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How to maintain motivation when blogging

clock photoAnother year slipped by! They seem to come faster and faster, just as promised by all the old men in the comic strips I read when growing up.

I recently had a couple of conversations about blogging: how to start, why to do it, how to maintain it. I thought I’d capture some of my responses.

After over twelve years of blogging (that’s correct, in 2016 my blog is a teenager!), here are the three reasons that I keep at it.

  • Writing crystallizes the mind. Writing a piece, especially a deep technical piece, clarifies my understanding of the problem (it’s similar to writing an email to the world, in some ways). Sometimes it will turn up items I hadn’t considered, or other questions to search on. It’s easy to hold a fuzzy concept in my mind, but when written down, the holes in my knowledge become more evident.
  • Writing builds credibility. I have received a number of business inquiries from my writing. (I suspect there’d be more if my blog were more focused. The excellent “How to start blogging” course from John Sonmez is worth signing up for.  The number one thing to have a successful blog is subject matter focus. But I have a hard time limiting myself to a single topic. Maybe I’m building credibility as a generalist?) And I’ve had a few people interview me for positions and mention they found this blog. It’s easy to say “I know technology XXX” in an interview or consulting situation, but I have found it to be powerful and credible to say “Ah yes, I’ve seen technology XXX before. I wrote a post about it six months ago. Let me send that to you.”
  • Writing helps others. I have had friends mention that they were looking for solutions for something and stumbled across my blog. In fact, I’ve been looking for solutions to issues myself and stumbled onto a post from my blog, so even my future self thanks me for blogging.  I don’t have many comments (real ones, at least. The spam, oh, the spam), but the ones that are left often thank me for helping them out. And I know I have been helped tremendously by posts written by others, so writing pays this help forward.

Of course, these reasons apply to almost all writing–whether magazine, comments on social networks, twitter, medium, answers on stack overflow or something else.  So why continue to write on “Dan Moore!”?  Well, I did try medium recently, and am relatively active on Twitter, HackerNews and StackOverflow, and slightly less active on other social sites like Reddit and Lobste.rs.  All these platforms are great, but my beef with all of them is the same–you are trading control for audience.  As long as I pay my hosting bill and keep my domain registered, my content will be ever-present.  In addition, my blog can weave all over the place as my available time and interests change.

If you blog, I’d love to hear your reasons for doing so.  If you don’t, would love to hear what is keeping you from doing so.

Blog Business | moore |

“Wave a magic wand”

wand photoThat was what a previous boss said when I would ask him about some particularly knotty, unwieldy issue. “What would the end solution look like if you could wave a magic wand and have it happen?”

For instance, when choosing a vendor to revamp the flagship website, don’t think about all the million details that need to be done to ensure this is successful. Don’t think about who has the best process. Certainly don’t think about the technical details of redirects, APIs and integrations. Instead, “wave a magic wand” and envision the end state–what does that look like? Who is using
it? What do they do with it? What do you want to be able to do with the site? What do you want it to look like?

Or if an employee is unhappy in their role, ask them to “wave the magic wand” and talk about what role they’d rather be in. With no constraints you find out what really matters to them (or what they think really matters to them, to be more precise).

When you think about issues through this lens, you focus on the ends, not the means.  It lets you think about the goal and not the obstacles.

Of course, then you have to hunker down, determine if the goal is reachable, and if so, plan how to reach it. I like to think of this as projecting the vector of the ideal solution into the geometric plane of solutions that are possible to you or your organization–the vector may not lie in the plane, but you can get as close as possible.

“Waving a magic wand” elevates your thinking. It is a great way to think about how to solve a problem not using known methods and processes, but rather determining the ideal end goal and working backwards from there to the “hows”.

Business Lifehack Useful Tools | moore |

Gluecon 2015 takeaways

Is it too early to write a takeaway post before a conference is over? I hope not!

I’m definitely not trying to write an exhaustive overview of Gluecon 2015–for that, check out the agenda. For a flavor of the conversations, check out the twitter stream:


Here are some of my longer term takeaways:

  • Better not to try to attend every session. Make time to chat with random folks in the hallway, and to integrate other knowledge. I attended a bitcoin talk, then tried out the API. (I failed at it, but hey, it was fun to try.)
  • Talks on microservices were plentiful. Lots of challenges there, and the benefits were most clearly espoused by Adrian Cockroft: they make complexity explicit. But they aren’t a silver bullet and require a certain level of organizational and business model maturity before it makes sense.
  • Developer hiring is hard, and it will get worse before it gets better. Some solutions propose starting at the elementary school level with with tools like Scratch. I talked to a number of folks looking to hire, and at least one presenter mentioned that as well at the end of his talk. It’s not quite as bad as 2000 because the standards are still high, but I didn’t talk to anyone who said “we have all the developers we need”. Anecdata, indeed.
  • The Denver Boulder area is a small tech community–I had beers last night with two folks that were friends of friends, and both of them knew and were working with former colleagues of mine. Mind that when thinking of burning that bridge.

To conclude, I’m starting to see repeat folks at Gluecon and that’s exciting. It’s great to have such a thought provoking conference which looks at both the forest and the trees of large scale software development.

Business Cloud Computing Conferences Recruiting Technology | moore |

On failing to enter a partnership

square knot photo
Photo by National Library of Ireland on The Commons

I recently explored a business partnership opportunity that was quite exciting.  I had met the possible partner a few years ago.  He has technical chops (a software developer) and runs a company in a sector I’m very interested in.  He had a SaaS application that had real traction–users, revenue.  It wasn’t profitable, but looked like it could be shortly.  If we could find a way to work together, I could own the technical side of things and let him focus on selling and marketing.

However, it didn’t end up working out.  No blowups, thankfully, just a failure to find an arrangement that worked for both parties.

It was quite the emotional roller coaster ride for me.  A business partnership is like marriage without the sex, and so we were both cautious, but it was very easy to get excited about working together and building a big business.  It was all the more exciting to me because he’d done this before.

Here’s what went right:

  • We had open conversations about each of our financial needs.
  • He built a budget and business plan.
  • We used Skype for conversations so that non verbal cues were available.
  • We worked together for a month before hand, which gave us some context.
  • We checked references and had our spouses meet.
  • We planned to get together and work face to face.
  • We used Google docs, which was a great way to share spreadsheets and documents about the business.
  • I reached out to a few mentors to get advice.  Every single person said: “write your expectations down”.  Every one.
  • On the advice of one of the mentors, I read the Nolo books about LLCs, partnerships and business buyouts.  These were tremendous.  Not only did they lay out scenarios I had never considered (what if one of the members of the partnership is disabled?  what if you want to bring someone new in?  what if you want to give time rather than money in exchange for equity?  and many many more), they also give you sample agreements.
  • We set deadlines, both for documents and for coming to a final decision.  We stuck to those.
  • We parted amicably.

And here’s what went wrong:

  • We put off explicitly valuing the existing company until late in the game.  Then it became clear we had pretty different numbers in mind.  We should have done this as soon as we were both interested.
  • We didn’t really know each other, the month of working together notwithstanding.  Just as for investing, I am beginning to think that partnerships work best with lines, not points.
  • The budget and business plan were limited in scope (one year out, then some major assumptions about future years).  Hard to make more detailed predictions about the future, especially since the plan called for major new products.
  • I was in a different state than he was.  This would have made finding common service providers (CPA, mediator, etc) difficult.  No real fix for this, other than one of us moving.
  • Valuing an ongoing, non profitable bootstrapped business is really hard, because most of the value of the business is in the future.  I found some articles, but didn’t find much about this particular scenario.
  • We didn’t really nail down whether this was a partnership, a buy in to an existing business or a valued employee relationship.  Each of these have different equity implications.
  • I didn’t sell myself as well as I should have.

All in all a great experience.  I learned a ton.  Of course, I would have been happier if we could have reached agreement, but I understand why we ended up where we did.

Books Business | moore |

Helping a friend gather data and reach prospects with gentle intros

coffee photo
Photo by My Aching Head

I had coffee with a friend the other day, and he shared a business idea. I thought it was an awesome idea–I certainly saw the need in the marketplace and believed he had the skillset and resources to execute on the idea.

He’s still in the exploratory phase, so I offered to send gentle intros to people in my network who I thought would benefit from his idea. (The target market is anyone with a custom web application that makes money, or anyone who builds custom web applications and is looking for a way to provide ongoing support–if that is you, contact me if you would like to learn more.)  I asked him to write a small spiel that he’d feel comfortable with me sharing.  If you are thinking of doing this, make your friend write a spiel for you.  If they can’t write a spiel, chances are they won’t be good at follow up and your intros will be wasted.

Then, I went through my LinkedIn network and put contacts into categories:

  1. this person (or the company for which they work) might want to partner with my friend
  2. this person (or the company for which they work) is a possible client for my friend’s offering
  3. this person might know people who are in categories 1 or 2.
  4. this person (or the company for which they work) is not a good fit for what my friend is working on
  5. who is this person?

And then I sent soft pitch emails to almost everyone in categories 1, 2 and 3.  The content varied based on which category someone was in, but for category 1, the email was something like:

I have a friend who owns a hosting company who is looking to talk to consulting companies about a possible new product he is thinking about offering.  Here is his spiel:

 

[…spiel from friend …]

 

I wasn’t sure if this kind of software maintenance was something that your company wanted to keep inhouse, or if you would be interested in discussing this with him.  I wanted to check before I did intros.    Is this something you think is worth learning more about?

This way, my friends and contacts on LinkedIn don’t get spammed from someone they don’t know.  Instead, they get an informative email from me, asking if they want to learn more.  If they do (and about 10% did), I do mutual introductions, and then the ball is in their court.  (Side note: here’s a great intro email etiquette guide.)

Why did I do this?  Well, there were a couple of reasons.

First and foremost, because I thought it would be a win win for both sides.  My friend gets more data about his offering and how the market will react to it.  My contacts/friends on LinkedIn learn about a new product from a trusted source.

Second, I was able to do some social network housecleaning.  I was able to ‘unlink’ with all people in category #5–it’s always nice to clean up your social graph.

Third, I reached out to people and had some interesting conversations.  Some folks I hadn’t talked to in years.  It’s good to reach out to people, and always better to do so with something of use to them, rather than a plea for work.

This was a fair bit of effort (a couple of hours).  I can’t imagine doing this monthly, but once a quarter seems reasonable, especially if I’m reaching out to a different segment of my network each time.  And I don’t have to do the whole process every time–spiel, linkedin, soft pitch, intro.  I actually like scanning news sites and simply sending interesting articles to old contacts: “Thought you might be interested in this <link> because of XXX and YYY”.  Those are super simple to send, and again, provide value and raise your profile.

Next time you talk to a friend who has a great idea, who can execute on it, and who will follow up with anybody you introduce them to, consider reviewing your social graph for prospects.  Gentle intros can benefit all three of you.

Business Consulting Web Applications | moore |

Denver Bootstrappers Lunch

boots photo
Photo by liftarn

My friend and former colleague Corey Snipes has been working to get a Bootstrapper’s meetup off the ground in Denver. This is a small group (limited to 12, I believe) of people who are building products (typically software) and self funding. I believe most of the members are in the solopreneur mode (I know Corey is).

I imagine this kind of support group would be fantastic–certainly I had a similar group when I was a consultant in the past, and bouncing ideas off of others in similar situations made the struggle much easier.

I’ve not made this meetup yet because, a) I’m not sure I’m bootstrapping (and you know what, if you aren’t sure you’re bootstrapping, you aren’t bootstrapping!), b) I live in Boulder and Boulderites have a hard time leaving the Boulder Bubble, and c) Wednesdays in general are tough days for me to do anything outside of the house.

If you are a bootstrapper in the Denver area, take a look.

Business Programming Technology | moore |

Open Source, Consulting and Building SaaS Products

construction photo
Photo by JD Hancock

I was browsing Hacker News the other day, and ran across this article, lamenting how difficult it was to support a company with an open source project and that insomuch as one could, consulting generated far more revenue than selling SaaS services like hosting.  For the record, I’ve never touched LocomotiveCMS.  From a brief glance, it looks nice.

While I feel for them, I think that they have alternatives:

  • Sell premium support.  Right now, it appears the only way to get premium support is to host with them, and it seems that many clients are more interested in self hosted solutions.  Makes sense–if you are a rails developer (the target market for this CMS) you already have a hosting solution.  But if premium support was offered separately, they could hire someone (possibly part time) less skilled than Didier, the primary developer, and have them take care of tier 1 support.  And still offer a warm fuzzy feeling for harder problems, which would escalate to Didier.  Companies like to pay for that kind of service, even if they don’t always use it.  This strategy would also decrease the amount of revenue needed to hire someone to help Didier (customer server folks are less expensive than developers).
  • Sell an ebook (or a couple).  These are far easier to create and sell than a SaaS product.  (I use leanpub!)  It could be an ‘authoritative guide to LocomotiveCMS’ or just focus on one part.  Since Didier knows which questions he often answers for people who have paid him money, he’s probably got a very good idea of where the pain points are.
  • Someone suggested this in the comments, but a marketplace for plugins to LocomotiveCMS seems like a natural way to go.  Again, i don’t know that community, and marketplaces for CMSes can be hard to kick start, but this is worth evaluating.
  • I’m sure there are others.  Here’s an exhaustive list of business models, courtesy of the AVC community, so if I were them, I’d review and see what was a fit.

In my comment on the HN post, I talk about how products often face a “round peg in an elliptical hole” problem. I meant that products often solve 80% of the problem for 80% of the users.  They also require users to change their processes (more crystallization).  Typically there’s just enough offset that people feel cognitive drag.  (Of course, the same thing usually happens with custom solutions, you just don’t know that until you are done.  Doh!)

Especially in crowded markets, like CMSes, it is far far easier to sell enough hours to make a living customizing a solution than it is to sell enough products to make a living.  Brennan Dunn covers this ground well.  Every consulting company I’ve ever seen or been a part of, and every consultant I’ve ever known (except the ones who were contracting for one client and really were employees with more flexibility), dreams of transitioning from non scalable consulting by the hour to scalable product sales.  One friend even had a name for it–the “von MacIntyre machine”, which would make money while he slept.

But it’s hard.

Business Dynamic Languages Web Applications | moore |