Google Blogoscoped is one of those blogs I rss to keep up to date for hat #5 (writing for Web Worker Daily). They have good stuff. So today when I saw, Tips for Dealing with Information Overload with advice from the likes of Matt Cutts and Noam Chomsky, my hopes rose that this bunch of smart people might have some really good insight I could grab.

Alas, there’s no magic bullet, app, technique, incantation, RSS reader or email filter. Of the 14 tips, most are common email/rss sense, a few illuminaries confess to information bankruptcy and Dave Winer plays Merry Prankster.

Here’s the best tip of the lot. It’s brutal, but it’s so right:

Shelley Powers, Burningbird.net: «Frankly, the people who are having problems with information overflow are people who want the information overflow. We’re all big boys and girls here. We don’t need specialized technology or social gurus to tell us when we’ve subscribed to too many feeds, or are on too many social networks. We don’t need calendaring software to tell us when we’ve taken on more work than we can handle. What we need to do is prioritize the demands on our attention, and when we find ourselves overwhelmed, lop off the bottom distractions.

In all honesty, people who talk about how “noisy” their lives are one moment, while extolling the virtues of Twitter for FriendFeed the next would be the first distractions to go, and easily. Other distractions may be more difficult to drop, but if we want to be known for something other than “she gave great Twitter”, we have to make the decision, and live with the loss.»

If you spend more time on your email/rss feeds than you do building your microISV/startup (Bad Developer, Bad!), give this post a quick read, check out the page I have on GTD at 47hats.com. And give yourself a pat on the back for wading through another week of Too Much Information in no worse condition than some of the brighter lights on the net.

No - I’m not quitting my day job helping microISVs succeed by signing up with StartupAgents - Here’s my profile there:

I work with startups/microISVs helping them succeed in three specific areas:

Product/SaaS Differentiation - What is going to make your product different, remarkable and important to customers?

Marketing Message - How should your site’s main page be structured to emotionally and logically connect with your Primary Customer, then build upon that connection via Relevant Value and Credibility Markers to establish trust, build excitement and generate sales?

roduct Blog - Hour for hour invested, a well structured and targeted blog is the single best marketing tool for a startup. But who are you blogging for, what are you blogging about and how do you incorporate yet another thing to do with the most leverage?

Perhaps you or your startup might need those services as well. In any case, the more we as startups and microISVs are marketed to, the better: it’s a sure sign of growth.

In early 2007, our team at Chambal.com was busy in building a desktop & site search product, which would index remote data on a local desktop and provide extensive searches and reports on that indexed data. We were exploring new data sources which none of our competitors were indexing and Amazon S3 was one of those. It seemed really great but there was no good interface available for us to use S3 efficiently.

At the same time, we had two interns join our team and we thought it would be a great starting project for them and we would get a tool to work with. When they completed the project, we realized that we really had a good product and since then we shifted most of our focus to improve and market that product, Bucket Explorer.

To give you some background, Amazon Web Services catalog comprises of a few core building block services for storage, database, computing and queuing. We will limit this article to some of the unique benefits of Simple Storage Service (S3), especially for Micro ISVs.

Amazon S3 is a “storage service” with some disruptive features. A lot of people refer to S3 as a Web Server replacement but Amazon S3 is not a Web Server. S3 offers some unique features which cause the web server confusion, but those features also make it truly disruptive. Let’s consider an example file “47hats.png” to take a closer look:

Every file has a URI and can be accessed via http protocol:

You store your files in a “bucket” on S3. Bucket is the top level container of files. S3 provides a URI for every bucket and every file stored in that bucket. It also allows you to access those files using http or https protocols. So if our example file was uploaded to a bucket named mybucket, it can be accessed via http using the following two URIs:

http:// mybucket.s3.amazonaws.com / 47hats.png

http:// s3.amazonaws.com/mybucket/47hats.png

You can also create a torrent URL by just adding “?torrent” at the end of any of these two URIs.

It allows different levels of permissions:

You can upload a file to S3 and keep in private. If you encrypt it before uploading, no-one can ever read that file. On the other extreme, you can make a file world readable. An object which has a URI, can be accessed via http and has ‘read’ permission to everyone is comparable to an object being served from a web server.

It allows DNS alias:

If the bucket name is a fully qualified host name, it can be accessed via a DNS alias. If we create a bucket named images.example.com, save the file 47hats.png in this bucket and point the CNAME entry for this bucket to s3.amazonaws.com, then we can access this file using this new URI- http:// images.example.com / 47hats.png

You can create up to 100 different buckets:

When I checked the home page of 47hats.com with web-site-grader, it warned for “too many images”. This site had 29 images on its home page that day. This is typical of most sites these days that when one page is served to the end user, it may download several individual files from the web server (images, css, java script etc). The browser usually limits 4 concurrent connections to a single host which increases the page load time. Using S3, you can host these files in multiple buckets and trick the browser to load all of them concurrently as it will treat them as different hosts:

Authenticated Requests with Expiration Time:

When you signup for Amazon S3, you get a public key and a secret key. Most http requests sent to S3 need to be signed using these keys. S3 allows you to add an “expires” header at the time of creating a signed request. This feature allows you to send someone a link to a private file stored on S3, which automatically expires at a future date & time.

Range GETs

You can ask S3 to give you specific bytes of a file. So you can download first few megabytes of a large file and start processing that data while you request the next chunk. This makes S3 a perfect “web server” to serve media files. A Flash player can download first few bytes and start playing those while it downloads more data.

User Metadata on files:

You can specify custom Metadata on every file. Any user Metadata is a key value pair. S3 just stores it for each file, and passes it back when you ask for it. This allows users to specify any “custom headers” that you would want to serve from a web server. There are many use cases for this feature, here are just two examples:

• S3 automatically serves last modified header when a file is requested. So if a browser is caching our image file 47hats.png it will check with S3 if it is changed or not, and will not download again, if it’s not changed. You can make it even better by adding an ‘Expires’ header to 47hats.png, which can tell the browsers not to even check for updates until a future expiration date.
• We can zip 47hats.png before uploading to S3 and add a header “Content-Encoding: gzip”. The browsers will automatically decompress the file and this will save us bandwidth and storage costs (read faster load times).

It can scale

S3 can scale, and it can scale massively.

• All Amazon web services are designed for concurrency; you can send several simultaneous requests to S3 and expect it to respond well.
• S3 supports RFC 1323 model for TCP window scaling. In short it makes the data transfer extremely fast.
• When you release a newer version of a product or you are in the news and suddenly get a lot of traffic, every user will share the same 10 or 100 mbps pipe provided by your web host going to a single server. With S3, each of those users’ download speed is limited to their own internet connection and not on the server side.
• Amazon has multiple data centers and there are always multiple copies of a file stored in different geographical region (reliable and always available).

As I mentioned in the beginning, S3 is not a web server, and Amazon has claimed that it is not a CDN (Content Delivery Network), as it does not provide edge caching, yet the support for all these features, scalability and the lowest “pay as you go” pricing in the market makes Amazon S3 the best “poor man’s CDN”.

If you are looking to try out Amazon S3, I can highly recommend Bucket Explorer ;). Seriously, we have some of the best reviews in this market. If you are interested in updates on our progress you can subscribe to my product blog at Bucket Explorer Blog.

No, DHH has not given up on 37signals and Rails to join the rancid ranks of Internet Marketing Mavens - he’s fired off a wake up call to all the startups in the world who’ve decided there’s nothing in between doing a open source project for free and creating some sort of insanely godzilla killer next Facebook app thing that it just has to be bought by Google, Yahoo or Microsoft for a billion dollars.

There is something in between, and it’s called a microISV.

You don’t need a billion dollar idea to launch a microISV like you do to get Venture Capital money to burn scale up; you just have to find a problem someone, anyone, will pay you to solve and work very, very hard. Because if you do the right things to find one customer, then you’ve probably done the right things to find or be found by thousands of customers.

I will warn the easily offended, VCs and those who think programming = vow of poverty this video contains profanity, common sense, a healthy respect for what making good money can do for you and a hell of a lot of great advice. Plan on watching it three times - it’s that good.

By James Avery
Infozerk Inc.

I have a problem with focus. A big problem. I would probably start at least one new project a week if I didn’t restrain myself. I continuously have ideas for books, articles, web sites, applications, open source projects… you name it I have an idea for it and want to do it. Of course the problem is that each of these ideas require a great deal of work and focus to see them to completion. This has been a big problem for me in the past, but in the last six months I have gotten much better at getting things done and in this post I am going to outline some of the methods I have used.

Treat your workload like debt. A couple years ago I went through the process of getting completely out of debt, and as I started writing this article I noticed some similarities in how I approached both problems.

Stop adding more.

The first step to getting out of debt is to stop charging stuff, so the first step to focusing better is to stop adding new work and projects. If you are like me you have enough to focus on at the moment, so don’t add anymore until you can cross some off. This is harder than it sounds, one thing I have done to help stop me from adding more is to carry a small notebook around and when I have an idea I would love to do I write it down in the notebook. I write down the general idea and brainstorm some possible features. I might even do some UI sketches, but then I don’t take it any further. If it is a good idea it will still be around in six months when I have the time and bandwidth to handle it. Ideas don’t make you a success, execution does. If you are too busy chasing new ideas you will never be able to execute effectively on any of them.

Pay off the small debts first.

A classic technique in getting out of debt is to pay off the smaller debts first, not only does this have a psychological effect it also leads to the snowball effect as you can pay more and more to your larger debts since the smaller ones are gone. In the same way I have tried to tackle the small projects first, anything I can cross off my list or relegate to maintenance mode I try to knock out first. This way I shorten the list of projects, or at least the list of projects that actively need work. For instance I recently re-designed and launched Visual Studio Hacks. The majority of the programming work is done and now it just needs weekly maintenance of an hour or two to write blog posts, articles, and make minor tweaks. Knock out whatever projects you can and get them off your plate (or minimize them to just maintenance), get the snowball effect going.

Clear your inbox and your mind.

Having a nice and clean inbox is invaluable, so is going to sleep with a clear mind and not worrying. I use a couple of tools to do this. First I have embraced Inbox Zero. This means I clean my inbox whenever I check my mail, any tasks that can’t be completed right away go to Remember The Milk. RTM is a simple online task management application and makes it easy to forward emails and make them tasks. Secondly I keep the simple notebook I mentioned early next to my bed at night and when I have an idea for a new project, or existing project, or anything at all I write it down and then let myself forget about it. It’s amazing how it makes getting to sleep and staying asleep much easier.

Keep it Big and Visible.

In agile methodologies you have something called a Big Visible Chart that makes your project status very transparent. For me I started using a whiteboard and a simple chart to symbolize what I should be working on now, and what I would be working on next. This makes it easy for me to at a glance always know what I should be focusing on and keeps me on task. I constantly adjust it, but because I am only one person and I need to focus I try to make sure the lines have zero overlap.

Treat your projects like a real job.

I found whenever I thought as the project as a side-project I worked on it less, and wouldn’t hit my deadlines. So I started treating it like a real job and got organized by using Unfuddle. Unfuddle is an online software management application and include source control, tickets, and much more. Using unfuddle I can track each of my projects, create milestones and deadlines, and keep track of bugs and future features.

These are the techniques that are working for me, have something that is working for you? Please leave a comment and let me know, I am always looking for new techniques to make the most out of my time.

- James Avery

Blog - http://www.infozerk.com/averyblog

The Lounge Advertising Network - http://www.infozerk.com/thelounge

Scott Guthrie’s keynote was good - but I’d watched it in March from the comfort of my Aaron chair live from Mix08 and the only new thing I picked up was Microsoft has added a small but important (to MSFT) goal to SilverLight 2’s to do list - being able to upscale code directly to WPF.

And unfortunately, Seema Ramchandani (the Microsoft program manager making sure Silverlight runs well on Macs as Windows boxes) who was supposed to dig deep into Silverlight 2’s code took a detour into Presenter’s Hell when her AV support people apparently forgot how to route video from a Mac between her morning and afternoon sessions.

What really impressed me was the panel discussion, “The Future of Social Networking”.

I know, I know, you as a microISV or a developer working long long days think, “Why would I spend time on Twitter, Pownce, Facebook and get constantly interrupted, poked and distracted? What’s the benefit unless I’m developing yet another social network that might turn into an $850 million impulse buy like Bebo did for AOL?”

While anyone who’s been in this industry a while can see that social networking is well down the dot.bomb road, there is a hard core of realness there for microISVs and non-social networking startups: Internet-enabled social networking has changed how under-30 year olds live/think in a lot of the developed world. Those MySpace teenagers and Facebook college kids continue to get older: in 2.5 years, one half of the U.S. workforce will be under 30 years old.

MicroISVs and startups (except for Paul Graham’s hatchlings and the like) tend to be in their 30’s or older: they’ve had time to develop their technical skills, learn to despise bosses and get some experience in what is laughingly referred to as the Real World. They don’t instinctively get what these youngsters (called customers) are into. But they need to: it won’t be the wrinkly old execs that are going to find new software for their companies to buy, it’s going to be some new hire who’s going to check you out with their network first.

Same issue, different direction: how do you write a desktop app that won’t get cracked or a SaaS that won’t go out of fashion in a matter of weeks? You build it so that it has an organic social network inside of it that connects with the larger mosaic of social networks.

As Dave McClure of 500 Hats (no relation) pointed out yesterday at that panel, ‘online social networking is about real needs and wants: getting laid, finding a job, making the right decisions’. (no relation, really)

While he drove the rest of the panels somewhat nuts, he had a good point: social networks like Facebook are all finding new ways of addressing intrinsic human needs in our physically increasingly unsafe, fragmented, segmented Real World.

MicroISVs who pride themselves in being tone deaf about social networking are missing more than a good non-coding distraction: they may be missing their future.

Why mediocre? That’s how Tim described it. Now granted, combining “Rambo” and a cool interface experience via WPF is not going to be in the cards for every microISV. But if you can show your product doing something interesting, something that make good video, what are you waiting for?

By Charles W. Zino
VP - iPortis.com

I would like to thank Bob for the opportunity to tell you more about our services at iPortis.com. I’d also like to tell you about our company’s focus on providing customer service, our pricing model, and our service offering which all help to create and grow collaborative business relationships with MicroISV’s like yourselves.

Quite simply, our mission is to provide outstanding personal service to our clients while offering the most affordable, reliable and comprehensive e-commerce solutions available. We have designed our platform with the MicroISV in mind, as most of us here were software developers as well!

We believe that providing exceptional support to our client and their customers is the most important responsibility we have. We provide this level of service by responding to each email we receive within 24 hours, and in most cases, only a few hours. We also believe it’s very important take time to listen to feedback we receive, and quickly add new functions and features to improve our services based on that feedback. Our ability to respond quickly to our clients will always be our #1 priority.

iPortis.com offers a comprehensive service offering for only 6.5% of the total transaction amount (excluding taxes) + $0.50 USD per transaction. Our rates are one of the lowest in the industry, and our aggressively priced commission structure helps MicroISV’s maximize their profit margin without sacrificing quality, functionality, and customer service.

We have over 20 years of combined experience working with (and being) MicroISV’s, and we have designed our platform to cater to those needs as simply and effectively as possible. Our Vendor Control Panel allows you to quickly see your sales figures, navigate to product and shopping cart configuration, perform order lookups, and execute sales reports.

For each of our clients, we offer to create custom product order pages and shopping carts to match the look and feel of their site, as well as allow them to perform their own customization. By use of templates and client-defined custom fields, we dynamically create product order pages and shopping carts to meet the needs of our clients and their customers.

We’ve also developed an iPortis.com Shopping Cart API that allows for seamless XML integration with client and third-party hosted shopping carts. MicroISV’s that host their own shopping cart, or have a shopping cart hosted by third-party, are very easily integrated with our platform to process transactions.

We offer integration with Google Analytics, which can help you identify the keywords, ads, referrals, and campaigns that contribute the most to your bottom line, as well as offer other standard e-commerce features such as customizable product delivery options and custom notifications, volume discount pricing, coupon codes, product upselling, and recurring billing payment options for service-based products.

We appreciate your taking time to learn more about our services. Please contact me at charles@iportis.com or visit http://www.iportis.com to learn more.

Wishing you continued success,

Charles

–

Based in Apex, North Carolina, iPortis.com (www.iPortis.com) offers full featured e-commerce payment solutions to software developers around the world. Their management team has over 20 years of e-commerce solutions and product fulfillment experience, and has used that knowledge and experience to create innovative, flexible, and affordable payment solutions. For more information, please visit www.iPortis.com.

First up, have a quick read of these short posts Keith Alperin (Helium Foot Software) put up at his blog about the process of working through the ebook’s exercises:

• They are Always Right: http://www.heliumfoot.com/blog/42
• Quintessence: http://www.heliumfoot.com/blog/43
• The Hook: http://www.heliumfoot.com/blog/45
• Helium Foot Site++: http://www.heliumfoot.com/blog/46
• Helium Foot Site++ plus: http://www.heliumfoot.com/blog/48 (this one has a cool graphic that overlays a screenshot of his new homepage on top of his old one.)

Put another way, here’s his home page before and after Keith completed the exercises and did the hard work:

Bottom line?

So, how’d we do? Well, it’s a little difficult to tell since we’re in the middle of our Daring Fireball promotion. However, the preliminary results are pretty good. From Monday to Thursday two weeks before the site changes (as well as before the DF promo) we had 101 visits and 18 downloads. The same period this week (post site update and during the DF promo) yielded 485 visitors and 91 downloads. That brings our conversion percentage from about 17.5% to 18.5%. Even more important, sales are way up for this week (from 0% of downloads to 10% of downloads!). None of these are really statistically valid results, but they are certainly good news. Stay tuned for an update in a few weeks when i can collect more data.

Speaking of exercises…

A week or so after releasing MicroISVs Sites that Sell!, I added a new fixed-price item on my microISV consulting menu: Fixed price MicroISV Sites that Sell consultation. I’d asked for 3 brave volunteers to let me beta test this consultation methodology on them in exchange for half-off the price; I got nine.

Now that I’ve finished (except for the 30 day revisits) those nine microISV consults, here’s what one of my beta testers - Mark Gladding, founder of Text2Go - had to say about the experience:

When Bob Walsh offered a fixed price consultation to review the exercises that accompany his recently launched eBook, ‘MicroISV Sites that Sell’ I didn’t hesitate to take up the offer. Not only would this force me to follow through and complete the exercises for my microISV, I would then get to have the results reviewed by an expert. There are lots of eBooks and blog posts out there on how to improve various aspects of your online business. The problem is that if you don’t act on the advice or implement it correctly, then they’re actually just a waste of time.

Bob’s consultation consists of two parts. He first provides a review of the exercises by email and then follows up with a Skype call to drill into his responses in more detail. For me the most beneficial part of the consultation was the Skype call. It was clear that Bob had done a fair amount of preparation leading up to the call. He had a really good understanding of what Text2Go was about, who the likely customers were and how they would use Text2Go to solve their pain. He had even taken the time to read my blog!

The call lasted about 45 minutes and included a lot more than just a review of the exercises and the identification of my Unique Selling Proposition. Bob did a really good job of explaining the importance of marketing to specific types of customers with specific problems. I finally think I’m starting to grasp this concept.

During the call Bob also generated a lot of ideas on who the potential customers of Text2Go are and how they would benefit using it. He also came up with a simple, repeatable marketing plan to generate a lot more traffic to my website and hence sales. On a technical note, Bob recorded the entire call and made it available as an mp3 file, so it wasn’t necessary to take notes.

Finally Bob has offered to check back in 30 days to see how the plan is proceeding.

Overall I felt that Bob provided a wealth of clear, actionable advice that was specific to my microISV. To those other microISVs out there who are struggling with marketing, I strongly recommend you book in for a consultation with Bob.

Regards,

Mark Gladding
Director
Tumbywood Software
markgladding@text2go.com
http://www.text2go.com

These are the kinds of results I’m interested in. What results do you want?

By Russell Nyland
Account Executive for EC Suite

Bob wanted to give us the chance to introduce ourselves to the community; some of you may already be familiar with the company name from trade shows or have seen me posting on BoS over the last few months. I work with the Business Development division of http://www.ecsuite.com, an e-commerce platform for digital content including software, media, and information.

I’ve seen a lot of concern about new processors being small, fly-by-night operations or just waiting to be acquired by larger competitors, so I think the best place to start would be a brief explanation of where we came from.

EC Suite was originally founded to help local companies sell digital products online; we quickly expanded to establish an international presence providing payment processing, merchant account and gateway services to North America and Europe. We currently have about 300 employees at our headquarters, data center, and support center buildings in Tempe, AZ as well as branch offices in Boston, MA, and Malta, EU. The EC Suite family includes our web hosting division (which also provides IP transit and CDN) as well as DRM Networks, an authorized Microsoft DRM Service Provider. This makes us the first fully-integrated DRM solution with a billing system.

Each new area of the company was developed to meet a need from online businesses that the market could not yet meet, and after 12 years, we now support over 22,000 websites.

EC Suite is a private, family-owned company. You’ll never see us getting bought out or buying up smaller companies and cheapening their name in order to satisfy a stockholder’s bottom line. Our revenue dollars have always gone back into new development, and helping new/small businesses sell their products online has become our expertise. As such, we have added a few interesting features to the normal e-commerce toolbox of a third party processor that will distinguish our focus on new technology and innovation.

Recurring Billing

We’re one of the largest online subscription processors in the US. Our Recurring Billing and License Revocation features specifically pertain to software-as-a-service (SaaS).

Recurring Billing allows companies to license their software on a timed basis rather than selling lifetime access to the program. Recurring subscriptions are typically done in 30, 60, or 90 day intervals, but 180 day and year-long intervals are also possible. When each period expires, our billing system will automatically process another charge using the payment information provided by the consumer. Upon completion of a successful rebill transaction, the consumer will be able to acquire a new license that is valid for the next subscription period. Additionally, consumers can utilize our support page to update their payment information if needed; for example, they can change credit card information, or update the expiration date on an existing card.

License Revocation ensures that, in the event a consumer’s transaction is returned or charged back for any reason, they lose the use of the software immediately rather than when the current license expires. A grace period can be implemented to allow for end users who may not be online each time they launch the program to revalidate their license. This process happens transparently to the user; no input is required from them unless the license is revoked or cannot be verified.

Regional Billing

EC Suite clients can target their product pricing directly to each consumer’s location and currency in an effort to maximize revenue when exchange markets fluctuate. This feature was created to address our clients’ concern about how the declining dollar has created a revenue drain or a price discount, specifically when it relates to the exchange with the euro and their European sales.

Currently the Regional Billing feature allows prices to be displayed in U.S. dollars, Canadian dollars, Australian dollars, euros, pounds sterling and yen. It will allow consumers to take advantage of the weak U.S. dollar and maintain current pricing for their U.S. consumers.

This is a feature we started implementing just a few months ago. With the declining value of the US dollar and the online consumer base expanding and becoming more stable in the EU and Asia, we believe this will become a standard requirement for online businesses as it has been in retail/brick and mortar businesses for quite some time. The Big Mac Index is one example of this.

Here’s an example of how Regional Billing works:

With normal billing:

Person in US buys a piece of software for 30 USD.

Person in EU buys the same software for 20 euros.

With Regional Billing:

Person in US buys a piece of software for 30 USD.

Person in EU buys the same software for 30 euros.

These numbers will vary from client to client depending where their sales come from and how much the U.S. dollar fluctuates, but we’ve seen zero drop in sales and an average overall revenue increase of 20% among our clients who have implemented this feature.

SecuredApp

SecuredApp is a product we developed in conjunction with VI Labs, and it isn’t just another license scheme advertised as DRM. SecuredApp is a security post-processor that creates self-protecting applications to prevent piracy, malicious tampering, and access to sensitive intellectual property embedded within the software application.

SecuredApp provides copy protection by using a highly unique user authentication system, ensuring only legitimate users are able to run the application. SecuredApp prevents tampering by encrypting the entire application and only decrypting functions when they’re called; once a function is finished running, it is re-encrypted and removed from memory. This way, dormant functions cannot be called by malicious third party software. File integrity is also checked at run-time to ensure each function executes as originally intended; this will detect any changes that have been made to the compiled program.

DLL files associated with the application can also be protected. SecuredApp can take an existing executable and associated DLLs as input and create a protected version of the same application as output. SecuredApp uses 128-bit encryption and memory obfuscation to protect the application. This memory obfuscation adds extraneous code to each function so that if a hacker attempts to copy code contained in memory, they will be unable to tell what code is real.

Developers are also given complete licensing control so that any pricing model can be used. This allows for promotions, trials, subscriptions, recurring billing, single purchase, and any other licensing model you choose.

If you’re interested in trying SecuredApp out on a trial basis, we’re always looking for live testers. Just email me at russell@ecsuite.com or learn more about how we can help grow your business at http://www.ecsuite.com/.

Thanks for reading, and thanks to Bob for giving us this chance to introduce ourselves.

Russ

- - -

EC Suite is an online payment processor providing a set of marketing, reporting and site building tools to help sell your software online. Check us out at http://www.ecsuite.com.

[Tony Wright is the CEO of RescueTime, a web service that allows people and businesses to understand exactly how they spend their time with functionally zero data entry. RescueTime was funded by Ycombinator and is currently engaged in raising a seed round. Tony sincerely apologizes if this sounds like a YCombinator infomercial. You can ping him with questions at tony [at] rescuetime [dot] com]

My company started as the most micro of Micro ISVs—pretty much just a few friends sitting around the table talking about an idea. In 8 months, it’s gone from conversation to prototype to product, and we’re now working on closing our seed funding round. While we’re happy to take a lot of the credit for our success, a ton of credit belongs to YCombinator, a new venture animal that is part VC and part incubator—they are accepting applications right now for their Summer funding round)

This post details how we went through the process, how and why we made the decisions that we did, and the value that we got out of the YCombinator experience.

Step 1 – Can You Build Something People Want?

After the initial “what if” conversation, the next logical step was to see if anyone else wanted what we wanted to build. We needed to know if there really was a problem there that anyone wanted to solve. Software success is a function of how many people have the problem you’re solving * how burning their need is * how well you can pull off a solution * how crappy all of the other available solutions are.

I think one of the keys in this phase is to realize that even for great product ideas, most people aren’t going to want it. So if you’re market analysis consists of asking ten people what they think, understand that having 9 of ‘em tell you, “I would never use that”, is perfectly okay. What you want to focus on (initially) is the second part of the equation—“How burning is the need?”. You’d much rather have 1 friend say, “I’d mug my own mother for software that does that” than 4 friends say, “Meh—I might use something like that every once in a while”.

The trick with this phase is to get out there and talk to the target audience. Talk to people who would be customers. Friends are a good start, but tend to tell you what you want to hear. Thankfully, the Internet is a wonderful place to get buried in criticism and feedback. Having just read Bob’s ebook, I would heartily recommend reading it before this step—you might find that the people aren’t interested in what you’re building because you aren’t describing it in a compelling way. Would you rather have a nice juicy steak or a muscle tissue sample from a castrated bull? The words that you choose are critical.

Step 2 – What’s the Business Goal

Most startup folks talk about this first, but I think it should be a distant second—your goal of a hyper-growth software company is pretty irrelevant if you can’t find a collection of people that want what you’re building.

Once you get an inkling that people want what you’re building, make sure everyone involved—why did we want to build this? Fame? Riches? Growth? To have a lifestyle/cash cow business? We were a 3-person business, but we didn’t talk about this enough– that was a painful mistake. As people continued to clamor for what we were building, two of us plunged ahead, eventually quitting our day-jobs. The third kept his day job, burned out and bowed out—If we’d had the discussion, we could’ve avoided that.

Step 3 – If you’re “Going Big”, you need help

The biggest mistake I see in startup founders is a failure to admit that they need help and an obsession over control/ownership.

If you didn’t start with one, a co-founder is strongly correlative with success. Make sure you have one or two. If you disagree, grab a list of the top 10 wildly successful software startups in the last decade and point out the ones that had solo founders. You won’t be doing much pointing.

Don’t be shy about trading equity for co-founders or investors. It’s easy to fall into the belief that you can’t fail, but the fact is that most startups do. If you can bump your chance of success by a few percentage points, it’s worth it. Most people overvalue ownership—the truth is it’s largely valueless unless you sell the company.

You cannot overestimate how challenging it is to get investors unless you already have great growth and traction… Even then, it’s a time consuming process that’s fraught with peril for neophytes… Which is why we leapt at the chance to apply to Ycombinator.

Step 4 – The YC Difference

Getting funding is only the right thing if you’re going BIG. Investors would much rather invest in a company with a 1% chance of being a billion dollar company than a company with a 10% chance of being a 100 million dollar company (this is especially true for VCs and can be less true for angels). There’s nothing wrong with building a million dollar “lifestyle” business, but don’t try to go the funding route if that’s your goal.

This doesn’t mean you need to solve HUGE and COMPLEX problems with your startup. Just have a good story about how you can expand your offering and market once you’ve nailed the core problem for your passionate-but-small userbase.

Just the act of applying to Ycombinator was liberating. It was a clear and obvious line where we publicly declared, “this is our job. This is no longer a hobby. We’re done screwing around, and we think that our product is more promising than the other thousands applications that YC gets.”

YC funds early stage companies with $15-20k in exchange for about 6% of your company and they require you to relocate most/all of your team to be near YC. Thousands apply to Ycombinator and about 20 companies were accepted into our “session”. They don’t provide office space, and there’s very little structure to the program. In exchange for their investment they:

• Give you relatively unfettered access to Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, and Trevor Blackwell– probably some of the smartest startup folks on the planet. They’ve made our product and the way we talk about it 500% better.
• Provide weekly dinners with guests like Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, and dozens of other Valley Titans. Not only do they bury you in hard-won wisdom, but they are amazing connections to have.
• Provide included legal assistance in setting up your company so you can focus on software.
• Provide great PR. Ycombinator is a phenomenon. Assuming you don’t drop the ball and fail to launch something, it’s good for major coverage on the top blogs and in MSM.
• Provide instant credibility. If I wasn’t already swimming in introductions, I could cold-call a lot of investors and probably get a meeting based entirely on the YC “brand”.
• Provide a great network of YC Founders, which is incredibly valuable for recruiting, advice, and more.
• Provide a great (and condensed) investor marketplace. This is (IMO) the biggest value YC provides. Talking to investors is hard enough that each investor is a multi-month investment of time. YC has a big “coming out” presentation (called “Demo Day”) where you get introduced to pretty much the most impressive angels and VCs on the planet. It’s literally standing room only. By condensing this process, you get to spend more time on your product and you generally get better terms from investors.

If you balk at the 6% ownership issue—I think it’s worth asking the following question: Will Ycombinator’s involvement result in your company ultimately result in doing 6.4% better in the next round of funding? I literally can’t imagine a scenario where it wouldn’t.

Step 5 – What’s Next?

Ycombinator (or any other funding) is not a victory- it’s a milestone. I’ve seen founders get so wrapped up in fundraising that they forget that their core goal needs to be solving the needs of their customers. But funding (especially from YC) lends credibility and gives you a deep well of resources to draw from if you are seeking meteoric growth. It’s incredibly motivating to have people believe in you and (despite the fact that I’d already built and sold a company before this) was the most educational experience of my life.

“Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School” [aff.] by John Medina is such a book.
I first heard about this guy when I heard Geoffrey Grosenbach’s interview of him on the Rails Podcast (Part 1 and Part 2). Poor Geoff sounded a bit overwhelmed by Medina - this guy knows how to interview!

So why should you care as a microISV, or even as a developer? What if you could improve how you code, how you learn new technology, how you design applications, how you think by about 30%? And you don’t have to spend a dime!

Medina has collected recent peer-reviewed brain research to deduce 12 rules we now can say are true, proven facts about the human brain. These aren’t the final end all - this is what we can now say are true.

Now I’m not going to go over each and every rule here; just the six of those rules that most directly relate to how we as developers do our work:

#1- Exercise boosts our brain power. A lot. Put aside all the medical benefits of not looking like the Pillsbury Dough Boy - exercise improves mental function. Specifically aerobic exercise. If you want to improve how your brain works, move.

#4 - There’s two things of note here: first, human brains are incapable of multitasking and that because of the cognitive cost of switching, attempting to do so will take 50 percent longer with 50 percent more errors. If there is one behavioral pattern robbing us of our productivity, this is it. If you want to boost your productivity, stop multitasking. Period.

Second point - peer reviewed studies have nailed this: every 10 - 15 minutes during a presentation, if you want to keep your audience’s attention, you need need to emotionally arouse your audience. If you’ve ever watched a really good presentation, you’ll notice this pattern; if you need to present your business idea to your peers or VCs or whoever, you need to build this into your calculations.

#5 - The more elaborately we encode short term information at the moment of learning, the stronger the memory. Short term memory is just that - about 30 seconds. If you don’t have an overall game plan for how you move all that information into long term memory, if you don’t have in place strategies that more strongly encode that information, you will retain less.

Case in point - learning a new programming language/technology. Twenty five years ago, back during the last Ice Age when I started programming for a living, I learned each bit via books. I’d read the text, typed the exercise, took notes, underlined text - and it stuck. The increasing velocity of information we have to keep up has sanded down what most of us do to retain new information. Underlining your screen is a no-no, who has time to type the code example in? You do - if you want to retain it.

#6 - If you want to get the full value of what you study doing just two things will greatly improve your retention and your ability to learn. First, break up those marathon sessions into 25 minutes segments on subject A, 25 minutes on B, then another 25 on A and so on. Segment and interleave. Second, every third or fourth day review the facts you learned in the prior 72-96 hours. For extra credit, and value, follow up with review every six months and annually. If all this review sounds like a waste of time, it’s not - it’s what cements that knowledge in our heads so we have it when we need it.

#7 - Four points here: first, sleep is when your brain processes, reviews, repeats and rehearses information. Second, humanity lives on a spectrum between people who think best early and those who think best late in a day. About 10% at either extreme. For example, I’ve always been an atypical programmer - I do my best work between 4am and 10am. If you are a lark or an owl - stop fighting it. Finally, mid-afternoon we are at our dullest - and a big carb-laden lunch only makes it worse. Now you can fight biology, but you lose. Instead, a 26 minute nap will improve your post nap performance 34%. And a 45 minute nap will give you a similar boost for about six hours. Finally - want to solve a tough coding problem or design issue? Sleep on it.

#8 - Our brains have evolved to handle short term stress - not long term stress. Chronic stress in the workplace, and especially in your personal life, are brain killers. Like working for a company mired in office politics and always pushing you to do more faster. Like knowing you could write software you really cared about, if only you could do it for yourself. Something to think about if you’re still on the fence about starting your own microISV.

Like I said at the start of this long post, there’s nothing more practical than a good theory - except peer-reviewed science that you apply - today - to improve what you do. You can learn more by buying the book - the dvd is worth it - or by visiting http://brainrules.net.

By Dan C. Engel, CEO FastSpring

Bob was nice enough to ask me to post about FastSpring. Thanks, Bob. I thought I’d talk some about what makes FastSpring unique, the advantages of MicroISVs using FastSpring, and so on.

FastSpring was developed specifically to address the e-commerce service dissatisfactions we’ve all faced as software publishers, to offer a fresh alternative software vendors can take advantage of that would ensure software companies and individual software authors are treated how they should be - like gold. We put you, the software vendor, back in the control seat, and we work to ensure technological innovation is again a big part of software publishers e-commerce solutions.

At FastSpring, we offer a higher level of customer service. A Dedicated Account Manager is assigned to you who is an experienced software industry veteran and whose sole job is to provide customer service and ensure you are pleased at all times. Your Account Manager handles setup for you if you’d like as well. You will always receive a personal response within 24 hours, often within just 1-2 hours.

For many software publishers, we can save you a significant amount of money in transaction fees.

Ryan Dewell, who pioneered shareware e-commerce through RegNow years ago, led the building of the next-generation system in FastSpring, utilizing technologies like Java and Ajax. Gone are the days of having to use legacy systems using old technologies and hard to use interfaces. SpringBoard, the FastSpring e-commerce platform, is architected from the ground up to be extremely flexible, adaptable, and configurable. We can adapt to your changing needs quicker, and the features and configurations you desire can often be added to our platform far faster than normal due to the flexibility we’ve built into SpringBoard from day one.

Our interface is both easy and enjoyable to use. Some of our software publishers have gone so far as to comment on its beauty and elegance, which we find very flattering and quite kind of them to say. You can see our interface in action here: http://fastspring.com/movie/

We create a customized order page for each new software vendor at no charge using your site’s look and feel, and the styles are highly configurable to satisfy your particular preferences.

We help our software publishers to grow their revenue upon request by suggesting new marketing channels and partners and by offering marketing guidance. We have a lot of software marketing experience. Personally, I’ve generated many tens of millions in software revenue by marketing Picasa (now Google), GoToMyPC (now Citrix), and other software products, building them from scratch to where they are today through online revenue generation.

Our order pages are highly customizable. FastSpring’s free-form structure enables you to configure pricing and component choices as desired. Add or remove various fields, forms, radio buttons, drop-down menus, checkboxes, etc. You’re able to create the optimal order page flow. For offerings like cross-selling on the order page, you have full control to determine your own price, how items are displayed, and to retain more of the funds for yourself. As we see it, the customer is yours, not ours, so you should control and benefit most from the products you sell to your customers.

We’ve integrated with various 3rd party affiliate tracking and site analysis systems such as Google Adwords, Google Analytics, and ShareASale to help you understand better where your site visitors and paying customers are coming from, their demographics, traffic trends and more. The integrations can increase your sales through affiliates, since affiliate programs like ShareASale often include higher volume producing affiliates since they can attract many of the larger affiliates who don’t join software-specific affiliate programs, only larger, more general affiliate networks. If you use a system or tool we haven’t yet integrated, just drop us a note and we can often add your favorite within just a couple of days.

There are various of advantageous points of differentiation you’ll benefit from as well, such as our dynamic visual reporting, our network of service providers to help grow and manage your business, our testing environment which helps you avoid potential revenue loss or store display errors, various default order page/shopping cart setups to choose from, our visually appealing order page urls, the ability to survey customers as they purchase from your order page to learn more about how they heard about your products, what they use your products for, etc., and so on…

If you’d like to have us design a custom FastSpring order page for you or you’re ready to give FastSpring a try, drop me an email at dan@fastspring.com or check out our website which features a Flash movie demonstrating our e-commerce platform at: http://www.fastspring.com.

Thanks for taking the time to learn about FastSpring.

Best,

Dan
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FastSpring offers a next generation Java-based e-commerce payment & merchandising solution for software publishers which is focused on customer service, flexibility, and reasonable pricing. Visit the website at: http://www.fastspring.com