When Does Paid Acquisition Work for SaaS Startups? – The right question to ask, with a solid analysis.

Simple Diagrams – If you need to create simple diagrams quickly, Simple Diagrams is supremely cool. Love the UI.

The True Cost of Commuting – “You Could Buy a House Priced $15,900 More for Each Mile You Move Closer to Work.” Ouch.

Full Service Kindle Publishing for $50 – I wish this was out when I paid $300 to have my book converted to Kindle.

Read Entrepreneur Magazine for Free – On your iOS device. Yes, magazines are old school, but Entrepreneur has decent stuff from time to time.

And finally, Derek Sivers, The Startup Daily and HN-Books review Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer’s Guide to Launching a Startup

How to Talk to Your Kids About Star Wars – A must see if you have kids and like The Trilogy. “Jar Jar only kicks the puppies he doesn’t eat, Junior!”

Roll Your Own Linkbait Tech Headline – I never tire of these phrase generators. Some of my favorites from this one include:

• 5-Year-Old Makes 110K On an Annual Holiday With Clever E-Trade Hack
• Linus Torvalds Goes Missing For 20 Days
• Torrent of all Zynga Passwords

Let’s Hang in Vancouver – I’m speaking at the Lean Startup Conference in Vancouver, B.C. May 5th and 6th along with Ash Maurya and the authors of The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development for Tech Startups.

Learn How Google Works in Gory Detail – Quite an infographic on how Google generates north of $20B per year.

Why Startups Fail: An Analysis of Post-Mortems – The top 20 causes of startup failure based on 32 post-mortems.

Top Startup Blogs – A real-time blog ranking tool by Dharmesh Shah based on his blog grader. I must have made a wrong-turn at some point because I think I’m the only blogger in the top 20 who isn’t a millionaire.

All Traffic Does Not Convert the Same – Along the lines of my post Nine Levels of Traffic Quality (though he ranks traffic sources in a different order), this is an in-depth look at one marketer’s experience looking at conversion rates from various sources (press release, social bookmarking, SEO, PPC and direct), as well as A/B testing landing pages for huge improvements.

Time Tracking Without Timers – Runs on your Mac and “figures out” what you’re working on so there’s no need for timers or manual entry. Launched this week from Micropreneur John Gallagher.

Skorks (An Underrated Developer Blog) – Good topics. Good writing. Check it out if you’re into the craft of software.

Finding Joy in the Terror of Starting Something New – Good advice from Pamela Slim on how to get over your terror and make things happen.

An Excellent WordPress Shopping Cart – I used PHPurchase on a recent site and it’s fantastic. Highly recommended if you need to sell physical or digital goods using WordPress.

While on paternity leave this week I read seven books. I haven’t had that much spare time, but I’ve been following my “if I’m not taking notes, toss it” methodology, and wound up skimming through the better part of five of them.

Never Eat Alone was not one of the skimmers.

The author has walked the walk – he has a network of over 5,000 people whom he has used throughout his career to achieve some pretty hefty accomplishments, including becoming the CMO of Deloitte Consulting, and CEO of YaYa Media. While his use of examples from his experience gets tiring (I did skim those parts), it’s obvious by the first chapter that he knows his stuff.

I have a list of around 20 bullet points I took away from this book, which is a solid task list for me to mull over in the coming months. The gyst of the book is to network, but to be genuine about it, to build relationships before you need them, and the biggest takeaway: try to help others without expecting anything in return.

While none of this is groundbreaking, the author’s examples help lend perspective to what he means specifically by “help people” (mostly it’s about connecting two people within  your network who can help each other).

He also provides something of a process for maintaining your network. Not trite advice like “Everyone enjoys the sound of their own name,” but things like “Make a list of all the people you know and want to know, organize them into categories, and ping those in category 1 once a month, category 2 once a quarter, etc…”

It sounds rigid, but this is the kind of process I need to put in place or else I find myself never lifting my fingers from the keyboard to have lunch with someone.

Frankly, Never Eat Alone delivered on the promise of How to Win Friends and Influence People; a book I’ve attempted to read three times and have never made it past the first chapter. It’s painfully bad.

So while Never Eat Alone is not revolutionary, it is an expert’s take on how to network in a way that allows you to keep your self-respect. I recommend it.

The early bird registration discount for this year’s Business of Software in Boston expires on Friday. If you are planning to go, sign up now to save $400 off the full price.

In addition to speakers like Seth Godin, Joel Spolsky, Dharmesh Shah and Eric Sink, there are excellent networking opportunities with the other 300 attendees (a lot of self-funded software companies in the audience). I’ll also have the pleasure of connecting with you, as I’m honored to be one of the speakers this year.

I hope to see you in Boston in October.

I was a judge at last night’s 59 days of code startup competition here in Fresno. Teams had 59 days to create a killer app. One that solves a problem, is marketable, and demos well.

Overall it was an impressive showing of local talent. You can view a list of contestants here.

The Categories
There were two categories: zero-code and in progress. Zero-code meant you had to start with…um, zero code on day 1. In progress meant you could have a partial or complete product, but it needs polish and customers.

We judged based on a number of criteria, which can be seen at the bottom of this page, but they include things like usefulness, demo, UI, and differentiation. Frankly, the ability for a team to describe their idea well had a huge impact on how you perceived their app.

The Winners
The winners received a couple of pretty cool prize packages: an iPad, a chunk of money ($2800 for in-progress and $7200 for zero-code), a lifetime membership to the Micropreneur Academy, a Balsamiq Mock-ups license, and a bunch of other stuff worth around $17k.

• The winner of the zero-code category was PostEcho, an analytics package for social media
• The winner of the in-progress category was MyNetworkFactory, an online tool for sharing referrals within referral networks

Congratulations to both winners, and a tip of the hat to all who focused their energy for 59 days. Thanks to Travis, Irma and CVBI for putting everything together.

See you in 2011.

I recently finished the book Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It). It’s a fascinating look at how we perceive pricing, mis-perceive pricing, and are easily fooled by small changes in packaging, presentation and marketing.

Though the book starts slowly with more than hundred pages of background on the study of pricing psychology, if you skip ahead to parts 3 and 4 you get to the meat of the book; the key takeaways that marketers use and abuse everyday in our supermarket, casinos and dollar stores.

More than anything, this book made me realize there are “black hat” tactics in many disciplines. Some of the tactics the author discusses made me want to shower, such as cell phone bills made complex on purpose so people can’t compare apples to apples with the competition.

On the flip side, the idea of ending a price with .99 seems so commonplace that I don’t question it these days. It doesn’t feel black hat to me, but perhaps it should.

An unintended benefit was walking away with a list of things to watch out for as a consumer (e.g., new packaging always means less product). I also walked away with a few pricing ideas to test on my products.

In the end, Priceless is a unique and well-constructed look at the psychology of pricing.

Late Stage Co-Founder Wanted – [Filled] I’ve been contacted by a colleague who has been working on a SaaS application in a fairly large market. The SaaS (Ruby on Rails) app i complete and needs marketing enhancements in order to launch. You need reasonable graphic design skills, the ability to shoot and edit a screencast, respond to customer feedback, and work on the messaging/marketing. If you are interested drop me a line at rob@softwarebyrob.com and I will send you additional information. No obligation; the current founder will not know who you are unless you decide to contact him.

The Screencasting Handbook – Newly released, this ebook is written by an expert on the subject and is aimed at anyone who is making screencasts. I own it; it’s top notch.

Triumph of the Nerds on DVD – An awesome tech documentary, and I recently discovered it’s on DVD.

What My User Survey Taught Me – Insights from Patrick McKenzie. My favorite quote: “Incidentally, I don’t feel any rancor at folks who believe that everything should be free on the Internet.  I just will not accommodate your preferences.  You’re welcome to use my free competitors if they better fit your needs.”

ABtests.com – Learn more about A/B testing by examining other peoples’ A/B tests, including their take on why one out-performed the other. Many 100%+ improvements.

Ummm…What am I Signing up For? - Seriously, I still can’t figure out the purpose of this site.

I know this is going to seem like a random post, but I found a killer service and I wanted to mention it here.

I used iMemories last Christmas to transfer a dozen VHS tapes to DVD as gifts for my in-laws and the results were awesome. I also converted about a dozen VHS tapes from my high school and college track and football days. (on

I had intended for years to buy one of those USB VCRs that allows you to convert VHS to digital format, but the setup, time to convert, time to create DVD menus and burn…just never made it on my priority list.

iMemories offers hassle-free conversion of pretty much any analog medium you have (even those old slide wheels and 8mm film) to DVD, and the DVD includes chapters every few minutes, plus a color cover with frames from the video.

You ship the VHS tapes to them, and within a few weeks your video is available through an online portal where you can choose which snippets to include on the finished DVDs. The site uses a custom Flash UI that allows you to navigate and select clips to include.

I realize this is a bit off topic from the typical fare of this blog, but I was so pleased with the service I wanted to help spread the word. If you have VHS tapes in need of a good DVD home, check out iMemories.

Surely you’ve heard the news by now. Joel Spolsky is going to wrap-up his blog on its 10-year anniversary, just a few days from now.

The memories I have of Joel on Software, especially from 2001-2004, run deep. These were my formative years as a developer, and Joel published some of his best work during this time. Though his blog has been pretty quiet for a few years now, I can still remember the bolts of insight I experienced as I read those early articles; always within minutes of receiving his email announcing it had been published.

It’s as if every one of those early articles was written to turn my own experience on its head and make me re-think what I was learning as a software developer. As if every article re-shaped my thinking about the software development process.

I know he’s not going away for good; he’s a producer and producers have to produce or they go crazy. Maybe one day someone will find reams of unpublished manuscripts stuffed under his mattress in a bizarre Kafka-esque fashion. But probably not. I think Joel will be in the public eye in one form or another for many years. Even if he does turn down the nob a bit.

So Joel, thank you for the memories. Love live the king.

Concept Feedback – Free feedback for marketers, designers and Micropreneurs. Share your website and get quick feedback. Excellent resource for fast, free site reviews.

lehan. paper. design. – Need an elegant “Thank You” card for a client? Or a custom card with your logo and message? Professional and elegant designs from a paper craftsman.

HotNameList – If you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, HotNameList is like having a metal detector. It finds good domains that are available to register right now. I’ve picked up 6 keyword-heavy domain names from this site in the past two months.

ABtests.com – Quick, informative A/B tests and how they’ve turned out. An awesome resource.

Working Longer Hours Is Not A Competitively Defensible Advantage – Patrick McKenzie, a brilliant Micropreneur, is on target with this post about monetizing your time, outsourcing, automation and elimination.

Web App Business Models: User Needs and What People Pay For – “If you’re planning a web application that can’t build a business model around one or more of these needs, you may face difficulties generating sustainable revenue.”

Smart People Should Do Stupid Stuff – It’s usually the simple ideas that work.

The Two iPhone App Stores – An insightful post about the two app stores – the “simple shallow” store and the “deeper, more expensive” store. The press loves to cover the “simple, shallow” store but the “deeper” store encompasses most of the apps.

Lessons from a “Pay What You Want” Software Sale – A key takeaway: “Few people chose their price based on the perceived value of the game.  How much the person feels they can afford seems to play a much larger role in the decision than how much the game is worth.”

Lessons of Failure Blog -A well-written blog about software development and project management. Relatively new but insightful and fun to read.

Finding Great Ideas for Your Startup – Good comic series.

Download the Audiobook of Chris Anderson’s Free – For…um…free.

Free Online Audio Editor – Myna allows you to edit audio in your browser for free. We are indeed moving to the cloud. I’m amazed at the power of this tool.

I’m really into saving time, and one way I’ve found to do that is to skim books, or listen to them as abridged audiobooks when I’m on the road.

In line with this, about a year ago I found an awesome collection of summaries of the best marketing books ever (in the opinion of the book’s editor).

These are books I would never take the time to read, but I have gleaned wisdom and entertainment from the summaries. While there is no substitute for the real thing, digesting 5-10 pages is much more palatable for me than thinking of 50 or 100 books at 200+ pages each.

I’ve since had two similar books recommended to me bringing my time saving to a grand total of…a lot of time:

• The Marketing Gurus: Lessons from the Best Marketing Books of All Time
• The 100 Best Business Books of All Time: What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You
• The Best Business Books Ever: The 100 Most Influential Business Books You’ll Never Have Time to Read

Business of Software is a conference organized by Neil Davidson and Joel Spolsky, and was held this year in San Francisco. The speaking line-up is a who’s who of software bloggers and authors, including Geoffrey Moore, Paul Graham, Dharmesh Shah and Joel Spolsky.

Overall the conference was well executed, the speakers were engaging and the opportunities to meet people abounded. The conference was the second reminder in just over a month that I need to get out of the house more often and meet other developers and entrepreneurs.

After getting used to hanging out with a few hundred people with a shared passion for starting “real” software companies, riding home on the train was a let-down as I realized the excitement of the previous 3 days was over.

There were several great presentations during the conference. These highlights focus on the key points I took away from my favorite talks.

Geoffrey Moore

Author of Crossing the Chasm and four other books, Geoffrey Moore has been thinking about high-tech product development longer than most of have been doing anything on a computer.

The key take-away is that product differentiation is how you make money, and neutralization (keeping up with your competition) is how you stay in the game. You have to focus on both neutralization and differentiation, but there is a no-man’s land “gap” in between them where your effort is totally wasted. In other words, being “best in class” is a waste of energy because it means you’ve expended resources to become the best among your peers, but you are not differentiated enough from them.

Geoffrey also talked through the product adoption cycle, but this was less applicable to the products I deal with as a Micropreneur.

Paul Graham

When I moved to the east coast in 2007 I made it a goal to see Joel Spolsky and Paul Graham speak at some point. I wound up seeing Joel, but I never caught Paul when I lived in New Haven or Boston.

Paul was the only presenter who didn’t use slides, and read from what looked like a tattered piece of binder paper he’d pulled from his back pocket. He spoke about 21 trends you should bet on, and 5 you shouldn’t. I won’t run through all of them (I’m sure he’ll publish them in essay form soon), but my favorites were:

Trends to Bet On (excerpt)

• Software
• Efficient markets
• Small companies
• Super good customer service
• Server based apps
• Open source
• The iPhone
• Design
• Real-time
• Founders

Trends Not to Bet On

• Credentials granted by institutions
• Business school
• The government changing
• Copyright
• Anything that depends on the restricted flow of information

Dharmesh Shah

Dharmesh’s talk was my favorite since he left me with a full page of to-do items. An excellent presentation from a brilliant guy.

He spoke about risk (development, market, financial and execution), social media, how you must create content (most likely through a blog) to win in today’s “search” economy. He also looked at calculating the cost of a customer acquisition (COCA) and a customer’s lifetime value (LTV), as well as the customer happiness index (CHI) which is a good indicator of how long they will stay your customer.

Overall, Dharmesh’s talk was filled with behind the scenes metrics from his company, HubSpot, and actionable points for SEO, Twitter, and social media.

Kathy Sierra

“Don’t build a better [X]. Build a better user of [X].”

Give your user a better experience out of the box, as they are learning, and once they are experts with your product. Doing so will build loyal fans and create powerful word of mouth.

Joel Spolsky

Joel’s talk was the same one he gave at StackOverflow DevDays, which I attended and enjoyed about a month ago.

His basic premise is that building new features really does add value to your product. Simplicity is mostly a way to avoid looking like you’re releasing a product that lacks features. Adding features without making the product too complex creates real value for your customers and produces revenue for your company.

photos by http://www.flickr.com/photos/jmpk/

Yep, that’s me (photo by jmpk).

Somehow I allowed myself to get talked into doing the Pecha Kucha at the 2009 Business of Software conference in San Francisco (seriously though, I want to thank Jeff Atwood for convincing me to go through with it).

Pecha Kucha is 20 slides, 20 seconds each…in 6 minutes 40 seconds you are done. And it’s twice as hard as it sounds.

I hope to share a video of the talk with you in the coming weeks, but for now here are a few resources I mentioned during the talk that I want to provide to anyone interested.

Overview
The presentation was titled Marketing is Design: Three Words that Increased Sales 1000%, and was based on an a post from about 8 months back.

Given the terse nature of the Pecha Kucha I focused the talk on the point that you should always be testing, and talked very briefly about how Google’s Website Optimizer allows you to do that quite easily. I also included some examples of smart companies and individuals who test.

Slides
Available here
(note: they are timed to automatically flip every 20 seconds).

Links

• Google Website Optimizer
• Getting Started with Google Website Optimizer
• Google’s A/B Testing with Gmail
• Frank Lutz

Screencast
I recorded a screencast that I mentioned during the talk. It’s for anyone who wants to setup an A/B test using Google Website Optimizer. It’s a lot faster than you think; you can setup your first test in under 5 minutes.

Hot off the press, hear the hosts of the Startup Success Podcast interview Mike Taber and I about the Micropreneur Academy. You can download the MP3 here.

P.S. I did a written interview a few weeks ago for LocationIndependent.com. You can find it here.

Work Less, Get More Done: Analytics for Maximizing Productivity – Patrick McKenzie is the embodiment of Micropreneurship; his focus on marketing, metrics and outsourcing is nothing short of impressive. This is a great post on how working hard is not a defensible advantage.

Making Open Source Convenient: JumpBox – A startup focused on making it dead-simple to get started with open source applications, they create virtual machines completely pre-configured to just start and go (including versions that runs on Amazon EC2). If you’re having trouble installing an open source app, JumpBox is your answer.

What a Startup is Really Like – Another great Paul Graham essay. My favorite points:

• 12. It’s Hard to Get Users. If you make something where the challenges are mostly technical, you can rely on word of mouth, like Google did…but with other types of startups you may win less by features and more by deals and marketing.
• 17. The Value of Community. A surprising number of founders said what surprised them most about starting a startup was the value of community [hanging around other people also starting a company]

A Story of a Launch Disaster…Fast-Food Style – While the truth of this tale is dubious, it’s still a good story of doing the unexpected to thwart your competition.

CrossLoop – Mom calling you for tech support? Send her to CrossLoop, affordable online computer help.

Coolest Business Card Ever – How am I not stealing this design right now?

Know Thy Audience – And look at creative funding sources.

How to Avoid Being Outsourced or Open Sourced – Pointed out to me after my post about competing with open source competition.

On Monday I attended Stack Overflow DevDays in San Francisco. Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood are hosting this series of one-day conferences as a way to get alpha-geeks out of the office to hear experts talk about new technologies ranging from Python to ASP.NET MVC. It was the best $99 (including lunch and coffee) I’ve spent in quite some time.

The highlight of the day was that I finally had the pleasure of meeting Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror and Stack Overflow. We’ve emailed several times over the years but never had the chance to meet face to face. And yes, he’s as smart as he sounds on his blog and podcast. And a super nice guy to boot.

Wireless Internet
Given Joel’s recent rant about trouble with wireless internet at conferences, I thought it comical that there was no wi-fi available for conference participants (and no way to get a hard-wired connection). AT&T must have seen a spike in usage in that are of S.F. as everyone pulled out their iPhones to check email and Twitter.

Topics
Let me start by saying that Joel Spolsky is an outlier. Like him or not, the guy is a genius. He knows how to capture peoples’ attention in both his writing and his presentations.

The conference opened with a keynote from Joel on power vs. simplicity. It was an examination of UI complexity and a more thorough treatment than a post I wrote on the subject a few years back. And of course Joel’s presentation included his typical humor, twists and entertainment value. Joel is all about entertainment, which makes you want to pay attention to everything he says. So much that it was a tough transition when Joel left the stage to make way for the next speaker.

After the keynote we heard talks on Python, iPhone development, FogBugz (Joel again, though this time in his less entertaining “demo mode”), ASP.NET MVC (from Scott Hanselman who also knows how to work a crowd), Stack Overflow (Jeff Atwood), Qt (a language that runs on Nokia phones), Android and jQuery.

Re-connecting
I work from home and since I live in Fresno I don’t get out much. The 7 hours of driving (round-trip) was tough to justify simply for tech content, but the bonus of the day was connecting with several developers including a guy I worked with in 2001, a developer of a former client, someone I had never met, and of course, Mr. Atwood.

Closing Thoughts
It’s easy to forget the impact of face-to-face contact. I sit in front of my laptop for days, nay weeks on end and never see another person who is remotely interested in technology. The conference was a well-needed reminder that there are other alpha-geeks in the world, and that being around one another generates excitement and energy that is impossible to duplicate in any other forum.

The conference was also a wake up call that I need to get out from behind my desk and make these face-to-face connections more often. So I’m in the process of booking speaking engagements over the next several months on how developers can launch and market their first product.

If you’re affiliated with a group in California who might be interested in a free speaker, please drop me a line.

Startup Marketing Advice from Balsamiq Studio – With the startup success he’s achieved in the past 18 months, Peldi seems to know what he’s doing.

Hierarchy of the Successful Independent Software Developer – Freelancer -> Consultant -> MicroISV -> Micropreneur.

“Failure” Nike Commercial – “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” – Michael Jordan

Things I Learned the Hard Way – Several related posts from Derek Powazek. Titles include Unsolicited Advice is a Valuable Clue, Save the Touchy-Feely for the Redwoods, Someone’s Always Listening and Never Piss Off the Sound Guy.

The Funniest Amazon Reviews Ever – 1,255 of them.

“The Office” ERP Parody – An exceptional parody of the British version of The Office. For a while I was trying to figure out if some of the actors were from the original series.

The Future of the Web is Small – A case for Micropreneurship.

Top 200 Blogs for Developers – I’ve moved from 40 to 88. I need to increase my posting schedule.

Paymo Time Tracking – A well-designed, free time tracking app with one of the coolest screenshot galleries I’ve seen.

Academic Earth – Video lectures, mostly math, science and entrepreneurship from Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, NIH, Princeton, Stanford and Yale.

Cool Lip Dub – Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger – The startup life. “We did this video one night after work. We are a company called Connected Ventures, a group of friends who work for: Vimeo, CollegeHumor, Busted Tees, and Defunker.”

The Beatles: Rock Band – 09.09.09. ‘Nuff said.