Lachlan Gemmell - Entrepreneur (not so) Extraordinaire

Email can be tricky

2007-11-01T17:51:00.001+11:00

Personally I think business would have be better off if email had never been invented but we're stuck with it now so it's important to learn how to use it properly. I consider myself reasonably accomplished in this area but today has been a day that tested my emailing skills and my restraint.

This email exchange came just after sending my monthly invoices to my tech support clients for October. I've been working on a network upgrade for the past few months for one of my clients and quite frankly it's been a nightmare. The reasons for this have been more bad luck than anyone in particular's fault and I've been trying hard to keep them happy through the process. I emailed them their monthly invoice this morning with some trepidation and waited to see what came back if anything.

Here is the reply I received shortly afterwards

Lachlan

As previously communicated I am concerned as to the length of time and now the budgeted cost overrun it is taking to complete the project. Also the fact that costs are being incurred in relation to <COMPANY NAME DELETED> are substantiallly as a result of the delay in the implementing the new server and network. I respectfully ask that you review your fees in relation to <COMPANY NAME DELETED>.

I also ask that you advise us of your anticipated completion. My expectation is that you allocate sufficent time to complete in 1 or 2 days and so as not to have such large lead times between visits.

Regards

Frank Jones

As I said this project has been a nightmare and I'm sympathetic to Frank's concerns (not his real name). I'd already discounted more than 50% of my charges from my previous few months' invoices due to these problems and that was without being asked to do so. I wasn't crazy about the idea of discounting this latest invoice even further. One of the reasons for the large lead times between visits that Frank speaks of is I was losing so much money doing Frank's work that I had to service other clients to ensure I didn't go broke.

What to do?

I had two options, either agree or refuse to further discount my latest invoice.

To refuse would probably result in the client going elsewhere and to be honest that would almost be a relief. I didn't like the idea of them walking with such a bad impression of me so I wanted to avoid that if possible.

That only left agreeing to discount my invoice even further and losing even more money. How much money though? Every amount I thought of was either too big for me to happily accept or too small to prevent Frank from being dissatisfied. There was obviously a sweet spot, a level that would keep Frank happy but not send me broke. I was struggling on how to find that sweet spot when I came up with a brain wave.

I would ask Frank.

Frank knows how much he wants to pay. He's a reasonable guy and I think I can trust him not to send me broke.

I eagerly sat back down at my desk and tapped out the following reply.

Hello Frank,

I am deeply concerned by the issues you have raised and express my sincere apologies for the delay in providing you with the services you have contracted me to provide.

I acknowledge that this project has been somewhat of a train wreck and true to form, continues to cause problems for me to this day. I have done my best to insulate <COMPANY NAME DELETED> from these problems by never leaving you with inoperative systems between visits and forgiving $2700 in labour charges over the past 3 months.

I have taken onboard your suggestions regarding my project scheduling and will endeavour to provide you with a completion schedule and date in the near future.

In an effort to aleve your budgetary concerns I invite you to adjust the total of my October invoice to an amount that you feel is more appropriate. Please advise me of the amount you feel is fair and I will supply you with a revised invoice reflecting that amount.

Regards,

Lachlan Gemmell

I perhaps laid it on a little thick but by and large the sentiment is genuine.

I sent that reply around midday and it's just gone 5pm. There's been no word back from Frank and I'm not surprised. I'm guessing he's never had a supplier say to him, "just pay me what you think it's worth". I don't think he knows quite how to respond.

I've no doubt that this offer will demonstrate to Frank that I'm serious about making sure he's happy with my service. What I'm hoping though is that he recognises that retaining someone with that sort of commitment is more important than saving a few extra dollars. If he doesn't and instead asks for some ridiculous discount, I'll honor my promise but he won't be receiving a November invoice from me.

Resurrection

2007-02-27T00:11:00.000+11:00

It's time to resurrect my long neglected blog. Once again I find myself embarking on new ventures and while the Sydney project ended in failure, I found writing this blog as I worked on Sydney helped me to focus my efforts and keep me motivated.

When you're self-employed maintaining focus and motivation is a continuing struggle. You can let yourself get so busy with your day to day work that you lose focus and don't have time for the bigger picture. Alternately motivation can be the problem and you can find yourself doing very little work at all. Of late I've found myself oscillating between those two extremes. A few weeks ago I was busy all day every day with my tech support consultancy fixing email, virus and networking problems for people. These past two weeks however it's been the opposite. I've been putting jobs off, wasting time on the internet, forgetting appointments and all for no good reason whatsoever.

So I'm resurrecting this blog to once again help keep myself honest. The basic premise is that since I don't really have a boss to report my progress back to, I'll report it here instead. As I said, I have some new business ventures in progress which I'll be writing about, plus I'll be sharing what I've learnt over the past decade about running a one man IT business.

Also because it's become such an important part of my life these past two years I'm going to occasionally bore you with my efforts to become a half decent long distance runner. Apart from that I'll keep my personal life out of this so if you're a friend of mine you have nothing to fear by my reappearance on the blog scene.

That should do for now. I'll post again tomorrow with a brief overview of each of the projects I'm currently working on.

Whatever happened to that Lachlan guy?

2006-09-26T08:43:00.000+10:00

Short answer, I set myself up to fail and used a competitor who beat me to the punch as an excuse to quit.

Yes it was a promising start, I was even surprising myself with my progress. I had an idea who's time I thought had come and I may have even been right about that. I abandoned the Sydney project with probably about 60% of it completed though I doubt I'll ever go back and finish it.

Thanks to everyone who followed my progress here. I'm really sorry to have let you all down with such a poor showing. At least some of you seemed to be quite entertained by my story as it unfolded, it's just a shame I never got around to finding out how it ended.

For those few of you who tracked me down to make sure I was still alive and kicking after my sudden disappearance from the net I am especially grateful. To have had people from the other side of the world that I'd never met before concerned about my welfare was a unique experience that I won't forget.

As for what I have actually been doing I've been continuing with my own business doing consulting work to help small businesses in Sydney with their IT systems. That's Sydney the city, not the code name for some vapourware pipe dream project. On top of that I discovered I'm a pretty good half-marathoner, found and lost a girlfriend or two, moved house again and suffered a major health scare (doing fine now thanks).

So what was the big secret?

At it's heart Sydney was an email archiving add-on for a particular email server. You can see what I hoped it would be become by checking out this real product released early last year.

Their product, while slightly different to what Sydney would have been, is actually very good and received endorsement from the manufacturers of the MDaemon email server I was targeting (previously codenamed Geneva by me).

At the time I decided, probably correctly, that the market share of MDaemon wasn't big enough for a second email archiving add-on and with everything else that was going on, I let work on Sydney fall away completely.

So what now?

I'm continuing with my consulting work doing IT for local small businesses. I'm doing a fair amount of programming as part of that but I'd like to be doing more.

There's potential there for bringing someone onboard to work with me, handling the tech support work while I do more programming, though I'm being extra cautious about finding the right person for the job. The fallout from mistakes I made last time I hired somebody was still haunting me these past few years and holding me back somewhat while I was working on Sydney.

There's also one or two other new business ideas that I'd like to explore further. I'm not sure if they're viable yet but I'll be looking into them more closely over the next few months.

And for this blog?

Well it's pretty obvious I lost interest in continuing this blog as of early last year. To be honest it's now more of an embarrassment to me than anything else. It's obviously the first thing that comes up if anybody Googles me and a few times in the past year I've had new acquaintances asking me if I ever got around to buying myself a new pair of shoes.

I'm not sure that just because it's a little embarrassing means that I should be taking it down though. It documents a fairly significant time in my life, and the fact that it isn't documenting a huge success doesn't seem sufficient enough reason to be removing it. After all the point of the whole blogging exercise was for both myself and others to learn from my mistakes. I can't do that if I hide them away and pretend they never happened.

So I'll keep it here. FeedBurner is currently reporting just over 200 subscribers who have stayed with me since my last post in March 2005. While that's incredibly flattering I'm not under any illusions that you've all been sitting on the edge of your seats the last 18 months waiting for me to post again. Certainly many of you no doubt just never got around to removing me from the list of feeds you have set up to check.

So now's your chance to unsubscribe if you want to.

If you stick around I'll post again before the end of the week. Most likely it will consist of some more in-depth navel gazing, disecting the doomed Sydney project and my failings. After that I'll probably go quiet again for a while. Like I said earlier I do have some other business ideas but I'm not ready to talk about them yet and maybe I won't talk about them here at all. I did have fun writing this blog though so I'll probably start writing again at some point in the next few months.

I won't be blogging again though unless I'm sure I can achieve a different end result the next time around. There was far too much talk and not enough action surrounding Sydney. Whether my next venture succeeds or fails that's one thing that needs to change.

So so tempting

2005-03-03T12:41:00.000+11:00

Back when I was moving house you might remember I was going to have to pay an extra weeks rent of $270 because I didn't give enough notice that I was moving out. Fortunately I was able to vacate early enough for the real estate agent to be able to find a new tenant before my notice period ended and so I didn't have to pay the extra $270. I was pretty happy about that since I just didn't have an extra $270 to waste on an empty flat that I wasn't using.

Stupidly though I forgot to cancel the automatic payment of my rent from my bank account resulting in me paying the extra $270 anyway. The real estate agent was quite good about it and about 2 weeks ago sent me a cheque for $270 reimbursing me for my accidental overpayment.

The twist to this story comes a few days ago when I received a second cheque for $270 in the mail. It's a mistake on the real estate agent's part, he's just forgotten he's already sent me a cheque. It even has an almost identical hand written note attached to it apologising for the delay.

I can think of many reasons why I'm morally entitled to a free weeks rent in my old house. The TV aerial socket never worked, the landlord refused to put in flyscreens over summer, and they didn't tell me before I moved in that I'd have builders doing repair work in my house for nearly a month.

I can think of even more good uses for that $270 right now also. Holes in my shoes and teeth, a wardrobe from 1999, an overdue Christmas present for my parents, and a girl to in vainly try to impress.

Whichever way I spin things though it's not my money. I can't say I haven't been tempted, if I'd had another reason to walk into a bank these past few days I think I would have deposited it into my account. It has to go back though and this public acknowledgement of that is designed to shame me into doing so. I'll take it back to them before the end of today and I'll post a comment below once I've done it.

That new pair of shoes will just have to wait.

Running on borrowed time

2005-02-25T08:33:00.000+11:00

Fresh from the double trouble hard drive failures in my server I've just had to go and buy a new transformer and cord for my primary development laptop. The old cord had just stopped working, I think 3 years of being wrapped and unwrapped every day took it's toll and broke a connection somewhere within it.

They sure do gouge you for those spare parts, $95 Australian it cost me for a replacement but at least it was only the cord and not the whole laptop that needed replacing.

My laptop, a Compaq Evo N160, is holding up reasonably well but it's definitely showing it's age. As I write this there is a folded up piece of cardboard jammed into the hinge of the screen which helps stop the crazy kaleidoscope patterns that appear when I first turn it on. If fiddling with the cardboard wedge doesn't work I have to push down on the bottom right and top left corners of the laptop while pushing upwards into the centre of the laptop with my left knee. Once the spinning screen stops, I have to keep very still to stop it from happening again.

That's pretty much indicative of most of my computing equipment. It was all purchased almost 3 years ago or more and it shows. I can cope with the little quirks each of my machines has for now but they're all on borrowed time. Every time I have to fight with my laptop to stop the screen spinning or my server blue screens at startup I wonder if it's day has come.

I just have to keep them up and running for a few more months. If they can hold together until Sydney is released I can start to retire them gracefully and replace them with some nice bright and shiny new machines. Assuming Sydney actually generates some income that is.

I hate Western Digital

2005-02-16T12:17:00.000+11:00

"...based on the lightning doesn't strike twice principle I should be right for a while now."

That was me almost exactly two months ago. I'd just had a hard drive failure in my server and lost my source code version control repository. It was an annoyance but I could get by since I still had the latest version of the Sydney source code on my working machine. I took it as a warning to improve my backup procedures but reasoned that statistically speaking I should be safe from hard drive failures for a while.

Statistically speaking, I'm an idiot.

The second hard drive that was in that server (another Western Digital 120GB IDE drive) has just failed. While I had some warning that the first drive was going to fail this one died suddenly before I could pull anything off it. On it was my version control repository (again), my build server virtual machine, a bunch of testing virtual machines and most importantly several years worth of real world test data that I have been gathering to feed into Sydney.

And what of my improved backup procedures that the first drive failure prompted me to put into place? Unfortunately they're still on the drawing board. I have a old machine ready to use as a backup server that I'll keep at my house but I haven't finished putting it together yet. Another week and it would have been ready, I've just been too busy with the moves and technical support jobs of late to devote more time to it.

The good news

The good news is that by going into Windows safe mode and using xcopy repeatedly it appears I was able to recover some of the files. I've retrieved my version control repository, an older version of my build server virtual machine and maybe 15% of the test data archive. The drive has now completely died, emitting all sorts of scraping, clicking and clanking noises if I try to use it.

So once again, through good fortune rather than good planning, I seem to have averted disaster. I'm not going to tempt fate again though. As I said last time

"Of course if lightning does happen to strike twice I'll have to be very wary. These things happen in threes you know."

The backup server will be up running at my house before the end of the working week.

All settled in

2005-02-12T17:24:00.000+11:00

It's been almost a month since my last posting. About half that time I was busy with my moves and the other half of the time I guess I was settling into my new surroundings and just didn't get around to posting.

Time to get stuck into it all again though with the moves from my old home/office to a new house and a new office completed. Many thanks to the friends and family who helped me through the whole process, without you I would really have been lost.

It was a very busy time made just that bit harder by a big network setup job for a local business that came through almost the day I started my move. I would have put them off until after the move but I'd been chasing this job for 3 months and didn't want to risk losing it to someone else. So I've been spending my days at their offices these past few weeks and moving my furniture and boxes in the early mornings and evenings.

There's been no progress on the Sydney front but I am in a much better position now, both in terms of my work and home environments and my financial situation.

The new house is really quite good and my housemates are good people. There have been no problems between us but even if there were, I'm traveling light now with all my work equipment at the office so I can quite easily move to another shared house if I need to.

The new office I'm assuming is also quite good, but the truth is I've only been there four times in the past 5 weeks, each time for no longer than an hour or two. Lucky the rent is so ridiculously cheap or it would have been a real waste of money. Starting next week though I'll be making a real effort to spend more time there and get stuck into Sydney again.

I did have one unexpected stroke of luck during the moving process. The real estate agent was able to find a new tenant for my old place before my notice period ended and as a result I didn't have to pay that extra week's rent I thought I was going to have to. A nice little bonus just when I needed it, moving is always a strain on the finances even when you do it on the cheap.

The first move

2005-01-15T09:47:00.000+11:00

After a slightly more difficult than expected search I've found a new house to live in. It's a share house a few hundred metres from my current house. I wanted somewhere that close since I don't have a car and so need somewhere central with good public transport. My current location is perfect in these respects and the new house will be just as good.

I'll start moving my stuff into the new house next weekend, but this weekend it's the move into the new office. I'm packing today, and tomorrow, with the help of a mate and his trailer will move my computers, books and desks. I'm only taking what is necessary for working on Sydney, all other distractions will go to the new house or into storage.

I've made a slight miscalculation with the amount of notice I had to give for my current residence. I thought I had to give 2 weeks notice that I was going to move out. It turns out I need to give 3 weeks notice before I leave. That's an extra $270 I'm going to have to pay to my old landlord for a flat I'll have moved out of and will be completely empty and unused during that third week. At a time when I'm also having to fork out bond money for both the new house and new office it's a costly mistake. A simple call to the real estate agent on my part to check how much notice I needed to give would have been advisable.

I can't dwell on that though, the purpose of the move wasn't to save money but to create a better working environment. The money I will be saving in rent, $65 per week, is just a nice side-benefit. The real measure of success will be if I'm able to once again properly focus on Sydney.

These boxes aren't going to pack themselves though so it's time to stop procrastinating and get to work. I'll post again soon once I've settled in.

Time to start packing

2005-01-11T13:15:00.000+11:00

I'm starting to organise for the move to the new shared office space. I've received confirmation by email stating what the rent and bond will be and the date I can move in it so it's all stations go. The rent will be $55 per week and I can start moving in on the 16th of this month. My tenancy will be based on a handshake agreement between myself and the other tenants so I at least wanted those important figures and dates in writing from day one.

Currently I pay $270 per week for my 1 bedroom unit (home/office), sleeping upstairs and working, cooking, eating, washing in the one room downstairs. It's a little pricey mainly because of the location, almost in the centre of the city. I could justify the high weekly cost when I was paying for only half the rent, $135, with personal funds and the other half, $135, with business funds. Once I move into the new office though I can't really justify spending the whole $270 solely on a place to live.

So as well as moving to a new office I'll also be moving house. These last 18 months were my first experience of living alone in a 1 bedroom place and I have to admit I didn't really like it much. It's far too isolating especially when you're working alone most of the time as well.

I'll be going back to living in share accomodation and it's something I'm looking forward to. I'd lived in share accomodation for about 7 years with nearly 20 different people before my current house. It's not for everyone but I enjoy the variety you get from with living with people of all types.

I wouldn't consider moving back to share accomodation if I was still working from home. Nobody wants a flatmate that's home all the time or else they wouldn't after a few months of me hanging around the house all day every day. There's also the security aspect, usually flatmates are OK but then there's their friends, people who forget to lock the doors and parties where you don't know most of the people wandering around your house.

Hopefully I'll find a suitable share house in the same suburb I'm in now. My current suburb is ideal being in a central location, with excellent public transport on my doorstep and within walking distance of my favourite pubs and venues. A room for around the same rent as what I currently pay, $135 out of personal funds, will put me ahead by close to $100 per week and in a better work environment as well. After that there'll be no more excuses for not making the progress I should be.

A second blog

2005-01-01T18:06:00.000+11:00

I've started another blog, titled Lachlan on Delphi. I'll be using it to record my experiences mainly with Borland's Delphi software development environment with the odd excursion into other areas. I won't be discussing Sydney over there, so if you're not a programmer it probably won't interest you much.

On a sidenote, if you are a programmer and you haven't looked at Delphi in a while, it's time you took another look. Borland is taking back their position of producing the best development tools on the market with the latest version of Delphi. The new Delphi 2005 supports Win32 development with Object Pascal and .NET development with both C# and Object Pascal all in the one IDE. Throw in a bunch of other enhancements like refactoring, direct integration to version control, automatic file history tracking, a highly customisable IDE and a Model Driven Architecture framework and it's proving to be a killer release.

Looks good

2004-12-22T07:15:00.000+11:00

I went and looked at that shared office space on Monday. I think it will suit me pretty well. There are some things that aren't so good, but it will be a massive improvement on my current situation and may even work out to be cheaper.

It's actually a bit of a find. Apparently the owners want to tear it down and build a block of flats there which is why the rent is so cheap. They can't give any certainty as to when it will happen but the building plans haven't even been submitted to the council yet. The other tenants have been there for up to three years and they seem to think the quickest anything might happen is 12 months or more.

The great thing is that it's just a quick cycle or bus ride from my house. I could also walk there in maybe 20-25 minutes.

The other tenants who I'll be sharing the space with all seem fine as well. They're your usual mix of hip young things with a graphic designer, fashion designer, web/graphic designer and an IT network support person. The office itself consists of several individual offices and a large common area. There's one less individual office than there are businesses so one person has to set up in the actual common area behind partitions. Being the last one in, that will be me. I'm not crazy about that but the area is quite large and the partitions provide a decent level of privacy. They've assured me that it's not a noisy work environment and that most of the time each of them is working away with their respective doors closed.

It's not in the best part of town, but I've previously had an office in the absolute worst part of town so I'm not too bothered too much by that. They were burgled earlier this year but since then the landlord has upgraded the locks and put bars on the doors. I think you'd still have to assume that it's going to happen again though and be prepared for it when it does.

The space will be available mid January and I'd like to be able to move in straight away. The cabin fever has been steadily rising here in my home office the last few weeks. I'm hoping a change of scenery, a less chaotic work environment and some people to talk to will help to restore some sanity and motivation levels.

Time for a change?

2004-12-16T23:15:00.000+11:00

I was at a Christmas party for one of my tech support clients last night and was speaking to the graphic designer they contract work out to on occasion. She shares office space with a few other micro businesses about 2kms from my current home office. Apparently one of the other businesses is moving out in a few weeks time and they're going to be looking for someone to take his place.

I haven't seen it yet but it sounds quite appealing and the rent is supposedly ridiculously cheap. I'll probably go and take a look early next week and meet the other business owners. If it's everything I've been told, and she hasn't promised a lot, I think I'll jump at the chance.

Five years ago I had a home office and it's something I said I'd never do again. I went back on that promise last year to string out my savings as long as possible for Sydney. Against my better judgement I moved into a one bedroom unit and turned the kitchen/living area into a kitchen/office. In theory it was do-able, in practice...

Not as bad as it could have been

2004-12-13T12:20:00.000+11:00

I've had a hard drive failure in my server over the weekend. It's a Western Digital 120GB IDE drive (a WD1200JB-00DUA3 to be exact) about 18 months old. It detects fine at startup but just doesn't respond to any requests and causes W2K server to freeze during boot. It's a data only drive so I've pulled it out and the server now runs fine.

I had a little trouble with this drive a few months ago but it started working again after a few days before I had a chance to look at it properly. After that I moved everything important to another drive, or so I thought I had.

It turns out I didn't move my StarTeam version control repository. I can't remember why I didn't, I probably just missed it. It's not as bad as it sounds, I may have lost my revision history of Sydney but I still have all the current source code on my development machine. If there had been any publicly released versions I would have lost the ability to recreate those versions for support purposes (although my build procedure DVD backups would hopefully save me here).

If I had to suffer some data loss, this isn't a bad way to suffer it. I've put the drive off to one side and if I ever make my fortune I'll send it off to a specialist data recovery service to recover some personal files that are on it. In the meantime it's a wake up call to me to improve my backup procedures and based on the lightning doesn't strike twice principle I should be right for a while now. Of course if lightning does happen to strike twice I'll have to be very wary. These things happen in threes you know.

Lefty responds

2004-12-05T17:12:00.000+11:00

If you were around last week to catch my hosting of the Carnival of the Capitalists you would have read about my misgivings with capitalism and my theme for the day of capitalism benefitting those who aren't at the top of the pyramid. There were several great postings and comments on both the topic and my attitudes so I thought I'd pick one in particular to respond to here.

Alex asks:

What is it with latter-entrepreneurs and disliking capitalism? Is it that you're trying to escape it (at least symbolically) by not working for an established business, or perhaps a worry about the lack of a guaranteed outcome in a capitalist economy? If the latter, you can take solace in the fact that history shows that capitalism alternatives don't offer a lot of safe bets either... ;-)

Snark aside, I'm genuinely curious. It seems like, if anybody, entrepreneurs - strongly self-motivated people with a vision of independent success - should be bigger fans of a system that lets them proceed however they want and keep their winnings than anybody...

I'm interested, and heartened, to hear Alex say there are other new entrepreneurs out there who think similarly to me in this regard. I can't speak for them of course but Alex's theories don't really ring true with me.

Certainly I'm trying to escape a particular lifestyle by creating my own. Rather than symbolically escaping capitalism though, I think I'm escaping the far more literal boredom that would follow with working for something I had no real interest in.

As for guaranteed outcomes, if I was worried about those I don't think I'd be doing this at all.

I think my dislike for capitalism is largely derived from guilt. I grew up in prosperous times and have never had to want for anything of real significance. I look around though and I see huge gaps between what I have as young middle class male and what basic needs others lack in both my country and elsewhere. When I look at the capitalist elites the difference between the haves and have nots is so monumental I find it obscene.

How could anyone be satisfied with a system that can produce such discrepancies and unfairness?

Note there that I did say "be satisfied with a system". I don't hate capitalism, and I don't have anything radically better to replace it with. I am however not satisfied with it in it's current form. I want us to do better, I want us to actively work towards bridging the gap between rich and poor and protecting the environment. I want us to do these things not just as flow-on affects but as primary goals, equal in importance to our current goals of making money and increasing shareholder value. To treat them as anything of less importance just doesn't seem very human to me.

...entrepreneurs should be bigger fans of a system that lets them proceed however they want and keep their winnings than anybody

I'm definitely a fan of a system that lets me proceed however I want, however I'm not such a fan of a society that has become obsessed with keeping their winnings to a degree that defies all logic. The term multi-millionaire seems non-sensical to me. What can you do personally with several million dollars that you can't do with one million? Plenty of things I'm sure, but are those things really that important?

On this point I'm speaking from some level of experience. To start my new venture I've dropped my salary to almost a third of what it previously was. It's now much closer to what I'd be getting on unemployment benefits than the average Australian's weekly wage. To my surprise my quality of life is pretty much unchanged if not improved. If my software is a success I don't really envisage changing my current lifestyle all that much. For me at least it seems what they say about a simpler life really is true.

So maybe that's what I'm really riling against here. Not so much the capitalist system but instead the capitalist societies that are our implementations of it. Everything looks great in theory, in practice we can always do better.

Receive my rants on paper

2004-11-30T11:56:00.000+11:00

I've signed on with Print My Blog, a service that provides hard copy versions of blogs to readers. I don't have any illusions of writing a proper book here but from looking at the traffic logs for this site it's quite common for new visitors to spend an hour or two reading the archives.

I know myself that reading a large chunk of any blog in sequential order is an annoying experience and Blogger's lack of good navigation links between articles makes it more difficult. The paper version is in chronological order from earliest to latest and is much easier to read than the online version.

What does it look like?

If you order a printed copy you get a cheap and nasty collection of half size pages stapled together containing all my blog posts to date. There's no reader comments but there is an online system in place to allow links to be followed. Like I said it's cheap and nasty, you won't be looking to place it on your bookshelf, but it is a much easier way to read my articles.

What does it cost?

US$4.50 (postage is free inside the USA)

The $4.50 all goes to the Print My Blog people. If you're feeling especially generous you can add on an extra amount of which I receive 75%. Many thanks if you do but it's really not necessary, I'm a developer not an author.

How do I order?

Just pick the link below that indicates the amount you'd like to pay for a printed copy of all my postings to the current date.

US$4.50 + postage
US$7.00 + postage ($1.88 goes to me)
US$10.00 + postage ($4.13 goes to me)
US$15.00 + postage ($7.88 goes to me)
US$20.00 + postage ($11.63 goes to me)
US$25.00 + postage ($15.38 goes to me)
US$50.00 + postage ($34.13 goes to me. Surely you can think of a better way to spend this much money though.)

Carnival of the Capitalists

2004-11-30T03:22:00.000+11:00

Welcome to the Carnival of the Capitalists for this week. With the Americans on holiday for Thanksgiving we expected a smaller carnival than usual but together with some overflow from last week, the carnival is as strong as ever.

I underestimated the amount of work involved in bringing this all together. Luckily the earth's rotation and Australia's close proximity to the international dateline is working in my favour so it won't be as late as it could have been.

Answering the call

Last week, while preparing my readers for the link fest that was about to occur (I don't do a lot of linking here at Software Startup), I posed the following challenge.

I doubt I'll be as provocative as Pete was but it would be nice if there were a few submissions that showed some examples of capitalism benefiting people other than just those at the top of the pyramid

Brian Gongol accepted the challenge to alleviate my uncertainty about capitalism and has a great post that lists 5 examples of capitalism improving society.

Similarly Tim Worstall has also given me plenty to think about with his commentary on the recent statements of a Bishop and what Tim believes is his misunderstanding of economics.

Both Brian and Tim make convincing cases for capitalism though I think as a society we can always do better. The challenge is there for everyone to keep looking for new ways to spread those benefits as widely as possible. After all we live in a society not an economy.

Lefty leanings from a reluctant capitalist aside let's get back to the business at hand with a topic close to my heart...

Entrepreneurship and Small Business.

Jeff Cornwall at The Entrepreneurial Mind illustrates the importance of planning in family businesses.

Ankesh Kothari presents a discussion from Dien Rice Ph.D on reducing risks when start a new venture. He cites the example of Richard Branson and suggests studying the risk reduction strategies of serial entrepreneurs.

Anita Campbell at Small Business Trends has an interview with a noted small business expert who in blunt and colorful fashion states why the U.S. Presidential election doesn’t matter for small business. Quoting Paul Simon songs, he says it’s because small businesses are on their own. Each one is so different that there is nothing any of them can band together and do as a group. They should get their lovin’ at home.

Harish Keshwani at BusinessWorks Inc has started an experimental blog about a "virtual" Dotcom company doing business in RFID based solutions. He takes readers through the steps involved creating a business plan for his "virtual" company.

Beth Mauldin is in the early stages of planning a restaurant web site business and asks for advice from readers on her ideas.

The Labor Market

Dean Esmay discusses impending unionization in an unlikely place, and the relative merits of unions and, especially, corporations as a valid business structure for true capitalism. Comments from readers and Dean expand on the topic spiritedly and at length.

Joshua Sharf discusses a Washington Post article about labor unrest in China. The fact that the Party has been playing for both sides, labor and management, combined with its need for increased growth, may hurt its ability to deal with this. It also shows that there are at least soft limits to China's ability to absorb jobs.

Jeff Cornwall investigates the current debate about outsourcing. The debate seems to only focus on free markets or government regulation. This fails to consider the ethical and moral dimension, which can move us beyond relying on government imposed controls.

Tim Worstall discusses job creation and how it relates to Bill Gates' inbox and the Lump of Labor Fallacy.

Leadership and Management

Steve Rucinski at Small Business CEO discusses leadership and asks what are the key tasks?

Wayne Allen asks why do managers and executives wait so long to make decisions about painfully obvious problems?

Jim Stroup at Managing Leadership commences a series on why the woman Peter Drucker called the "Prophet of Management," Mary Parker Follett, is more urgently relevant to practicing managers and executives today than virtually the entire crop of contemporary writers - even though she wrote in the 1920s!

Economics

Rawdon Adams at Capital Chronicle is interested in exploiting the dollar's drop. He theorises that the brutal drop in the greenback is a chance for holders of foreign cash to take advantage of the new investment opportunities being presented. But is the time ripe?

Dave Foster of Photon Courier fame introduces the Harvard indicator, a stock market indicator based on the career choices of Harvard MBA graduates.

Arnold Kling debates the The Flynn Effect which is the increase in IQ test scores each decade. Arnold wonders if it is a result of economic growth.

Captain Arbyte (AKA Kyle Markley) discusses the economics of insurance in particular health insurance. The Captain discusses how tax incentives have contributed to the structure of the health care system in the United States, and some of the bad results. He also explains why insurance is the wrong vehicle for paying for chronic medical conditions.

The Free Market

John Beck at Incite debates a bill currently in congress would require DVD player manufacturers to make it impossible for viewers to fast-forward through commercials. John thinks the very essence of this bill is an affront to property rights and the notion that free market transactions are voluntary. It sounds like a good way to get people to go back to reading books to me.

Barry Ritholtz of the Big Picture takes great pleasure in debunking the kinda-eventually-sorta-mostly-almost Efficient Market Theory.

Arnold Kling discusses the affect of regulation without thinking through the consequences in the area of affordable housing.

Russell Buckley of the Mobile Technology Weblog talks of Amazon's plans to allow customers of traditional retailers to to scan bar codes with their cell phone whilst instore to see if Amazon can offer it cheaper.

The Interested Participant, Mike Pechar, details multi-million dollar agreements recently signed by Beijing and Tianjin allowing licensed use of Microsoft software products as well as 16,000 Dell personal computers for primary and secondary schools. These sales are good news for U.S. suppliers but they have produced a loud protest from the nascent Chinese information technology industry.

Warren Meyer at Coyote Blog discusses why many reverse auction sites failed (even some of those you may have thought succeeded) and why Priceline, the most famous success story, succeeded for a very unique reason.

Blogging

Wayne Hurlbert of Blog Business World tells the tale of a blogger who received some shabby treatment from a mainstream newspaper.

Brendon Connelly of Slacker Management is thinking about blogging as "professional lubricant." He examines the pros and cons of citing your blog in a resume, and how hiring managers might view it.

James at Collaborate Marketing has written an article to try and make it easier to explain blogging to business people. He offers it here for your use next time you have to explain the importance of blogging to someone.

Business

Phillip Wilson has some thoughts on the Appreciative Mindset in business. The basic point is to explore what gives the organization life - instead of looking for "problems" to solve, a negative way to look at life. According to Phillip it always transforms the conversations that occur in an organization - the first step to any lasting change.

David Masten at Catallarchy has an amusing piece on what life would be like if pharmaceuticals were produced and sold like computers, and vice versa.

Frank Scavo at the Enterprise System Spectator thinks that most Sarbanes-Oxley compliance efforts will not do much to mitigate business risk. In this post, he describes how companies should focus their efforts to make Sarbanes Oxley compliance a meaningful exercise.

Director Mitch from the Window Manager takes an ironic look at how to tell customers the truth when they ask for things that are impossible to deliver.

Todd Sattersten of A Penny For... talks of Gamesmanship in the Air and the strategies employed in the competition between Boeing and Airbus.

And finally on the lighter side

A satirical riff from Kevin McGehee on a recent vote by the city council of North Pole, Alaska to raise the sales tax by one cent (from 3¢ to 4¢) for two years, with some consideration of the challenges of a certain unique, seasonal manufacturing operation staffed by extremely long-lived elves.

Well that's it I guess. The earth's rotation may have saved my bacon but only just so I'm off to bed. My advice to future carnival hosts, start early.

The original eureka moment

2004-11-26T13:44:00.000+11:00

Earlier this month I mentioned that I was going to reduce the scope of my first version of Sydney and target a narrower market. That narrower market is one that I've personally been a part of and it's my own experiences that make me think it's a good first step for Sydney.

During my years at my former day job I encountered a program which I'll give the codename Geneva (yes another codename). Geneva is a server based software system, used primarily by small to medium businesses, that has established itself as the premier reasonably priced solution in it's field. I was responsible, amongst many other things, for maintaining a Geneva server for several years and was very impressed with it's features and reliability.

There was one operation though that Geneva took the easy way out with in the area of long term data storage and retrieval. Because of this I would often find myself recovering data stored in Geneva for staff who had no means of accessing it themselves.

It was after a long session of manually sifting through this data that I had my eureka moment. If this data currently stored in Geneva could be made accessible to users, then my time and the time of others like me could be devoted to more important tasks (such as resetting passwords and teaching people when to double click and when to single click).

It wasn't a quit your day job straight away sort of idea but over the next few months the vision grew in scope from a simple add-on to Geneva to an industrial strength distributed platform for storing all sorts of unstructured data. Support for Geneva would be just one small aspect, if I wasn't too busy catering for the big end of town that is.

Over the past few months you've been witness to me reversing my thinking on this and now once again Sydney will be an add-on to Geneva. There's been some time wasted on building some now somewhat redundant infrastructure but that will hopefully pay dividends for building future releases.

Sydney's design is much more open than it was originally and should be easier to extend than if it had been designed solely with Geneva in mind. After this first Geneva specific version I'll start by adding support for Geneva's competitors, with each release incorporating more of the big picture features. Perhaps one day I'll approach my vision of a full bells and whistles Sydney that doesn't need to attach itself to another product to justify it's existence.

Do not adjust your set

2004-11-24T10:18:00.000+11:00

Next Tuesday there's going to be a break from the usual program here. I'm going to be hosting next week's edition of Carnival of the Capitalists.

What's that?

It's a regular weekly blogging event with articles about business, management, marketing, accounting, finance, economics, sales and of course capitalism. The Carnival is hosted by a different site each week and anyone who has posted a blog entry on one of those topics is invited to submit it to the host for that week to include a link to it in their carnival presentation.

To see what I mean take a look at this week's Carnival hosted at Social Twister. You can also take a look at these past Carnivals where I submitted some of my postings at Blog Business World, The Outsourcing Weblog and Crossroads Dispatches.

It would be great if there were any readers of my blog who could make their Carnival debut here. It's a guaranteed way to bring more people to your blog. To do so you need to have written a blog posting on one of those topics, and send a link to it along with a short summary to capitalists - at - elhide.com. You can find out more at the Carnival's home page.

Some philosophical musings

Although I'm hosting the Carnival of the Capitalists this week I have to admit to having some reservations about the Capitalists part of the name. These last few months I've really learnt to make do with less and I'm just as happy if not more so than when I was earning a reasonably large income.

But while I've been finding that less really is more I do wonder if it's a sustainable position. As a single guy with no financial commitments it's quite easy to live on a modest income but could I say the same thing in five years time if I had a family to support.

Unfortunately it seems that capitalism with all it's faults is the best system we've been able to come up with to date. I'd love to be able to suggest an alternative but to the best of my knowledge every other alternative has pretty much failed. Until someone comes up with a radical new economic and social structure that's sustainable, I guess we'll all have to make do with the devil we know. Those romantic "less is more" types like your's truly might have to be satisfied with tweaking capitalism around the edges to make it a bit more "human".

A fellow reluctant capitalist

Peter Caputa also showed his left leanings when he blazed a trail while hosting the carnival a few months back. He received quite a bit of negative feedback my favourite being, "I can see why the French like you so much."

I doubt I'll be as provocative as Pete was but it would be nice if there were a few submissions that showed some examples of capitalism benefiting people other than just those at the top of the pyramid.

Opportunity reconsidered

2004-11-18T10:33:00.000+11:00

There was a range of good advice from commentors to my last post both for and against developing Sydney for a specific company. The arguments were sound and I'm going to give more consideration to my decision not to pursue this opportunity. I don't think I need to reach a final decision quickly, as well as Sydney not being ready, the company in question has put their purchase project on the back burner. With Christmas approaching I'm guessing they won't start looking again until early next year. By that time Sydney should be getting ready for prime time.

An anonymous commentor recommended I read Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm. This is the second time it's been recommended to me by a commentor so I think I'll go and take a look for it in the bookstore today. I know a little bit about it from reading Luke Hohmann's excellent book Beyond Software Architecture who mention's Moore's book in passing.

From Hohmann's book I was introduced to the S-curve of adoption. This is a well known pattern that describes the different categories of customers and their adoption rates of a new technology. It divides people up into:

innovators, those who want to be on the cutting edge and can tolerate a few rough edges,
early adopters, people who like to push the envelope but expect a higher standard of reliability and completeness.
early majority, who expect a higher still standard of reliability and completeness,
late majority, those who will only consider a tried and true solution,
laggards, who adopt a technology only because all their competitors have already done so.

As I understand it, Crossing the Chasm refers to making the jump between marketing to innovators, which I guess is what I'm doing now with this blog, and marketing to the early adopters. It's an interesting topic and I'm eager to compare Moore's advice with my own marketing plans (which you'll hear about shortly).

Opportunity or step backwards?

2004-11-16T14:49:00.000+11:00

I was speaking with a friend a few days ago about Sydney. He's someone who was initially skeptical about the concept of Sydney but has come around since the company he works at started shopping around for a system just like it. They're currently evaluating a New York style product but apparently aren't all that wrapped in it. Being a good friend my mate was enquiring with me about Sydney's progress and if I would be interested in presenting it to his bosses with a view to them purchasing a license.

It was a nice gesture but I've declined for a few reasons. Firstly Sydney just isn't ready yet. Hopefully by early next year I'll be preparing to release my version 1, but right now it's a definite work in progress. According to my friend that time frame would be acceptable for his company but I still don't want to go ahead with it. I'm staking my future on this venture, I wouldn't want him staking his reputation/future in his company on it also if things don't go well.

The other reason I'm declining his offer is that I want to maintain full control over the path this project takes. If I were to agree to developing Sydney with his company in mind then I'd have to, and my friend said as much, take their suggestions onboard and incorporate them into my feature set. Certainly many of the features they'd ask for would be ones that I would implement anyway but there is bound to be some that would be specific to them and not able to be resold in a wider release.

I don't want to be obligated to anyone as strongly as that. I've been doing consulting and contract work for almost 10 years and it's what I'm trying to move away from. Taking the ideas of others and turning them into software is all well and good but this time I want to try my hand at being the ideas man as well as being the developer. My friend thinks I'm being unrealistic and a bit stubborn in wanting everything my own way. Stubborn I'll put my hand up for. Unrealistic is something that only time will tell. If I don't give it a go though I'll never know.

My first taste of dog food

2004-11-09T07:56:00.000+11:00

I'm about to add a data import feature to Sydney. This might appear to be a bit premature since the main core of the system is nowhere near finished and, apart from a few flashing lights in my unit tests suite, Sydney doesn't really do anything useful yet. Why would I be writing the data import routine this early when the core is still unfinished and very likely subject to change?

The answer, of course, is that I'm looking to eat my own dog food as soon as possible.

I don't have the luxury of dedicated testers so I need to spend as much time making use of the system in the same way a future user would. By importing my large store of historical data into Sydney and managing it there on a day to day basis I'm hoping to identify problems now rather than at release time.

It will also give me plenty of testing data and I won't have to worry about converting test data as the data format changes. Instead I'll just clear out all the data and reimport again.

Since there is so much of the core application still to be written those import routines will likely be broken by changes several times over the coming months. This shouldn't be too big a deal though. As long as I fix the import routines each time they break the changes required shouldn't build up and become a major task. The time I lose making those fixes I should recover by having a more robust and well tested system that requires less debugging further down the track.

How will I know when changes to the core have broken the import routines?

Two ways. Before I even write the import routines I'll be writing some unit tests to check that the import routines will at least execute without error and perform some basic validation on the imported data. I execute all unit tests frequently as part of my development process so I should know almost immediately of any major errors that cause the import to fail.

Secondly I'm thinking of clearing out and then repeating the full import of all my historical data on a nightly basis. This will hopefully help me realise if more subtle errors have crept in, errors that don't cause the import to fail but perhaps affect the consistency of the data.

There's nothing revolutionary about any of this of course. I'm just making good use of some best practices and techniques I've learnt from others. You can read about Joel Spolsky's experiences with eating his own dog food and there's a wealth of material available on Unit Testing and Test Driven Development from the XP folks and others.

Adjusting expectations and strategies

2004-11-07T09:25:00.000+11:00

Fresh from my realisation that Sydney wasn't the most original idea in the world I've re-analysed my situation and made some adjustments. While I was never absolutely certain that Sydney would be a run-away success I have to admit I was fairly confident that it would spark a reasonably successful business. With that business I expected to be able to set myself up comfortably for quite a few years to come.

I'm not so certain of that anymore. Finding out the market for Sydney has become a fair bit more crowded with New York, London and other products has lowered my expectations somewhat. I'm now thinking that a few years of quite modest* income is a much more likely outcome.

* Keep in mind you're talking to someone who currently pays himself a wage that's much closer to the unemployment benefits amount than the average weekly wage so my idea of a modest income is probably well below your idea of a modest income.

I'm not giving up though, just acknowledging the more likely than not possibility that Sydney isn't the million dollar idea I thought it was. Maybe Sydney is a stepping stone idea, something that I can work on while I come up with the next project, or perhaps it will eventually evolve into something else completely. I'm going to forge ahead though, at worst the experience will help me to better prepare for my next venture. I also think I can probably make enough sales to go part-way to getting me off the tech support consulting treadmill.

My strategy does need some adjusting though. Previously my strategy was simply success or bust in the form of one grand release (which with all the recent delays would have been late 2005). Since I no longer have as much blind faith in the Sydney concept it would be foolish to keep putting all my eggs into that one basket.

I think I need a more staged strategy, one that's more transparent as to how well the project and business is performing to it's goals. That way I'll hopefully be able to recognise if and when Sydney has run it's course and when it's time to move on to the next idea. Here's a rough outline of what I'm planning:

Release a version sooner rather than later,
Reduce the scope of the first version to allow this,
Target a narrower market where I have a good channel to market Sydney through,
Leverage any successes in this narrower market to expand to other markets and
Reinvest this initial income back into the business.

Treading water

2004-11-01T21:08:00.000+11:00

Despite my intentions to do as little actual paying work as possible, I seem to be every week drawn closer and closer to becoming a full time technical support consultant to local small businesses.

Word is getting around to both old clients and new that I am available again and for the past month I've done little else but service those businesses. It's been a great month for the bottom line but a terrible month for Sydney. My business cash reserves are healthy and could cover my expenses until late February, but I'm more than a month behind on my development schedule.

The time has really come when I have to make a decision about whether I'm an independent software developer or a freelance tech support guy.

I'm an independent software developer.

That was easy.

Frivolity aside, the past month has only reinforced my feelings on this. While I'm happy to do a limited amount of support for another year or two, I don't want to still be doing this years from now. There's quite a few reasons for that but the main reason is that I don't find it very fulfilling. I quite like going around helping people but I'd much rather be building the dam instead of just plugging holes in it.

The one good thing about this past month is that I've had time to do some planning and research for Sydney. I'll talk more about that tomorrow but the short version is that I'm hoping to have something ready in a few months time. Since I've built up a few months of living expenses I'm going to try and dedicate myself almost fully to Sydney until the money runs out. I'll still have to support existing clients but aside from emergencies I'll be limiting myself to 1 maybe 2 days per week for support work and only on days that fit in with my schedule not theirs.

That's the new plan, although it's remarkably similar to the original plan. This time though I'm going to add a new word to the vocabulary, "No!"

Learning to roll with the punches

2004-10-05T23:14:00.000+10:00

In the aftermath of my New York inspired meltdown I spent some time looking at the other players in the market. It turns out the market has matured somewhat since I last did this seriously, which was obviously far too long ago.

Mostly I found products with similar price tags to New York. There was one product though, which I'll call London, which is comparable to Sydney in both features and pricing though based on the Application Service Provider (ASP) model. Their monthly charges are very reasonable and their features include most of the planned features of Sydney. To be honest I'm tempted to start using their service myself right now.

The ASP model is something that I had considered for Sydney but as a future step. I don't have the networking experience to run a 24x7 service and I don't have the funds to pay for someone else to do it for me.

I can't say that I wasn't worried by this discovery. When I found the London website late one night I just turned off my computer and went straight to bed.

"Well that's that," I remember thinking, "I'm sick of all this IT stuff, time to find something new."

I don't think I was really serious about that but at the time it was quite liberating to think that I could just walk away from it all. I didn't have a clue what I'd be walking away to, but I did realise for the first time that there were probably other options out there if Sydney doesn't come about.

Thankfully morning brought with it some perspective and renewed enthusiasm. I realised just because the potential market isn't quite as open as I originally thought that doesn't mean I should give up without a fight. I wasn't quite sure how but I was resolved to find a way to adapt to this new challenge. Amongst other things I went back and re-read the comments I received from readers when I wrote about New York a few weeks back. Once again, many thanks to those who took the time to give suggestions and encouragement.

I haven't got around to reading the books that were recommended to me as yet, but I did follow the suggestions from Brian, Adam, Chris, Tom, Glenn and David. I listed London's strengths against Sydney's and looked for ways that I can differentiate myself using the flexibility I have as a one man operation. I've got a few ideas and I'll keep looking for more, but unfortunately London looks pretty darn good and it's available here and now. The main point of difference between the two appears to be the deployment models, with Sydney being a more traditional onsite application against the ASP model of London.

I'm interested to hear what others think about this but I'm of the opinion that most people fall into either the traditional onsite application camp or the ASP camp and don't often shift between the two. If I'm correct there should be plenty of room for both Sydney and London without the two even needing to go head to head.

If I'm wrong and London does turn out to be a direct competitor to Sydney then I'll need to play on the usual fears about losing control of one's data and the potential privacy implications about using an ASP. I'm not particularly worried by these issues myself but there are plenty of people who are. Another point of difference could be the increased flexibility of running Sydney inhouse and being able to more easily integrate it into existing systems than London.

It's this integration with existing systems that I'm investigating right now. If I can work out a few technical integration details I'm thinking of altering my development schedule and maybe initially targeting a smaller niche to test the waters. More on that soon.

Don't panic

2004-09-21T21:47:00.000+10:00

Apologies for leaving you all hanging after my last post. I wasn't thinking clearly about the issues so I decided to take a few days break from Sydney to try to regain some perspective. Many thanks to everyone who discussed the issues, and gave me suggestions or words of encouragement, you certainly helped me to see the forest for the trees.

My fears that there would be a copy of New York on every server and desktop within 12 months weren't particularly rational and as some of you pointed out this could actually be beneficial for me. The more interest there is in this type of product, the larger the market will become for both the high and low end products. I somewhat arrogantly assumed that high priced systems like New York were my competitors. Of course anyone in the market for a product like New York wouldn't even consider looking at a low end product like Sydney and vice-versa.

So as long as New York stays a high end product I don't believe it's a threat to my business.

Will New York stay a high end product though?

The new owners do sell software for as little as $1000 so they're used to selling software to the little guys as well as the big guys.

On the other hand the new owners aren't suddenly going to drop it's price by an order of magnitude or two when they're currently making $350 000 sales to US government departments. I also imagine it would take quite a bit of work to re-engineer a system like that to make a low end version.

There's not much I can do about it either way though so I'm not going to lose any more sleep over it. Instead I've found something else much more troubling to lose sleep over...