talent
I wish I had talent like this
I wish I had talent like this
"When I joined, I was really excited to get a chance to use Salesforce for the first time. I had held up Salesforce as a great example of the death of enterprise software and why apps were best delivered over the web.
Now, after having access to it for two months, I have to say, its pretty underwhelming... or maybe I just don't get it."
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/thisisgoingtobebig/~3/24046476/salesforce_mayb.html
Christopher Hawkins had some good questions in his "Monday Consulting Questions" segment this week. My 2 cents:
Q2: I've actually been wondering a bit about this myself in terms of how fast is common to return to your "day job" levels. Personally with 1 month to go until the 1 year anniversary of the release of HelpSpot I'm at about a 50% increase. Certainly way ahead of the goals I set out with. As a side note, that extra $ is going to enable some interesting developments in the coming months, stay tuned!
Q3: I agree, there's little business reason to spend endless hours becoming proficient in a new technology. That doesn't mean you shouldn't keep track of what's going on, just that you don't need to spend months learning them until there's a business reason to do so. At least from the perspective of a business owner.
Part of a series of responses to questions posed in the "have any questions for me" post.
Q: ChrisC
"Oh man, where to begin? grin
I'd love to hear more about your development environment. I'm not sure why but I'm always fascinated to learn how others are doing things.
Have you ever "run out of steam" midway into a project, e.g. lost interest, decided the project idea wouldn't ever be successful, etc. If so, how do you deal with it?
That's probably enough for a start."
A:
My primary development environment is a dual G5 mac with 4gb or ram and assorted other goodies including raid drives. I also have a windows machine with VMWare's excellent server for testing various Windows setups (ick).
As for software I use BBEdit and I've been playing with Textmate as well. OmniOutliner for product planning. Subversion for source control. That's pretty much it. I spend 98% of my day in a browser or text editor.
As for running out of steam I definetly have. I'd say I started about 5 products before HelpSpot. I ran out of steam on all of them. The reason I ran out of steam was that I didn't understand the markets I was going into. So half way through the development I got scared and wasn't sure if it was worth continuing. Being better informed about the help desk market is really what kept me from bailing and also allowed me to commit even more to development than I otherwise would have, such as leaving my day job, selling my car to help fund that and so on.
An interesting note is that of the 5 businesses (approx) that I abandoned only 1 had a real chance at success. It was a blog server back before blogging truly took off. It allowed the hosting of unlimited blogs from one codebase and was designed for schools, hosting companies, etc. Actually I still think this is a bit of an under-served market, but I wouldn't want to jump in that game now.
Part of a series of responses to questions posed in the "have any questions for me" post.
Q: Lee
OK, here's a good question. Say you're a programmer with a particular idea - what are the most effective ways that you know of to research and evaluate the market before you jump in? Both qualitatively and quantitatively?
A:
Hmm, I'm trying to think back to everything I did getting ready for HelpSpot. First off I think it's different for each market. Some have lots of data all over the place whereas others are a bit harder to find. In many ways I think that can be your first clue. If it's very easy to find lots of good data on your prospective market then it may not be a great market for a small software shop. If that many people are spending time aggregating data about your market there's a reason and it probably means lots of strong players.
As far as evaluating I like to find high dollar value markets that have lots of competition, but which are highly fragmented. Lots of competitors allow you to use their marketing dollars to create general awareness of the need for your product. That's really expensive general advertising type stuff. Once they've created demand you can focus your limited budget and time on pulling in those leads they created.
Another thing I like to look for is who exactly the competition is. Personally I prefer to go up against relatively large companies and open source projects. What I don't want to see in a space is lots of small ISV's like me. The reason is that I rely pretty heavily on grassroots type marketing. The big guys have no idea how to do that and open source projects don't really market at all, though they do get press which feeds back into creating general knowledge about the market and creates more customers for me to capture. If the market has lots of smaller ISV's there's likely to be a lot more noise in the grassroots streams you'll want to use and it will make it harder for you to get noticed. For example, trying to create a hosted project management app (like Basecamp), a bug tracking application (like FogBugz), or a blog search engine (like Technorati) is going to be much more difficult because many of the grassroots channels are clogged up with talk of these other products already.
As a programmer one place I think you should never go to evaluate your product ideas is a programmers forum. Many programmers seem to think those are good places to ask about their product ideas, I completely disagree. Not for anything you're truly serious about anyway. The problem is that programmers like to shoot from the hip on those type of questions. So you've got this really well thought out product idea and then you post about it and 20 people come in and say it's junk in the first 5 minutes. I've seen many people get dissuaded by this, but the truth is those 20 people have no vision of your product, haven't thought about the market at all and generally are trying to stir up conversation as much as anything else.
Otherwise I don't have have much formal advice. I didn't do loads of computational analysis. It was much more driven by feel. Searching around, reading everything, and as I found areas that felt right that felt approachable I followed those paths. You definitely can't rush it. It takes months of research to really know the market and have a strong feel for where you fit in. I do suggest though that you go after an existing market that already has many millions or even small billions of dollars in sales. That gives you a nice big pond to work in. Trying to invent a new market or edge out a piece of a tiny one really lowers your chance of success IMHO.
Response 1 in a series of responses to questions posed in the "have any questions for me" post.
Q: Kris
You mentioned a while back about a product idea you had kicking around outside of HelpSpot. Any news on this front?
A:
I'm sorry to say there's been no progress, in fact I'd say I've moved backward. There's just too much to do in and around HelpSpot right now to even think about a new venture. I have made one decision about any future products which I hope to stick to though. I've decided that I'd like my next product to be ultra simple. Something that truly only does one thing.
Not "one" thing like run your help desk. I'm talking about truly one function with maybe a few supporting screens and that's it. Perhaps it's because HS has so many moving parts, but the idea of selling an ultra simple solution to some problem really appeals to me.
One page websites have been in vogue lately, I wonder if one page apps would be an interesting idea. Kind of like a useless Web 2.0 AJAX homepage site but instead it's an app that actually does something useful in the B2B arena.
I've been so busy this summer that I've really fallen off in my blogging. I suppose it happens to all bloggers, but I really want to kick things back in motion. Since I've also done a poor job keeping up with my feeds I'm a bit short on general blogging fodder so I thought instead it might be interesting to fields questions from readers. So if you have any questions for me please post them here. I'll then pick a few and respond via a dedicated post. I'll also try and answer everyone's questions in the comments if I don't do a post on the question.
Note, I won't be responding below until after I choose a few questions to respond to towards the end of the week.
I'm open ended on the questions so whatever you've got. Business, HelpSpot, other, it's all on the table.
A nice customer service story which demonstrates a great point to small ISV's out there. You should pretty much always charge a premium for great customer service. In fact, it's worth letting customers go away and come back as long as you can really live up to your end. I've already made dozens of decent size sales where people tried HelpSpot, then tried another help desk tool and finally came back to HelpSpot because they couldn't get their questions answered, get timely support and so on.
This is a really important consideration when working out your maintenance pricing. If you're providing top notch customer support make sure you're charging for it. Don't be tempted to simply match the competition or under cut them. People like to pay for the best as long as you really are.
http://www.itsmwatch.com/itil/article.php/3625741
For early success, the service desk is where ITIL can really shine. In ITIL, the service desk function performs a number of critical tasks. To say it is simply the traditional help desk renamed does not do the service desk justice.
http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/Default.asp?ArticleID=6268
As customer service organizations continue to look at ways to reduce operational costs, drive greater productivity, and enable users to help themselves, many businesses have made the adoption of customer self-service a key priority. At the same time the economics of outsourcing remain compelling, especially in countries like India and the Philippines, where labor costs continue to be significantly lower than in the United States, Europe, or parts of Asia, such as Korea.
But can companies make up for the potential loss of customer intimacy if clients are helping themselves online, or chatting with other users in a forum, rather than interacting with the firm's agents? If a business chooses to outsource and another company is answering the client's phones (or emails or chats), does that enterprise face the same risks? And what about political issues? Is it more acceptable to replace staff with a support portal versus an offshore call center?