My Micro ISV Journey

It has been really busy around here for the last month. I've fallen behind on posting to this blog. I'm falling behind on reading all the blogs I'm subscribed to. I'm trying to keep up with everything that is happening in the uISV space but I feel like I'm falling behind every day. But I did catch a few important milestones from a few of our members. I'd also like to welcome a few new members to our class, Chris Hynes from Krystalware and Scott Karstetter from Smart To-Do List. And now to the grades...

Site	Score	Page Rank	SEOmoz
chatspring.com	58(-5)	2	2
www.thinklife.co.uk/	37 (-1)	3	2.5
joelmarcey.com	81 (-1)	4	3
www.smallfarmcentral.com/	79 (+1)	4	4.5
www.sportavista.com/	65(+1)	3	2.5
www.sendalong.com/	80 (+15)	3	3
catchthebest.com	84 (+1)	5	4.5
www.heliumfoot.com/	75 (+4)	5	3.5
www.lokad.com/	95 (+1)	5	5
twistedwave.com	71 (+1)	5	3.5
www.omnicustomersupport.com/	52 (-1)	2	1.5
www.webworkschedules.com/	58(+2)	2	2
www.sixproducts.com/	44 (-8)	1	1
krystalware.com	88 (--)	3	4
www.smarttodolist.com/	26 (--)	0	2
Average	66(-1)		3

I decided after the graph last month, that I would simplify the graph to focus only on one or two uISV's. This month the focus is on Jon at SendAlong.com. SendAlong is a tool for sending large files to people. I've personally used it a few times and recommend it. I want to point Jon out, because back when I first started, Jon had a score of 9! And this month he had another large jump (15 points) and even more important is that he has had quite a bit of success since his launch including his first paying customers. Following Jon's success has been a source of motivation for me.








Our group grade dropped slightly. Not to point fingers but I think it might have been one of our new additions. But as the graph above shows, with a little work you can make large strides in improving your website.



I also want to congratulate Starr on getting ChatSpring into Beta. If you have not looked at his application, a live chat software for your websites, you should. I've used it a few times already and it is great app. Starr has done a beautiful job on the UI (using EXT-JS) and the app simply works. For uISV's that want to add that extra level of customer service, it is a great tool.

I'm looking at adding the seomoz's page strength tool grades this month as well. I'm late on getting ths post out, so I figure I will publish it now and then update it with the page strength scores when I get that data.

Updated: Special thanks to Chris Hynes who has an account at seomoz.org and run the page strength tool for all of our sites. I added a new column which is the score (1-10 range) of the page strength. I'm new to seomoz so I'll try to dig into it a bit more and report back on it. It would appear that we rank poorer overall vs our ratings on web site grader.

I'm not sure where the time went. It feels like just yesterday I posted the March grades and now its been over 2 weeks already. I'd like to send out a thank you to Patrick McKenzie who mentioned my blog on his site. I've always had a lot of respect for Patrick based on the amount of help he has given back to the uISV community. I've relied heavily on his blog for help and advice on getting my uISV up and running.

I don't want to steal any of the thunder but I'm excited for a new product launch coming up from one of our members if the class of '07. I don't think an offical announcement has been made so I'll hold off, but I've been given a sneak peak and it looks very impressive. Stay tuned for a full review once it is announced.

I'd like to point out a huge benefit of actually getting your product in the hands of users, even in a beta stage. If you go read Jon's blogs about SendAlong, his product to send large files you will a flourish of activity right after he released his product. He added quite a few new features, and I guarentee that some of them he never considered until his users suggested them. Until you have real users banging on your product, you will not really know how they will use or want to use it. I'm a big fan of release early and release often because of the many benefits of having real users using your product.

I was kindly asked when the grades for March were going to be up, so here there are. Here's last months results for a reference point. I'm going to keep the +/- next to the score that I started last month to make it easy to see the general progress. I'm getting enough data points, I think I might start adding a graph. Something to think about.

Site	Score	Page Rank
chatspring.com	63 (+12)	2
www.thinklife.co.uk/	38 (+1)	3
joelmarcey.com	82 (+2)	4
www.smallfarmcentral.com/	78 (-1)	4
www.sportavista.com/	64 (+35)	3
www.sendalong.com/	65 (+11)	3
catchthebest.com	83 (-2)	5
www.heliumfoot.com/	71 (-5)	5
www.lokad.com/	94 (--)	5
twistedwave.com	70 (-7)	5
www.omnicustomersupport.com/	53 (-4)	2
www.webworkschedules.com/	56(-6)	2
www.sixproducts.com/	52 (--)	1
Average	67(+2)

I decided to create a graph to see what it looks like. Its not as helpful as I would have liked, but here it is

Only really three sites moved this month. I think any change < 10 points is really just noise in the grading. Since the grade is a percent of the all web sites graded, the more sites that are used, the more this can fluctuate. Over time this will have less affect as the number data set gets large enough. I don't know if we have hit that point or not. I don't think we have because I have not changed the omnicustomersupport and its score keeps bouncing around.

Last month Boris, from SportaVista, stated his goal was to be the most improved for the month and he was very successful. His score jumped a staggering 35 points. That's why its important to set goals in life.

And SendAlong and Chatspring also showed double digit gains. Good timing for both of them. I keep hearing that Chatspring will be in beta any time now (lets all encourage Starr to finally push it out the door and let us look at his baby.) And Jon released version 1.0 of SendAlong that allows you send large files to people. It really is a great app that is easy to use. He has had a lot of good press lately. Jon, anything special you did during your release to get the traffic increase that you are seeing?

The average score nosed up a bit. We can thank Boris for that. Some of us appear to have reached a plateau. I'm not sure how to break through it. Any ideas?

Let me know if the chart is useful or just taking up space. I'm not sure. I thought it would be nice to see longer term trends, but with so many data sets, it is a little messy. Maybe I'll just call out a few sites each month (biggest gainers & losers?) to see trends.

See you all again next month.

As a uISV I've always put customer service as one of the areas that I want to exceed expectations. I have always been good with customers, which for a software developer can be a unique thing. A lot of developers I know would rather never see a customer, they just want to code. And sometimes you don't ever want the customer to see them either. While having great customer service should not be your sole differentiator, it does not mean you should not strive to achieve great customer service.

I've always admired the length that Patrick McKenzie has gone to provide support to his customers (and even some of his competitors customers.) I used Patrick as the gold standard of customer service. I recently received a comment through my website (for creating employee schedules.) They actually provided both their email and phone number which I've found out to be fairly rare thing to do. The customer briefly described their scheduling pain and wanted to know if Web Work Schedules could help.

I composed a brief email back and sent it off. A short while later the email bounced back undeliverable. I verified the email address and then checked the domain to see if I could find their web site. Still no luck, so I decide to do it the old fashion way and pick up the phone and call him. Thankfully he was working today and was able to give me a few minutes of his time.

It turns out the feature he needs is not currently in WWS, but it is a feature that would be useful to most of my customers, so I have no problem implementing it. Like I said before, customized software is a slippery slope, which is why I evaluate each feature request. The customer told me that he had purchased some scheduling software before. It was hard to use and he could not get it to work. The company never responded to his questions. He felt that he just wasted his time and money.

Contrast that to the effort I've made so far. I tried to email him, but that failed. Then I call him and ask him questions about his problems. I listen to his answers and explain that the current state of WWS will not solve his exact problem, I would like to work with him to create a solution that will. I followed up the phone call with an email outlining the steps to take if he would like to work with me to enhance WWS so that it solves his problem. I also mentioned I'd would wave the monthly fees during development of the new feature.

So how does this customer feel about my company? Well I'll let you judge by his email response:

"Thanks again for working with us on this that is GREAT customer service."

Unrelated side note: I find it funny that the last couple of potential customers that have found me on search engines and have contacted me happen to live within a few hours of where I'm located. The world seems to be getting smaller every day.

I try to keep a close watch on my fellow uISV'ers to see how everyone is doing. Its tough to watch them struggle but it is awesome to see them succeed. I've been following Jon Chase's progress for a long time now and he announced his 1.0 release last weekend. His application SendAlong is a web application for sending large files to people. I've used SendAlong to send some small movies of my kids to my parents and it worked like a charm. Which is no small feat considering the computer skill level of my parents.

And it looks like Jon is starting gain some traction as well. He posted both on SendAlong's Blog and his personal blog some details of the traffic he is getting.

I wish Jon the best of luck and success in his business. Right up until you launch your product, it is easy to feel that you are not really a business, but you just have a really time consuming hobby. But with the launch version 1.0, suddenly there is a new sense of what you are and what you have accomplished. Great work Jon. Keep it up.

I was contacted by a potential customer for Web Work Schedules, the software that allows you to create work schedules online. Her company has a slightly different way of scheduling. They needed some additional information on the schedule, and view the schedule in a new way (a month at a time.)

There is a great feeling of discussing your application with potential customers if you believe in your product. My wife use to work in this particular vertical market that this customer is from, so I had some insight on how they were currently doing their scheduling. I don't know why I didn't think of this particular vertical before. It seems so obvious to me now. The company currently uses Excel to create its schedules and emails them out. Needless to say, WWS is a huge step up for them.

But first I needed to decide if I should make the required customization. There is a slippery slope on doing customizations for clients. It is hard to scale and if you are selling a $50 service, you might actually be losing money by doing the work. But since the changes they were asking for will be useful to every company in the vertical market, and most likely in other markets as well, then it was an easy decision to make.

And having active customers to work with is a huge motivation factor, so I was able to bang out the changes (and a slew of other issues that had been bothering me) in a few days. During the whole time I kept in contact with the customer, trying to understand their scheduling process, their current pains and what I can do to help. By being proactive in the relationship and delivering a capability that will solve their problem, I hope that I will have a new happy customer.

Even better than that, is that I have a whole new vertical market to go after. This small niche is currently under served and could be a big success for me. It pays to get to know your customers, because you never know what you might learn. In this case, I discovered a new niche market.

I’ve read a few posts recently about people wanting to start a uISV. I thought I would share a little of my experience with the different stages of starting a uISV.

1. The Idea
   
   • This is the best stage to me. You are going to conquer the world. Bells and whistles are going off, why didn’t you think of this before. This is going to be so much fun.
   
   
   • Reality check: This is the easiest stage there is. There is no actual work involved in this stage. It is fun to think about your idea and maybe even plan out how everything will fall into place once you start. Ideas are cheap, its execution that is important. I’m guess the vast majority of uISV’s never make it past this stage.
   
   
   
   


2. Initial development
   
   • As a software developer, I think this is the best stage. You’ve chosen the technology you are going to use (maybe even experimenting with a few from the bleeding edge). You put in long hours but it doesn’t feel like work, this is fun! You stay up late into the night and your fingers are a blur at the keyboard. You are banging out various parts of your app.
   
   
   • Reality Check: This is the second best stage there is. (The best is when someone actually buys your product.) This stage will soon end when you run into a challenge and suddenly coding is a lot like working at your day job. You start avoiding sections of code or features that need to get done. You start to regret some of the earlier decisions you made. A lot of uISVs are abandoned at this stage. I have no hard numbers but from personal experience, figure at 60-70% failure rate.
   
   


3. Beta Release
   
   • You’ve completed enough of the app that it is ready to show to people other than your family or close friends. You can almost see the finished product. Just a few more things to wrap.
   
   
   • Reality Check: All those task that you have avoided are coming back to haunt you now. The mundane tasks that have to be finished, the mind numbing ones, and possibly even a technical challenging one as well. While the beta is just around the corner, just weeks away, it keeps slipping beyond your grasp. Part of the issue is that you are afraid to release it. So you keep making excuses on why it is not ready yet. The hours you spend on your uISV are down considerable from when you first started. You sit down to work on it, but end up browsing the web instead.
   
   



4. 1.0 Release
   
   • You can see the light at the end of the tunnel. You will have accomplished what 98% of uISVs have failed to do. Launch a product.
   
   
   • Reality Check: In all your free time (working nights and weekends) you forgot to do any marketing yet. And being more technical, marketing is not one of your strengths. The only way some one finds your website is by searching for your-company.com in Google. The whole world of SEO, AdWords, link building is brand new territory. On one hand you feel great that you actually have a product, but you are waiting for validation until someone actually parts money and pays for it.
   
   

This is not the path everyone takes when starting a company. Since it paints a difficult path to follow, you might ask if it is worth it. I’ll refer back to my post on consulting vs ownership and say that yes it is. If I ever do it again (I’m hoping my current efforts on my customer service knowledge base and online employee scheduling will take off and I will not have to) I’ll have gained a lot of experience and do things a little differently.

The two main things I would do differently is

1. Start marketing from the moment I have an idea. This includes SEO work, blogging, market research, etc.
2. Choose an idea that can be developed in 6 months or less. This reduces the chances of burn out. To me the 6 months is the upper end limit. The less time it takes to develop, I think the better you need to be at marketing because it would be easy for copy cat competitors to spring up.

So for you that have started a uISV, did you hit these stages? Are there any stages that I missed that you think belong in the list? Let me know in the comments.

One thing that I have been good at over my career is selling myself. This is a skill that you can always be working on. Even when I was working for my last company, up until my last day there, I was selling myself to the company's customers. You never know when someone will need your capabilities. Here are 4 key things that are required to successfully sell your services

1) Believe in yourself (your capabilities, your worth to the client)

2) Always be selling, especially when they are not buying

3) Never burn any bridges

4) Over deliver

To have any success I think you have to believe in yourself. I know what my skill set is and where my strengths and weakness are. I also know how fast I can pick up new skill when required. This is tied together with knowing what I'm worth to my customers. It helps that I know what my company used to bill my out at, so I know what people were willing to pay for me. Even still, my first contract was under priced. When it was time to renew, I said I would, but only at a new rate.

When you are consulting, every interaction is a sales call. The weekly status meeting is a reminder to the client of my capabilities and what I'm bringing to the table. My goal of every interaction with clients, partners, and any one else I run into is to be professional and be viewed as an expert in my field. Each time I build up my personal brand that these people will remember when they have a problem that I can solve. Networking and selling go hand in hand. The benefit of selling yourself (instead of trying to sell a product) is that it should never feel like a sales pitch. You should just be yourself, connecting with people, expanding your network and building your personal brand.

The world really is a small place. Even on the internet with billions of people online, people know people. I always leave a job and/or customer in the best possible conditions. The majority of my work has come from past employers or customers. If I had burned bridges it would affect my reputation. That is a problem when what I'm selling is myself.

The easiest way to sell yourself is to over deliver on the last job. This is the sure fire way to get repeat business. Word of mouth advertising is the best form of advertisement. I just received an email where a former client was telling a potential client that "I recall we spoke last week about you looking for some outside the box SOA talent. ... I cannot speak highly enough about Chris' talents." So now not only am I selling but now my customer is even selling for me.

By leveraging these 4 items, I have been successful at getting consulting work. Would you add anything else to this list? Let me know in the comments.

This year is moving fast. I can't believe its February already. Here's last months results for a reference point. Since it is nice to see how you compare with last month, I added a +/- after the score so you don't have to check lasts month if you don't want to. Page Rank updates so infrequently, I decided to not do it for that, even though we did finally see some updates there. Several of the sites that previously had a 0 page rank, now have a PR score. Here is how we are all doing:

Site	Score	Page Rank
chatspring.com	51 (+6)	2
www.thinklife.co.uk/	37 (-27)	3
joelmarcey.com	80 (+2)	4
www.smallfarmcentral.com/	79 (-2)	4
www.sportavista.com/	29	0
www.sendalong.com/	54 (+21)	3
catchthebest.com	85 (-2)	5
www.heliumfoot.com/	76 (+4)	0
www.lokad.com/	94 (-4)	4
twistedwave.com	77 (-2)	5
www.omnicustomersupport.com/	57 (-2)	0
www.webworkschedules.com/	62 (+24)	2
www.sixproducts.com/	52 (+5)	1

This month marks the first month with a lot of scores that dropped. The some of the drops are likely due to more sites being used. If your score did drop, I'd run WebSitegrader yourself and look at the details to see if something has changed since last month.

Two big jumps this month, Jon with Send Along jumping up 21 points (and a new fancy PR 3). Like always, any advice on changes you made to help you make the jump? I couldn't let Jon have all the fun, so I shot up 24 points at Web Work Schedules. I think part of this has to do with also the new PR 2 score (it was previously a 0). One thing I have done in the last month is increased blogging on the site. I actually outsourced some of the content creation and I've been very pleased with the quality. I can't tell if it is driving more traffic (and hopefully sales) but that is the hope.

Keith Alperin, from Helium Foot +33 points last month, commented on the last update that he launched their first product and did a PR blitz that was very successful (both in inbound links and sales!) If anyone else has updates (product releases, major milestones, etc,) drop me a line and I'll make sure to include it in the update.

A little historical background, I first graded the websites on 11/15/07. At that time the average score was 49. The average score for this month was a 67. Almost a 20 point increase! I think that is pretty impressive. Lets keep up the good work.

--Updated 2/12/08-- Ran WebSiteGrader again on SportaVista.

I finally got my act together and moved off of blogger. I read this article on why you should move your business blog from blogspot.com a while ago. I was reminded of it when I ran website grader on my blog. But I've been busy with everything else and kept putting it off. Well as of today, I'm now hosting it myself.

Nothing has changed in the blog itself, other than the location. I've also switched to using feedburner for my feeds. I'm looking into pulling out all the old entries on blogger, but I'm not making it a priority at the moment. I pulled out the entries from January and I feel that is good enough for now. I'm leaving the old blog up, but it will not be updated.

One thing that I have noticed, is that with blogspot, my posts showed up right away in Google Reader, but with my feeds going through feedburner, Google Reader takes forever to show the new feeds. A ding against Google Reader, but not that big of a deal overall for my content.

I had a meeting a few days ago where I was looking to do some subcontracting though a company. The owner/founder of the company pitched the idea of joining the company as an employee. They are an employee owned company, so every employee has a stake in the company. The owner has a fairly good track record. He said said something that stood out to me. I recently passed it along to a fellow uISV and thought I would share it here as well.

As a consultant, you will typically start out making more money (figure about 2X your normal salary) than you would owning a company (or uISV in my case), but you can only bump your rate a little bit every year or so. If you price yourself low, you might have big jumps initially, but soon you will hit your limit. Even during the late 90's there was a maximum price that you could get out of desperate companies. And this is the limit of your income. You can only work so many hours in a day and that is all you can earn.

But as an owner, even of a uISV, your income is not tied to the number of hours you can work. It is tied to the number of people who buy your product or service. Initially you will probably not make anything near what you can make as a consultant. This is especially true with uISVs where revenue can sit at 0 for quite a while. But long term, you can make substantially more if you are successful.

There is risk that your business will fail and you will earn nothing for your valuable time. That is the risk/reward of being a business owner. This is a sample graph and is the ideal situation. Here is some real world data compiled by Neil Davidson last year that doesn't paint a really happy picture. But I think there is a small percentage of owners who see this type of scenario come true. And there is still a lot of space above the consulting line where many uISV's would be happy to find themselves.

And it isn't really an either/or model. I'm doing both at the same time. This pushes out the time frame on the success of the uISV, but it reduces the risk.

-- Side Note -- The graph was created using Google's Chart API. Its pretty cool to use. The graph took way longer to create than it would have in excel, but there was a learning curve involved.

I've been a user of GMail since the very beginning. I've been using Google Reader for a while now. I've always liked the google products for my personal needs. A recent post on BoS about using Google Apps for Email got me to look into using Google Apps for my uISV. I have 3 domains set up so I did a test with my least used domain. I configured the email correctly and everything worked like a charm. I had to do a little searching on how to update my MX records, but it was easy once I found how to do it. After using it for a little bit, I bit the bullet and switched over everything.

I'd like to say it went without a snag, but that is not the case. In Web Work Schedules, there are several places where email notifications are sent out, like when a schedule changes, or when a user sends feedback to me. Luckily I tested this after making the changes and found out that it was broken. It looked like a 5 minute fix to update the SMTP host, username, password, etc.

Things always take longer than anticipated. I was missing a setting in java mail for STARTTLS property that was a problem. Add that and retest. Oops. I was creating the mail session to soon, fix that retest. Everything should be working. Its working locally, so push it to the server. Damn, its not working. I'm checking the configuration files that I modified. I love typos, how about you. I was missing one little 's' in the username and for some reason, the authentication was failing So after 1 1/2 hours everything was back up and running.

One cool thing is that now that I'm splitting time between my desktop and my laptop, I'm using google docs more and I'm finding it pretty useful. The files I need are always available. I'm not 100% sold on everything, but so far I'm liking the experience.

When I started blogging, I wrote a post about my bootstrapping efforts. At that time I was just about to start a new contract with my old company. That was a very successful contract (for both parties involved) that just wrapped up. Now I find myself deciding what I want to do now.

Since neither of my efforts has launched into orbit yet, I still need some side work to pay the bills (and a few perks as well.) I had lunch with a former boss to talk about some work possibilities. There are two things to take away from that statement 1) Never burn your bridges, you never know when you might want to go back, 2) Maintain and grow your network. Don't lose contacts and constantly be on the look out to expand your network.

During the conversation, I said that I'm not interested in full time work. His questions is how is it possible that I don't need full time work? Here is my secret. I don't have a lot of vices, expensive hobbies or lots of new things. I'm driving a crappy old car (waiting to get a used Toyota Tacoma.) Its not a requirement to replace the car yet. I don't smoke or visit really makes you focus on what you need vs. what you want.

I still will spend several hundred dollars at our Costco shopping trips ( I can't wait until both kids are out of diapers!) We don't skimp on food. There are a ton of things we could buy to fill up our house. When I was at the in. Now that I have a somewhat steady income, we are making a few purchases, but I can't say that we missed out on anything in the mean time.

I think bootstrapping your business is a lot like living below your means. Its a simple concept that a lot of people have trouble with. If you can do that in your personal life, you can do that with your business.

I have another week to decide between a few different contract offers. I aware that this is a great position to be in and I've got a post about selling yourself that will go into more details about why I am able to be in this position. Stay tuned.

I've been a little quite on this blog. Part of it was the holidays and not having time and the second is a deadline with my consulting contract. I've actually have two separate projects with the same company. The first phase of the first project is wrapped up and I'm waiting for the second phase to start. The second project wraps up next week. I should have some down time before the tasking picks back up. I hope to use this time make a lot of progress on my uISV.

I feel pretty good in that I set 3 goals to accomplish over the last month and I've done with 2 of them. The first was adding a "Demo Account" functionality to WWS. Potential users can now give Web Work Schedules a test drive for creating online employee schedules. This creates a fictional business with employees, messages, time off requests, etc. This allows them to get a feel for the application and see how it works. I've seen pretty good traffic (for me) in the demo account.

The second thing that I accomplished was an experiment with outsourcing some content creation for the website. I consider this experiment a huge success. I had 10 articles written at a great rate and the content is better than I expected. If you are in need of website content / articles, drop me an email and I'll send you the contact info. Once she has her website up, I'll add a link to it. I'll be publishing the articles over the next month on the site.

The one thing I have not accomplished, but I still have a few more days left to do it, is old fashion sales. I wanted to go out and talk to some local business and see if I can get at least one to sign up. I have not done this. Two main reasons:

1) I just ordered my laptop and I'm waiting for it to show up. I want this to be able to do a demo on the spot.
2) I'm not sure the application is ready yet. I need to get over this and just go out and do it. If it is not ready, the way I will find out is by talking to customers not by waiting for them to contact me.

So that's where things are. Things are looking positive so far in January and I hope that it will be a great year.

Its nice to be wanted. I have another potential contract that I'm considering doing. The big issue is that some of the work will have to be done on site. I've got really use to my 10 foot commute. The commute and time commitment is making me really think if I want to take the work or not.

I read T.J.'s post about Making a Goal to Quit the Day Job. It made me reconsider how much time I've been putting into the consulting vs the . Even so I feel that given the holidays and the deadlines, my recent progress has been good. But I think I need to find a more even balance between the two.

And then .

And its almost spring in San Diego, the recent rains have the weeds growing like crazy and I promised the wife that I'd have the lawn in 4 months ago.

And then there are my two kids that I want to spend as much time with as I can before they grow up. I can't my son will be two next month. Where did the time go?

And then there this blog

I know most of you probably have just as much if not more going on in your lives. So how do you keep it all balanced?