ianmjones

A day or so ago I got an email from Seth Godin which was sent to all Squidoo Lens Masters that had a lens in the top 100 to say that the ranking mechanism was about to change.

Originally Lenses were ranked by total visits since they were created, it was now going to be based on a rolling previous two weeks worth instead. So my RapidWeaver Lens which has been around since the beta days was likely to drop from the top 100, or so I thought.

Well, I’ve just looked at the “Top 100 Most Visited (traffic)” stats and this is what I’ve found:

As you can see, I’ve jumped from position 97 to position 20! Woohoo!

Now, you might be wondering why I have a RapidWeaver lens anyway, what’s that got to do with my current business, selling a desktop reporting tool for FogBugz called CaseDetective?

Apart from being a very happy RapidWeaver user and wanting to support a fellow U.K. based software developer, I’ll let you into a little secret… I had seriously thought about writing some RapidWeaver plugins. Having a RapidWeaver Lens would therefore have been a very good move, allowing me to gain an element of “master-hood” on the subject of RapidWeaver.

I say “had” because I’ve since decided not to take that path, writing plugins for someone else’s software isn’t the way I currently want to go with my business, I already have one “add-on” product in CaseDetective for FogBugz. I’d also have to spend considerable time learning Objective-C and Cocoa when I’m still enjoying discovering the power and new features of the forever evolving REALbasic language on a daily basis.

I must admit that the RapidWeaver plugin ideas I had were pretty darn good, and each was one that I could use myself, so there’s still a chance that I’ll build one or more of them in the future if no-one else does, but I have since come up with plenty of product ideas which I’ll most likely explore before.

All the ideas I have for new products are independent, i.e. they do not need any other software (other than basic OS services), which means they have their own market and are not constrained by the size of another product’s user base. I think this lack of independence in CaseDetective for FogBugz is it’s Achilles Heal, it means CaseDetective is forever tied to the fortunes of FogBugz, or any other bug tracking system that I might port it to. I’m also going to be forever playing catch-up with Fog Creek as they improve FogBugz and add features. I don’t want to be in that position with more than one product, one is enough.

Another benefit of the product ideas I have is that they are all able to be developed in REALbasic, and are largely database based and easily cross-platform, which plays on my strengths and interests.

The only problem, I’m so busy with CaseDetective I don’t have time to develop these ideas anyway! Which further backs up my decision not to create RapidWeaver plugins, I simply don’t have the time to learn the technology just now, even with Aaron Hillegass’s Cocoa: Programming For Mac OS X by my side.

I’m looking forward to a time when I’ll be able to develop some new products and hopefully improve my revenue streams, but at present there is so much I want to add to CaseDetective that I feel it might be some time before I’m able to get anything else to market.

Talking of which, I’d better get back to development, bye for now!

Joe Indie has just made a great post to his blog about the ups and downs of riding the Google AdWords roller coaster, how pulling back on his spending has had a delayed effect on his sales, and how he needs to find other methods of attracting the right traffic.

I’ve only recently started using Google AdWords for CaseDetective for FogBugz, but I’ve seen a steady increase in traffic to casedetective.com because of it, even though I’m keeping my bids very low at the moment. It’s a very interesting area that I’ll be coming back to soon.

Glenn Rice has decided that he too would like to have a micro adventure, so is starting his own MicroISV.

I have no idea what he’s up to just yet (not sure he knows yet either, or maybe he’s just playing his cards very close to his chest), but it sounds like he’s interested in doing something which may be sold as a software service rather than a straight download and buy.

It’ll be interesting to see how he goes with this, it’s always been touted as a great way to keep revenue flowing, but to my mind it only suits business orientated applications/services.

For example, both FogBugz and HelpSpot have an initial license fee which covers upgrades and support for a period of time, then there is a much reduced fee for continuing free upgrades and support cover. This gives a business peace of mind that they’re going to get a one-off annual charge that they can budget for and know they will always be able to pick up the phone to get support as and when they need it.

If however you tried to apply that model to a consumer orientated product you might struggle, consumers are much more near-sighted when it comes to buying software, they need what they need now and don’t want to continue spending money for something that already works for them. To some extent this can be extended to desktop software verses server, it’s not often you’ll see any kind of desktop software being sold as a service without a lot of back-chat from the users, whereas for most server software having the prospects of continuous upgrades is always desired.

When it comes to web services however, it’s a totally different ball of fish. If you’re not downloading a piece of software and everything is online, then it’s obvious to anyone, business or consumer, that the simplest way to pay is by the month or whatever period the customer feels comfortable with. As the customer has much less control over the updates to the software as it’s updated on the server and that’s it, customers are much more comfortable with being able to say to hell with it, it doesn’t work for me anymore so I’m not going to subscribe for another month.

That’s why paying for a year’s worth of a web service in advance doesn’t usually happen at first, most will pay for a month or two and if they really like it then plump down the wonga for a full year if the discount is attractive enough.

For me CaseDetective was always going to be a “download and buy” even though it’s primarily a business product. I guess the main reason being that it’s desktop software, and as I mentioned above I and many others just aren’t comfortable with paying an on-going fee for desktop software, try and buy suits most people just fine.

Anyway, this wasn’t supposed to be an analysis of payment methods, good luck Glenn, in whatever it is you’re looking to do!

Last week Dimitris Giannitsaros of RapidSgnal released MagnaCRM 1.0 unto the World, and I clean forgot to congratulate him, not even by email. I can only hang my head in shame and beg forgiveness, especially as he’s always been one of the first to send me notes of support and congratulations in the past.

Congratulations Dimitris, I know it must be a huge weight off of your shoulders to have finally released MagnaCRM, good luck, I hope you do very well with it.

But, your work has only really now begun, as people start to use your product you’ll get lots of great feedback, bug reports (no matter how good your QA is, there’s always something), feature requests and questions. It’s a great place to be, I know I’m enjoying myself, I’m sure you will to.

Well done, looking forward to seeing how things progress for you.

Matt Breckon has decided to create his very own Micro ISV.

He’s going to continue to develop an application called PageTrack that he released as a free “proof of concept” a little while ago.

PageTrack is going to be an “intuitive light-weight application to aid browsing the web.” which will allow you to…

• Quickly Create & Search Bookmarks
• Be Notified When Pages Change
• Monitor RSS Feeds

Sounds like an interesting project, you can follow Matt’s exploits as he develops PageTrack and brings it to market on the PageTrack blog at PageTrack.co.uk/blog.

Good luck Matt, hope you enjoy the ride!

Previously I’ve talked about how I’ve not accomplished as much as I’d liked in the first couple of weeks of working on my own, and also that I need to change the structure of my day to allow for “spiking”.

Before Christmas I had finally found what amounts to a daily rhythm, but it wasn’t perfect, and I certainly didn’t follow it perfectly. This is what I wanted to do…

• 07:30 – Get up, shower, shave, breakfast etc.
• 08:30 – Review email, forums and feeds. Deal with paper work such as VAT etc.
• 09:30 – Development.
• 13:00 – Lunch / Go out for an hour / run errands etc.
• 14:00 – Review email and forums.
• 14:15 – Development.
• 17:30 – Review email, forums and feeds, maybe write a blog post and generally wind-down until it’s time for dinner.

This regime was supposed to give me plenty of time to leisurely wake up, deal with the “urgent” stuff and then get in a good few hours development before lunch. After lunch just a few minutes to check email etc and then back to development until it was time to wind-down ready for the evening.

Well, I generally managed to get up between 07:30 and 08:00, not always, but mostly, without using an alarm clock, which I was pretty happy with.

However, if I’d been up late for whatever reason then I allowed myself a little extra time in bed to compensate. Which occasionally lapsed into a whole lot of extra time, which ain’t so good.

Lesson #1: No matter what, set an alarm and get up at a constant time.

Because I wasn’t always getting up dead on 07:30 sometimes breakfast was a little rushed and not as leisurely as I’d hoped, sometimes I’d have breakfast at my desk while ready email etc. This isn’t what I wanted at all.

I thought the hour I gave myself for reading and responding to email, checking the forums and stats and then scanning the news feeds was quite generous, turns out it wasn’t, I’ve been spending way too much time reading feeds and certain other forums I frequent. This has got to change, my priority is development not reading news feeds.

Lesson #2: Do not check email, forums and feeds or deal with paper work first thing. Development must come first.

This is going to be very hard, I have this in-built need to check for any support email or forum posts often, I hate the thought of not responding as soon as I can. However, I recognise that I’m totally incapable of controlling my click finger, once I’ve checked my email for support emails I naturally check out the mailing lists I subscribe to, even though they filter into separate folders. Similarly when I check my forums I find myself clicking on the bookmarks for a couple of others too, I just can’t help it. So I’m not going to do anything but development in the mornings while at my computer.

A lot of my recent re-thinking on how to structure my day has been influenced by Steve Pavlina’s recent The 50-30-20 Rule post. In it he explains how he’s trying to follow a rule whereby at least half of his day will be taken up with actions that contribute to his long term goals, he calls them Class A actions. So in an 8 hour day he’ll spend 4 hours or more on those Class A actions. He will spend no more than 20% of his day on short term actions, those actions that have no real effect beyond 90 days, things like paper work and email (Class C). This 20% is an upper limit, if he doesn’t get everything done from Class C then so be it, they’ll keep until the next day. The remaining time, approximately 30% of the day, will be spent on Class B actions, actions that contribute to mid-term goals that are typically realized within 2 years. Class B actions use up all the time left after Class A and C.

Steve doesn’t quite make it clear as to how he structures his day, whether he gets the Class C stuff out of the way first and then spends the rest of the day on Class A then B actions, but I know how I’m going to attempt it.

I don’t trust myself to stick to only spending 1:30 on Class C stuff and then moving onto the rest, so I’m going to do at least 4 hours on Class A (primarily development at the moment) before then doing the Class C stuff. Once I’ve done 1:30 on Class C I’ll move onto Class B and maybe back to Class A if I have the time.

Before I detail what my new regime is to look like, there is one more item I need to address, health.

Last year (2005) I was going to lose one pound of weight every week until I reached my goal of 12 stone. I started the year at just over 14 stone, so expected to be fighting fit by the end of July. Suffice it to say that didn’t happen, I’m now a good 5 pounds heavier than I was this time last year, and not feeling the better for it! I didn’t have any real plan on how to lose the weight, certainly no exercise plan.

Lesson #3: Plan exercise into the week.

So, it’s back on the bike. I love cycling and am determined to be in good shape for the summer so that I can take advantage of all these free weekends I now have to take nice long rides out into the Scottish countryside.

I’ve ordered a set of cheap rollers, a cheap heart rate monitor and a couple of extra pairs of cheap cycling shorts (anyone getting the idea I’m looking after the pennies just now? ). The rollers are so that I can get a good start now, while the roads are as dangerous as hell with darkness, frost and usual half asleep or drunk drivers. I’m going to start off with a daily 30 minute spin and then ramp up from there.

So, with no further ado, here’s the new daily regime:

• 07:30 – Alarm goes off, get up, pee, get on bike.
• 08:00 – Shower, shave, breakfast etc.
• 09:00 – Development – super fueled by oxygen from exercise and breakfast.
• 13:00 – Lunch.
• 14:00 – Email, forums, paper work, feeds etc.
• 15:30 – Class B items such as planning, marketing and organisational stuff, blogging and spiking.
• 17:30 – Wind-down with reading and listening to podcasts etc (or more development if in the mood).

The 08:00 timing isn’t going to be hit, ever, as it’ll be a few minutes after 08:00 before I finish my 30 min session in the bike, it’s just a rough placeholder. But the 09:00 start should be easily achievable, that’s the most important timing of the whole day.

Everything after 13:00 is approximate, I may find I’m right in the middle of some development that I don’t want to stop so lunch may be delayed, which will have the effect of reducing the time spent on Class B stuff, but so be it.

OK, I realise I’m no robot, so those timings may be flexed a little, but it’ll be interesting to see how much more I can accomplish by trying to follow this regime.

When the lighter evenings come in I intend to use the 17:30 wind-down slot to go out on my bike for an hour or two. I may even just start my day a little earlier so that I can get out on the bike even earlier, we’ll see, that’s a couple of months away yet.

I’ll be sure to report back on how the new regime is holding up in due course, and whether I needed to alter it at all.

Happy New Year!

Yeah I know, not the most original of titles, but it is timely (almost)!

I’m really looking forward to the coming year, primarily as it’s the make or break period for CaseDetective for FogBugz and anything else my company might produce.

I’ve been away for the Christmas period visiting my family “Down South” but kept an eye on my email and forums. As expected there wasn’t much in the way of support requests for CaseDetective as most people interested in CaseDetective were enjoying Christmas too, but there was a very nice volume license sale just a couple of days before Christmas, which was very nice and timely of itself.

Before releasing CaseDetective I set some sales goals that I hoped to achieve before the end of the year, in the paltry 6 weeks I had to do so. I had a “realistic goal” and an “optimistic goal”. The realistic goal was accomplished within a week of release and by the end of the year I’d more than doubled my optimistic goal. So things are looking good for this year, as long as I continue to improve CaseDetective to attract more users.

As I’ve actually made a few sales I thought it a bit silly to keep my blogs tag line as “So, I want to be an ISV…”, as technically I now am an ISV, with real customers and all that. Hence I’ve changed my tag line to “So, now I’m an ISV…”. I know, sheer genius!

I had been thinking about launching another product (or ten, my mind’s racing with ideas at the moment), but having the time to think about things over the last couple of weeks and the initial sales success I’ve since decided to work only on CaseDetective for the next couple of months.

I was going to accomplish development of these new products by splitting up my day to allow for a couple of hours “spiking” in the afternoon, but the following post will explain how I’m now going to structure my day.

Once again, Happy New Year to you all, here’s hoping we all accomplish our dreams this year!

The following blogs have found there way onto my permanent feed list in the last few months, and as normal I thought I’d share them with you here.

Normally I’d write a little about each one to introduce it, but frankly I haven’t got the time just now, so I’ll leave it to you to explore them and discover for yourself why I took a shine to these. All have gone into my “Business Of Software” category, but a couple could have maybe gone into “Apple” or even “Design”, but all are related to small software related businesses.

Haja Weblog

LookLater Blog

My Cantina

Phil’s Development Journal

Random Thoughts from Tifty Croft

Shirt Pocket Watch

The Obligatory Blog

[ThinkMac blog];

Ripples: post-corporate adventures

Yeadon Group Projects

YourHead Blog

Just a quick note to all you MarsEdit fans out there to say how good it is to have a new version of MarsEdit at last.

Brent’s MarsEdit 1.1b5 announcement.

I’ve been on the private beta program for a few weeks and been using MarsEdit betas for posting the few entries I’ve made in that time without any problems at all.

The one thing that I really needed fixed was that in previous versions of MarsEdit when working with a WordPress blog you had to encode all the paragraphs and line breaks yourself or else the preview wouldn’t show the correct structure, and when a post was pulled back down from WordPress all that structure would be lost (but not the tags). Basically white space was lost.

That’s all been fixed, I only need to write what I want write now, no more inserting paragraph or breakpoint tags for me!

The second biggest bug-bear I had with MarsEdit 1.0 was the way it kind of went a bit loopy when you selected multiple lines with the up and down cursor keys and then tried to move the end of the select left or right. That’s all fixed now too, which makes such a difference.

I don’t know about the new features, it just works perfectly for me now, so I’m super happy.

Go see what’s changed and pick up a copy from the what’s new in MarsEdit 1.1 page.

Oh, and just in case you didn’t already know, Brent had done a good portion of the work for MarsEdit 1.1 over the summer, but what with the deal with NewsGator and stuff ended up asking Gus Mueller (he of VoodooPad) to finish it off for him while he concentrates on NetNewsWire.

So that’s why this post is still “on topic”, ‘cos Gus is a MicroISV!

Well, I’ve just finished my first week working on my own for myself as “IMiJ Software“, and it’s been kind of strange, and not as productive as I hoped.

The first couple of days were wasted with setting up my desktop computer, moving stuff across from my PowerBook to my PowerMac and installing all the software I use on a regular basis.

Moving my data was a breeze as I use “Portable Home Directories” on my Mac OS X Server, but installing software took forever, partly hampered by a dodgy external firewire drive that held all my install files. I dragged a lot of stuff across from my PowerBook, a lot of other stuff off of the ‘net, but some stuff had to be installed from scratch from CDs etc (e.g. Virtual PC).

Of course I didn’t spend two full days installing software, I did catch up with email and feeds, and did even manage to develop a little bit of stuff in CaseDetective, but the first two days did feel like a bit of a waste.

After that though things started to get moving, although I still haven’t found a rhythm yet. I thought I’d spend the first hour each day checking mail, answering support questions that came in via mail or my forums, and then scan my news feeds before getting down to work. But it never really worked out that way, there always seemed to be things I needed to do or that took my interest before I finally got going with development.

Having said that, I have managed to get some solid development in during the week, much more than I would normally, but very little of it would be visible to CaseDetective users, most has been restructuring for some features planned for the next couple of releases. Important work, but hasn’t given me the satisfaction that I’d get from seeing new features.

What has been noticeable about the time I’ve spent developing is that I’ve been able and willing to do the tricky stuff that I would normally be putting off due to the lateness of the evening. Now that I’m developing during the day I feel a lot more alert and have a lot more energy to put into development. I can juggle more code in my head and the “big picture” isn’t getting lost. I’ve also found myself entering a lot more feature ideas into FogBugz for future development.

It’s been very nice not having to commute into work every day that’s for sure, and having much more time with Mandy has been fantastic. However, I can see why some people find working from home so hard, come today (Friday) I’m definitely feeling a little cut-off from the rest of the World, even though I’ve been visiting my regular forums and such regularly. I’m missing the guys I used to work with, even though I was never very chatty I enjoyed being with them.

I need to start getting out more during the day, something I said I would do from day one but haven’t managed yet. I’m just too wrapped up in getting on with things and so haven’t torn myself away from my desk much at all this week. That’s going to change, come next week I intend to set myself some tasks that mean I have to leave the house, simple things like finish off the Christmas shopping (just need a few cards etc) and get out on my bike for a gentle spin every other lunch.

All in all it’s been a great week, but I’m looking forward to a more productive time from now on now that all my systems are sorted and I have some plans for getting away from the desk occasionally to recharge.