6 ounces rather than 12. And you get 60 calories versus 120 calories and then you are satisfied and you’re happy.

Everything prepared in this country has corn syrup in it. And it’s totally unnecessary. The largest single crop in the world is cane sugar. It’s larger than corn and wheat put together. It takes three times less sugar to sweeten with than it does corn syrup. I mean take a look around at the diabetes; you will never get an allergy from sugar. You’re going to get an allergy because there’s a spore in corn syrup that cannot be refined out. And people have allergies to corn products. So why would you use corn as a sweetener? We have some, yes, the Stewarts, the IBCs, and the Crush. They are contract bottled and they are done in glass but they are done with corn syrup for the supermarkets primarily. We carry them because they don’t come in any other way. Once a year Coca cola makes a Kosher coke just before Passover. The Kosher one will be cane sugared, it’ll have a yellow cap, it’ll have a ‘U’ on the upper left hand corner with a circle around it and the label will still say, ‘corn syrup’, it won’t be changed. Try the two side by side and then tell me. The one with the cane sugar just goes pop! And it explodes and the flavor just goes wham!! It’s delicious and the one with the corn syrup is like prrpth!!

What I would to see is a root beer cola. There was actually a company about 100 years ago called root beer cola, and it was a cross between a root beer and cola. And I’m just fascinated with that. Or I would like to see a pineapple cream. I just think it would just be delicious. I’ve been trying to get somebody to make it so we we’ll see.

OH!! Energy drinks, they taste bad. They are small cans, small sizes, big prices. I mean Red Bull sells in the billions. I mean Coca Cola wish they could get that kind of a profit out of a 8 or a 12 ounce can, and for what?

Big business loves big government. They just take the market place up, eliminate all the little guys, they run them out of business and then they jack the prices up and then they control the market. But you look at the candy section its Nestle, Hershey’s and Mars, or you look at the soda pop market its Coke and Pepsi. My thought had always been that what I wanted to do, was do business with other businesses my size, to help them become unique businesses and that’s exactly what’s happening. And what’s really interesting about it is, out of all the things we sell wholesale, one business a mile away from the other and what they are selling is totally different. One restaurant we sell to, they love the floral sodas and another place they can’t give them away but they are doing the Red Ribbons and I’m going, “isn’t this interesting that everybody has found their own level and their own niche, and they’ve done it on their own.” The important thing is to set yourself apart and provide your customer with something that nobody else has.

The most common thing I hear from the American public is, what’s the best? In Coca Cola and Pepsi, what they’d like you to believe is what they make is the best. Everybody’s taste is different. I can tell you what I like or I can make suggestions, I mean the New York Times called the best cola ever made Fentimans, curiosity cola. It’s brewed like a beer, it has natural carbonation and it has ginger in it. There’s so many people came in here still looking for RC Draft, which was a very soft cola a very smooth. So I point them out and say well maybe you want to try a Rock & Rye which is cream finish cola from Detroit, a very old brand. So try all these and then tell me what the best is for you.

Who do you think passed CRV laws? You’re going to get me on my soap box again and then you’re going to have to point the camera up.

It wasn’t written for the consumer and it certainly wasn’t written to keep this country green, it was written so coke and Pepsi wouldn’t have to wash a bottle and they wouldn’t have to make recyclable bottles and they could transfer the cost to the consumer. I called the recycling center when I got started and I said, “listen I want to put a recycling center in. They bring them back to me and I’ll give them the money and I’ll sell them some more sodas.” “Oh am sorry you can’t do that, because you have a recycling center two blocks away.” I said “yeah but they don’t give the full price, and I want to give the full price to the customer to get them back to sell them some more.” And he says, “if you did anything like that you’d be in restraint of trade and you could probably get sued by the state.” If we were really carrying about the environment we would have reuse, not recycling.

Oh I’ll drink one or two a day. But I’ll actually have diets or water or something. I like carbonated water, I started drinking carbonated water about 20 years ago, I just like the bubbles. If you get a bottle of Gerilschteiner and it has the great big bubbles. And then there was another one from Germany called the Polynarios with the little bubbles. I just tasted one today, a Vishey water but it came from Spain, from Catalonia and I tasted it and that had the finest bubbles I’d ever tasted. I mean it was really fine mineral water.

What would you like? If you’ve been looking for double cola and can’t find it, we have it. Before 1900 it was called the Lota cola now it’s called Double Cola and when you taste it you’ll know why they call it double cola. Below it is the Red ribbon, by far the cherriest of all the cherry soda. And when you taste it’s like oh my goodness! Hotlips, this is actually a pizza kitchen up in Oregon. They are made from 100% organic fruit. And if turn them upside down you’ll actually see the fruit coming down the neck of the bottle. We also have from Central America, Banana Nina. This one actually tastes like a Charlie rancher banana. It’s the only banana soda I’ve ever tasted to date. This is very interesting. This is made from the bark of the Mabi tree and it is actually brewed like a beer and it wasn’t up until two years ago that this was available commercially. Up until that time if you went to the Caribbean it was made home brewed and that was the only way you could get it. This is Moxie, the original elixir. This has been around since 1884. By the way it’s the only soda to ever make it to the dictionary. And it came in a six and a half ounce bottle and if you could drink two of them you had a lot of Moxie. And we have the Manhattan Specials. They are all natural, they are natural bottling, if you look at the bottom you’ll see the fuzz and that’s because they use real vanilla beans, if you look at the orange you’ll see the pulp of the fruit in their orange. So whatever you are interested in we have it, and if we don’t, we are looking.

Spk2: Ladies and gentlemen, John Nese. [Applause]

John Nese: That’s the first time I’ve seen these.

Peldi: Is it really the first time you’ve ever seen it. Coz I watch every other week. [Laughter] I want to be just like you when I grow up. So before we start I have a little present that…don’t tell anyone but I smuggled it in the country. You’re not supposed to bring liquid. I brought you some Italian sodas. Wow!! Am nervous. Oh my goodness

Spk2: I thought we could have one or two while we have this intimate chat. [Laughter] Ok. And also my favorite kind of Italian soda… its balsamic vinegar. [Laughter]

John Nese: Thank you. I like balsamic vinegar.

Spk2: Thank you for the cucumber soda that you sent me and it’s actually really delicious. I’m going to open it up right now. So I also want to thank mark for giving me a chance to meet one of my heroes in front of everybody. This video really speaks to me and I thought it would also speak to this crowd. Coz I see a lot of parallels between what you’ve been doing and the way this part of the IT industry sees themselves. We want to build sustainable businesses. We are not the Facebook or the Twitter or the Google, that’s like a whole different, we read the same news, we both write code but it’s completely separate. I think that this crowd can learn a lot from you and so I wanted to just ask you a few questions.

John Nese: Of course

Peldi: All right. So first how did you get started? How has your business grown? Why sodas? Well, I can tell why.

John Nese: Basically what happened is we were going broke, we were an Italian grocery store and the neighborhood changed and the Italians who were in the neighborhood did one of two things. Either they moved out or they stopped cooking. The second thing that happened, the supermarkets bought the distribution channels for the little markets and the first thing that they did was close them down. By closing them down, they eliminated the cap on supermarket pricing, up until that time little independent businesses were the cap on supermarket pricing. So by eliminating the cap they can charge whatever they want. And by the way the prices in this country reflect that.

Peldi: so what year was that?

John Nese: That was somewhere right around the nineties. Eighty five, ninety.

Peldi: So your business, everybody went to the cheaper supermarket?

John Nese:  Well yes, they could buy it cheaper. Of course they were paying more but still they could buy it cheaper.

Peldi: and you had this business, how old was it at the time? You have been around for a while.

John Nese: Well its very interesting. It was right around 95 that we started thinking about, I started thinking if we could go another year another two years it may get to 1997 we would have been in business a 100 years and no one could be ashamed of that. You know, you just got to make that little bit more.

Peldi: 2 more years.

John Nese: And so we worked to that goal and we made it and we were still there. And then we looked around and go, “you know if we can make it to the year 2000 or 2001 we would have been in existence not just 100 years but in two millenniums.” How many businesses can claim that? So we worked and we kept working. And it’s really interesting how things happened. They just started happening.

Peldi: so was it a conscious decision. The business is drying up quickly we have to do something urgently and boom I have an idea let’s just become the soda business and boom it just happened?

John Nese: No what happened is Pepsi cola came in and they were really arrogant about it. A salesman came and said, “am going to sell you this Pepsi and am only going to charge you 5.59 a case.” And I looked at him and said, “Well, tell me on that 100 case pallet how much profit am I going to make?” “Oh you going to make 30 dollars.” And I said “thank you but no thank you. I’m sending my customers to the supermarket down the street because they are selling it at $1.99 a twelve pack and it doesn’t make any sense” “well you can’t do that because Pepsi cola is a demand item and your customers are going to demand that you carry Pepsi cola.” And I said, “my customers are going to be happy that I was honest with them and I send them down there. They can buy them cheaper and I can buy them cheaper.” They don’t owe me anything.

Peldi: and that’s when you decided to start buying some other sodas for that same shelf? So they helped you?

John Nese: Well they did. It took about two weeks. I was so angry. Nobody could talk to me, I was upset, I went through the whole thing. And after two weeks the light bulb went on. The light bulb said “you know you should thank Pepsi cola for reminding you that you own your shelf space and they don’t and you can sell anything you want.” And it was at that moment that this big relief, it was like, ‘ok I can do this.’ I immediately went out and found 25 little brands of soda, they were still in glass bottles, they were still made with canned sugar, a lot of them were made with real ingredients and I put them up on the shelf and all the people coming in look and they would go, “what are you doing with all those old brands that don’t sell?” And I didn’t say a word, I just kept adding and kept adding and when I got to 250 is where you find it. And then my daughter came along, and my daughter is very bright, and she said to me “dad what you are doing here is really great. But if the people don’t know about it, it’s not going to do any good. I am going to send a letter to … what is it…Western Magazine or something like that,” I forgot the name of the magazine. And I said “oh OK.” And as she was walking by she said, “by the way dad I’m sending one to Huel Howser.” Now Huel Howser is a fellow that concentrates on little business and little things that most people in California don’t know about, and he highlights them. And so, that was on a Thursday, on a Monday we got a call from Huels office he says, ‘if what you say is true, we want to do a show on you.’ They were out the next day, “we want to do a show.” They filmed in 2 weeks and 2 weeks from then it was being broadcast. And it was just happening immediately. And then at the same time there was a fellow by the name… a lady came in and we were on the art and Oddity tour in Highland Park. All of the artists were displaying their wares and we were the oddity. So people would come in and get a little sample of soda and that was really interesting. And then this lady came and she says,“you belong in the times” and I said, “oh yeah I know that.” And a couple of weeks later she comes in with her friend Charles Perry and we just talk like we are doing now, he never took a note, never said a word and walked out. I said, “I guess he doesn’t like it.” And a couple of weeks, three weeks later I get a call from The Times and they said they wanted to do a photo shoot. They came in and then they did a photo shoot. Charles Perry copyrighted… or syndicated that column and it ran for 9 months all over the world. I didn’t know what he was doing but I know our business went up, Hugh Houser aired and oh my goodness we were jammed. That was interesting because this man walks up and he has a copy of a newspaper in black and white, the photo was in black and white in his pocket, and I looked at it and said, “oh I haven’t seen a black and white,” most of them are in color. And he says “I was sitting in the Tokyo airport and I knew I was coming to Los Angeles and I thought I’d stop.” And it goes like whoop!

Peldi: Wow nice pivot. [Laughs] And your daughter is in marketing?

John Nese: No, she’s a chiropractor [laughs] but she’s smart. You don’t have to be in marketing. She’s in tune. She came to work when she was about 12-13 years old.

Peldi: Nice. Speaking of doing your job, how did you learn? You said in the video you started when you were 5, how did you learn to become the business owner and how long did it take you get really good at it?

John Nese: Oh all my life. It’s not something that happens overnight, you have to work at it. And I started when I was very young. Of course I had good models, my father…

Peldi: he owned the store before you?

John Nese: Yes and he became a partner with the fellow that founded it back in 1897.

Peldi: I see.

John Nese: And it was really something. My father would say you know you got to go broke three times before you can make it. I don’t know whether he literally meant going broke but I think what he meant is that you had to go down three times you had to fail, and I think that’s been the whole thing in this seminar, don’t be afraid to fail because you’re going to gain and you are going to do better.

Peldi: thank you, I’ll remember that. So since you mentioned your father, I had this slide up last year when I made my speech about my heroes and you know of them and in the room and it’s kind of embarrassing, but do you have people that you look up to still to this day or they sort of inspire you. Who do you want to be when you grow up?

John Nese: Well, I read a lot. And the person I got the most knowledge out of was Cincinnatus.

Peldi: who’s that?

John Nese: Ancient history, romans, he was ploughing the fields and they needed him to help defend rome. So they pulled him out of retirement he led the army and when he finished he put his sword down and went back to his plot.

Peldi: so what about him?

John Nese: I think he set a precedent. You do what you need to do and you go on and you have to do what you need to do. I mean that was really important to me and I read that a long time ago.

Peldi: everybody is taking notes. [Laughs] damn I should have majored in history instead of engineering.

John Nese: Well, I wanted to teach ancient history. That’s what I wanted to do. And then i got into college and then I found out you had to be fluent in two out of three ancient languages to do your dissertation. And it was Latin, ancient Greek and ancient Hebrew. Most people don’t know what ancient Greek sounds like so I got [??] and decided that was it. I have to do something else.

Peldi: so you said it is about doing the work and the job to be done. So how much do you work? Can you describe a typical day?

John Nese: I never work; I’ve said that very early on. I just go in and play. When I was six years old I went to work with my father and it was very interesting. He said, “ok you dust all the lower shelves.” I go in there and am dusting all the lower shelves and I got to the Twinkie rack. And what really intrigued me were the jelly rolls at the bottom of the shelf. I wanted to know how that jelly was rolled inside there. I could go into the cooler and there was a wheel of Swiss cheese and I wanted to know where those holes went. And so that was all very intriguing to me. And so when I grew up and I graduated from college and my father he calls in and he says, “ok I guess you’re going to work for a big company now.” And I said, “no I want to work here.” And he looked at me and he just shook his head and he says, “I want to tell you something” he says “all you going to do is make a living here, and you’re a damn fool. Go for the money.” And I said Pop they’re going to stick me in a cubicle somewhere and am going to be there for the rest of my life until I’m ready to retire. And I’m not going to be happy. I’d rather be here, I can hear the motor run, I can see if the light bulb has to be changed whatever that has to be done I can do it and I have something different to do every day”, so you are challenged every single day. And I think that is really important for people.

Peldi: excellent. [Applause] I knew they were going to like you. So let’s see, you’ve been very successful lately… Well am just doing what I always do.

John Nese:: well there are people around, are people approaching you wanting to invest or acquire you, pressure you to grow? Yes and that becomes a very big problem. My thought was I really wanted to develop a buying co-op. and everybody would put their money in and we’d all divide the money up and the first thing that happened is the bin counters got involved. And the bin counters said, “you can’t do that because you’re not going to wind up with the business.” And I said, “what!!?” And then I remembered what happened to us in the grocery business when the chain stores bought the distribution channels and they closed them down. And that was a real problem because here was the big guy controlling the market place again and eliminating competition. And I said, “yeah that’s true, that could happen.” So.. But at the same time I am not interested in a pyramid. I mean I’ve seen too many franchises that are nothing more than pyramids where the only ones who make it on are the ones on the top, and that’s exactly what’s happening in our area right now. People are going in and setting up soda pop stores and charging $50000 for franchising and another $50000 upfront. You got a $100000 invested and then they come along and say, “you have to buy everything from me.” And I’m saying, “Who in their right mind wants to do that?” Do you really want to guarantee someone their income for life?

Peldi: wait, so people so what you did and know you have knock offs Yeah?

John Nese:: oh well interesting. Has that been good or bad for business? It doesn’t matter. When I go in and I take a look at the stores that are there and am looking around and am going everything is private label in here, not everything but most of everything is private label and there is nothing really authentic and it’s not really helping who it’s supposed to be helping. For me that’s a problem, for them they are making a lot of money so there’s no problem.

Peldi: they are making a quick buck but probably not… excellent. So how is your company structure right now? How many people do you have?

John Nese: Well we have about eight or nine people.

Peldi: oh! Me too.

John Nese: Yeah [Laughs] it’s a nice size you know everyone and my help is definitely getting better. Oh my goodness it’s really good.

Peldi: wait, lets dig in a little bit. What do you mean? So your help was not so good at the beginning?

John Nese: Well you know I have had employees, I shouldn’t say I’ve had employees because we all just work together but they are dedicated people. I’ve had one lady when we were going broke she didn’t take any money for three years.

Peldi: three years? Wow!

John Nese: I mean three years which she never said anything to me because she could sign the checks. I mean she knew what she was… I mean she is so fantastic. And then the other lady has been there for 20 years, so we’ve had a very long term…

Peldi: so there are ups and downs, there are fights, it is like a family.

John Nese: Yeah and then younger people, what I see here today especially in the United States is young people have a hard time working. I mean…

Peldi: millennials?

John Nese: Is that what they… I don’t know [laughs] but all I know is they have a difficult time. Many of them want to start at the top and but with me, I’m sorry but that’s not going to happen. If I’m at the floor and am cleaning the shelves they better be there with me to know how it’s done. Then they have appreciation for the people who stock the shelves, mop the floors and do all of it. And that’s vital, absolutely vital to get a company to work together.

Peldi: imagine you were hiring and you want me to work for you for some reason. What would you tell me, how would you…

John Nese: I probably couldn’t afford you. [Laughs]

Peldi: But let’s say somebody is about to start. Well let me just give you an example. There is a young lady that we just hired and I had gone to the business where she was priorly working and I told her, “don’t lose her, she is really good” and I just felt it. She was on the ball, she had my orders ready, everything was ready and she never winced or anything. When she said she was going to do something, she did it. And I said, “don’t lose her”. Well they lost her and I hired her.

John Nese:: but how did you steal her away, what did you offer her?

John Nese: I didn’t steal her away I just said to her I like the way you work. I would like very much for you to come and work for me. [Laughs]

Peldi: it’s that easy.

John Nese: I will be honest and that’s the truth but I watched her and I told her that and it’s really important and so far, and she has a lot more to learn because we are still training her, but everything she does she is meticulous about it and she knows what she is doing.

Peldi: so do you plan on ever retiring?

John Nese: No. I tend to joke about it. I say go on as far as you can.

Peldi: what happens then? Well I have grandchildren. My grandchildren, they come and they play on the pallets that you saw on the video and they climb and they think they are king of the mountain or whatever and one of them comes over to me and says, “Papa john, you’re the boss right?” “Yeah I’m the boss” and he says “does that make me a boss too?” [Laughs]

Peldi: so he is the one, nice.

John Nese: And every time I see him he runs… they are twins by way, he runs and puts on his soda pop stop trainee shirt when I go visiting.

Peldi: nice. So it seemed like from the video you were still very much hands on, you’re the CEO right.

John Nese: Well that doesn’t mean anything, that’s just three letters.

Peldi: I know, I know [Applause] but I am totally jealous coz it seems like you’re still able to do what you love every day. I do. So how do you do that even if you have nine people to manage and check in and this is problem I’m facing right now, this is what I really wanted to ask you. [Laughs]

John Nese: Well, I think you have to work in to that solution and every solution is different.

Peldi: ok that doesn’t help me so much No, [Laughs]

John Nese: No, maybe one day, yes of course. Ok, well alright. Ok I’ll digest that. OK, so what type of metrics do you look at?

John Nese: What type of what? [Laughs]

Peldi: that’s enough thank you. Thank you so much for that.

John Nese: Well you know when you ask me about retiring, I talk to the Doctor, I’ve known him for probably 40 years. He used to take care of my parents, and he just says work as long as you can.

Peldi: Steve Jobs worked until the last day.

John Nese: Right that’s true and my parents did too. Both of them.

Peldi: that’s great. So do you have any company policies, salary, vacation, bonus?

John Nese: The employees that have been there a long time, yes we do. The newer ones, you know the laws have been changed, especially in California and the politicians want to tell everybody about how many jobs they’ve created, what they should be telling everybody is how many part time jobs they’ve created. Not how many jobs. And I think the politicians have it wrong. We should be creating wealth. I am not interested in jobs, I am interested in creating wealth so we can get other people to work again. [Applause] And we need to create wealth. Not just here but everywhere. I mean if we just spread the things out and then everybody makes less and oh yeah, we put in 80000 new jobs this year, yeah but they are all part time so what good is it?

Peldi: so you’ve helped create some wealth by giving a chance to these small bottlers all over the world it seems.

John Nese: Well, I don’t know about all over the world but here. We made a point, it was really interesting very earlier on that the small bottles, oh we just can’t compete, Coke and Pepsi owns the shelf space and we can’t compete price wise. And I just said, “Paul, remember you have to make a profit. If you don’t make a profit I can’t buy your products and my customers can’t enjoy your products. And it is really important that you make a profit. Don’t worry about the other little bottler next to you because they are going to help sell your products and you’re going to help sell their products. The only one you have to worry about is coke and Pepsi because they are interested in putting you out of business.” And that’s what they are.

Peldi: I just an idea for a brilliant business plan. So the small bottler gives away all their sodas but they put little ads in the bottle. [Laughs] what do you think about that?

John Nese: Ah! Well that could work.

Peldi: no eyeballs, throats. Let’s talk about the doing the business with businesses your size. I really love that. We are web, sort of internet company, and it’s like an ecosystem. We pay for all these services online and I notice that I’m always happier if I know that the company that I’m buying the service from is roughly our size, coz we sort of see eye to eye in things. If there’s a problem I know I can somehow get in touch with the CEO.

John Nese: Yeah, you can call him and talk to him and he can talk back to you. A couple of years ago, it was really interesting, I’d been doing business with these people and the family for ever and ever, and we are Soda Pop Stop ok? Because there were stops before there were shops. But this candy company filed on the word Soda Pop Shop and I went to my attorney and I told him, “you told me you couldn’t do that.” “Oh well I guess they did.” So he got involved in it and pretty soon he’s running up this bill, the bill was getting bigger every week and I said, “look at it. They are much larger than we are, they are going to kill me; they are going to drain me. I can’t do this.” And he says, “well you can call the head guy yourself if you like.” And these people that I’ve known, they were in the wine and beer business, I buy a lot of beer from them, well they knew that fellow. As a matter of fact, their father had sold one of his brands to them when he exited the candy business. So he called them and told them the two of us should talk. So I got on the phone, and I called and we talked; we worked it out in about 3 minutes. [Laughs] And I’m going, what do I need an attorney for? My thing was I don’t have a problem with you using the term Soda Pop Shop versus Soda Pop Stop, but if somebody hits on your website and he’s looking for Soda Pop I would appreciate if you would refer them to me. And at the same time as long as you protect Soda Pop Shop and there is no confusion I don’t have a problem. And it works.

Peldi: I read somewhere that you are giving back to the local community; can you tell me a little bit about that?

John Nese: We’ve been there a long time. We’ve been at this location since 1955 and there is a museum in Los Angeles which was the first museum in the city of Los Angeles, the first museum in the county. And it’s the museum which the American Indians, it’s called, it’s called south west museum. Well there is another museum who are absolute money grabbers, are stealing the collection, and I understand the same thing happened in Philadelphia about a year ago or something like that. And what they promised is that they were going to keep the South West museum, which is on the national historic register open as a separate museum.

Peldi: but empty.

John Nese: Yeah they closed it. They picked the collection up, put it in storage and they are telling everybody, we are preserving the collection. They told everybody they were going to keep it open as a separate museum and they didn’t. They didn’t have a problem telling everybody that they had a 10 million dollar endowment. Their endowment when they merged was a million and a half dollars. They didn’t have a problem taking the five and a half million dollars endowment that the South West museum had, no problem at all. And the politicians in Los Angeles, they are chasing the dollars, and they are not taking care of business. That museum deserves to be there. That museum is sitting on a site that used to be a crossover for the American Indians to the next world. Not only is it their crossover, but they have human remains in there that go back a hundred years and they are just white washing over this whole subject. And that museum should never ever be moved.

Peldi: so what are you guys doing to help? Well we had a fundraiser to raise funds. And I have to say it was very successful especially in light of the fact that the Los Angeles times will not print an article on what’s going on in the museum. We had about 800 people show up for a soda taste and this was the benefit of the friends of the South West museum who are taking a point on trying to keep the museum there, and trying to keep the museum open. And I was very happy to do that and by the way Peldi, I never wanted to do a soda sampling. I mean, people should do their own soda sampling; it’s the fastest way to open up lines of communication between people. But this was for a very worthy cause and I very happy about that. I feel good about it and we are going to another one for them.

Peldi: Excellent. Well, we are going to be having a soda sampling as you walk out. Yeah, only coke and Pepsi. [Laughs] So when you heard about pricing, how much freedom do you have to price things coz you have a supply chain right?

John Nese: Yeah, we have pricing; we have to make a profit.

Peldi: Do you have some tricks, like you put the expensive stuff at the top?

John Nese: Nope, I put everything up there but I can tell you what I put on the bottom shelf; all the corn syrup. [Laughs] I mean we have to carry some of those things but they are on the lower shelf. I tell people, “you can get those anywhere; you don’t want us to waste your money here. You want to try these little bottles.” And for example today we going to have a sampling afterwards and these comes from the second oldest bottler. It’s the Red Ribbon line; they are the second oldest and family owned and operated bottling company in the United States. I say second because everybody will fight over the first. Their products are completely unique, and when you taste them you’ll know. They are the last operational pinpoint carbonator. Pinpoint carbonation is made with dry ice; it’s not made on a mechanical carbonator the way everybody makes sodas today.

Peldi: Nice. Actually, do have any thoughts on the in house soda bubbler, soda stream? [Laughs] We just got one and we are pretty happy.

John Nese: I mean, when you drink mineral water, does all of it taste the same?

Peldi: Yes to me. [Laughs]

John Nese: Every water has its own flavor and there are bottling companies that are sitting on springs. And every water will have a different flavor. Not only do the waters have a different flavor but every manufacturer has a different hand on how they do things. And with those bubblers yes, if you’re just buying, you can buy a syrup and just put it in but you just don’t have that individuality. I mean you going to buy terroni(sp) syrups and there’s another one from France, or there’s another one from New Orleans – I don’t know where they are from, but anyway if you’re buying syrups and you are happy with them it’s ok. But you are not going to get that individuality of taste. I mean I’ve tasted a ginger ale that came out of a little bottler in Great Next Virginia it was called Carvers. And it was a golden ginger ale. That was probably the best ginger ale I have ever tasted. Well a few years later the company I don’t when it was, it was sold to a football player from the NFL and the first thing he did was close the place down, rush over to a contract bottler and have his ginger ale made there. And you know what? It’s not the same; you can taste the difference in it. So bubblelers are like contract bottlers, you’re going to get what you get.

Peldi: So must have a lot of people come through your store. Do you have any idea how many customers, repeat customers?

John Nese: No.

Peldi: what about some memorable customers? Did you ever become friends with some of your customers?

John Nese: Well yes, one couple in particular. They came from Michigan, and she was telling me, we were talking about things and she ran a little Italian grocery store and it’s been converted to a gourmet store now. And she was saying, “when my parents got ready to retire my husband and I talked about it and decided to take it over.” He was an engineer. And I said “why was your husband who was an engineer want to leave and take over a little family grocery store?” And she said, “for the quality of life. That it was important for her family and everybody knew where they were all the time, and any time her kids wanted to see her they knew where to go. Just go to the store they are there.” That really struck a chord with me.

Peldi: I could stay here all night. I wanted to open it up for questions to anyone.

Speaker 3: Groupon, do you know what Groupon is?

John Nese: No I don’t like Groupon. Because you have to pay them a percentage of what you earn. What we are going to do is we are going to go to the nonprofits in the area and when we do soda tastings, when we get by this thing with the South West museum we are going to go to soda tastings and we are going to do them for the benefits of things in the area. It was very interesting there was a library and they asked me for a donation and I told them what was going on with the South West museum and everything and she said, “would it be ok if I bought some products.” And it really struck me because she wasn’t asking for a donation, she wanted to do it. And they will be the first ones; we give them the total proceeds. Not a percentage or anything else. This is going to that library.

Peldi: So you pick where you give the discounts and why.

John Nese: And I think it’s important for businesses to be involved in their community because the politicians are going to get the money but who’s going to wind up with it. I mean politicians will sell out in a minute. They are going to sell out your community too. And they have by the way. [Laughs]

Peldi: Our community is the internet is so for now it’s a little more protected I guess, or harder to control. But we’ll see. So anyone else?

Speaker 4: hello, I would just like to ask do you use Foursquare for promotion.

Peldi: do you know what foursquare is? Have you heard of foursquare?

John Nese: No.

Peldi: it’s where people check in… No.

John Nese: yeah. The answer is no [Laughs] You’re talking to the wrong person. I am not computer literate. I was born way before.

Peldi: actually this might be a good time, what’s your website address?

John Nese: It’s sodapopstop.com or if you go to galcos.com they’ll both point to the same site. And in all fairness that site was done 15 years ago.

Peldi: so go open it up on your phones if you ask, there’s a nice animated gif but it works right. How much business do you from the website. Yes, And as Mark and I were talking and I said am really happy about my site nobody has been able to hack into it. And Mark says “oh that’s because it was built before the hackers were born” [Laughs]

Peldi: So I don’t know if Toby from Shopify is here. He helps businesses… we have people here who help businesses like yours with their online presence. Who would like to volunteer to help them with their website, come by later coz we could use the help. His assistant told me to say this. [Laughs] alright anything else, any other?

Spk4: so what percentage of your business is mail order versus…?

John Nese: Most of our business is walk in but we do have a very substantial mail order business. The problem with mail order especially with sodas and I have to tell you a little story. That was my daughter’s idea. And when we first got started I got a call from Tennessee and this man says, “I’d like to buy some of your great bet” and I said, “oh am sorry but we don’t ship.” My feeling was it was too expensive to ship. It cost more than the product. And the man he said, “well I’m taking a road trip about the grand canyon I think I’ll kind of swing buy and pick up some great bet” [Laughs] and my daughter is listening in and she says “now dad do you want to tell people how to spend their money?” and at that point I said “ok you take care of it” [Laughs]

Peldi: I think your daughter should be in marketing.

John Nese: She is very good at it by the way.

Spk5: First I wanted to say thank you for sharing your story. It is very inspirational that you basically told the big guy to go to hell; I will do business the way I feel that is best to my customer.

John Nese: Well yeah you have to. Because if you don’t they are going to own you. Now, there’s something else too. [Laughs] When they come in and they sell to you they are not giving you the same price that they are giving to the big guy. ‘Oh they buy more’ well where do you think your profits go? Your profits go to help buy shelf space in the big stores, so you are paying for that shelf space and they are helping to put other little businesses out of business. And so do you really want to do that. And the answer came back to me and no I don’t want anything to do with them.

Spk5: so my question, which actually is a follow-up, when you were actually thinking about this, what sort of fears did you actually have to overcome to just go in the direction you actually went.

John Nese: That I actually what?

Spk5: You decided to expand your soda offering and directly compete against them in a slightly different market, what sort of things were going through your head when you were making those decisions?

John Nese: Well it’s really easy to make decisions when you are going broke. [Laughs, Applause] and quite frankly we were going broke, we were in a controlled collapse and that’s when I thought about making it to 97, making it to 2000, 2001. Oh, first I wanted to make it to 2000 then I realized that the millennium didn’t start till 2001 [Laughs] and we made it, and then after that it was just boom, it hit. And you never know. If you quit, you defeat yourself. Nobody can defeat you but yourself.

Peldi: there’s lots of tweeting material in here. Anyone else?

Spk6: In the video you talked about different things, different products that you want to see and you’re like I can’t find this particular type of root beers and like that. Have you ever thought about getting in to actually making your own soda?

John Nese: Making our own soda?

Spk6: yeah, you seemed very knowledgeable It’s really interesting that you brought that up because we are In the highland park of Los Angeles. Highland Park area was the first area outside the [??] boundaries of Los Angeles that was annexed to the city of Los Angeles. And we had a number of very small bottlers. One of them, which was White Rose which was sitting on the white rose springs. Now they bottled up to the late 60s and early 70s. And so we wanted to do something that would be a continuous add on to the South West museum and so we brought it back. And this is the truth, the members of the community, computer people, graphic designers, actually found the old label and redrew it by hand and we came out with White Rose sodas. So on our side is the White Rose. You won’t see the label because we got work to do, but we did white rose.

Peldi: are the original business owners…?

John Nese: No, they are gone. We had to find a bottler who used the same type of equipment. And there were people around whom as little children who would walk out of their way after school to walk by the bottling plant and the people there would give them a short filled bottle of soda. And they told me, “you are really close.” It’s not exact, but that’s the best we could do. So that’s the one. And then a portion of the proceeds will go towards the reopening of the South Western museum.

Peldi: did you bring some today? Can we try?

John Nese: No, I didn’t bring any.

Peldi: I’ll have to order it.

Spk7: I’m into this kind of trend that people are into these days, like really nice cocktails. Something that started a revival around 12 years ago and do you feel like this is going to go through a similar thing, where you are helping bring sodas back in style I guess?

John Nese: That’s true. We are. As a matter of fact it was really interesting, Fortune magazine did a page on us a couple of years back, and I got a call from Pepsi cola. The head attorney from Chicago, and he is telling me that if we sell Pepsi cola coming from Mexico then he was going to sue me. And I said, “you got to be kidding me. I didn’t know I was such a pain in the ass to Pepsi cola.” And he says, “well you are not, but you understand, we are just trying to protect our investors.” I said,” ok, send me a letter.” So now I have the letter in a frame and its hanging on the wall. [Applause] And I don’t sell Pepsi cola.

Spk8: John we really appreciate what you’ve done for this industry that could have gone away forever. Could you explain maybe some good and bad anecdotes when dealing with so many small businesses?

John Nese: The bad what?

Peldi: anecdotes.

Spk8: Just stories about dealing with so many small companies, maybe some good stories or some bad.

Peldi: do you have some vendors that are easier to deal with than some others?

John Nese: Well you know when you are dealing with little people your size you know exactly what they are going through and they know exactly what you are going through. And their attitude is going to be the same thing. You know, you have to make a profit. You can’t run a business without a profit. And they understand that, and I would say the larger the vendor becomes, the more problems that you have because they want to control you. They want to do anything they can to control you and take your flexibility and your freedom away. And what you are doing is really important you know, you all know what an impact the internet has had, you all know what you are doing, but there is a problem out there and it’s called control. And the big guys want control and it’s your creativity that is giving them fits, you may not know it but it’s giving them real big fits because they can’t control you. And that is your edge over everybody. [Applause]

Peldi: one more question, last question. Or we can skip dinner and stay all here tonight. [laughter].

Spk9: ok so you talked about 97 as a goal and then 2001 as your goal, what’s your goal at this point? Are you in it to enjoy what you are doing right now? What kind of goals do you have at this point now that you have survived?

John Nese: Well we are going to go into…well I can’t unveil it, I really can’t. But we are going to do things that the other these pyramid schemes can’t follow. And when we do that it’ll take another step and set us completely apart from what they are able to do. Coz all they are able to do is just sell. And if ever get into those places, Peldi, if you ever get into Los Angeles I’ll take you out and show them to you. You walk in, the person who made the investment, he has nothing, people have nothing to do with the day to day operations, the people behind the counter don’t know anything about what’s going on. And it’s really interesting, one of the managers from one of those places who is just an employee, he is sending customers to me, so they got a much wider selection.

Peldi: they are not committed to the business.

John Nese: Yeah but he has a little more than most of the people that are working in the stores. I mean if you’re going to make your own you have to be there, and if you are not going to make it your own don’t invest in somebody else’s idea, invest in yourself. You’ll be way ahead. And you will be a lot happier. Believe me you will go to work every day, and you’re not going to work, you’re going to play.

Peldi: Alright, last one.

Spk10: just a follow up to the previous gentleman’s. Do you always drink your soda straight, do any of them make any interesting mixes or cocktails etc.?

Peldi: do you just drink the soda or you still use it to make cocktails?

John Nese: Oh no. I like just the soda, by itself. I’m very happy with it.

Peldi: Alright and with that bombshell, thank you very much. [Applause] Thank you.

 

It might just be possible that one of the world’s leading management thinkers, Professor Clayton Christensen, author of the ‘Innovator’s Dilemma‘ and other extraordinary books will be remembered principally, not for his contribution to innovation and management thinking which is immense, but for the ideas he shares in his latest book, ‘How will you measure your life?‘

It does contain lots of great ideas about management, but more importantly, some brilliant ideas about managing and thinking about your own life and what is really important.

“Over the years, he also noticed that many of his former classmates at Harvard and University of Oxford, where Christensen was a Rhodes Scholar, had ended up deeply unhappy. “Something had gone wrong for some of them along the way: their personal relationships had begun to deteriorate, even as their professional prospects blossomed,” he writes in the prologue of his new book, How Will You Measure Your Life? Many of these folks stopped attending reunions, and Christensen sensed that they “felt embarrassed to explain to their friends the contrast in the trajectories of their personal and professional lives.” Bloomberg Businessweek

How will you measure your life? is less about business, more about, well, life…

“When people who have a high need for achievement—and that includes all Harvard Business School graduates—have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward. You ship a product, finish a design, complete a presentation, close a sale, teach a class, publish a paper, get paid, get promoted. In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.” Clayton Christensen.

We just shipped 50 copies of the book to the first of the 200 or so people who have already registered for Business of Software.

We are offering the next 25 registrants for BoS 2012 a copy of the book too. We know you will value what it contains.