Eagerness to learn is key. Our clients expect us to deliver relevant new technologies in rapid fashion. Design touches everything we do at WisdomGroup:

• Delivering results for clients.
• Serving our fellow developers through the ChicagoRuby user group.
• Running the successful WindyCityRails annual conference.

When it comes to design, Autodesk gets it right in this ad:

If you know a solid candidate for WisdomGroup’s Web Design Internship, please point them to the job description. Thanks.

Visualize Your Finished Project
Close your eyes and visualize your web or mobile app in a finished state. Your customers are happy and money is flowing into your bank account. What does the app look like?

• Business Logic. Business logic is a company’s business model (their way of making money) reflected in software. Does the app you envision depend on business logic to function? Example: A simple online brochure requires less business logic. A full-blown e-commerce engine like Amazon.com requires more.
• Change. Is the app likely to change often? Example: An online brochure for a restaurant will change less because it only displays a few pieces of key information: Location, type of food, and hours of operation. However, a custom web app for a commodities trader will change often because markets are volatile and unpredictable.

Make a Decision
If your app depends on business logic, and if you operate in a competitive environment where change is the norm, then the right app will generate serious ROI for you. Depending on your specific needs, the app will either earn you money, save you money, or save you time. All of these will help your business grow.

Do not spend money on app development unless it makes business sense to do so. If your needs can be met with an online brochure, then WisdomGroup probably isn’t a good fit for you. You might consider WordPress.

Budget
If your idea is in its early stages, then a minimum viable product (MVP) will prove useful. The right MVP will make you smarter about your customers while minimizing your financial risk.

A custom software project can run $250,000 or more over the course of a year. WisdomGroup prefers to start with an MVP and a smaller budget of roughly $20,000 to $50,000. When building an MVP, WisdomGroup collaborates with the client to break the big idea into smaller pieces. Our goal is to deliver initial results (the MVP) in 60 to 90 days.

Get Smarter and Succeed With an MVP
Business professionals understand reality. A perfect app will only succeed if customers buy the end product. WebVan was a technical success, but it was a business failure because the app couldn’t attract enough customers. Don’t let that happen to you. You can avoid that kind of failure by starting with an MVP. If the MVP succeeds, you can invest more money to add features. Let the features you add be driven by the needs of the customer.

WisdomGroup’s MVP approach is a systemized way to get smarter with experience.

Maintenance and Growth
You might think of your app as a factory that prints money. Factories need maintenance, and the same is true for apps. Once the app is up and running, you can expect to spend $5,000 to $20,000 per month for maintenance. Monthly maintenance tasks include:

• Adding new features. Your business grows because you continue to have new ideas. Many of those ideas will be implemented in software. WisdomGroup stands ready to make your ideas real in your code.
• Dealing with security issues. As long as the bad guys keep dreaming up new ways to attack, the good guys need to work hard to defeat them.
• Improving performance. As more people learn about your business, your traffic will grow. If your app is slow, they will go to your competitors. WisdomGroup watches response time and performance statistics. We allocate additional resources as needed.

Next Step
You have an app to build and zero time to waste. When you’re ready to move forward, contact WisdomGroup. Let’s get this done.

Location challenges aside, day one of CocoaConf was excellent. Great presenters, great talks. After arriving on the night before the conference, I was introduced to the Hey Nerd meme and I met a cool bunch of software developers.

Here’s a recap of the day one sessions I attended.

UI Automation – Jonathan Penn
Penn kicked things off with a very hands-on demo & presentation of UI Automation. A quote from one of his early slides sums things up pretty well:

Automated testing does not guarantee that your code is correct or bug free.
It raises your confidence so you can make changes in the code when needed.

Penn bounced very freely between Xcode and Vim, using Xcode to run his automated tests and Vim to highlight parts of the test files as he presented his points. One subtle (and indirect) point of the talk: The best developers are polyglot. Penn never said this explicitly, but I could see elements of his Ruby heritage coming through in the talk. The Ruby TDD culture is filtering into the Cocoa world, while Cocoa teaches Rubyists about great UXD. Both worlds benefit from this exchange of knowledge.

UI Documents in iOS – Bill Dudney

Many developers (including me) were disappointed about the lack of a traditional file system in iOS. Can an iPad/iPhone be a real computer if you can’t navigate the directory structure in the “traditional” way? Yes, it can. It seems that there are new paradigms for navigation, and users find these new paradigms to be intuitive.

Dudney shared a story of a user who, when looking for a Pages file, never thinks of looking in a particular directory. Instead, he thinks of opening Pages and finding his way to a file. Further, users like the idea of editing a file on one device, shutting that device down, and opening the same file on a different device to continue the edit task. Note the lack of a “save” step! UI Documents is the feature that enables this seamless (to the user) migration between devices. Omni Group uses UI Documents to support synchronization in several of their products.

Dudney bounced between UI Document, UI Kit, NSData, and NSFileWrapper in a way that tied things together neatly. Now I have tons of research and experimentation ahead of me as I dig into these tools.

Debugging With Xcode – Dave Koziol

The best way to debug code: Don’t write bugs in the first place! So says Dave Koziol. He took the group through the Gnu Debugger (old school!) and the relatively new LLDB. The audience learned where to find the crash logs on iOS devices, and some of the plusses & minuses of the Watchdog timer.

I approached Koziol after the talk for recommendations on which debugger to use moving forward. I used GDB in my college days. But since I’m re-immersing myself in development, would it make sense to continue with GDB? Koziol’s response: Jump on LLDB. It’s the future. Further, LLDB builds on the commands of GDB, so it’s not like you’re completely abandoning the old school tool.

DTrace – Not Your Father’s Debugger – Craig Castelaz

CocoConf marks my first exposure to DTrace, first in Jonathan Penn’s talk about UI Animation, and second in the DTrace talk by Craig Castelaz. Castelaz is a true old-school Unix dev who currently fixes bugs for Oracle (his words). What’s the most amazing thing about DTrace? According to Castelaz: Nothing. It’s already there (in Xcode).

“Nothing” yields many advantages. In DTrace we have a tool that’s already part of our dev environment, ready to give us info we need to troubleshoot effectively. There are two ways to interface with DTrace: the command line, and through Instruments. DTrace clauses consist of four parts:

• Providers.
• Probes. The point of instrumentation, where queries begin.
• Predicates. Filters for our queries. DTrace generates more data than a human can read in a reasonable time!
• Pactions (the “P” is silent). Actions allow us to write scripts in Ruby, Python, or another scripting language.

The bottom line from this talk: DTrace complements our other debuggers and tools like instruments. It’s a powerful device to have when things misbehave in production.

To Be Continued…
Let’s call this blog post Day One, Part One. Gotta run to the conference rooms for Day Two. More to come…

Here’s a transcript of a recent post office commercial:

A refrigerator has never been hacked.
An online virus has never attacked a cork board.
Give your customers the added feeling of security that a printed statement or receipt provides.
With mail.
It’s good for your business, and even better for your customers.
For safe & secure ways to stay connected, visit usps.com/mail.

Excellent Execution. Wrong strategy.
The commercial is well produced. The music is engaging and it’s backed by subtle, secure sound effects of papers ruffling and drawers closing. But the strategy is wrong. Asking customers to return to paper mail ignores basic customer needs.

Once the toothpaste has left the tube, you can’t get it back inside. Companies are already saving money and time by communicating with customers electronically. Why would they return to the expense and drudgery of paper mail? How many of us use candles for lighting our homes? How many of us ride horses to work? When customers can pay bills quickly and securely online, why should they do otherwise?

A Better Strategy for the Post Service
Fortunately for USPS, their service is still relevant. They just need to look at their business a different way. They can start by asking a few questions:

• What does the USPS offer that the alternatives do not?
• What can the US Postal Service deliver better than any other delivery system?

The Postal Service has several strengths to build upon, including:

• USPS can deliver physical objects like gifts, merchandise ordered online, and other physical objects. We can’t email physical objects (yet).
• USPS has bricks & mortar offices near every address in the country. Can the physical offices be re-purposed for other services that leverage the strengths of USPS?
• Some post offices are located in rural areas which the for-profit delivery services (like FedEx and UPS) don’t serve. Since the structures are already built, what can these offices offer that rural customers will pay for? How about mailbox services or an Internet cafe?
• Dedicated workforce, driven by their unofficial motto: Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

Trains and Airplanes. Paper Mail and the Web
The Pullman Company might have survived the shift to air travel if it realized that it was in the transporation business, not the train business. The Post Office needs to realize that it’s in the delivery business, not the paper mail business.

Pivots Can Be Hard
The Four Steps to the Epiphany defines a pivot as a changing one’s business model in response to a newly discovered reality about customer needs. USPS needs to pivot away from paper mail. It won’t be easy because paper has been a cash cow for centuries. It’s hard to abandon a revenue source, even a dying one. But if USPS wants to thrive & grow, they need to stop running commercials about paper mail.

What’s Next
The best move for USPS: Pivot away from paper mail, become an outstanding physical delivery service, and build on the strength of the existing physical locations.

Starting Point: Solid Presentations
A good conference will feature solid presentations. That’s a given. But it’s easy to find technical videos on the internet. Why would a smart person pay money to hear speakers present their material in real time? Because the presentations are only the starting point.

Relationships Are a Big Part
Beyond presentations, a strong conference will give attendees several chances to meet each other, interact, and build relationships. Great teams come from great relationships. Great companies come from great relationships. Everyone wins when great relationships are built.

Additional conference benefits:

• The opportunity to challenge speakers in real-time. You might ask a question that causes a presenter to re-think their approach to a problem. New libraries are born that way. Your project might benefit from the new library.
• Interaction with others who are hearing the same material as you. Maybe you’ve had this experience: You and a friend attend an event together. Afterwards, the two of you compare what you saw. In many cases you find that different things resonated with each of you. Many experiences are richer when shared with others.
• Meeting others with skills that complement yours. Are you a designer looking for a developer? Developer looking for a designer? Entrepreneur looking for both? Meet your team in a place that attracts passionate and skilled professionals.

Conclusion
In 2011, I attended nine conferences related to Ruby, Rails, Objective-C, Software Craftsmanship, and NoSQL databases. I won’t share the number of user group meetings I attend every week, but it’s enough to expose me to ribbing by my developer friends. My brain is not big enough to retain every piece of information that gets presented. However, at every conference I meet people who help me to grow into a better developer and entrepreneur.

A single individual cannot absorb every piece of information that’s out there. But collectively, we can achieve great things. To quote Woodrow Wilson, “No one of us is as smart as all of us.”

Why do I go to conferences? To meet smart people and to share ideas. That’s why.

WisdomGroup assumed a leadership role within ChicagoRuby about a month after we became involved. We are grateful for the trust that the community has placed in us. Today I was reminded of a time when we almost lost that trust.

Restrictive Guidelines
A member of our community approached me with some legitimate concerns about ChicagoRuby’s speaker guidelines. Could the guidelines be too restrictive? Maybe. In order to answer that, we have to look at some history.

A Bad Meeting
The speaker guidelines were written after an especially terrible ChicagoRuby meeting in 2010. I chose the speaker that evening, so the meeting was my fault. Essentially, the presenter came in and pitched a Ruby code generator that runs on Windows. The audience was not pleased.

Recovery and Learning
After the meeting, one of our organizers, Dave Giunta, wrote the first version of the speaker guidelines. Dave is no longer a ChicagoRuby organizer, but his document lives on. We’ve only made minor changes to Dave’s original document in the two years since he wrote it.

Building Trust
The guidelines are critical because they help us to build trust within the community. This is especially true of guideline #3: Attend some of our meetings prior to presenting.

How do the guidelines build trust?

• Developers trust us to deliver top-notch events full of useful information.
• We want our presenters to do well. Presenters do better when they undersand the audience.
• The best way for presenters to understand our audience is to attend a few ChicagoRuby meetings and talk to our members.
• The second best way is to watch our videos.

Filters Are Good
Yes, the guidelines serve as a filter. Certain types of presenters will never approach ChicagoRuby. Others will depart when we email them a link to the guidelines. And the best presenters, the ones who make it through, will have the time of their lives.

The result: A growing, thriving Ruby community in Chicago. A place where smart people can challenge each other to grow so great things can happen.

In 2009 people wondered What does Groupon do? Today pundits are asking “Is Groupon’s business model sustainable?” The future is unknown. However, Groupon is certainly positioned to pounce on opportunities as they unfold.

60 Minutes at Groupon
Journalist Leslie Stahl interviews titans. Sergey Brin of Google. Mark Zukerberg of Facebook. Paul Allen of Microsoft. This week 60 Minutes aired Stahl’s interview of Groupon’s CEO, Andrew Mason. Here’s a 4-minute clip:

Is Groupon’s Business Model Sustainable?
So far the model works. Local businesses get a sudden surge of new customers. If the customers are happy, they return.

Over time, entrepreneurs who noticed Groupon’s success launched competing companies. Will the competitors eat Groupon’s lunch?

They might. But that only becomes a problem if Groupon stands still.

Competition is Good
Successful pioneers attract competitors. Personally I believe that competition yields several benefits, among them:

• Excellence. Competition drives all of us to achieve more. When I was a competitive swimmer, my teammates and I always achieved faster times against our tougher rivals. Maybe it was the adrenaline.
• Market legitimacy. Some customers prefer to follow the crowd. When they see multiple companies offering similar services, they begin to view the service as “legitimate”. And then they buy.
• The shopping cluster effect. Why do restaurants cluster together in city neighborhoods? Zoning might play a role. In fact, restaurants have learned that when people want to eat, they don’t necessarily know what they want until they get close to their destination. It makes more sense to drive toward a cluster of restaurants because you’ll have more choices once you arrive. When restaurants locate near other restaurants, they all win, even though they may be competitors.

In summary, competition creates more opportunities for all players in the game.

What If Groupon’s Model Fails?
A failed business model means that the company needs to find a new way to make money. Steve Blank’s book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, shows how a company can pivot through several business models before achieving success. To pivot successfully, a company must:

• Listen to customers, so that they know which parts of their model to modify.
• Build a team of smart & capable people so that they can implement the new model quickly and effectively.

Groupon’s rapid growth in three short years shows that they know how to listen to customers. As far as the team is concerned, Groupon attracts some of the sharpest software developers around. Their acquisition of Obtiva was a big move in the team-building department.

Groupon has a strong team. If a pivot becomes necessary, they’re well equipped to handle it.

Positioned to Win
Overall it appears that Groupon (and their hometown, Chicago) will do well over time:

• If the Groupon model proves successful over time, they will make money and grow.
• If their model fails, they have the right team on board for a successful pivot.

I look forward to watching Groupon as they continue to grow.

What is the WindyCity Experience?

What can you expect at WindyCityRails? Take a look at feedback we received on two conferences held earlier in 2011: WindyCityGo (mobile) and WindyCityDB (NoSQL databases).

Why do we go to conferences?

• Presentations. To hear from peers who are working on the cutting edge of our profession. Presentations from this year’s WindyCityGo and WindyCityDB are online.
• Networking. To share ideas with our peers – some of the sharpest minds in the developer community. To talk to folks that we don’t see every day. To give serendipity a chance to work!
• Fun. After all, if we’re not having fun, maybe we should go somewhere else :-)

What does the WindyCity experience mean to you? Hear more about the experience from people who have been there.

When smart people challenge each other to grow, great things happen. We look forward to seeing you at WindyCityRails!

Portions of this article also appear at http://chicagoruby.org.

Ignite Chicago
This presentation was created for Ignite Chicago. Ignite talks are special because speakers are required to present their thoughts in five minutes with slides that auto-advance every fifteen seconds. Thank you Stella Fayman and Tim Jahn for organizing the event.

About the Author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany
Steve Blank worked in, owned, or managed eight different silicon valley startups in the course of twenty years. His eighth startup was very successful; he was able to exit with enough money to retire. At that point, Blank began to reflect on the successes and failures of the various startups he had been involved with. Reflection led to lectures at Stanford, Berkeley, and Columbia. Notes from his lectures evolved into the book: The Four Steps to the Epiphany.

Blank noticed that startups went through predictable patterns of success or failure. Yes, there are multiple paths to failure, but there are fewer paths to success. Blank believes he has found a success path that applies to most startups.

Counter Example: Webvan
Sometimes it helps to explain an idea through counter example. Webvan was built to deliver groceries to people who ordered on the web. The problem? Webvan built software and warehouses before they had a reliable supply of customers. They were so confident of their future success that they spent close to one billion dollars building infrastructure. They ran out of money before they had customers.

It’s not fair to pick on Webvan when so many other companies make the same mistake. Remember the Apple Newton? Apple is a great company, but they put tons of money into an early PDA (the Newton) before customers even knew what a PDA was. Same with Motorola. Motorola’s Iridium was supposed to be a network of communications satellites covering the planet. Satellites designed to give internet and phone access to every human on planet earth. The problem: Nobody could afford Iridium. In these examples, Motorola, Apple, and Webvan, all burned through money before they had a steady supply of customers. There is a better way.

The Four Steps
Steve Blank lists The Four Steps to the Epiphany as:

1. Customer Discovery
2. Customer Validation
3. Customer Creation
4. Company Building

There are a few things to point out about the steps. First the process is iterative, not linear. If at any point we get stuck, we go back and repeat a step (or two) based on what we’ve learned. A smaller repetition might be termed an iteration. But if the entrepreneur needs to revisit the entire business plan, or change basic assumptions in the business model, the repetition/backtracking would be termed a pivot.

Customer Discovery and the Minimum Viable Product
Every entrepreneur has an idea about what customers want. We all know something of the pain felt by our customers, or so we think. Blank’s suggestion: Take what you know about your prospective customers’ pain and build a minimum viable product (MVP) with just enough features to address the pain. Then get outside the building. Get away from wherever it is that you work and talk to real customers with your MVP in hand. Let them try it. They’ll give you valuable feedback about what you should do next. If their pain is great enough, and if your MVP is good enough, they’ll buy it.

Which Customers?
It’s important to note the type of customer we want at this stage. We want early adopters. We want customers who are feeling pain in the entrepreneur’s area of expertise. Perhaps customers who have tried to solve the problem themselves with no success. Early adopters will give us the most useful & actionable feedback at this stage.

Customer Validation
The customer validation step is complete when early adopters buy the product we’re offering. When customers buy, we know we have a valid product. If they don’t buy, it might be time to pivot. In this context, pivot means to change the basic assumptions of the business we’re building. We might change pricing, features, or we might change our entire approach to customers. Many startups go through several pivots before achieving success.

Customer Creation
After we’ve discovered customers, and after we’ve gone through customer validation, it’s time to create more customers. Our initial customers were the early adopters and innovators. In the customer creation step, we move beyond our initial customers into the majority. At this point we begin to spend money on marketing.

Company Building
After we’ve gone through the first three customer-oriented steps, we build the company. Now it’s time to spend money on infrastructure, warehouses, expensive customized software… anything we need to scale the company as large as we can. Notice that we don’t try to scale until after we figure out how to develop a steady supply of customers.

That’s Not All…
We live in a time of continuous & rapid change. Once a business has become successful with The Four Steps, it’s important to remain watchful for new opportunities. Good companies become great when they execute consistently over time.

Feelings of grave concern set in this morning when I powered up my MacBook Pro only to find out that it wouldn’t power up. I’m dependent on my laptop for daily work like most people in my field.

Data loss is not an issue since we use a belt & suspenders backup policy here at WisdomGroup. Time Machine & Mozy keep us well covered. But downtime is always an issue because downtime costs time.

Solution: I grabbed the first available appointment at the Genius Bar. Less than five minutes after he first saw the machine, Olin Langley found that I had a bad AC adapter. He swapped the adapter and my machine was back in business.

Kudos to Apple, and kudos to Olin Langley. Well done.