The Blog of Codora

Time Freedom

Duff OMelia — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:03:00 +0000

I met a dad in the pediatric intensive care unit whose child had been in the neonatal area of the hospital for 3 months. I asked him how things went with work and how he and his wife were able to spend so much time at the hospital. He replied that he’s a business owner and that his work wasn’t too affected by the long hospital stay.

Creating assets that provide value to people is important. Producing more than we consume is important. Figuring out how to live in a way such that your income is not solely based on the time you spend working is important.

Ready for real customers?

Duff OMelia — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:00:00 +0000

You’re creating a website that you’d like to release to the general public. One of the questions that needs answering is, which features do you need to make it to that first release?

I’ve been enjoying creating sites that I personally use like Spreedly and No Kahuna. When I’m an actual user of the site I’m making, it makes the decision about what to implement a bit easier.

The goal is to get to market and have the site being used by real customers as quickly as possible. For No Kahuna, that happened in 2 days. Spreedly took many weeks of effort before a real customer started using it. To release to a real customer, we’re only trying to make something that’s slightly better than what’s out there. We’re only trying to provide some value to the customer, not all of the value we’re ever going to provide. Does the site in its current state improve the lives of our customers?

When you’re your own customer, this becomes fun because you’re only working on the features that you’re quite sure would improve your life. If you’re at all unsure whether a feature provides value, defer it. Only do the stuff you’re confident about. This is fine because you’ll be released soon, and then customers will start giving you real feedback which is much more valuable than your guesses about what’s important.

Once you’re released, then you need to be judicious about which features to implement and be willing to say no to many requests from customers. In Getting Real, the 37 Signals guys said this:

And one more thing: it’s not just about the sheer number of requests (we don’t recommend adding something just because X# of people requested it), it’s about customers planting a seed in your mind. If they keep reminding you of something, it forces you to think about it. Maybe it is a good idea. Maybe it isn’t. But at least it’s important enough to consider if so many people keep asking for it.

No Kahuna

Duff OMelia — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:34:00 +0000

My friend Alex and I spent 2 full days last week creating No Kahuna. It was an intense and quite enjoyable 48 hour burst of design and development. We can’t wait to see what the world thinks of it.

Of course, we used Spreedly to handle our subscriptions and payments. Without Spreedly or something like it, going live in that time frame with a subscription-based web site capable of collecting real money would be pretty difficult if not impossible.

I hope you can give it a try.

Nathaniel Talbott's first Spreedly interview

Duff OMelia — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:22:00 +0000

Some exciting things have been happening in Spreedly land. More invites have been sent and Nathaniel’s been interviewed.

The Art of Innovation

Duff OMelia — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:31:00 +0000

I found this excellent talk by Guy Kawasaki to be quite motivational:

Spreedly

Duff OMelia — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 11:52:00 +0000

I’ve spent the last few months working on Spreedly with 3 friends. It’s been a wonderful experience working together to create a business.

Less time, more done?

Duff OMelia — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 15:05:00 +0000

For the past year and a half or so, I decided to spend less time consulting and more time creating businesses. For a long time I knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I wasn’t really spending any time doing it. It took me a few years actually to make the realization that if you want something to happen, you need to spend some time working toward the goal in a disciplined way.

So I had decided to spend about 30 hours consulting per week rather than the typical 40. I would spend the other 10 hours creating businesses. Now that I’ve been doing this for awhile, I’ve come to some conclusions.

It’s amazing what can be accomplished in about 10 hours per week. I’ve been quite surprised about it. Here’s what I mean. Let’s say I have a project that I think will take about a month to complete if I were working on it full time. At the normal 40 hours per week that would work out to be about 160 hours for this project. If I only worked on it for 10 hours per week, I would have thought that it would take me 16 weeks to complete the project.

It turns that it’s been taking me much less time than I anticipated. I would have thought that because I was working 1/4 of the time, I would only accomplish 1/4 of the work. Instead, it seems as though I’m accomplishing much more than 1/4 of the work in that time. How is that possible? Why is it that I feel so productive for those 10 hours?

I think it’s because there’s a whole bunch of time during the week that I’m not working the project. By the time I’m ready to do some actual work on it, I’ve spent a ton of time mulling over things and making determinations about what the next steps should be. These determinations are often not even conscious thoughts. But by the time I’m ready to pick up that project again, I feel like I’m ready to code like the wind.

Soapadone

Duff OMelia — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 17:07:00 +0000

One of the businesses I’ve spent a good amount of time on is Soapadoo. A few days ago, the server that Soapadoo was hosted on had some issues in that suddenly some directories were missing. In working with the hosting provider, we weren’t able to determine the cause. It’s strange because the site had been running for about a year and nothing like this issue had ever happened before.

It would probably take me about a day to recover from the server issue and institute an improved backup system taking into account the lessons learned in the incident. As I started on that work, I started to think about whether the work was worth it.

I’ve decided not to bring Soapadoo back. Some of the reasons include:

Soapadoo was making about $10-$30 per month in advertising revenue. This revenue doesn’t cover the hosting cost of the site.
The site is clearly not viral or remarkable since the traffic wasn’t steadily increasing.
I don’t have any ideas as to how to make Soapadoo more remarkable.
I’ve learned a ton of lessons about running an advertising based business. I think I’ve learned all the lessons I’m going to learn about it for now.
I’ve spent very little time on Soapadoo over the past few months because I’ve been working on other businesses.

It’s always a tough question about whether to persevere or change gears to work on something different. At this point, the other business opportunities I’m pursuing seem to have much more potential than Soapadoo.

For those Soapadoo users who would like a copy of their reviews, just send me an email about it and I can get you a copy in a number of different formats.

The Geek Blog of Codora

Duff OMelia — Fri, 11 May 2007 15:32:00 +0000

I thought I’d mention that I recently created a technical blog called The Geek Blog of Codora. It’s a place for me to share any geeky/technical lessons learned.

Ron Paul

Duff OMelia — Thu, 10 May 2007 19:29:00 +0000

I’ve never really blogged about politics before, but I must say that Ron Paul looks like an excellent candidate for President in 2008.

UPDATE: Well… I’ve now blogged a few times about politics. If you’re interested, you can check out Among These.

Expectations and Mental State

Duff OMelia — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 15:22:00 +0000

I’ve been wondering about how much of our mental state is based solely on our expectations.

Consider this. The day begins and I plan on accomplishing 10 specific tasks. By the end of the day I’ve only achieved 6 of them. I can feel discouraged. I can feel like a failure. I can feel as if I just wasn’t very productive.

Now change the scenario just a bit. The same day begins and I plan on accomplishing 4 specific tasks rather than the 10 I was predicting before. I work just as hard and I’m just as productive so I get to the end of the day and I’ve accomplished those same 6 tasks. I feel great! I’m an efficient machine. I accomplished 2 more tasks than I thought I would. Can anything stop me?

The only difference between the two scenarios was my prediction for how much I thought I’d accomplish. I worked just as hard and just as efficiently but my mental state at the end of each scenario was markedly different.

It’s interesting to me that we know that we’re not clairvoyant yet our mental state can be affected by our ability to predict the future.

Zippy Soapadoo

Duff OMelia — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 08:48:00 +0000

I was recently able to give Soapadoo a nice little performance makeover. The site is now considerably faster than it’s ever been. It’s quite evident clicking around the site that the performance improvements are significant. For the curious geeks out there, here are some of the things I did:

I changed to a different hosting company. Soapadoo used to be hosted on OCS Solutions. Now it’s hosted on Slicehost. Reason: twice the memory for less money.
I’m no longer using Lighty. Soapadoo is now being run by a cluster of mongrels sitting behind Apache.
I switched from Debian to Ubuntu.
I switched from Postgres to MySql.

THIS is the day. Not Tomorrow.

Duff OMelia — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 16:30:00 +0000

I just read the following about joy from The Life You’ve Always Wanted by John Ortberg:

We all live with the illusion that joy will come someday when conditions change. We go to school and think we will be happy when we graduate. We are single and are convinced we will be happy when we get married. We get married and decide we will be happy someday when we have children. We have children and decide we will be happy when they grow up and leave the nest – then they do, and we think we were happier when they were still at home.

And this:

When we celebrate, we exercise our ability to see and feel goodness in the simplest gifts of God. We are able to take delight today in something we wouldn’t have even noticed yesterday. Our capacity for joy increases.

Some take home lessons for me:

Yes, I need to place some emphasis on setting goals for the future and working today to help achieve objectives tomorrow. Not as much emphasis as I’ve been placing, though. I shouldn’t be so focused on tomorrow that I’m missing the wonder of today.
I need to start taking much more notice of the incredible things that happen on a daily basis right in front of me.
Joy in life and achieving goals aren’t tied together. One is not dependent on the other.

This is the day which the LORD has made; Let us rejoice and be glad in it. - Psalm 118:24

To Quit or Persevere

Duff OMelia — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 13:34:00 +0000

In Seth Godin’s blog post about strategy, he says:

It takes real guts to abandon a strategy, especially if you’ve gotten super good at the tactics. That’s precisely the reason that switching strategies is often such a good idea. Because your competition is afraid to.

I agree with him. Abandoning a strategy is often a good idea.

His post brought to mind a few questions I’ve thought about in the past along similar lines. When do you quit? How do you know if your current strategy really should be abandoned, or if you’re just quitting before your strategy had enough time to succeed?

We’re often given seemingly conflicting advice in life:

“Never ever ever quit.”
“Embrace change and be willing to change strategies because the path that you’re on might not be feasible.”
“It’s not possible to fail if you don’t give up.”

I’m not really sure how to generically know if it’s time to change strategies. I am, however, capable of coming to a conclusion for a specific business instance. Soapadoo.

Is the whole strategy of Soapadoo flawed? Should I stop spending time on it and instead devote time to another business? Soapadoo clearly isn’t viral yet and it hasn’t become the dominant reviews website on the internet. It’s generated revenue but it’s not yet profitable. Should it be scrapped?

My answer is no. Certainly not. Here are some reasons why:

Soapadoo hasn’t been around very long.
Most businesses take time to develop and succeed. Sam Walton said that Wal-Mart, like most overnight successes, was 10 years in the making.
It often takes time for a business to adapt and change to the marketplace. This refinement can often cause a business to become remarkable/viral. Ward Cunningham has spoken about “waiting for insight”. Insight often takes time.
I haven’t found another website yet that’s completely focused on reviews and keeping things simple without bloat.
I haven’t found another website yet that allowed bloggers and other reviewers to aggregate a subset of their posts onto a review site that’s highly Googleable.
I haven’t found another review site yet where reviewers could benefit financially.
I haven’t found another website that effectively combined the idea of a social network with reviews.
As a consumer of the site, I find it personally useful to read reviews written by friends and others I respect. I’ve also found it useful to be able to email a link to a Soapadoo review to those looking for recommendations.
This business has a really low capital burn rate.
If Soapadoo isn’t profitable a year from now, I’ll certainly consider spending less time on it in favor spending time on more profitable ventures.

Interviewed on CenterNetworks

Duff OMelia — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 13:04:00 +0000

Allen from CenterNetworks recently interviewed me about Soapadoo and a number of other topics. I think Allen’s a pretty talented interviewer so you might want to check it out.

If you haven’t seen CenterNetworks yet, it’s a pretty useful source of information for people in the tech world. It’s also a great place to learn some lessons from tech entrepreneurs.

Here is the interview. You can listen to it on the bottom of that page. I’m hopeful that it’ll provide some value to folks.

Dream Small Dreams Every Day

Duff OMelia — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 13:29:00 +0000

There has been much written in the area of setting goals for one’s life. It seems that most successful folks attribute some of their success to the fact that they had very clear, very big, and very specific written-down goals.

Most people think way too small. If they’ve even established some goals, those goals are often much smaller than they should be. People seem to underestimate their potential and this can often contribute to a lack of fulfillment in one’s life. To combat this tendency, many authors would say that your goals should be ginormous. They should be so huge that you have no idea how you’re going to accomplish them. Dream really big dreams and you’ll achieve much more than you thought possible.

This all makes sense if you’re talking about long term goals – 30 year goals, 10 year goals, 3 year goals, and 1 year goals. For these kinds of time frames, I think that having incredibly huge dreams about your future helps you. I can see very little downside to having goals that are seemingly beyond your reach – when you’re creating your long-term goals.

I’ve run into some trouble when trying to apply these principles to daily goals. There’s a major downside to setting goals that are too big when you’re working with a daily time frame. That downside is discouragement.

I’ve had many days when I’ve felt disappointed at the end of the day. Some days I’ve felt unproductive. Other days I’ve felt like I just didn’t get nearly enough done as I should have. It’s pretty easy to feel like a failure if your daily goals are too big. Disappointment comes from unmet expectations. The failure I was feeling was not because I didn’t accomplish enough that day. It was because I didn’t accomplish as much as I thought I would at the start of the day. If my expectations for the day are unrealistic, it’s a recipe for continual discouragement. Discrouragement can then lead to other problems because it’s tough to be optimistic when you’re disappointed.

I’m not arguing that you should low-ball your daily goals. I’m not saying you should turn into a daily sloth and only set a few easy goals each day so you can feel accomplished and stay positive. This wouldn’t be living up to your potential.

Instead, I’d argue that a daily goal list should be broken down into 2 sections:

The first section is the must-have list. This is the list of things that you need to do every single day no matter what. These things ought to be done regardless of what happens that day. If you’re in a coma, then you don’t need to accomplish the must-haves. No other excuse holds any water. It’s the section of your daily goals that you’re not willing to compromise on. If the things on this section aren’t done by the end of the day, you don’t go to sleep until they are.
The second section is the nice-to-have list. Every other goal you have for the day is in this list. It’s ok to think bigger here because everything in this list is gravy. It’s nice if you get them done but it’s certainly not the end of the world if you don’t accomplish every nice-to-have goal for the day.

This type of approach builds up your confidence and leads to more discipline in your life because you form the daily habit of always doing what you say you’re going to do that day. It also encourages you to stretch a bit with the nice-to-haves.

Soapadoo Reviewers Share Profits

Duff OMelia — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 21:26:00 +0000

I recently decided that the profit that the Soapadoo website generates should be shared with reviewers. 50-50.

The reviews on Soapadoo are assets. They were created by reviewers who were willing to take the time and energy necessary to create worthwhile reviews others can benefit from.

The Soapadoo website generates revenue primarily through relevant advertising. This money is now shared with reviewers. It would be foolish for Soapadoo to keep all of the profit when the reviewers are doing so much of the work. The reviews on Soapadoo provide value to the people reading the site. The reviewers are now compensated for providing this value. If you’re a blogger, this is another reason to re-publish the reviews from your blog onto Soapadoo.

If you’d like more information about the program, you can read more about it here.

Is Any Progress Being Made?

Duff OMelia — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 10:02:00 +0000

I’ve often had days when I wonder if I’m making any progress at all toward some long-term goals. It seems pretty easy to think this way given that the goals are long-term and we often only consider the hear and the now. These questions of progress can do some good. They can also hurt.

The downside of these thoughts is that it’s easy to draw the conclusion that no progress is in fact being made. If no progress is being made, what is the point of doing all of this work anyway? Will I ever see a payoff for my labors? It doesn’t seem like it. Maybe I should just quit. Perhaps that long term goal made no sense. Maybe it just wasn’t for me. It would probably be better if I invested my time in other pursuits. These negative thoughts are not helpful.

The upside of questions of progress is that they can cause introspection to occur which can lead to significant breakthroughs. Perhaps it feels like no progress is being made because the path needs a slight adjustment. Perhaps I can work smarter on this goal and bring about its achievement sooner than I thought possible. Perhaps I need to set some shorter term goals to give myself more feedback about the progress. Or perhaps it really is time to assess the worthiness of the goal and whether I’ve learned anything that causes me to question its value.

Most goals that really matter are the long term variety. Achievement of these goals matters because it often takes time and energy to do great things. It takes time and energy to change yourself enough such that the achievement of some goals is even possible. Simply put, achieving long term goals is hard. It’s much easier to quit. It’s much easier to not even establish long term objectives in the first place. As is often the case, the difficult path leads to the more rewarding outcome.

Here are two examples I’ve been thinking about recently:

I have spent about 3 years learning to trade the stock market. I’ve often wondered why it’s taking so long to become an excellent trader. I’ve often wondered whether I’ll ever get it. I’ve often felt like I wasn’t making any progress. The reality, though, is that a ton of progress has been made, even though it often doesn’t feel that way. I didn’t know anything about the stock market a few years ago. If I really look back in time, it’s easy to see the progress. If I consider where I’ve come from, if I consider where I started, the progress becomes evident. So will I ever get it? I’m quite confident that I will because I’ve had an incredible mentor. This ensures that the things I’m doing every day to get closer to that goal do in fact work. Hundreds of other people have taken the same steps and become excellent traders. It takes time. It takes patience. And it takes a ton of perserverance. This is one of those goals I never plan on giving up on. I plan on pursuing it for the rest of my life.
Another long term goal has led to questions of progress – Soapadoo. I would like Soapadoo to be a very successful business that provides a ton of value to people. I want it to be so remarkable and useful that folks can’t help but tell others about it. Soapadoo certainly hasn’t achieved these goals yet. If the site were truly remarkable, the traffic to it would have exploded. At this point, there’s been a steady rise in traffic each month, but it’s certainly not viral by any means. Are these Soapadoo goals achievable? I believe so, but I don’t know for certain. Does that mean I should give up? No! Hear’s why – I haven’t even been trying for very long. A few months is just not a long time when it comes to creating a business. It takes time to refine a business to be what customers are looking for. It takes time to market a web site. It’s easy to start a business and then wonder a few weeks later why it hasn’t been an incredible success. If you listen to successful entrepreneurs, it often takes months or even years for an entrepreneurial venture to gain some traction. Overnight successes are rare.

So, for me, I need to keep plugging away every day. I need to ensure that the things I’m working on every day take me a step closer toward these long term objectives. I need to be disciplined and determined.

Soapadoo on a Sign

Duff OMelia — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 06:55:00 +0000

This is some high quality marketing, heh? :)

Idea from: The Ship’s Log

Operation Rename Complete

Duff OMelia — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 23:08:00 +0000

Well, it’s official. Soapbox has been renamed. The new name is Soapadoo. This is why the site was renamed.

I’ve learned a number of lessons during this transition:

Naming products is difficult.
The domain real estate market seems like a pretty profitable business to be in. There’s certainly not an endless supply of .com domains out there.
I need to research trademarking and determine if I should trademark Soapadoo. I don’t know if trademarking Soapbox would have helped me against Microsoft. Their site is a different kind of site than the Soapbox featuring reviews.

I’ve thought a lot about whether to give the site a name that in some way tells what it does. There are certainly a number of advantages of doing so. There are also a number of benefits of naming a product using a newly created word that doesn’t necessarily explain what the product does. There are a ton of examples of successful products on both sides of this issue. In the end, I chose a name that is a new word that doesn’t explain what the site does.

Either way, I need to make the site so remarkable and so useful to folks that they feel compelled to tell others about it. Then over time, perhaps the name Soapadoo can be positioned in people’s minds as an amazing reviews web site.

This rename process hasn’t exactly been easy. I felt like my car had stalled in the intersection and I couldn’t convince it to start back up. I’m glad to be out of the intersection now. My wife Kelly said at one point, “I am so sick of talking about new names for Soapbox. It seems like we’ve been doing this for weeks. Soapadoo is fine. Will you just go with it?” So I did.

Now, there’s much work to do. I’m really excited about it. I’ve got a number of features coming which will improve the site’s browsing features, make it more social, and help to spread the word about it. I’m also excited to finally start implementing some of Seth Godin’s ideas for how to market Soapadoo. If I can execute well on the plan, there should be a significant increase in traffic to the site. We’ll see in the next few weeks.