The Iron Law of running a startup or microISV is there’s never enough time to everything, especially the important but non-critical stuff. It takes lots and lots of time to do the strategic stuff – often you have to pump in some unknown number of hours just researching.

That’s why I’m excited by Fancy Hands – it’s fixed price virtual assistants for simple but time-consuming tasks. I recently used Fancy Hands (15 tasks per month for $35) to kick off two projects that have been stalled forever: engaging more with other startup bloggers and social media bloggers. Before you can engage, you have to know who to engage with – and that’s an easy task to hand off to someone else and get “good enough” results.

All it took was signing up with the service (FH uses Google Accounts for authentication), then send them an email for a task:

• Name, email and blog URL and name for the top 25 Social Media Bloggers.
• Name, email and blog URL and name for the top 25 software Startup Bloggers.
• (something private)

Here’s something worth mentioning: total elapsed time between putting in these two requests (and a third) and getting results: 45 minutes. Put another way, for that 45 minutes it was like having 3 Bob VMs running in addition to yours truly.

Fancy Hands isn’t a virtual bookkeeper, fashion consultant or speechwriter: they focus on scheduling, web research, making appointments. But getting 15 of those things off your plate for the month is worth a lot more than $35 or the X hours it would take you. Here’s some of their most requested tasks:

• Restaurant Reservations
• Scheduling a car service / taxi pickup
• Find the nearest place that has iPads in stock
• Find the advertising rates (or contact info) for the top 10 [industry] blogs
• Schedule a haircut with [stylist] on Friday after 1pm
• Call [three bars] and find out if they have a private room available for rentals
• Call [primarily offline company] and get the status of order number xyz
• Find a couple upholsterer options near where I work
• Call TD Bank and ask how many checks I can use for free on a standard personal account
• Call some hotel and extend my stay for three nights instead of two

I’ve been cajoling Mason Levey to add a more technical track to deal with the real IT pains in my butt like:

• Why are my iCal alarms doubled up?
• What’s the best online service out there to let people fill in a short questionnaire and book my time?
• A proven recipe for setting up 3 WordPress blogs on a new VPS.
• Best current tool for winnowing out low value Twitter follows?
• What’s the best automatic Twitter background maker out there?
• What should my Facebook privacy settings be?

There’s a huge market out there for these kind of Internet-related tasks – not just startups and IT people, but all those hundreds of millions of people out there being pulled day by day and step by step into our net-centric world. Give Fancy Hands a try (and here’s a StartupToDo.com Guide on Fancy Hands with a nice discount code), and bug Mason to offer an IT track: it would be awesome!

(P.S – and if you can make any of those IT pains go away, let’s talk: bob.walsh@47hats.com.)

I’m about 40 pounds overweight; worse, odds are good you are too.

If you are reading this you probably spend your days in front of a computer, your nights in front of a computer and year by year your weight is creeping up.

The old industrial way to stop looking so bovine was to go to a centralized facility on a regular schedule (a gym) and perform specific movements in a specific way. As an added bonus you might meet a someone attractive.

Worked for me 25 years ago; not so much now when I’m dealing with ten times more work, a hundred times more people and a thousand times more things clamoring for attention.

With apologies and kudos to Linda Stone and her meme of Continuous Partial Attention, Factory exercise is so 20th century. It’s time for Continuous Partial Exercise. Spend a few bucks and load up your iPhone with Hundred Pushups, Two Hundred Squats, Two Hundred Situps and for extra credit if you have a chinup bar, 20 Chinups. When you’ve been working for an hour or two, fire up one of these apps and do it.

Don’t have an iPhone or don’t like these apps? There are others. If all else fails, find a fitness site with a mobile interface.

If your manager asks what you are doing, tell them your lowering the company’s health care costs. If the office Mr. Negativity chimes in, tell him you’re planning to outlive him. If someone cute asks you, ask them to join in, or invite them to do some social group exercises like Robert Scoble is.

The point is use disruptive postindustrial technologies to disrupt some of that fat that’s dragging you down.

The brave new world we are building online has it’s share of brave new problems:

• Does the Internet remain a level playing field or do large corporations “help” it by picking and choosing whose bits are more important (theirs)?
• How do we deal with the Media Tsunami that is growing to truly apocalyptic size day by day?
• Humans can only make so many decisions a day: after that our brains turn to mush. Between the web and social media, our supply of decisionmaking is wiped out before we start whatever we do to earn money.

He’s one answer to that last problem: reduce the number of trivial decisions you make each day by making checklists for all the routine stuff. Then instead of wasting XX decisions feeding the cats every day, you conserve those decisions for things that matter.

Thanks to MacRae Linton for turning me on to Checklist Wrangler today – it’s far from perfect, but if you pair a bluetooth mac keyboard to you iPhone, you can easily and quickly make checklist templates that will auto generate as you need them. Not a perfect solution, but it helps reduce decision fatigue.

As you may have noticed, I’ve been fairly quiet here of late. That’s changing, but as part of that change I need to know if continuing the weekly MicroISV Digest is of value to you. If it is, let me know, and please vote!

[ 4:31 PM PT - update: Carla just upped the ante to 6 from 4, so Karl, you're in and there's one more left.]

The one thing every self-respecting startup founder needs is snazzy new business cards, so let me pass on to you an offer from Carla San Gaspar at Uprinting.com, an online printing company. The first four people to comment on this post will get 250 Die Cut Business Cards from Uprinting.com, free.

These are real business cards, not the cheesy kind with “printed by Acme printer” on the back. Here’s the details:

• 2 x 3.5”, 2 x 2” (square card) or 1.75 x 3.5” (slim card)
• Die cutting options available: Rounded Corners, Leaf, Rounded One-Corner, Half-Circle Side, Circle.
• Paper Type: 14pt Cardstock Gloss, Matte, or High Gloss; 13pt Cardstock Uncoated.
• Color: 4Color Front, Blank Back; 4Color Front, Black Back; 4Color Both Sides.
• Limited to US residents only  18 years old and above.

Well, it’s not for sending out Tweets of version 2.31… 2.32…. 2.33. That’s insufferably boring and a waste of your time. Instead:

1. Find things you can retweet that your customers will be interested in. Set aside a fixed amount of time a day to do this. Not to get too personal, but an iPad, Flipboard and Tweetings can turn answering the call of nature into productive social media time .
2. Congratulate your customers – if you are doing B2B or variations thereof, keep up with their news by creating a twitter list of your twittering customers and scan that. When they get excited, retweeting that news and reaching out to them puts you head and shoulders above other vendors.
3. Reach out: watch for hashtag conversations (#) that you can join and add value to. Not hijack, not add noise, but add value.

(Need more ideas? Check out Kristin and I’s Twitter Survival Guide. It’s getting up there in Twitter years, but you’ll find the profiles from some major Twitter People useful.)

photo credit: 7son75

By Brian Noll
Code Complete Software

A few typical things can happen when developers sell and market development tools to other developers. Here are some things to be careful about:

Overselling

OK, here is the deal.  It’s plain and simple, but sometimes forgotten.  Developers, engineers, and any scientific thinking person tend to reject outlandish marketing that overpromises.  Also, that same disgust and rejection is now directed towards “management speak”. How many sites, sales processes, and emails to prospects are still bathed in sports analogies, non sequitur solution selling, and ROI vagueness, It’s simple, in reality developers just want products to make their life easier.  Keep away from sensationalism and overstating the benefits of your product.  Keep it pragmatic, honest, direct, and understated.  Solicit both good and bad feedback.   This goes not only for marketing, but also for communication during the sales process.

Also, although you might think it is about closing, it is a sales person’s job to help discover issues.  As far as development tools go, all tools have issues.  All tools have problems.  Not sure if I should write this, but it is your job is get users to come to conclusion that your tool “sucks less”.  Even if you are lacking some features, if you are responsive and helpful, you can land a happy user.

Remove roadblocks

Make it as easy as possible for someone to get a look at your product.  As a general rule, remove roadblocks for trying your product.  If you can get the user experience in a web based sandbox without an install; do it.  If you have several registration pages with logins to get a build; remove it.  Make it as easy as possible for new users to get a look at the product and make it even easier to solicit feedback.  If you can solicit feedback from within the product; code it in, as it is much easier than soliciting an email response (if you capture email information).  You will have very little time to hold a prospective users attention, so make the most of the situation.

We get it.  You’re smart. We’re smart. Now about the order?

Monitor situations where the support and development team gets into conflicts over technical details.  Is your team responding like a cheery English mouse or more like the soup nazi from Seinfeld?  Sales can and should help monitor the situation.  Think about it, for every 1 response you get about an issue, there could be 5 to 10 silently suffering.  Make sure you aren’t dismissive of technical objections on the way to an order.  Make sure the response from your company doesn’t make them look technically challenged.  After all, they are possible customers. The company goal is to sell product, not to show how smart we are, although we sometimes can get confused.

Be responsive.

Think of your product as being completely like an open source project without the need for contributors to do the hard work of coding features.  Get responses.  If someone makes a feature request; respond.  Listen, ask more questions, survey, and solicit responses.  If you are able to turn those responses into product changes, you’ve empowered those users into loyal users.

Communicate

I know it is the age or permissive marketing and spam, but it’s OK to send emails, especially if someone downloaded your product.   Pick up the phone and talk to those who respond via email or on your site.  Ask for a live chat via Skype or GoogleTalk with a customer who is having an issue.  Don’t worry as much about the finesse as the act itself.  Customers love to talk about their own experiences and not enough vendors reach out in friendly consultative ways.  After all, you are trying to improve the experience of using your product; not trying to necessarily close a deal.

====

Brian and Code Complete Software, which markets and sells some of the world’s best development tools, is sponsoring 30 six-month StartupToDo.com Scholarships for startups creating/selling products to developers. To apply for a free scholarship, just email me (bob.walsh@startuptodo.com) with your startup’s URL or a brief non-proprietary description of what your startup will be selling.

By Jim Rhoades
Founder
Crush Apps

In the article “How to be a successful iPhone developer”, Bob Walsh offered some thoughts on why apps succeed or fail. As a developer who has had an app in Apple’s app store for a few months now, I thought I’d add to the discussion with some hard data and thoughts on what I think I’ve done right, and what I could be doing better.

Ten months ago, I decided to learn to make an iPhone app because I wasn’t satisfied with any of the to do list and notes apps in the app store. All of the ones I tried were too complicated, or didn’t offer the features I wanted. So, I bought a couple of books and started learning objective-c and the iPhone programming API’s. It started off as an experiment, but I discovered that I really like developing software for the iOS platform.

In March I released my first app “Paperless“, which is used to make lists and checklists. My goal was to make it flexible and easy to use… something that just about anybody could find a use for. I’ll spare you the sales pitch though – if you want to find out more you can read about it on my website.

The first couple of months were slow in sales due to the fact that I didn’t have much time for marketing, but the people who did find it were generally very positive about it and provided good feedback. Over time I’ve made improvements based on that feedback, and my user base has grown steadily.

During May, I released “Paperless Lite”, a free version of the app to let people try it out before buying the full version. At the same time, I temporarily lowered the price of the full version to just $0.99 to generate more sales. Both of those things really helped, and after another small update 3 weeks later, I reached the number 3 spot in the Productivity category in the UK app store, and was doing okay in the U.S. app store as well.

User reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, and for most of July Paperless hovered around the #30 – #45 spot in the Productivity category in the U.S. At $1.99 per sale ($1.39 after Apple takes its 30 percent) that works out to around $100 – $150 a day. It’s not enough to meet my long term goal of being able to develop apps full time, but it’s a good start. A couple of Sundays ago, sales of my app brought in over $150 while I spent time with the family at the beach.

In the graphs below, you can see how offering the free version of Paperless helped to generate some sales – and how pricing adjustments have affected the number of sales and the income I’ve made. I can’t fully explain the first big spike on June 3rd. I released a new version then and that’s when it caught on in the UK. The popularity of it there only lasted a month, but luckily as sales in the UK dropped, sales in the U.S. picked up.

What I’m Doing Right

Some people have said that the app store is like the lottery. That, in order to do well, you have to get lucky with Apple featuring your app or placing you in their “New and Noteworthy” or “Staff Favorites” category. While that would certainly help (a lot) – it isn’t something I’m relying on. What I AM doing is:

Trying to make apps that are functional, easy to use, and look great… it’s the Apple way and it’s what customers expect. Some apps try to do too much, which leads to a complicated and cluttered user interface. With Paperless, I think I’ve done a pretty good job at keeping it simple and attractive, while offering a lot of functionality.

Enjoying what I do, and creating things out of the love for doing it – not out of trying to make a quick buck. I care more about my product and my users experiences with it, than I do about making money. I figure that if I have a good product that people really find useful – then the money will come.

Listening and responding to customers needs. I have a “Feedback” button in my app so that people can easily email me if they need help or want to offer suggestions. I’m open with customers, and am genuinely interested in knowing what they think could be done better in Paperless – and they appreciate that.

Constantly making improvements. I know that Paperless isn’t perfect, and there are a few key features (landscape mode!) that need to be added. I have an FAQ to let customers know what features I plan on adding in a future release – or at least offer some reasoning behind why a specific feature isn’t there.

Creating a recognizable brand for myself, that people trust. A few customers have said they can’t wait to see what I come up with next. So, once I do make another app, I know that I’ll have some interest in it from the beginning.

Always learning new things. I’m constantly reading Apple’s documentation, iOS development books and watching video tutorials to try and expand my knowledge.

What I Could Do Better

So, those are the things I think I’m doing right – but what about things I could do better, or that I’m not doing at all? There aren’t enough hours in each day to do everything I would like, and here are the big things I’ve neglected:

The Cloud. Users don’t like their data stuck on one device. They want to be able to view and edit their information on their computer as well as their phone and possibly their iPad. Not every app needs this, but for something like Paperless the ability to sync and share information would be very useful. I’d love to build a web service that synced with Paperless, along with a Mac OS X app and an iPad version – but, as a one person shop doing this in my spare time, those things are going to take a while.

Localization. While my app is available for purchase in any of the Apple app store regions, I haven’t taken the time (or spent the money) to have features within the app translated to other languages. Translating it to the biggest 3 or 4 non-English speaking markets could potentially double my income.

Marketing. If I’m not relying on a featured spot by Apple, then the only way I’m going to gain more customers is by reaching out in other ways. I need to spend a lot more time letting people know about my app, and in a way that sets it apart from the hundreds of other list/todo/notes apps in the app store. With so many other developers vying for attention, it’s hard to get coverage for your app on many of the app review sites or tech related news sites. I’m going to have to find ways to reach outside of the online Apple community.

In Steve Jobs’ presentation on iOS4 in April, he stated that over 50 million iPhones had been sold. If you add the number of iPod Touches to that, it’s over 85 million. The 3 million iPads and 1.7 million iPhone 4’s bring the total of iOS devices out there to around 90 million. That’s a huge market, even if you consider that some people own more than one device.

If I sold Paperless at the current price of $1.99 to be installed on just one half of one percent of those devices, I’d make roughly $600,000 (before taxes).

Surely there must be a way? I’m working towards that, and feeling optimistic…

===

(Got something to share with the microISV/Startup community? Why not do a guest post for 47Hats? Email bob.walsh@47hats.com.)

You’ve heard the adage that doctors make the worst patients? Well, software developers can be a hard market to sell software to. That’s why I’m especially pleased to announce a new StartupToDo.com Scholarship just for those startups building and selling the tools we all need to build our products.

Code Complete Software, which markets and sells some of the world’s best development tools, is sponsoring 30 six-month StartupToDo.com Scholarships for startups creating/selling products to developers. To apply for a free scholarship, just email me (bob.walsh@startuptodo.com) with your startup’s URL or a brief non-proprietary description of what your startup will be selling.

Code Complete Software is one of those companies you won’t find mentioned on TechCrunch – they’re in the business of being the sales force for some of the best development tools and packages out there. For example, they’re the exclusive North American distributor for JetBrains (IntelliJ IDEA, RubyMine, and other software tools) since 2002.

If your startup is (or will be selling) to developers, why not grab a Code Complete Software StartupToDo.com Scholarship while supplies last?

…from calculating what time it is across multiple time zones, thanks EveryTimeZone.com by Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs.

Besides being a dead-easy way to figure out what time will work for a Skype conference call with three people in three different time zones, it’s:

a) A very cool HTML5 example pointed out by John Allsopp in Lesson 1 of his SitePoint HTML5 course I’m consuming with lunch, and,

b) An excellent example of how creating “non-product” value can get your product – in this case Freckle Time Tracking – generates huge attention from your target market. Way to go Amy and Thomas!

Just got an online training offer from SitePoint – the awesome Australian IT powerhouse: “The course costs just $9.95 and includes eight lessons containing a mix of videos, mini articles, and exercises, as well as two live Q&A sessions where you can ask questions of John directly. You’ll also gain access to a private forum where you can talk HTML5 all day.”

What convinced me to put aside the time for this and do this was this video – John Allsopp is passionate about HTML5 (and the next course, CSS3) and it comes across. I think that will make this a fun way to further my tech education. Now, how are you keeping up with your fellow developers?

Here’s my Flipboard Find of the Week (something worthwhile Flipboard brought to my attention that would have otherwise been lost in the social media noise): Power Friending: Demystifying Social Media to Grow Your Business by Amber Mac. I grabbed the Kindle sample to my iPad, read that, just ordered the full book and am looking forward to reading it. Do I think you should get it (or at least try out the free Kindle sample on your platform of choice)? You bet!

Amber is one of those amazing people who gets tech, gets people and is a delight to be around, even if that being around is listening/watching her podcasts.

One Amazon reviewer summarized the value of this book better than I; “This book is not only my new bible for my business social stuff but explains the bigger picture in a way that allows you to easily grasp the smaller details & be able to make connections for yourself. So many books just give the directions with no oversight of how it works on the inside both technically & personally.”

As for Flipboard, it’s become my social media reader of choice: as one reviewer put it, it makes signal out of noise. Other social media readers do a great job of organizing; Flipboard does a superb job of editing. I don’t want 249 items since this morning to decide if they matter, I want news.

]]> http://www.47hats.com/2010/07/flipboard-find-of-the-week/feed/ 1 http://www.47hats.com/2010/07/breakthroughs/ http://www.47hats.com/2010/07/breakthroughs/#comments Sat, 24 Jul 2010 00:42:19 +0000 Bob Walsh http://www.47hats.com/?p=2360

Everything is always the same – until it isn’t. This week, there’s been two new products – one slammed by demand, the other in alpha – that for all their faults change what at least I thought was possible for software to do. These are breakthroughs – these are things that until you see them, they are not part of the lexicon of what is possible. The IT industry is all about these breakthroughs:

• The Apple iPad – it was the breakthrough that finally after at least 20 years make “slate computing” something real. How many iPad-like devices have been announced now? 100?
• For you Mac Haters out there, how about the IBM PC AT, Lotus 1-2-3, AutoDesk, and a couple thousand other apps that created a whole new way of using a computer?

The defining thing about these Breakthroughs is until someone, somewhere, somehow creates an actual working version of it, most people literally cannot imagine it, and even the most starry-eyed tech idealists will only see the glimmering of what could be.

Until someone does it.

Two such products came out this week I’d like to recommend you get your head around because they will alter your world tech view. Hell, there are both (as of now) free. First is FlipBoard for the iPad. I was lucky to see Flipboard in action about 2+ weeks ago, so I’ve had a little more time to mull it over and have been using it since the hour it became available. You can read all the details starting here but I can tell you two things from my own experience: it redefines for me where news comes from and adds a whole new purpose and reason for “doing” social media. That’s Big.

Here’s the second one: Tab Candy for Firefox:

An Introduction to Firefox’s Tab Candy from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

For the past decade or so, the only way to interact with a lot of sites, the only way to struggle with all those browser tabs you have open right now was as a set of tabs along the top of your Firefox, IE, Chrome, or Safari browser. Aza Raskin has a working version housed in an edge version of Firefox that delivers a whole new way to relate to and solve the “I have too many browser tabs open” problem. Here’s a quick example I threw together:

Tab Candy lets you create sizable, moveable groups of tabs. Working on one thing with its 8 tabs open, but you need to flip over to the 6 tabs social media tabs you have open? Two. Clicks. Definitely watch the video. Even it it’s a an alpha product on a developer build, this version of Firefox with Tab Candy is 10x more valuable to me than Chrome – my browser of choice.

Of course both FlipBoard and Eye Candy have rough edges, will be copied, probably improved upon, and endlessly lauded over and railed against on the interwebs. My point is you should be on the lookout as a startup or microISV for just these kind of breakthroughes to spark ideas in your head, and if you’re lucky, your own breakthrough.  Because everything is impossible – until it isn’t.

I came across this YouTube video of Brian Greenstone from Pangea Software talking about how his company made $1.5 million on a two-week port of a Mac OS game over in the comments of my online friend Andy Brice’s blog.

Andy’s post concerned the media reality distortion field cast over the iPhone, rightly pointing out that while some developers do quite well, most make more like bus fare.

“Before you write your iPhone App I think you should ask yourself if it has got a realistic shot at making the top 10 in its App store category. If not, don’t give up the day job just yet,” Andy concludes.

While that’s true enough, I don’t draw the same conclusions as Andy does about the iOS market. I think there’s more to the story than the odds are against you, so why bother?

• I think the number one reason most iOS apps fail is that they are poorly executed knock-offs of common ideas and approaches. For example, I went looking this weekend for a different kind of checklist app. I found a good hundred that would let you create a checklist – and not one that would let you reuse and improve a checklist. Those hundred shared a common view: A checklist is something you make and use once. But, if you’ve read Atul Gawande’s, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (and you should), there’s a entirely different way checklists can be created, maintained, improved and used than the make a list once approach.
• Another reason software companies large and small fail when they get on the iOS bandwagon is they start from the point of view of “How do we squeeze our app from the desktop to an iPhone?” They ignore/disrespect the platform. And by the way, the iPhone and the iPad may share an OS, but they are emphatically not the same platform. Same thing happens when Windows software makers try to “cash in” Mac users or the reverse.

I find the reason some developers succeed beyond their wildest dreams more interesting:

• They passionately believe in not doing what is commonly expected.
• They are willing to take a risk.
• They work hard at getting their execution right.

What do you think?