selling – Page 2 – ɔimoɈɒ

Square is for tomorrow’s mobile workers

Square is a neat solution from one of the Twitter founders, Jack Dorsey. It’s a little dongle that plugs into the audio port and allows you to scan in credit cards and take payments. Anywhere. The launch site was some bohemian coffee shop somewhere in the Valley but the real value is the ability for … Continue reading “Square is for tomorrow’s mobile workers”

Square is a neat solution from one of the Twitter founders, Jack Dorsey. It’s a little dongle that plugs into the audio port and allows you to scan in credit cards and take payments. Anywhere.

The launch site was some bohemian coffee shop somewhere in the Valley but the real value is the ability for anyone providing a service or product to sell wherever they are.

Put it another way. There’s less need for this:

When you can take this:

It’s a very important distinction. The number of exhibitions and conferences I’ve been to where we come away with pockets full of business cards that we absolutely will follow up. Bollocks to that. Make the sale. They give you money, you give them money and get down to business. After all, it’s all about the business.

Haggling: a way to kill a startup

This one did the rounds before I finally paused for two minutes to see it. This sort of abusive relationship endeared me to one of the big names in the content industry in Northern Ireland. It was 2003 and I was working in a brand new startup. Out cashflow was zilch and I had five … Continue reading “Haggling: a way to kill a startup”

This one did the rounds before I finally paused for two minutes to see it.

This sort of abusive relationship endeared me to one of the big names in the content industry in Northern Ireland. It was 2003 and I was working in a brand new startup. Out cashflow was zilch and I had five families to look after.

“If you give me three of these $high_end_powermacs now, then I’ll pay for them in three months.”

Needless to say he was shown the door and I’ve never worked with that company since. Caveat Startup.

Was I too “risk averse” at the time? Did I want to risk the little savings I had (which were paying salaries at the time) in order to try and weather out three months of no cash flow for someone who drove a big car and owned a big building? Maybe I made the wrong decision but it’s my feeling that if I’d taken that step then the following five years of work, fighting and the joy of success would have been condensed into three months of going out of business (and the machines would therefore never be paid for).

GamesIndustry.biz poll

GamesIndustry.biz have the results of a poll on the 2009 tech people can not wait for. Over 300 industry professionals in the GamesIndustry.biz Network were polled to gauge interest on new technology, with the Wii MotionPlus, iPhone, Nintendo’s DSi and the continued evolution of the New Xbox Experience also piquing interest. 3D TV/Gaming Wii MotionPlus … Continue reading “GamesIndustry.biz poll”

GamesIndustry.biz have the results of a poll on the 2009 tech people can not wait for. Over 300 industry professionals in the GamesIndustry.biz Network were polled to gauge interest on new technology, with the Wii MotionPlus, iPhone, Nintendo’s DSi and the continued evolution of the New Xbox Experience also piquing interest.

3D TV/Gaming
Wii MotionPlus
iPhone
DSi
New Xbox Experience
PlayStation 3
New Wii peripheral
Android
DX11
- 10 New PlayStation 3 controller
- Digital distribution
- id’s Tech 5

Who would have thought that an Apple device would be in the top 10 of any games industry list never mind ahead of luminaries such as the PS3, the DSi and anything from id Software.

If that’s not reason to consider the iPhone a major platform for the next 18 months, then you’re got some pretty major biases there (hey, yes, I have biases, and reasons for them).

Plus Ã§a change

Apogee Press Release: Santa Monica, CA, February 23, 2009 – As of 2009, Apogee Electronics will no longer develop products for the Microsoft Windows platform. Apogee has made this decision in order to focus all research, development, and support resources on the Apple platform with its unparalleled power and stability. Apple offers a wide range … Continue reading “Plus Ã§a change”

Apogee Press Release:

Santa Monica, CA, February 23, 2009 – As of 2009, Apogee Electronics will no longer develop products for the Microsoft Windows platform. Apogee has made this decision in order to focus all research, development, and support resources on the Apple platform with its unparalleled power and stability. Apple offers a wide range of affordable, powerful desktop and laptop solutions ideally suited for music creation and audio production.

A couple of years ago, Wil Shipley wrote about why he develops for the Mac and how it allowed him to score a big fat Lotus sports car.

Frankly, I see this happening more and more in the near future as people change their needs and there are realisations that beyond the FUD, there’s not much difference between Vista and Mac OS X in terms of casual surfer utility and once you break this hold on people, it changes them forever.

I’d like to think that ten years of running NIMUG and five years of running Mac-Sys would mean something in the current tsunami of people coming to the Mac platform in Northern Ireland but in truth we’d have to point at the Apple Store in Belfast as having a huge effect on general acceptance. Actually having a store on the high street was something that I’d considered (but frankly the margins available to me as an Apple Reseller did not permit that – and that’s fine. The Apple Store excels at bringing people to the platform and giving them the basic training skills and Mac-Sys excels at fixing their computers (according to Apple, MacSys has a 93.3% approval rating which put’s comfortably in the top 10% of Euro Apple Service Providers.)

Having a complementary relationship with Apple was always something we strived for. We didn’t have cash flow to sell Apple hardware but there was always room for us to help customers find the best and cheapest place to buy. And we spend hours on the phone every month fighting for value for Mac owners in terms of dealing with insurance companies, Apple Customer Service and other repair companies (who don’t specialise in Mac repair). We’re responsive to the market which is why Mac-Sys now has a “Free on Friday” health check, waiving diagnosis fees for hardware we receive on Fridays, the Enterprise Park is open late on Tuesdays and so is Mac-Sys and lastly, the guys have dropped the charges for picking up hardware – we have guys out in the field already doing installations in homes and offices and it’s going to be a minor detour to have your Mac picked up and dropped off after repair.

Like Apogee, we’ve responded to the market as a result of making the decision to specialise on the Mac platform six years ago as no-one else was doing it in Northern Ireland.

Find your niche, own your niche and when folk in your market tell lies about you, try to resist the temptation to punch them in the mouth 🙂

Open Source Funding?

Mark Cuban is an American billionaire entrepreneur, ranking 407th on Forbes’ “World’s Richest People” list. He owns the Dallas Mavericks and is chairman of HDNet (a HDTV Cable network). He’s been involved in some of the biggest names in eCommerce – Broadcast.com, Weblogs, Grokster, IceRocket… ..his latest idea is Open Source Funding. “Rather than trying … Continue reading “Open Source Funding?”

..his latest idea is Open Source Funding.

“Rather than trying to be a Venture Capitalist, I was looking for an idea that hopefully could inspire people to create businesses that could quickly become self funding. Businesses that just needed a jump start to get the ball rolling and create jobs. Im a big believer that entrepreneurs will lead us out of this mess. I just needed a way to help.
…
I will invest money in businesses presented here on this blog. No minimum, no maximum, but a very specific set of rules. Here they are:

1. It can be an existing business or a start up.
2. It can not be a business that generates any revenue from advertising. Why ? Because I want this to be a business where you sell something and get paid for it. Thats the only way to get and stay profitable in such a short period of time.
3. It MUST BE CASH FLOW BREAK EVEN within 60 days
4. It must be profitable within 90 days.
5. Funding will be on a monthly basis. If you dont make your numbers, the funding stops
6. You must demonstrate as part of your plan that you sell your product or service for more than what it costs you to produce, fully encumbered
7. Everyone must work. The organization is completely flat. There are no employees reporting to managers. There is the founder/owners and everyone else
8. You must post your business plan here, or you can post it on slideshare.com , scribd.com or google docs, all completely public for anyone to see and/or download
9. I make no promises that if your business is profitable, that I will invest more money. Once you get the initial funding you are on your own
10. I will make no promises that I will be available to offer help. If I want to , I will. If not, I wont.
11. If you do get money, it goes into a bank that I specify, and I have the ability to watch the funds flow and the opportunity to require that I cosign any outflows.
12. In your business plan , make sure to specify how much equity I will receive or how I will get a return on my money.
13. No multi-level marketing programs”

His blog post has attracted over a thousand comments so far but, nomatter what you think of the scheme, there are some parts of his rules which seem obvious.

It can’t depend on advertising for revenue
This is obvious. Companies are not making money on advertising – the smaller companies are drying up in the baking heat of the recession and larger companies are only just weathering the situation. Newspapers, wholly dependent on advertising for their revenue (and being vastly outpaced by online models of news distribution) are struggling if not already dead.

It must be cash flow break even in 60 days. It must be profitable within 90 days. If you dont make your numbers, the funding stops
This effectively mean you have to be selling your product within 30 days and you’ve gotta make some money from that initial sale. Companies are going to want to get NET30 after all. You have to be profit focussed and you have to exceed your business plan sales numbers.

In your business plan , make sure to specify how much equity I will receive or how I will get a return on my money.
This is the question that will give most entrepreneurs the heebie-jeebies. When you’ve worked your ass off on some project, the idea of giving part of it away it very tough to stomach. But if you don’t then there’s the question of how quickly you can pay him back (and at what return).

There’s nothing new here. This is something that Business Angels and Venture Capitalists have been doing for years. The difference is in the cachet that Mark Cuban may bring and the fact that this offer is being posted on his blog and not just an invitation on a VC web site. This idea isn’t really Open Source – it’s just taking the elevator pitch and putting it into some blog comments.

You can talk to VCs. They’re human. And some of them will be at the Digital Media Forum’s Innovation Accelerator which is an all-day event on the 24th of February in Dublin.

Is crowdsourcing fundamentally flawed?

Giles Bowkett wrote When you build a system where you get points for the number of people who agree with you, you are building a popularity contest for ideas. However, your popularity contest for ideas will not be dominated by the people with the best ideas, but the people with the most time to spend … Continue reading “Is crowdsourcing fundamentally flawed?”

Giles Bowkett wrote

When you build a system where you get points for the number of people who agree with you, you are building a popularity contest for ideas. However, your popularity contest for ideas will not be dominated by the people with the best ideas, but the people with the most time to spend on your web site.
…
Even if you didn’t know about the long tail, you’d look for the best ideas on Hacker News (for example) not in its top 10 but in its bottom 1000, because any reasonable person would expect this effect – that people who waste their own time have, in effect, more votes than people who value it – to elevate bad but popular ideas and irretrievably sink independent thinking. And you would be right. TechCrunch is frequently in HN’s top ten.

It also speaks poorly for crowdsourced ideas. People who put a lot of time into these things need to be ranked by authority in some way, but how do you verify the authority, how do you independently value someone’s time? And how do you tell that one person spending five minutes on a subject is worth considerably more than another spending five days? It’s the same effect, I think, that has made Sourceforge almost useless – projects get ranked by releases and activity which means little in a world where all projects are treated equal regardless of actual quality.

Then again, this is a world where a fart noise application makes someone a years salary in two weeks.

…over Christmas Eve and Christmas day, more than 58,000 people purchased a copy of iFart, netting him over $40,000 dollars in just two days.
…
It was initially released on December 12th…
In the two weeks following its release, itâ€™s been downloaded 113,865 times, netting the creators $78,908 in the process. 78 grand is higher than the average income per capita for every country in the world – and this guy surpassed that in two weeks.

I guess this is why I had a meeting last week entitled “A Better iFart App” which was, in part, ironic and in part, totally serious. Someone out there is sitting on a goldmine idea which will net him or her thousands upon thousands times more than the actual monetary input (in terms of developer hours). It won’t see the iFund VC fund, it won’t enable someone to retire but it will mean that someone can spend two weeks building something and then spend the rest of the year trying to think of an interesting followup.

Crowds are stupid. Farts are funny. And because of this, we may find ourselves constantly disappointed by the world.

Save your business.

From a post on Enterprise Ireland’s forum “We’re a small software consultancy in business since Q3 2006; we’ve recently lost our main customer (they’ve pulled out of Ireland), upon whom we were dependent for about 90% of our revenue; we’re a small team made up exclusively of engineers; in advance of winding the operation up, … Continue reading “Save your business.”

From a post on Enterprise Ireland’s forum

“We’re a small software consultancy in business since Q3 2006; we’ve recently lost our main customer (they’ve pulled out of Ireland), upon whom we were dependent for about 90% of our revenue; we’re a small team made up exclusively of engineers; in advance of winding the operation up, I would like to explore our options with regard to getting new business; we have deep familiarity with many technologies, mainly in the enterprise computing area and I think it would be a shame to go back to the day jobs, considering we have a very strong team and can compete on cost and results with just about any comparable firm, but alas we have no sales function to speak of.”

Contrast this with a famous Joel Spolsky quote:

Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf.
“It’s ok! I have great advisors standing on the shore telling me what to do!” they say, and then fall off the board, again and again. The standard cry of the MBA who believes that management is a generic function.
…
The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand.”

Now, I’m not promoting the use of the MBA as any yardstick of competency but I can both agree and disagree with Joel in the same quote based on the first paragraph from the Enterprise Ireland forum.

This small software consultancy has found itself up the creek without a paddle because they didn’t have someone smart in the ways of business at the helm. They may have had the best programmers they could source but their business is going down the toilet because they didn’t think of the business eventualities. They maybe didn’t think that their client would depart the country and this highlights two things to me:

Don’t Assume Anything: The directors of the company were not directing. They were just managing. A director needs to be anticipating the direction of the company from the minutiae right up to the ten-thousand-foot view. They should have been expecting the worst. In my own experience, I’ve always considered what would happen if Mac-Sys had a credible competitor and it’s done us well. Now, with the Belfast Apple Store only weeks away, Mac-Sys will have another potential challenge. I think they will be okay due to other things they have in place but the reality of a competitor or a change in business has to be fully realised.
Remove your Cataracts: The directors of the company are concerned because their client is leaving Ireland and they’re looking for alternatives. The most immediate thing that springs to mind is why their product is localised to Ireland? Can’t their client use their product elsewhere? Government agencies are always encouraging local companies to export – in this case there’s already a market. What about competitors? Can the product be re-purposed? Rather than winding up the company and posting on a local forum, they should get everyone who is able to walk out on the street looking for new software gigs).

This is why the person running a company, even a software company, needs to be a business person. She can be a programmer as well but she needs to understand the business world and take the unpredictability of business into account. It’s not the just the cult of the MBA who expects people to run organisations they don’t understand, Joel is taking for granted that the person running the software company is a programmer and therefore can understand business as well. While that may be great for him with his established pedigree, it’s not going to be the case for every person. Some people are lucky enough to be able to see with both sets of eyes: that of a programmer and a director. Some can’t. If you can’t you need to recognise this and stop running the company.

I was told a story a couple of years ago about a business that was kept running via multiple handouts from the directors and it wasn’t until the directors themselves were bankrupted that they thought to involve the workers in their own destiny. He was honest with the workers. He had no money left. And with only days to payday, he had to shut up shop unless they could do something. And do something is what they did. They worked on getting new customers, convinced them to pay within seven days and, most importantly, kept every promise they made.

Joel is fond of telling us that a great company needs great infrastructure and that the programmers may find themselves in the minority in a software company. Management is part of that infrastructure. Experienced programmers have been telling me over the last year that programming isn’t hard but you’ll hear an analogue from experienced business managers.

A software company certainly needs competent programmers – individuals who can work together to create a compelling product right from the sketch on the back of a napkin through to the version 1.0 and bug fixes. Without them you have no product. But without someone with a bit of business ken, you’ve no market.

Nothing is harder on your laurels….

John Gruber writes: “Borrowing ideas is fair game, but copying an entire app is wrong. And itâ€™s creepy, in a Microsoft-of-the-â€™90s way, when itâ€™s a $150 billion company cloning an app from a 10-person company.” This is the #1 demotivator for me when it comes to software development. It’s an unreasonable fear and like all … Continue reading “Nothing is harder on your laurels….”

John Gruber writes:

“Borrowing ideas is fair game, but copying an entire app is wrong. And itâ€™s creepy, in a Microsoft-of-the-â€™90s way, when itâ€™s a $150 billion company cloning an app from a 10-person company.”

This is the #1 demotivator for me when it comes to software development. It’s an unreasonable fear and like all unreasonable fears it has to be overcome. Being afraid to do something because someone else will do it is simply stupid as is giving up when a big competitor comes on the scene. If they see it as a viable market then it’s actually an exceedingly viable market for the small business. You’ll have to fight against their ability to leverage market pressure and the two biggest issues there are going to be:

They can offer for free what you’re selling
The end user likely already has a login to their authentication system

Yes, it’s hard to fight against that kind of pressure but who told you that being an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) was going to be easy?

There are a lot of big company projects out there that start as skunkworks where someone has an idea and a project manager gives them enough rope to run for a while as long as they don’t step out of the yard. Google somewhat circumvents this with the 80:20 work week – 20% of the time you’re permitted to work on projects that interest you. It’s a sneaky way to use/abuse geeks who have a persistent work ethic (the things they love working on, that others would see as ‘work’, they see as enjoyment!). This kind of behaviour is why Google, though massive, still retains some agility and is able to throw out new and exciting stuff on a relatively regular interval. Compare this to Yahoo or Microsoft who haven’t given us anything interesting in years.

Just because Google has completely ripped off the look and feel of your app doesn’t mean you should stop. And that also goes for Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Facebook, Yahoo or any of the other 900lb gorillas in the market. You’ve got a good product I hope, you have some first mover advantage (in that people have already been paying you money) and you’ve already been thinking of what to do next with your application (which means when some copycat clones you, you can wait, see the effect on sales and then release your planned upgrade).

That said: if you think you could lose 80% of your customer base to this new free service run by one of the big nasty companies out there and this would cause you to lose a significant percentage of income and endanger your company, then you need to start diversifying.

Nothing is harder on your laurels than sitting on them.

Distribution of iPhone apps

So, there’s three categories of applications which can be installed onto the iPhone without Jailbreak. Payfer Apps – you write your application, sign it, give it to Apple and they host it on the App Store and you get 70% of all proceeds. Free Apps – you write the application, sign it, give it to … Continue reading “Distribution of iPhone apps”

So, there’s three categories of applications which can be installed onto the iPhone without Jailbreak.

Payfer Apps – you write your application, sign it, give it to Apple and they host it on the App Store and you get 70% of all proceeds.
Free Apps – you write the application, sign it, give it to Apple and they host it on the App Store for free.
Source – you write the application, give the code to someone else, they sign it themselves and then they can install on their own iPhone via XCode

The last method changes things. It’s no longer just a case of just releasing source code, there’s the signing too. You’re attaching your identity to the code. A bit more than just running ports or apt.

But it does mean that for the select few who can install apps (been accepted into the Beta program, paid their $99, uploaded their CSR, downloaded their certificate), there’s a method of swapping test code and with a bit of luck a community will build.

For my part, I’d like to play with Kalimba on my iPhone!

Thirty percent of everything

Let’s say you’re a developer producing applications. Your livelihood depends on applications sold and you really want to get the best penetration for them. How much would you pay for: a) no need to set up a web shopping cart b) no need to pay for bandwidth and hosting c) greatly reduced need for marketing … Continue reading “Thirty percent of everything”

Let’s say you’re a developer producing applications. Your livelihood depends on applications sold and you really want to get the best penetration for them.

How much would you pay for:
a) no need to set up a web shopping cart
b) no need to pay for bandwidth and hosting
c) greatly reduced need for marketing
d) reduced need to ‘package’ an app
e) listing on a web store that will be in front of about 7 million customers at launch.

Apple wants thirty percent (though they’ll host your free app for free). For this thirty percent, they’ll approve, list, maintain a reviews database, process payments and send you the income monthly.

Some people think this smacks of greed but I’d counter that it smacks of reality. If you’ve spent a lot of time working in software but not in the retail side then you have probably very little experience of the costs. We are agreed that Apple is a publicly traded corporation and therefore needs to turn a profit. We’re going to have to agree that the App Store will be a hot trick for software distribution.

So let’s look at the competition. Who else hosts software for download like this?

The obvious candidate is Handango.

From Electronista:

Small developers who sell less than $250,000 in gross revenue will see exactly half of their income stripped from each sale — up from 40 percent, Handango reportedly says. More profitable firms will see even more money siphoned away, with all businesses selling between $250,000 and $1 million supplying 60 percent of their revenue and all larger outlets conceding 70 percent. The notice will be made public within a few days and should see the new distribution agreement take effect by March 15th, the alleged source indicates.

Handango makes Apple’s 30% seem like a bargain.

On the other hand, Mobihand gives developers 80%. What do we get for that extra 10%? I’m guessing we get placement on the device itself. Mobihand claims to have the lowest rates in the industry for application hosting.

MobiHand will pay to Content Provider 80% of Net Receipts occurring at www.mobihand.com and 60% of Net Receipts at all other channels.

So, Mobihand will charge you 20-40% of the cost of your software for hosting the sale depending on how and where they bought it.

Even at 30%, Apple’s deal is no strings, no nonsense and is going to have the advantage that every piece of software you see there will work on your iPhone.

And it’s shitloads better than Handango.

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