Software by Rob

The Software Product Myth

Rob — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:30:40 +0000

Most developers start as salaried employees, slogging through code and loving it because they never imagined a job could be challenging, educational, and downright fun. Where else can you learn new things every day, play around with computers, and get paid for it? Aside from working at Best Buy.

A certain percentage of developers become unhappy with salaried development over time (typically it’s shortly after they’re asked to manage people, or maintain legacy code), and they dream of breaking out of the cube walls and running their own show. Some choose consulting, but many more inevitably decide to build a software product.

“After all,” they think “you code it up and sell it a thousand times - it’s like printing your own money! I build apps all the time, how hard could it be to launch a product?”

Against All Odds
And most often the developer who chooses to become a consultant (whether as a freelancer or working for a company), does okay. She doesn’t have a ton of risk and she gets paid for the hours she works, so as long as she has consulting gigs she can live high on the hog

But developers who make the leap to develop a product are another story. Building a product involves a large up-front time investment, and as a result is far riskier than becoming a consultant because you have to wait months to find out if your effort will generate revenue. In addition, growing a product to the point of providing substantial income is a long, arduous road.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you spend 6 months of your spare time and you now own a web-based car key locator that sells 100 copies per month at $25 a pop. At long last, after months of working nights and weekends, spending every waking moment poring over your code, marketing, selling, and burning the midnight oil, you’re living the dream of a MicroISV.

Except for one thing.

The Inmates are Running the Asylum
In our completely un-contrived scenario you’re now making $2500/month from your product, which doesn’t allow you to quit your day job. So you work 8-10 hours during the day writing code for someone else, and come home each night to a slow but steady stream of support emails. And the worst part is that if you’ve built your software right the majority of the issues will not be problems with your product, but degraded OS installations, crazy configurations, a customer who doesn’t know how to double-click, etc…

The next step is to figure out, between the 5-10 hours per week you’re spending on support, and the 40-50 hours per week you spend at work, how you’re going to find time to add new features. And the kicker is that support burden actually worsens with time because your customer base grows. After 1 month you have 100 customers with potential problems, after a year, 1,200.

And yes, the person you decided to sell to even though they complained about the high price ($25) and then couldn’t get it installed on their Win95 machine so you spent 3 hours on the phone with them and finally got it working only through an act of ritual sacrifice is still hanging around, emailing you weekly wondering when the next release is coming out with his feature requests included (requests that not a single one of your other 1199 customers have conceived of).

But you persevere, and manage to slog your way through the incoming support requests and get started on new features.

What you find is that ongoing development, as with any legacy system, is much slower than green field development. You’re now tied to legacy code and design decisions, and you soon realize this isn’t what you signed up for when you had that brilliant flash of insight that people need web-based help locating their keys.

It’s about this time that support emails start going unanswered, releases stop, and the product withers on the vine. It may wind up for sale on SitePoint, or it may be relegated to the bone yard of failed software products.

The Upside
The flip side to all of this is what you’ve already heard on the blogs of successful product developers.

Once a product hits critical mass you’ve conquered the hardest part of the equation. After that the exponential leverage of software products kicks in and you can live large on your empire of web-based unlocking-device locator applications. It’s a recurring revenue stream that can grow far beyond what you would make as a consultant, all the while creating balance sheet value meaning one day you can sell it for stacks of proverbial cash and retire.

This is unlike your consultant buddy, whose consulting firm is worth about 42 cents (he had an unused stamp on his desk) once he decides to retire.

But there is a dip before you get to this place of exponential leverage and proverbial cash. A big dip. And if you can get through it once, it’s more likely that you’ll be able to get through it with your next product. And the one after that.

Once you make it to the other side, you’ve learned what it takes to launch and maintain a product, and next time you will have a monumentally better chance of success because you are now a more savvy software entrepreneur.

Congratulations! Go buy yourself a nice bottle of wine and sit back, relax…and enjoy answering your support emails.

I’m in a Book! Blog Blazers: 40 Top Bloggers Share Their Secrets

Rob — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 06:30:00 +0000

Blog Blazers is a book where “40 Top Bloggers Share Their Secrets to Creating a High-Profile, High-Traffic, and High-Profit Blog.” And amid the likes if Seth Godin, Eric Sink, Aaron Wall, and Jeff Atwood is yours truly (chapter 34).

It’s an easy book to pick up for a few minutes at a time since each chapter (comprising one interview) is only 5 or 6 pages. Many of the ideas presented are unique to this book, and I’ve been keeping a running list of changes I plan to implement on this blog.

The book hit the shelves last week. You can buy it from Amazon, or from the Blog Blazers website.

Book Review: Finding a New Career that Values Your IT Knowledge

Rob — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 12:05:05 +0000

A few months ago I received a review copy of Debugging Your Information Technology Career: A Compass to New and Rewarding Fields that Value Computer Knowledge. I haven’t written many book reviews on this blog, but this book caught my attention as it relates to some of my past posts on job dissatisfaction and the potential for an IT job crunch.

I’m intrigued by the unique concept of this book: to provide alternatives to IT workers looking to change careers, but who want to leverage their existing technical knowledge.

The book lists 20 positions and includes an overview of each, a job description, an example of the typical workday, advice on where to look for this type of job, and a look at how the job is likely to hold up to outsourcing and a recession.

A few of the job titles include:

Product Manager
Systems Engineer
Technology Due Diligence Analyst
Technology Insurance Underwriter
Intellectual Property Lawyer

For someone looking to leave software development, this book would serve as a good starting point for additional research. I would not recommend it to the casual reader (the text is a bit dry), but if you are seriously considering leaving programming it’s a good way to get an idea of where you might find refuge.

~~If you’re in this position drop me an email and I will send you my copy.~~ (sent)

Should You Build or Buy Your Micro-ISV?

Rob — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:46:30 +0000

Micro-ISVs. I’ve been contemplating the issue of building vs. buying for the past four years.

I’ve been on both sides of the coin: I’ve purchased 10 profit-oriented software products or websites, and built three.

Knowing what it takes to develop the initial version of a non-trivial software product (read: hundreds of hours), I’ve become a fan of buying. This is based on two factors:

I have no spare time and a bit of spare money
Hmm…no, I guess #1 is the only reason

As a software consultant I’m booked full-time and I bill a reasonable hourly rate. So to spend 348 hours (2 months) building a product means I’m approaching a mid-five figure investment into a software product. That’s not play money; those are real dollars that don’t wind up in my pocket.

And I don’t have the confidence in my ability to know a market well enough that I would drop that kind of money on an untested product idea when there are less risky alternatives.

Looking at the products I’ve bought and built, none of them required skills beyond that of a mid-level developer. Sure, there are products that are more complex, but let’s be honest, building an invoicing system does not involve insanely complex algorithms and coding chops. Most successful Micro-ISV products (and a lot of not-so-Micro-ISV products) could have been built by a few solid mid-level developers.

With this in mind, spending 348 hours of my time doesn’t seem like the best business decision when I can:

Hire someone to build the application (in my case, use the team I already have in place), or
Find a proven product that may already have a customer base, sales website, etc… that I can buy for less than I can build it

You probably think I’m nuts, preaching “buy” over “build” to a group of software developers. So let’s take a closer look at the scenarios:

Building It
I love writing software, so this has historically been my path of choice. However, the amount of money (based on lost consulting hours) I would spend on a 1.0, plus building a sales site, documentation, SEO, pay per click (PPC) campaign, etc… would be at least $40,000.

I have faith in my ability to build and market software, but that’s a lot of faith to put into something that’s generating zero cash. You’d be nuts to buy a software product with no revenue for $40,000.

However, if you want to run a Micro-ISV because you enjoy writing code, or you have a lot of non-billable spare time, then this is a viable option.

But I must caution you - laptops around the world are filled with the remnants of half-built products. Committing 200+ hours of your spare time to build and launch a product is no joke. Writing code 50 hours per week you would have a 200 hour project launched in 4 weeks…no problem!

But if you’re coding in your spare time you’ll be lucky to get in 10 hours of coding per week, and your productivity will be low because it will be 2 hour blocks when you’re already tired from schlepping mindless reports all day for “the man.” Trust me - I’ve done it. It’s not easy.

Soon that 200 hour project turns into more than 20 weeks of your free time…almost 6 months. The first month is a breeze, it’s the last five that’ll kill ya!

Hiring It Out
Hiring someone to build your software is a good middle ground, and allows you to maintain some control over the technical piece without it sucking the coding life from your veins.

The advantage of hiring out product development is that it gives you time to build the sales site, write documentation, focus on SEO, marketing, PPC advertising set-up, payment processing, and the hundred other things I’m forgetting to mention.

If you’re doing things right, the effort to get your product built is around 50% of the total time it takes to launch a Micro-ISV.

I’ve found success in outsourcing code and graphic design, and handling everything else myself. “Everything else” means the business side of things…the piece where you will likely learn the most, where you can bring the most value, and that you can’t easily outsource.

And think about it…a lot of people can build a good invoicing application. A lot.

But how many can work the necessary marketing angles, form partnerships, create a profitable pay per click campaign, and build a compelling sales site? Finding someone who can execute on these is much more difficult (and more expensive) than finding a developer who can build your application.

The single most important factor in the success of a Micro-ISV is marketing and sales, not the software itself.

In no way am I arguing for mediocrity in software development - your software has to get the job done. However, don’t believe for a minute that great software beats great marketing. It never happens.

There’s a reason Bob Walsh doesn’t help developers write better applications. He helps educate them on sales and marketing.

FogBugz is good, but probably not the best bug tracking software on the market. Yet I bet it outsells most of its competitors by a huge margin based on marketing.

If you don’t know how to work the marketing angles, form the partnerships, and do the other things I mentioned above you’re going to need to:

learn fast,
find a partner, or
stick to the day job.

Seriously…building (or buying) a great application is not going to get you there.

With this in mind, let’s take a wild swing at the costs involved in this approach:

The graphic design and HTML will run from $500-$1500 if you offshore (optional depending on your personal view). Doing it in the U.S. will cost $2,000-6,000.

Two months of development (a safe estimate when hiring someone to build a small product from scratch) will run $14k-$21k here in the states, or around $7k if you offshore.

Total you’re looking at $16k-$27k in the states, $8-9k if you offshore. These are obviously very rough numbers based on a typical Micro-ISV product requiring two months of development.

The potential pitfalls of this approach are obvious: if the developer is bad, you get software that doesn’t work. A key strategy here is to screen your developer carefully and only hire really good ones.

Also, design the DB and screen mock-ups yourself. Not only will you get much closer to the product you envision, you’ll be able to maintain it in the long-term.

Buying It
This is the approach I started favoring about two years ago. It started with my interest in buying (and later selling) domain names and websites. I soon realized that there are bargains to be had when buying a product or site that’s already making money.

DotNetInvoice (my ASP.NET billing product) is a good example - I purchased the product, sales site, payment processing code, search engine rankings, and a small customer base for about 20% of what it would have taken me to build it, and yes, even cheaper than I could have hired someone to build it. It was built in Florida by two professional developers in their spare time. Quite a deal, indeed.

The reason these products and websites sell for such low valuations is that the market values revenue, and most of the product developers don’t have the marketing and sales knowledge to bring their product to its full revenue potential.

This means there are completed software products and websites for sale, selling for literally pennies on the dollar compared to your cost to build them. I realize this sounds like a late night infomercial, but believe me, it’s true. And how much would you expect to pay for this information? Just kidding…

The pitfalls of this approach:

You’re taking on risk in buying a product you didn’t build
You can’t search for a specific type of product; for the most part you’re limited to what’s for sale

As an example, I didn’t go looking for an invoicing system. I happened across DotNetInvoice and made an unsolicited offer. If you read my original account of the purchase you’ll know there were some early hurdles that I had to overcome. But once I worked out those kinks I’ve never doubted that I made the right decision.

One aspect I really like about buying a product is that it forces you, right off the bat, to not think about code.

As developers we want to spend all of our time working on technology because it’s where we’re most comfortable. But as I mentioned above the real hard work, and where you should spend the majority of your time, is on marketing, PPC, SEO, and partnerships. Buying a product forces you to think like this because the thing’s already built.

If you don’t want to spend the majority of your spare time on non-technical issues like marketing, I suggest partnering with someone who does, or sticking to the day job. The day job will probably pay better, anyway.

Dell is Dead, Long Live the King

Rob — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:38:47 +0000

I’m one of the last hold-outs from the early days. You know, one of those crochety old developers who still buys Dell because they make the best computers at the lowest cost. Last night was the last straw in a series of events that have spelled the end of their reign for me.

I recently purchased a brand new Inspiron 1525 and ran into a number of problems after the order was placed that resulted in a 6-week delay in receiving it. I killed at least three or four hours with customer service, and several reps were actually quite rude on the phone. It was very interesting to have them give me attitidue and then to have no recourse (i.e., I asked to talk to their supervisor and they kept saying he was not available. I called back, waited on hold for another 20 minutes and talked to a supervisor who totally blew me off). That put me on the edge.

Then last night, I restarted my laptop and saw this:

My six-week old hard-drive is failing.

Sure, I have backups, but six weeks ago I spent close to 20 hours installing Vista 64 and the other 40 apps I use on a regular basis. Needless to say I don’t have another 20 hours to kill. But after 30 minutes on the phone with an unhelpful (and downright nasty) Dell tech support rep, a new drive is on its way. Don’t invite me to your house this weekend; you know what I’ll be doing.

Next time it will be Sony or Toshiba. Or does anyone have other suggestions on good brands?

Dell is dead. Long live the king.

Update
The day after this post went live I received a call from a Dell Level 3 Tech Support Specialist who was asked to contact me by Dell Corporate. The guy was a “Fixer,” and a good one at that.

The new hard drive had arrived by 7am that morning and the Fixer walked me through the install process and asked a few detailed questions about my previous experience with tech support. He let me rant for a few minutes, apologized, and got my system running again very quickly. He was insanely knowledgable - by far the best tech support person I had ever spoken with at Dell. Level 3, indeed.

He gave me his direct email and phone number and said if I ran into any problems to contact him. I re-installed Windows and my other apps in about 14 hours this time around, and was ready to work by the following Monday.

So at least one big company is listening. At the same time, if you don’t find a company with great customer service, or you don’t have a public soap box through which to voice your complaints, you’re going to be forever relegated to poor customer service prison.

MSDN Webcast: REST and Windows Communication Foundation 3.5

Rob — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 17:17:38 +0000

A good friend of mine is being featured on this week’s MSDN webast geekSpeak. If you are interested in hearing more about REST and WCF 3.5 from someone with a lot of experience, check out the live webcast tomorrow (September 3) at Noon Pacific Time (you can even call-in since the show is recorded live!). More info available here: MSDN Webcast: REST and Windows Communication Foundation 3.5 with Adnan Masood.

From the geekSpeak site:

The geekSpeak webcast series brings you industry experts in a “talk-radio” format hosted by developer evangelists from Microsoft. This week, distributed systems guru Adnan Masood introduces the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style and its design principles, and discusses how they can be implemented using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) 3.5. Adnan offers guidance and takes questions on when to choose a RESTful design over SOAP-based services and how WCF fits into the spectrum of Microsoft technologies that include ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) and ASP.NET MVC.

I’m dying to call in and ask how the adoption of WCF 3.5 relates to John McCain’s decision to select Sarah Palin as his VP.

One of the Funniest Code Comments I’ve Read

Rob — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:30:22 +0000

From a production app:

// You would think this would be as easy as using chkSend.Checked.
// But no. Despite what Microsoft says about the page life cycle,
// the Checked property is not set at this point in the life cycle.
// Maybe it doesn’t ever get set at all because of the repeater.
// I don’t think anyone really knows. It’s one of life’s great
// mysteries, like whether a falling tree makes noise if there’s
// no one around to hear it. I think it does, but just like the
// Checked property ever being set, I can’t prove it.

My New Rig

Rob — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:14:31 +0000

In the past 3 months I’ve completely revamped my development machine. I purchased a new external monitor, laptop, external keyboard, and printer. I figured the hours I spent researching and purchasing might benefit someone else looking to upgrade.

The New Laptop (Dell Inspiron 1525) - Dual core 2.4GHz processor, 4GB Ram, 320GB HD, Vista 64-bit. This thing screams. I’ve gone back and forth over the years between Inspirons and Latitudes, and while Inspirons have more consumer-friendly aspects (such as audio controls on the keyboard and a memory card reader), the placement of ports leaves a lot to be desired (Latitudes have all ports in the rear, while Inspirons have them all over the place). This time around I chose an Inspiron for the screen quality and price. Total cost was around $1450 including a 3-year at-home warranty.

The New Display (DELL SP2208WFP) - 22″ widescreen. 1680 x 1050 native resolution. Awesome brightness. Built-in webcam. The only downside is it doesn’t swivel 90 degrees (helpful for viewing long documents). Nonetheless, a steal at the sale price of $299 (now $339). I ran three displays for a while (2 externals + my laptop screen), but after I upgraded to Vista 64-bit my USB2DVI video adapter stopped working (no 64-bit drivers) so I’m back to two displays. I’ll probably buy a DualHead2Go in the near future, although fitting another 22″ monitor on my desk is going to be challenging.

The New OS (Vista Ultimate 64-bit) - Oy vey…transferring to a new laptop normally takes about 8 hours. This time, due to the 64-bit OS, it took me closer to 20. In addition, I lost the ability to sync with my Treo, the ability to use my Treo as a broadband cellular modem, and my ethernet card doesn’t work (although wireless is fine). I read a lot of reports on how Vista 64 is ready for primtime, and my comment is: “mostly.” Many peripherals did not work right away and this added up to several hours of troubleshooting.

I like Vista quite a bit (it’s fast with 4GB of RAM), but I have mixed feelings about the 64-bit upgrade path. However, if you want to utilize more than 3GB of RAM it’s your only choice; 32-bit Vista will not support more than 3GB. Of course, most of us remember when hard drives weren’t even 3GB. Crazy.

The New Keyboard (BTC 6300C) - I have long been a fan of laptop keyboards. I love the responsiveness of the keys and I type much faster on a laptop kayboard (which is due to the types of keys used, called “scissor keys”). I use an external keyboard since my laptop is elevated for optimal screen-viewing ergonomics (see picture below). After using a clunky $10 Dell keyboard for the past year it suddenly occurred to me that someone out there might just make an external keyboard with scissor keys. Lo and behold, there are several. I settled on the BTC 6300C, and love it. About $33 with shipping.

The New Printer (Samsung Clx-3175fn) - I looked everywhere for a color laser with built-in networking and a feeder tray. This is the only one I found under $600, and it was a steal at $299 from Office Depot (normally $399). I’ve had it for 2 weeks and I’m loving it. A huge improvement over my 5 ppm HP Photosmart.

My Rig. Simple, productive, and…gray. Wait, is that iTunes on the external monitor? Back to work!

The view from my office (note downtown Boston in the distance)

More About Selling a Micro-ISV, PDFs in Office 2007, and Microsoft’s Boston Concept Development Center

Rob — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 13:15:28 +0000

A Tale of Selling a MicroISV - My guest post on “Mr. MicroISV” Bob Walsh’s blog, 47hats.

Create PDFs from Office 2007 - You probably know this already, but you can generate PDFs from Office 2007 using this free download from Microsoft. This is news to me since I just upgraded to Office 2007 this week. I also upgraded to Vista 64-bit, which doesn’t run the software I’ve typically used to create PDFs. Also note, this capability was originally built into Office 2007 but Adobe threatened to sue and Microsoft removed it. Lame move on Adobe’s part.

Where Do Babies Come From as Explained By A Software Engineer

Microsoft Opens a Boston R&D Facility - More evidence that Boston/Cambridge is a good place to be in software.

M.I.T. (notice my son and I at the bottom center)

Does Anyone Know of a Real Software Apprenticeship?

Rob — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:58:17 +0000

A Software by Rob reader writes:

Today, after typing in “learning .net through apprenticeship” into my Live search bar, I was pleased to see as the number 1 hit: Software Training Sucks: Why We Need to Roll it Back 1,000 Years … . As I read the article, I found myself nodding in agreement and wishing for a solution. You see, as a programmer who hasn’t done what I would consider real programming since back in the BASIC and COBOL days, I’ve been struggling trying to pull myself up by my bootstraps learning C# by meticulously going through books and online material

I am right now in a position where I’ve made a commitment to stop what I’m doing to devote full time to learning a new programming model and I chose .NET over the LAMP stack. Since publishing your article, have you heard of anyone who has gotten creative with apprenticing new programmers?

A very interesting apprenticeship model I’ve encountered in the past few years, albeit in another industry, is one in the entertainment industry. My daughter had an aptitude for audio recording and, through research, found a company out in L.A. that does recording apprenticeships. She was chosen as an apprentice and within 10 months they were pleased with her work and hired her full-time as an assistant engineer.

Is there any reason in your opinion that such a model (or something close to it) could not work apprenticing .NET developers?

I haven’t heard of any real apprenticeship programs for .NET developers. I think it would be an excellent model for improving development skills, building morale, etc… but it would take a very special company, probably one run by a software developer, to even consider such a thing.

Has anyone heard of such a company? [Consider this permission to shamelessly plug your company]

Trading Places with Indian Outsourcers, MIT/Stanford Venture Videos, and Intelligent Syntax Highlighting

Rob — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:00:13 +0000

Trading Places with Indian Outsourcers (video) - An interesting look at a programmer who loses his job to offshoring and travels to India to get his job back. From the TV show 30 Days.

MIT/Stanford Venture Lab Videos - A collection of videos (updated monthly) presented by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab, including: The Rise of Crowdsourcing, Future of Content Consumption, Shaking the Money Tree of Multi-Platform Social Networks, and Green Tech for the Consumer Market.

Prettify Code Syntax Highlighter - “A JavaScript module and CSS file that allows syntax highlighting of source code snippets in an html page.” If you listen to the stackoverflow podcast you’ve already heard Jeff Atwood talk about this tool. It’s impressive, especially since it’s written in JS. Make up a fake programming language and it will infer the syntax and highlight it. Seems like the first sign of the impending launch of SkyNet.

We Hate Quickbooks - A smart viral marketing play by the developers of Less Accounting. From the site’s description: “This site shows the unfiltered timeline of Twitter users who ‘tweet’ the word ‘quickbooks.’ We’re showing the good with the bad, so decide for yourself!” (link via Matt Youell)

Increasing Conversion Rates & Looking for Suggestions

Rob — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 01:49:32 +0000

I’m back from 10-days in L.A. where my wife received her PhD in Psychology after six years of grueling work. Yes, Dr. Walling is now in the house.

I’m launching a decent-sized project tomorrow (about 22 person-months of work), and moving to Boston on Monday - thus the dearth of posts lately. But tonight, instead of doing something important, I’m blogging. Since I don’t have a lot of time I’m going to rattle off a few things I’ve been thinking about:

What’s New
I’m on a kick to increase revenue from a few of my websites. Aside from my ASP.NET Invoicing Application, I run a blog directory submission tool and an e-commerce site.

My blog directory submission service receives 900 organic visitors per month without fail, and has for 3+ years, but only makes around $60 a month. The same goes for my e-com site, except that gets around 5,000 organic visitors (it’s on the first page of google for some generic keywords), and closes only 3-5 orders per month.

Those numbers are despicable, so I’m on a quest to improve the conversion rate of both sites, and will be sharing that process with you in the coming months.

Looking for Suggestions
I’m looking for a term to describe something I’ve been thinking about: a software/web developer who uses his (or her) talents to build, buy, and leverage websites and software applications to create multiple recurring income streams. Sort of a cross between a webmaster, a Micro-ISV and a website flipper.

It’s like a Micro-ISV in that it’s one person, but the “products” he makes money from are not limited to downloadable software. The “products” can be software as a service (SaaS) applications, e-commerce sites, interactive learning environments…anything you would need technical skills to implement that provides real value for a group of people (i.e., not these crappy Adsense sites that clutter search results with poorly-written ESL content). This developer would typically have a portfolio of sites/apps he’s working on to stave off boredom and ensure a stable, recurring income.

I’m trying to describe that in less than the two paragraphs used above, and here’s what I’ve come up:

Solo Entrepreneur (too vague)
Solo Software Entrepreneur (too long)
Web Entrepreneur (too lame)
Internet Entrepreneur (also vague but my current favorite, even though it sounds like a term Dan Kennedy or Yanik Silver would use)

Yes, this is a somewhat random question, but I think I’m going somewhere with it.

Any suggestions?

ASP.NET Developers: Why Not to Use Parentheses in Directory Names

Rob — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 01:12:01 +0000

A friend of mine wrote the other day:

If you include parentheses ( ) anywhere in the directory path of a website, the error list in Visual Studio 2005 SP1 will not report the File/Line number/Column number for any compile time errors in the website project.

This has been a known issue since at least last year (I found blog posts dating from back then). One of the developers here [at his current place of employment] reported it to Microsoft months ago when they were on-site and nothing happened. I asked about it again last week after spending a couple of hours tracking down an error, so he opened a support ticket for it. A week later MS gets back to him and says “change the parenthesis to brackets and it will work fine.”

Except that we are on 3.x of the application and it’s all in MS Team Foundation Server (TFS), and TFS doesn’t allow you to rename a project (according to the guy I’m working with).

First of all, ouch.

Secondly, can anyone confirm or deny that you can’t rename a project in TFS?

Third, if you can’t rename a project in TFS…Microsoft, this is lame…fix it!

LinkedIn PDF Button as a Resume, Sarcastic ecards, Writing Code for Obama, Cities & Ambition

Rob — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:35:54 +0000

The LinkedIn PDF Button is the New Resume - Another post supporting my theory of the impending extinction of MS Word resumes. The best line:

Finally, after many years of wondering how to go about that, an opportunity to dabble on the side has presented itself. The first step was to hand off a resume. Hrm. I don’t even keep a resume anymore. I mean, how can I? I’m the blog is the resume guy.

Cities and Ambition - Paul Graham’s new essay bodes well for my move to Boston. I like that Paul’s best writing has nothing to do with software. Plus he’s really, really smart.

PHP Developer Opening in Obama’s Campaign - Write software, change Washington.

someecards.com | ecards for when you care enough to hit send - Sarcastic and often hilarious ecards from one of the writers of the Onion.

SomaFM: Commercial-Free Internet Radio - With several instrumental stations this site has some good coding tunes. Coming to you straight from my homeland, San Francisco.

Why an NDA (or Any Small Contract) is Worth Your Time

Rob — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:15:57 +0000

A comment from Warren on my recent post Lessons Learned “Selling” My Micro-ISV (about my ASP.NET billing product, DotNetInvoice) brought up an important issue and a common misconception about NDAs:

Is an NDA even worth the time of writing it up?

Unless what you’re selling is worth the better part of a million USD, all you’re going hear from a lawyer is “it’s not worth taking it to court” (i.e. legal fees will eat everything before you get a bite)

A wise man once told me “We don’t write contracts for when we go to court, we write them to keep us out of court.”

In the case of small dollar contracts like an NDA for a $10,000 software product, a sales contract for a $5,000 website, or a $20,000 software development contract, the idea is not to win a court battle, but to accomplish two things:

To communicate the terms of the agreement with crystal clarity. Most people want to do the right thing, and having a signed document is enough to keep the vast majority of people on the right side of the fence.
In case of a breach, a contract is there to convince the other person (or their lawyer) that you will win a court battle. If you have someone dead to rights they will not go to court because you will be able to sue for damages plus your court costs. This is why there are so many out of court settlements; one of the parties thinks they are going to lose and decide to pay damages instead of going to court and losing and paying for the whole mess. Indeed, this is the true power of a contract.

Lessons Learned “Selling” My Micro-ISV

Rob — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:28:45 +0000

Those of you following the chronicles of my ASP.NET billing product know that I purchased it about 16 months ago and after putting in hundreds of hours cleaning up the code and growing revenue, I offered it for sale to free up time for this blog and pursue another potential opportunity (that has since gone by the wayside, as these things are apt to do).

Within a week of my “for sale” post I received 20 email inquiries, sent out nearly that many NDAs, distributed 13 sales packets (including a detailed description of the product with all the relevant data, and a Google Analytics PDF) to those who returned signed NDAs, and spent about 10 hours answering questions via email. I set a deadline for offers to keep the process from dragging on, and by the time the deadline passed I had three suitable offers on my desk. Two of them were nearly identical, with a down payment and monthly payments.

The third was something I hadn’t expected.

Good Developers
In my 9 years as a professional developer I’ve worked with at least a hundred developers, but I can count on one hand the people I would recruit if I were starting a company - these are the best software developers I’ve worked with. Most are not great because of their pyrotechnic coding skills; they’re great because of their non-technical chops (future-oriented, ultra-reliable, attention to detail, and smart).

When I put DotNetInvoice on the auction block I was contacted by a developer named Jeremy whom I worked with from 2000-2003 (and on a few small projects since then). We worked closely on a number of projects, pulled a few all-nighters, and wrote more software than many of the four (or more) person teams I’ve worked with since. Jeremy is one of the aforementioned developers that I would count on my one hand.

So Jeremy called to make an offer for DotNetInvoice, but he had some concerns. He was fine with the coding aspects of the project, but questioned whether he had the time to get up to speed on everything it takes to run a Micro-ISV given that he hasn’t done much in the way of shrinkwrapped software, SEO, and marketing. After a few conversations he brought up the idea of buying in as a partner.

Partnerships
I’m wary of partnerships for a few reasons. I’ve worked solo for years and I like the control, the ability to make decisions when and how I want, and the fact that I answer to no one except my clients/customers. Partnerships inevitably bring a loss of control and create many unknowns due to the fact that you’re working with another person, typically someone you don’t know as well as you should when you start the partnership (”You’ve been to jail for what?!”).

Having worked with Jeremy for thousands of hours I have a good read on his strengths and weaknesses, which means many of the scary unknowns of forming a partnership are a little less scary and a little less unknown. And I have to admit that the prospect of being able to share the ongoing support and development burden was enticing. To top it off, although the the other two cash offers were over my minimum asking price, they were not what I was hoping for.

So I mulled it over for a few days, talked to a few friends and colleagues, and decided that the partnership offered the best terms: I get a small bit of up front cash, retain partial ownership, and get to focus on the pieces of the business I enjoy (and where I do the most good).

We still have the complications that come with a partnership (potential conflicts, loss of control, things falling through the cracks), but the thought of keeping the product I’ve worked so hard to build and having more time for other endeavors is very, very appealing. And the fact that I’m going out of town next week and I don’t have to spend a moment thinking about answering support emails is priceless.

Although not what I anticipated, my gut tells me the product will be far better with two experienced people working on it.

Next Steps
We recently finished hashing out the contract, and expect to release the much needed next version, with much sweat from Jeremy, in the next few weeks.

Do I wish it had sold for a high valuation? I think so. But even though I was committed to selling, I had a nagging doubt about whether it was the right decision. If you’ve ever built something and tried to sell it you’ll know the mechanics of the sale aren’t the hard part - it’s the psychological piece. I think I lucked out this time around.

A few lessons I took away from the sale process (keeping in mind I’ve bought or sold several websites and one software product in the past):

Set Your Price Range - You’ll want to stay between 12 and 30 months of revenue. This is the standard range for websites and software products and in my experience is in line with what the market will bear. The range varies based on the amount of time your product takes to maintain, your expenses, and the number of potential buyers given your price range and technology.
Rule of Thumb on NDAs - If you expect the product to sell for more than $10k, protect the future buyer by requiring an NDA before disclosing financial information.
Prepare Your Sales Kit - Include a detailed summary of the product:
- Product Overview
- Customers
- Technical details
- Positive reviews and high-profile links
- Revenue
- Expenses
- Partnerships
- Personnel
- Competition
- Website traffic (although include a detailed traffic report in a separate document)
- Assets included in the sale
- Price range
- Future plans (surely you will have a list a mile long)
Don’t Accept PayPal or Credit Cards - Chargebacks are too easy and the fees are high (3% of $10,000 is $300). Use escrow.com or good old fashioned checks.
Transferring Assets - You may want to use a service like escrow.com; they facilitate the exchange of your product once funds are deposited in an escrow account. Another option is to use a sales contracts that specifies the following: half of the purchase price to be paid up-front (via check), the assets are transferred, then the second half is paid.
Hold on to Your Domain Until the Last Dollar is Paid - I received two offers that involved ongoing monthly payments for a fixed duration (1 year). In this case, after a contract was signed and I had received the down payment I would have sent the assets to the new owner and pointed the domain to his server, but maintained control of the domain until the last dollar was in my hand. Maintain control of your domain name: it’s your most valuable piece of IP.

Thanks to everyone who expressed interest in the sale. I’ll keep you posted on how things progress.

Tags: asp.net, invoicing, partners, microisv, micro isv

What’s Better Self-Promotion: Speaking or Blogging?

Rob — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:00:06 +0000

What’s Next?
Like many software developers I’m afflicted with ‘What’s Next?’ Syndrome. It’s a disease whereby you’re never content with your situation, no matter how cool it is, how long you planned for it, or how many hours you spent working to get there. My stagnation range is 6-12 months; if I’m not learning new things by then I start to unravel. Blessing? Curse? Not quite sure.

It seems like the most common activities for climbing the ranks in the development community are blogging, writing books, training/teaching, and public speaking.

Blogging? Check.

So what’s next?

I’ve waffled on this decision for a long time due to the high barriers to entry and uncertainty of the payoff. Since I’m an independent developer working for an hourly rate, taking hundreds (thousands) of hours to write a book is a tremendous commitment. Training is similar: it requires learning a whole new set of skills, earning a certification or two (the easy part), and shifting your work schedule and marketing approach to accommodate a hybrid business model. I’m not sure how many trainers remain day-to-day developers.

But of the three options public speaking certainly has the lowest barrier to entry, especially in the .NET community where there are frequent local events that welcome new speakers. So 6 months ago I dipped my toe into the water and participated in my first speaking engagement.

The Numbers
I had mixed emotions about the outcome. On the one hand getting out of the house and seeing other developers face to face was a welcome change (even though it was 28 degrees outside). On the other hand, the amount of time invested seemed out of synch with the benefits.

Since I didn’t have much development experience with my topic I spent 8 hours learning it, creating the slide deck, and coding the examples. Then on a chilly Saturday morning I traveled an hour to the conference, spoke for an hour, and traveled home. In the end I spent about 11 hours and spoke to around 25 people.

As a point of comparison, in 11 hours I could have written 1-2 long-form articles or 5-10 blog posts that would have been read by 12,000-50,000 people (depending on the post’s popularity). In terms of people influenced, blogging is going to be more effective for me due to the massive up-front time investment I’ve made over the past three years (my “sunk costs”).

What makes things complicated is that face to face contact is exponentially more memorable than someone skimming your essay in their RSS reader. In addition, if I dedicated as much time to speaking as I have to blogging I would be speaking to much larger crowds, speaking more often (which would allow re-use of my talks), and generally glean a lot of benefits that a single speaking engagement at a local code camp wouldn’t bring.

The conclusions I’ve arrived at are:

Assuming you have any lick of natural ability, investing hundreds of hours into any of these options (blogging, writing, training, speaking) will pay off, and I would venture to say that hundreds of hours is what’s required to obtain a good return on your investment.
Pick the one you think you’ll enjoy most, and only get started if you have time to invest.
A combination of two or more is a good approach; that’s why it’s so common among big names in the community. Plus it will keep you from getting bored.

Any thoughts?

Tags: programming, self-promotion

A Non-traditional Resume, Web Service Studio on CodePlex, Official Shotgun Rules, and Win a MacBook Air

Rob — Thu, 29 May 2008 13:47:25 +0000

My non-traditional resume: Seth Godin’s Internship Application - Jeff Widman spent 50 hours creating a one-of-a-kind resume when applying for an internship with Seth Godin. He read my post on self-marketing for software developers and thought it embodied an approach to marketing yourself through “exceptional means.”

Web Service Studio on CodePlex - This CodePlex project posted by Adnan Masood is the revival of the .NET WebService Studio tool. “This tool is meant for web service implementers to test their web services interactively without having to write client code. This could also be used to access other web services whose WSDL endpoint is known.”

The Official Shotgun Rules - Finally someone puts it in writing!

Win a MacBook Air in the ZocDoc Developer Contest - On May 13, “ZocDoc kicked off a contest for software developers to create new applications that help patients book doctor appointments anywhere on the web. The contest, which runs from now until August 1, 2008, challenges developers to build the application that will most benefit patients looking for a doctor. A new API allows developers to pull data from ZocDoc.”

Response to ‘Two Flaws With “Time Off From Programming”‘

Rob — Sat, 24 May 2008 19:53:00 +0000

Giles Bowkett published a post titled Two Flaws With “Time Off From Programming” that disputes some of the thoughts in my recent article The Technology Cliff: How Time Off From Programming Affects Your Chops.

The first point he disagrees with is that leaving programming hurts your coding skills. Giles took a similar leave from programming that was similar to my foray into management, except he became a “starving artist”:

…what I lost in technical knowledge I gained in perspective…After that period, the code I wrote upon returning was more compact and more powerful. The things I built were more inventive, more original, and more worth building in the first place.

I can’t dispute first-hand experience, but I have a hard time agreeing that leaving coding for 2-4 years to become an artist is going to leave you in a better place to come back and hit the ground running writing code. Leaving for a short sabbatical is fantastic; want to throw clay pots for 6 months? Awesome…I bet you’ll come back more motivated and energized.

But the premise of my article was that becoming an artist, a manager, or a shoe salesman for several years is going to take its toll on your coding skills; I don’t see any way around it.

Next, Giles comments about my statement that “4 years could include 2 or 3 new releases of your language”:

Consider how different this sentence would be if Rob wasn’t assuming that you use one language, you choose that language, you settle on that language, and four years later, even though you haven’t written any code in it over the past four years, that language is still your language.

4 years could include 2 or 3 new languages you might use.

Suddenly it sounds like fun!

This is true; if I came back to programming after 4 years I would consider switching to a new language. But I don’t see how this changes the conclusion.

Whether you try to learn the past 2-3 revisions of a language you know, or try to learn one from scratch, the learning curve is going to be similar. I would argue that if you are an expert in a language (I don’t mean in the syntax, but the class libraries, architectures, standards, style, etc… a truly deep expertise) and you come back in 4 years, you’re going to have an easier time returning to your expertise in the language that you left, as opposed to something completely new.

Learning a new language is fun? Definitely. Easier to transition into? No chance.

Finally, Giles concludes with:

If you want time off from programming to be good for your programming skill, choose a way to spend that time off which will be good for you in general…Time away from programming is very, very healthy, and you should definitely take it now and again.

I agree with him here. I’m a hearty proponent of sabbaticals, long vacations, and lots of travel. Short times away from programming have always done me good and allowed me to return to work refreshed and with new perspective. But stepping away for multiple years is going to take its toll on your expertise, whether through new technology releases, or simply memory loss.

Tags: programming, sabbaticals, coding

Macintosh Desktop Music Video

Rob — Mon, 19 May 2008 17:18:58 +0000

What an impressive display of innovative music video production. The entire video is of a Macintosh desktop, with various windows flashing across the screen: a woman sings in an iMovie window, lyrics are thrown into text editors in varying fonts all in time with the music. This must have taken forever to edit, but it’s a brilliant link-bait play to the geek crowd.