Category: Startup

As you can tell I’ve been reading a lot from the 37signals blog this week.

The title of this post comes from their post about Why Enterprise Software Sucks.

A few years ago everything was about the Fortune 500. Even I, as a lowly network engineer, had some familiarity with it. We’d all heard most of the names for sure. The 2007 list, for example, looks like this.

1. Wal-Mart Stores
2. Exxon Mobil
3. General Motors
4. Chevron
5. ConocoPhillips
6. General Electric
7. Ford Motor
8. Citigroup
9. Bank of America
10. American International Group

As a small Mac-focused company, there’s very little that we can target at these immense corporations. For one thing, they are pretty much standardised on Windows. That kinda kills any development stone dead. There’s some work we can do in the enterprise space which is platform-agnostic and we probably have a leg up on many in our position.

But is this where the money is?

I don’t think so.

Landing those big deals with the big companies out there lands you in a world of competition – where you’re often competing with the staff inside the company for work (which can make co-operation very difficult).

There are literally millions of companies out there and everyone, especially small businesses aiming to start to make it big, should be aiming at the SME (Small to Medium Enterprise) sector. These companies have more limited budgets it’s true, but they are also much more in need of external expertise.

I said on a forum I run recently:

90% of small businesses don’t need to run a mail server on site. That sort of thing should be outsourced.

The other 10% are, of course, Microsoft Certified Partners….who insist on installing Exchange on a DSL line…

Outsourcing is a dirty word in many areas. It reminds me of my experiences with Compass, Nortel, CSC, IBM, Flextronics and other companies who I had dealings with. I’ve been outsourced and I’ve witnessed outsourcing and I have never found the process to be fulfilling or enjoyable. Quite the opposite. It ruined working relationships, built up hostility within teams and fostered a Can’t Do attitude in almost every case.

In these examples, it was the outsourcing of people which caused the problem. People are crazy, emotional, irrational. Of course it’s not going to be simple.

But should a mortgage advice/brokerage company run a mail server onsite? Should a design firm have any more technology onsite than the need to store their image libraries for swift access? Why does a company where everyone has a laptop feel the need to run essential services on their business broadband lines which, by the way, have ZERO assurance on uptime or bandwidth. (Yes, we’re getting dangerously into Bedouin territory here).

Outsourcing these functions in a small business where it’s not someone’s entire job makes a lot of sense. This is why, despite being a “technology” company, Infurious does not have their own dedicated mail server (sitting on a fluffy carpet in a warm dusty office). It’s why Mac-Sys, despite being a technology company, advises their customers to using hosting plans for their mail and web servers. Email is so important that you want it to be on 24×7, sitting in a cooled rack of other servers with multiply-redundant network pipes and avoid outages caused by someone kicking the cable while slouching in their chair.

There’s a lot of work involved in freeing the Fortune 5 000 000, the hosts of small businesses out there, from the legacy of blunders caused by centralising their infrastructure around legacy Exchange installations. Just my £0.02

BBC News LinkMore than 900 workers losing their jobs at a County Londonderry computer company are to receive details of the redundancy terms being offered to them. Staff at Seagate in Limavady were told on Monday they were losing their jobs. Seagate, which has received £12m from Invest Northern Ireland and its predecessor IDB since 2001, will close in the second half of next year.

…

However, it has a plant in Malaysia which is due to start operations in the new year.
It will make the computer components currently being made in Limavady.

Ouch.

The hard drive manufacture market is going to take more of a beating in the future as more and more devices move to solid state memory. Seagate don’t really have a rep for reliability anyway but reduced margins and reduced costs are not going to improve that.

End of the day, that’s probably 900 Christmases ruined. I love it when companies wait til this time of the year to dump their staff. Scrooge ain’t in it. Nortel was an expert at it (note: it’s now 5 years since I left Nortel) with multiple years of “Christmas is coming, better go down the job market”. Bless them.

This, alongside the Nortel/Flextronics fallout, is going to flood the Northern Ireland marketplace with ex-technology workers. I think, however, the market will have to realise that these things come in cycles. Technology firms like Seagate will come in, stay for a decade and realise good savings from Northern Irelands low-cost economy (and a £12 000 000 sweetener ain’t bad) and then will move off again to a lower cost economy. This means, in the grand scheme of things, that Northern Ireland is just a middle man, a safe harbour for US companies to attempt their offshoring. Once they’re confident with it, they can go further afield.

Is Northern Ireland doomed to an ephemeral manufacturing economy? Yes, I think so.

Are there other areas where Northern Ireland could excel? Possibly.

We’ve already seen how popular Northern Ireland is as a call centre location: all of the call centres in the province are growing, especially as companies attempt to bring them back from their first rounds of offshoring. The Irish just seem to be cheap good at it.

InvestNI should be focussing on the Seagate fallout and acting as a dating service. There are going to be a lot of potential startup companies coming out of Limavady in the near future with specific (and potentially high margin) expertise in data storage and retention.

There’s a frighteningly large number of empty and derelict warehouse and manufacturing premises in Northern Ireland that could really do with being repurposed. All of them “InvestNI properties”. Empty they’re a drain, filled, even with only a small number of tenant companies, they’re a boon.

There’s a wordy post on The Equity Kicker about how to think about product (in terms of Seedcamp).

The point that caught my attention more than others was:

Find the ‘nub’ of your product and only build stuff that fits with that. You should be able to capture the ‘nub’ in a single sentence. If you find yourself wanting to build stuff that doesn’t fit with the nub then it is probably time to re-examine it….

With Infurious, we have four guiding principles and this coincides with one of them. We want to create products that people will use to solve problems. Some of these will be problems we’ve had and we’ve built the solution to solve that. When you look at the list of apps that we intend to build eventually, it would seem we have a lot of itches that need scratched. The truth is: collectively we have a lot of experience in our markets as users and, perhaps more relevantly, as troubleshooters and consultants. The apps we build are maybe not for scratching an itch we have but they’re certainly itch points, or in some cases, pain points for customers.

I guess what the quote says is that you have to define the itch. What does a product do? In simple layman terms.

SyncBridge, for example, allowed the sharing of calendars with friends and colleagues. Other apps just remove pain points that we’ve witnessed (and I’m waiting for one of the guys to finish a blog post on the next product).

The mantra: Do One Thing Really Well is really a paraphrasing of the UNIX way and, to a lesser degree, the Mac way. I find there’s a surprising correlation between the two though on paper they used to be such diametric opposites. I grew up in a culture of UNIX + Mac = Computers.

I’m excited about some of the things coming because they scratch an itch I have and I’m even more excited about the pain points we can remove for some of the customers I have in Mac-Sys.

Once a week we use the miracle of Voice over IP to stay in touch with the rest of the team.

During the week we are pretty much in constant contact with a IM-type chat room which logs all conversations and allows scrolling back through history but there’s something solid and real about talking to people.

We talk, we joke, we take some minutes and action items and for a split second we’re back in corporate land. But we have a timeline, we’re meeting from 9 pm to 10 pm and we’re doig this in addition to the day job.

One thing that resounded around the echo chamber recently was the expressed desire to be doing this full time, for the day job, rather than as we are. That really means taking it to the next step. And beyond.

We have the Subversion server set up, Trac too. We’re working on the new web site and online store. It’s all so exciting.

Doug Copeland wrote

Here’s my theory about meetings and life; the three things you can’t fake are erections, competence and creativity. That’s why meetings become toxic—they put uncreative people in a situation in which they have to be something they can never be.

37signals expounds on the “meetings are evil” meme in their blog and get a few cracks about them in their book, Getting Real.

They often contain at least one moron that inevitably get his turn to waste everyone’s time with nonsense

(I do wish that moron was not me!)

Meetings do generally suck, especially at big companies who use conference calls as a way of filling the time in for overpaid project managers with nothing else to do.

What do you want out of meetings?

Here’s my quick list:

1. Everyone turns up on time
2. We start off with a positive note.
3. When the time spent in the meeting loses quality, it’s time to stop.
4. Meetings should be less than 1 hour. Less than 30 mins ideally

I think we manage most of this. We had a lot to talk about this week, 1 week after we turned things on their heads and decided to start working as a group of 4. To some this fulfills a dream of working for their own software company, to others it represented a pension. In one week we’ve had some amazing work done including the creation of an entire product (isn’t Objective C with Cocoa amazing?)

Now, it’s late. Sayonara!

One of the most interesting blogs to read at the moment continues to be Tom Harrington’s Atomic Bird blog. Atomic Bird is probably most well known for their application, Macaroni, which gives the end user a lot more control over some of the automated processes which happen in the background on Mac OS X plus giving the ability to strip out Localised code (though this can cause a support nightmare as I’ve found). Atomic Bird recently celebrated their fifth birthday and Tom has been writing about their startup experience. The most recent installment describes his first attempts to expand the product lineup which he describes as being more of an effort to have something to look at other than Macaroni source code.

In effect, starting to build a second and third product was an attempt to build his own cowslayer (a product designed to be the thing that kills your first cash cow product.)

Apple, of course, managed this incredibly well with the iPod mini. They took the mini which was the best selling iPod at the time and refined and re-released it into the iPod nano. They took a cash cow, killed it and made everyone go out a buy their new one. And the latest iPod nano? It looks like a slim version of the mini. I think we’ve been had!

I guess that’s the trick. Find your cowslayer before your cash cow dies of old age.