Someone at last night’s AJUG meeting articulately expressed what I’ve been thinking for the last several weeks as I’ve been learning Google AppEngine: this platform gives the independent software vendor (aka “the computer guy at your church”) a new lease on life. Why will AppEngine bring back affordable custom programming for small business?

1. There are no servers to configure. Sys admin and tech support are the bane of every developer’s existence, which makes AppEngine a developer’s dream. Code, test, and deploy. No sys admin needed.
2. There’s nothing to buy up front: no servers, software, firewalls, backup solution–not even hosting fees until you exceed AppEngine’s generous usage limits.
3. You can log on to your AppEngine application with your Google account (Gmail) or Google Apps login. For many businesses, Google Apps is a compelling alternative to running your own file and document servers and paying for MS Office on every desk. If everyone in your business already has a Google Apps account, it’s a no-brainer to use AppEngine for your custom apps, too.

As more folks learn how to create AppEngine apps in Python or Java, I expect there to be low-cost applications you can purchase for your business as well as pre-packaged applications that developers can buy and customize for your needs. The fabled long tail of software niche marketing is set to EXPLODE.

Shameless plug: if you’ve always dreamed of having software that could do (whatever) for your business, but thought it was probably too expensive, drop me a note. The game has changed.

While there are many places I’d love to be in mid-November, there’s definitely one place I really want to be (but can’t)  on Tuesday November 10, 2009.

And before I say anything else, let me tell you this is not a paid promo piece from the PR firm that promotes the Cranky PM.

Where would I like to be on Nov. 10? I’d like to be in San Francisco where the Cranky PM will appear live (from 2:30-3:00)  and speak at the Business of Software conference.  Last year, Steve Johnson was the big hit at the conference. This year, let’s help the Cranky PM!

As readers of our respective blogs may have noticed, We’ve had an ongoing, healthy online conversation(!) over the last couple of years. Here are a few from this blog:

• In Search Of: CrankyPM.com
• What’s the deal with Personas?
• What’s in a name? A PM by any other name…
• Saeed vs. Cranky PM: Fight!

And here are a couple from hers:

• On Engineering Meetings: Redux
• Three things the CPM doesn’t want to hear

Now, I’m sure there will be people who go to the CrankyPM’s session simply for voyeuristic reasons. What does she look like? Is she a she at all? Do her legs look like those in the picture? Is she as funny in person as she is on her blog? etc. etc.

I think people should go there to support her. I’m pretty sure that being a popular anonymous blogger has it’s benefits. But being a frequent speaker at conferences is NOT one of them.

So here’s a tip of the hat to the Cranky PM, and whether she decides to reveal her identity or not, try to support her by attending her talk.

And for those of us who can’t be there, please live blog or tweet it if at all possible!

Saeed

Suppose you’ve got a new customer request for a feature, or maybe some great new idea by marketing people that will certainly increase sales of your product. Whether you are working in agile or a more traditional environment you are usually going to get a bunch of functional requirements (program should do a,b and c) and sometimes some non-functional requirements (performance targets, security). Sometimes you will also talk about usability – but in my experience you are never going to get “and it must look really really good” as a requirement. Most of my experience is in management systems development, so it is an assumption, but I am willing to guess that in most “business oriented” software eye candy is not a requirement.

You are not your user

I have recently read a great book called “Why Software Sucks?” and the basic idea of the author is that most of the people involved in making software come from very technology oriented engineering background (he uses the word geeks but lets not go there) and so to us everything is an engineering problem. We value technology and features and prefer more functionality over everything else really. So it is more natural for us to focus on features and performance and elegant solutions and mostly ignore usability and eye candy. But there is a catch – “You are not your user“. The things we value may be not the things our users value. And when developing applications we need to focus on what users want not what we think we would want if we were users. There are a lot of examples in the book of what happens when developers do what they think is usable instead of what their users would consider usable, and it’s not pretty.

But what about visuals and eye candy? Is it possible that the same thing happens here as well? Is it possible that while we as developers often consider eye candy irrelevant and even waste of resources, our users actually value it much more?

Well, some evidence is certainly out there. Take video games for example – good looking games with tons of eye candy just sell much much more. Take Hollywood – the big budget flicks with most effects often are criticized for being too shallow – and yet they are the ones that bring the most money and most people go to watch them. And how about Apple which took eye candy to a whole new levels? I have never used macs in my life, but if you ask me which is better mac or pc in terms usability – I would go with Mac.

So good looks sell but what is even more important here is that often good visuals are even more important than actual features. Macs have less software available for them then PCs. Big budget flicks have usually much less substance than independent movies. Most of recent blockbuster video games are just remakes of existing formula with almost no actual gameplay improvement.

So, yes, I believe that eye candy alone is worth a lot more than we usually think it is, even for applications that are not mass market oriented. (quick test, which bug tracking software is better: bugzilla or jira?). It’s great for first impression and thus sales and it’s great for continuing user satisfaction and thus retaining customers and creating word of the mouth hype. Features and usability alone are not enough anymore – your users demand that it also  must look really really good.

I had an opportunity to meet up with bunch of VC folks in BLR area. Here are my notes from those discussions.

• When funding VCs look for the core team to be in one place. It has been proven time and again that when the core team is together, success rates are higher.
• 2/3rd of the companies that get VC funding don’t even return their capital money. This means that 7 out of 10 companies fail. This is actually an optimistic number than what I had read about Bay area startups which had a failure rate of 9 out of 10!
• In most cases, VCs are interested in funding a company and exit in 4-5 years timeframe. As such they are looking to build a company that becomes a good acquisition target
• VCs tend to invest in growing markets and also in larger markets! Market size should be more than $2-2.5 billion for VCs to get interested in it.
• As per VCs, product companies should own IP. This means having patents!
• VCs want to make $5-15 million investment and wants to know how you will reach $75-100 million mark!
• Usually raising capital takes about 6-12 months time!

Some words of wisdom from a reputed VC from a reputed global VC company out of BLR

• Articulate why you exist and then articulate why would you exist 5 years from now!
• Parallelize Sales and Marketing Geographics first rather than build next set of features.
• Have a 10 page price list. Longer price list means you have given enough thought to how to sell your product in various situations.
• Always increase price with every new customer! The VC gave an example that after funding a start up they immediately doubled their product license price. Customers did not flinch and continued to flock. As per VCs, more often than not, founders tend to under price their products.
• Rule of thumb for pricing discounts, if it costs $1 in US, then it should be priced 1 pound in UK, 1 euro in Europe and $0.60 in India/APAC
• Don’t build a product because you love it. Build a product because your customers love it.
• Second round of financing hurts founders more than the first round VCs

If you want to further look into what VCs are looking for then visit this link. It has point by point description of what VCs are looking for when evaluating an idea. Good luck for your next venture!

It seems sometimes people just completely miss the point, even the brightest of them. Yesterday I was doing some prototyping for some new project I am working on which is based on JBoss EJB3 implementation, and since most of my background comes from Spring based project, I was looking for some answers. Nothing too complicated, mind you, I just needed some way to have one of the EJB beans to hold some shared state for all the application, something that is really straightforward in Spring, and something that I assume most of the applications out there today need at one point or another.

So, since I am no JBoss expert (yet ) I did the sensible thing and tried to google it. Well, simple queries didn’t find anything for me (“jboss service”, “jboss singleton”, “jboss ejb singleton” etc), but in the end I stumbled upon something called @Service annotation which is a proprietary annotation of JBoss and can be used for this kind of stuff. Which is documented in this page. Which is while it is couple of pages long and have some code examples lacks one very basic thing – it doesn’t show how to use the thing in the simplest and most common use case, the one I was actually looking for. So instead of just copying and pasting the sample into my code and just running it and continuing to some other stuff I had to spend about an hour trying to figure this stuff out. (BTW the solution turned out extremely simple, elegant and it doesn’t require any of the stuff that is printed on that “help” page – I will put it in a separate post for others to reuse)

Which is why I think some people just don’t get it. I mean they are great developers and the eventual solution is really great and working flawlessly – but they miss the most  important point. Open source frameworks and projects that provide infrastructure are just tools that allow us developers to solve some common problems. The reason these things are actually used (and not reimplemented in house) is that they provide solutions without the need to really go deep and understand all the implementation issues. When I write some application for an end user any time spent on figuring out some stuff that should have been in the manual is time not spent on providing value to my customer.

And this is my main point – you must know who your customer is. It just doesn’t work otherwise. And if you develop open source project that is going to be used by other developers – your customers are  those other developers, usually the ones working on end user oriented software.  This is not about who got the coolest implementation or the tightest algorithm or the most generic platform. This is about providing simple solutions to most common problems. And the reason why you should care is that even though we are not the ones paying your bills  – your success and success of your project is directly proportional to its adoption rate. And guess where that adoption rate comes from.

Here is an example of project that does get it – Terracotta. It will take you less than 5 minutes to understand what it does and what problems it solves. And if you decide to try it out, it will take you less than 5 mintues to download and run an interactive sample of the technology (which is very cool by the way). Compare that site with site for JBoss Microcontainer which is the core of the new JBoss 5 release. I assume it is really good piece of technology but try to spend only 5 minutes on their site and try to understand what it does and whether is solves any of your problems. I couldn’t. And if I was really evaluating it I would just discard it at that point and go look at the next thing. Because there is always another thing (competition is great isn’t it?).

So here is my 5 minute rule – make sure your site and documentation can provide some initial idea of what problems you solve in less than 5 minutes. Make sure that for the most common problems the solution (including examples or better yet cookbook style recipe) is no father than 5 minutes away. Otherwise you are just not competitive with the projects (which by the way may be less technologically advanced) that do provide those answers. Take a look at the success of Spring Framework. Take a look at the success of Ruby on Rails when they took the world by storm using that video of creating a blog application in under 15 minutes. They did it despite the many technological problems that they had (like native threads and performance). This is really fast world. Help yourself by helping me quickly. Otherwise no one will care.

I am doing some thinking about what it takes to implement Scrum in an organization that is not used to or even familiar with agile concepts, let alone Scrum. When you start a new team or a new company implementing new methodology is rather easy – you select people based on what you believe the required roles and functions are, there is no legacy to overcome and everybody is open to whatever process you are installing. There is no inertia, there is no resistance and there is no conflicting interests you need to account for.

Of course the exact opposite is true when you are attempting to implement Scrum (or whatever else) in an organization with strong waterfall culture. It’s not just about telling people about how in Scrum you do so and so, go to this meetings, here is how product backlog should look like – and then you are done. It is much more challenging because of “that’s not how we are used to do things around here” – so not only you have to be able to teach what Scrum is, but also be able to overcome years of practise of doing something else.

And that is not the hardest part. It is impossible to make all the changes overnight – this stuff takes a long time to get absorbed and interned and used to. So there is going to be some time where organization is not going to be very “organized” for the lack of better word. And yet, there are customers and sales and support and contracts that need to be taken care of, and that cannot be “pushed back” until we can figure out how to do the Scrum stuff properly.

And this brings me to the concept of refactoring. In software engineering, refactoring is the art of taking an existing piece of software that maybe is using some old technology that is a bit obsolete by now, or maybe it is written in somewhat inefficient way and taking that piece of software and rewriting it in such a way that from the outside it keeps looking exactly the same, performs exactly the same function (but better) while inside it gets completely overhauled and made more efficient, with less bugs and easier to maintain. And I call it an art because yes there are some practices and tricks which help you do that refactoring, but in the end, every software is different and what might have worked on a previous project wouldn’t work on the next one, so to be able to do this and succeed requires some flexibility and creativity.

And I think similar art form should be developed for implementing Scrum in organizations that are currently stuck in the old ways. The similar challenges apply – keep the outside interface, support clients, make the sales, while in the same time transforming the entire organization to much more efficient, flexible and adaptive proceses. And yes, even though some techniques are probable shareable, in the end every organization is different and it will take each one a unique path on its road to agile success.

After reading war stories on Joel On Software, I was steeling myself to accept the harsh reality of no sales for the first few months.

To my delight, I made the first sale a day after releasing the product (I believe it was a referral from Tucows).

At this point I wasn’t checking the logs to see where the customers were coming from and haven’t set up Google Analytics yet.

The second sale came from an Adwords referral a few days later. The Pay per Click commission ate up a big chunk of the sale amount, but it still felt good to make another sale.

The name quickbooks in a potential client’s mouth makes me clinge and run away!

Majority of the potential clients for local custom software are SMEs. These guys hire accountants whose only contact with an accounting software is a pirated version in college or in another client’s site. Since they don’t understand piracy, they know that Quickbooks costed them Kshs 2,000 and its awesome.

For our kind of software (business software) accountants and auditors are our main internal clients. They are used to the reports formats of QB which it wouldn’t make sense to try to match, considering Intuit is a huge company which thousands of developers, testers, marketers etc.

Whenever I go for a sales call and I meet a guy who matches my offering with QB I know its a lost deal and I have to fold my tail and move on.

The other day we took a trip to Masii via machakos to demo our products. It is generally a nice place and one cant believe that it is usually a food challenged zone. Climate cool for jan.

The road is made up of smooth and rough strips. It looks like the contractor split the stretch into odd and even sections and has started with the odd sections first.

Managed to do a demo to a school, visit a hotel and a college. Came back with an order for a school software so it wasn’t a bad trip after all.

This is a personal opinion on the challenges that a software developer cum entrepreneur will face.

1. Low demand of software; Am yet to meet a programmer who has sold over 100 copies of her software and actually got paid for all of it.

2. Nature of SME businesses in kenya; It is actually hard (if not impossible) to sell to large companies except when doing a custom software (i.e. developer on hire). So we are left with SMEs. Now the owners of these SME’s are typically unappreciative of the power on investing in serious IT. Majority cannot understand why they need to buy software after buying the hardware. The same case where you dont pay NTV/KTN after paying for the TV.

3. Past experience with programmers; To be true to ourselves, a good number of programmers havn’t done an exemplary job. I’ve been called to undo or redo a work done by a programmer many times. So the perception amongst most is unfavourable with makes clients unwilling to invest alot on “risky” local products.

4. Lack of serious marketers; Most are deal makers who want 50:50 share of the revenue!

5. Getting developers to hire; In my experience most CS/IT/BBIT graduates are low in experience and high in selfworth. In my opinion a serious developer needs programming, accounting(understanding of busieness processes) and communication skills. The possible candidates only have a basic understanding of the first one. This is mainly VB and sample hello world programs in Java, ASP etc.

6. Training in Colleges/Universities; The development of software developers is non-existent. Nearly all of the lecturers have never written commercial applications themselves!

Yesterday (8th Jan 09) I visited a client who we had upgraded an access database to be shared across the network. The job was suppossed to have been completed over a year ago but staff and hardware issues made this impossible.

They kept calling me every 30 minutes so after I finished with the client I had i went there. As we were looking into the problem there was a power blackout. However they said they had a generator so we need not worry.

After a little while the generator guy came and asked me to lend them my car battery as their generator battery was dead. I was amused as this is a big well reknowned institution. Well, looks can be deceiving.

We started the generator with my battery and continued with work. I just kept hoping that it would not runout of fuel and they ask for a share of mine

I was watching this video today. If you are a small startup (typically bootstrapped), this is a must watch. Here are some notes:

• Keep the Momentum
• We work on projects that are chunked in smaller bits
• Planning is vastly over rated
• We don’t do road maps
• We do not write  functional specifications ( They lead to a illusion of agreement )
• Decisions are temporary
• Red Flag words – Need, Can’t, Easy, Everyone, Nobody). He explains each one of the words and points out how they are red flags
• Interruption is the Enemy of Productivity ( the closer you are, the less work you get done)
• A fragmented day is not a productive day
• Creative people need uninterrupted chunks of time
• Focus on Passive Collaboration (email, wikis)
• Focus on what doesn’t change. What is going to be important Today and 10 years from now – Speed, Simplicity, Ease of Use, clarity, Reliability, Uptime
• Underdoing (instead of overdoing the competitors)
• Find markets where you can start on the low end and grow (Great thing about the market is the big guys do not care about them)
• As long as you deliver more value than the price, people will pay for products
• Follow the Chefs -  they out teach, out share and out contribute
• what is your cookbook? You can either outspend or out teach your competition
• Always be questioning: Why are we doing this? What problem are we solving? Is this actually useful? Are we adding value? Is there an easier way?

Neil Davidson of Red Gate Software , Business of Software blog and Business of Software conference has created network.businessofsoftware.org, a social network “For anybody interested in building long term, sustainable, profitable software businesses” (as opposed to burning millions of VC money to ‘buy eyeballs’ and then flipping to Google/Yahoo/Microsoft). It is free to join. They have a Pizza and beer evening in London on 12-Nov-08.

Want to know why Toyota is the #1 selling car in America? I know one reason why. I recently purchased my first foreign car, a 2004 Toyota Sienna, from a third party. After a few months, the driver door started squeaking and popping when opening and closing, and the rear liftgate was starting to hesitate a little on opening. How disappointing to one who had expected the famed Toyota quality!

But wait, there’s more. I took it to my local Toyota dealer, who informed me that Toyota had extended the warranty for this issue to 100k miles, and also informed me of an active recall involving the rear liftgate struts. These were the major things wrong with the car, and both were fixed at no charge, even though I’m the second owner of a car with 89k miles and didn’t buy from the dealership! Until now, I’ve never heard of a manufacturer extending the warranty retroactively for a particular issue! GM and Ford think that TV commercials inspire customer loyalty, but Toyota understands that quality and service inspire loyalty, and neither ends when the car rolls off the line.

Does your software have enduring quality?

/dmc

Mark Fox’s Novator has dedicated customer service teams for each of his big clients. When the client calls, the same team picks up every time. In Novator’s case, this team might only work for the one client.

I want this for consumer call centres.

When I call today, I wait on hold, then someone in a call centre answers. The person who answers is the first among thousands to be available to take my call. They don’t know me and will never deal with me again. If I call back, I get someone else. They don’t care if I am unhappy.

Stupid.

Better:

When I call, I identify myself and leave a call-back number. When someone is ready to deal with me, I get a call. Innovation #1.*

The call centre is sliced into hundreds of small teams of two or three attendants. Each team of attendants has a portion of the customer base assigned to it. Every time I call, I get someone on the same tiny team. There is an infusion of accountability and humanity. Innovation #2.

(The disadvantage is the statistically higher likelihood of waiting on hold for longer. See Innovation #1.)

* Business idea: A for-pay service that waits on hold for you, and calls you when the other party picks up.

From class:

• Why is it the way it is?
• What’s ridiculous?
• Cui bono? (Who benefits?)
• We’ve always done it this way.
• Where’s the gap?

From the Little Computer Scientist:

• Internet → Intranet.
  • Facebook → Social Networking for the Enterprise or Social Networking for Families.
  • Youtube → Video Sharing and Search Behind the Firewall.
  • GMail → GMail on Google Appliance for Intranet. (And not Google Office!)
• Desktop → Internet
  • Finder + Git → Dropbox
  • finger → Facebook
  • Eclipse → Heroku

Prior to my trip to Boulder for the CWA Summit I settled on a price range for ClimbPoint that I could live with.  Since that time I’ve returned to my original estimate, sharpened it, and become more comfortable with the price I’m charging for the software.

Building a bottom-up sales forecast

My initial pricing decision was made based on an estimation of the cash I would need during the first year to cover my expenses.  I then guessed at how many licenses of ClimbPoint I could sell in that time period.  That gave me a minimum amount that I would need to charge for the software to break even after the first year.  I think my first amount was around $400 or $500.

The above method is roughly a bottom-up sales forecast, as described by Guy Kawasaki in the first couple points of this post on the art of bootstrapping.  I first began experimenting with this method while learning the art of the start.

Pricing and positioning

I then took some advice from Eric Sink on pricing and positioning, and checked out my competitors in the area of software for recreation management.  I made a list of similar products, along with the features they offered, the initial cost, and any maintenance fee.

Well, as my list grew longer I decided to plot my competitors on a two by two matrix based on cost and functionality.  Dirt cheap and painfully limited software was in the lower left, while the pricey software with all the bells and whistles was in the upper right.

I decided that I wanted ClimbPoint to be in the upper right quadrant, though not too pricey.  This exercise mainly served to boost my confidence when telling a prospective customer, “yes, we’re charging $650 for the initial license.”  Prior to convincing myself that this price was fair and reasonable, I was apologizing to customers because that price felt a little high to me.

A sanity check!

The most helpful activity in settling on a price for ClimbPoint was, to my surprise, talking with a potential customer and friend about whether the price was reasonable.  As we discussed the initial cost and yearly maintenance fee, I discovered that my friend felt he would have a hard time convincing his manager to purchase the product — the maintenance fee was almost 1/3 of the purchase price!

I don’t think I would have caught that problem with the pricing without customer feedback, and that “reality check” was the final piece of the pricing puzzle for me.  The updated pricing information is now prominently displayed on the ClimbPoint purchase page.

Last weekend I decided to post a NetPoint ad on Facebook. I like the general idea of advertising with Facebook since you can target an audience based on their age, location, interests, and job. There aren’t many advertising avenues that offer this kind of granularity. In this post, I plan on sharing this experience and some of my thoughts.

The Experience

Creating an ad is pretty simple, you only need to enter the following info:

• Your web site URL
• The audience you’d like to target
• Ad content
• Pricing model (either based on the number of views or clicks)

I wanted to target IT professionals, so I keyed in a bunch of job titles that were related (e.g. network administrator, IT manager, etc). One nuisance I did find was only being able to target one country. If I have a product or service that can be marketed worldwide, why should I be restricted to just one country?

The pricing models were pretty standard, based on the number of clicks or impressions. Facebook auctions off their ad space, so they will ask you for the maximum price you’re willing to pay per click or impression. I chose to pay per click at 50 cents for each one. Throughout your campaign you will only be charged the amount the ad space sold for, so you may pay less than your bid price. This all works similar to eBay, except it’s for ads.

Once I was done I had created two identical ads for NetPoint. One ad was for the US and had the potential of reaching 25,580 Facebook users. The other ad was targeted for the UK with a potential of reaching 10,580 people. Sounds good, so let’s take a look at the results.

The Results

I let the NetPoint campaign run for a week. As of today, a total of 117 Facebook users clicked on my ad. 68 of these users were from the US and 49 were from the UK. It seems the UK campaign was almost 2x more effective than the US. There are a significant amount of NetPoint customers in the UK, so it’s interesting to see the relationship here.

I paid an average of 42 cents per click for a total of $49.23, not bad for 117 potential customers. However, it looks like I would have been better off paying per impression, saving nearly 25%. Good to know for next time. I initially thought pay per click would have been more effective, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. I assume this is due to a mix of pay per click’s demand and the targeted nature of my ad.

I have to admit that although I am a fan of Facebook, I didn’t initially think of using it for NetPoint. It seemed perfect if you’re targeting teens or students in college, but not very effective if you’re trying to reach businesses. However, a lot of professionals are starting to use social networking sites. As this becomes more popular, I think we’ll start seeing more ads targeted towards the corporate world.

As a regular on FogCreek’s Business of Software forum I see the same questions come up time and again.

• How do I do SEO?
• How do I improve my return on Adwords?
• Which hosting company should I use?
• Which payment processor should I use?
• etc.

So I have quickly thrown together a BOS FAQ page in an attempt to raise the level of debate. Hopefully other people will add it to it. Even if you don’t read the forum you might find some of the links useful.