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If you're stuck for ideas, then check out this post from Andy Brice:
http://successfulsoftware.net/2008/11/25/what-do-you-buy-a-programmer-for-christmas/
But what do you buy a programmer for Christmas? If you're a programmer maybe you want an Xbox. If you're a tester you'll probably want to buy your favourite programmer something he wouldn't normally buy himself. Unit tests maybe.
Post here ...
When Simon and I started Red Gate, the two of us decided which product to build over beers and phone calls between Guildford and the Hague. We were doing product management. By guesswork, gut instinct and scribbling on envelopes and whiteboards, but it seemed to work.
Well, yes and no.
Our first product - an online bug tracking system - never followed the hockey stick curve of our business plan. But it didn't matter. You don't need stratospheric growth and a billion dollar addressable market to bootstrap a software company. A $50,000 market opportunity is enough to get you off the ground - once you get started you'll figure out the rest.
As we grew, so did the costs of failure and the spoils of success. At some point, these became large enough to make proper product management essential. We didn't realise we'd reached that stage until we were long past it. We'd experimented with engineers working on product roadmaps in between project work; we'd navel gazed and debated what 'product management' really was; we'd argued about how it would fit in with our way of doing things. As often happens, it took somebody from the outside to tell us what we all already knew but had failed to articulate. At the end of two days at Red Gate, Tim Lister, the author of Peopleware, told us that:
"Currently the role of product manager is not working. It seems like all the most likely candidates are so busy being developers, testers, and project managers, that nobody has the time to ponder and research the future of the products."
There were 85 of us before we finally hired our first full time product manager. We should have done it two years earlier.
I'm hoping that you'll do something that we failed to do: listen to the advice of others and learn from other people's mistakes rather than insist on making the same ones yourself. Here are three good ways to start.
Firstly, watch the video of Steve Johnson at Business of Software 2008. Steve is an instructor at Pragmatic Marketing and has personally trained thousands of product managers.
Secondly, join the online chat about product management that Steve is moderating. It's on December 12th at 5pm GMT (that's noon EST or 9am PST). You can sign up at the BoS social network.
Thirdly, subscribe to the Cranky PM blog.
Got links to other excellent product management resources? Post them here.
Based in the UK and want to discuss building profitable, sustainable long term software businesses? Come to the second London Business of Software meet up on January 13th. Register here. Or come to the Software East meeting in Cambridge, UK on January 22nd.
On the forum, there are questions about product management, Micro ISVs and marketing mistakes. Reply to them, or post your own questions on the forum.
On my blog, I give seven tips for surviving the downturn. I'd like to hear your opinion too, so if you've got a comment then please post it.
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There's an old joke about a couple lost deep in rural Suffolk. They come across a local, wind down their car window and ask for directions to Cambridge. He thinks, chews on his stalk of wheat, sucks through his teeth and says "Well, if I were going to Cambridge then I wouldn't start from here".
There's been much written on how to survive the recession. Sequoia capital recently told their companies to become cash-flow positive, develop a must-have product and not to rely on raising further capital in the short term. Tim O'Reilly told people to stop throwing sheep.
Excellent advice, but in this blog post I'm going to play the part of the country bumpkin. If you're going to survive this recession, then I say don't start from having no business model, no useful product and no revenue. If you're in that position then, frankly, you're screwed. Sorry.
Instead, this blog post is aimed at software businesses that are fundamentally sound. Businesses with products that people want to buy. Businesses that are sustainable in the long term, but who must first survive the short term.
Here are my seven tips on how to survive the recession:
1) Don't panic. Keep your head when all about you are losing theirs. You've got time - not a lot though - to think things through. So use it.
2) Don't ignore the problem. In Jim Collins's words, you must confront the brutal facts. Think that the recession is not going to effect you because you're too small, or because you're too big? Or because your products are tactical not strategic, or because they're strategic not tactical? Or because you're selling products not services, or services not products? Odds are you're kidding yourself.
3) Communicate with your people. Make it clear you understand the situation. They need to know that you're not whistling blithely as you sail into the storm. They need to know that you have a plan.
4) The bargains can wait. Some people are saying that this is a time to buy companies or technologies at bargain prices. This recession is going to be long, it's going to be deep and it's going to be nasty. There will be better bargains in six months' time. So wait.
5) Watch your customers. How have their priorities changed? Have the buttons you need to push to get them to buy changed? Do you need to change your marketing tactics or the way that you sell?
6) Focus on sales. The statement "My product is so good it sells itself" is even less true now than it was six months ago. Watch this video of Paul Kenny at Business of Software 2008.
7) Letting people go is a last resort. You have an implicit contract with your staff. You give them more than just a salary and a job, and they give you more than just their presence from nine to five. Never say never, but think hard before you break that contract.
What are your tips for surviving as times go bad? Post here ...
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I love it when our customers write in, or come up to us at shows, and tell us how much they love our products. When people e-mail, unprompted, comments like:
My job used to consist almost entirely of comparing SQL databases, by hand. Now that I've started using SQL Compare I've bought a pair of glasses, painted on eyes, and now spend much of my day snoozing
Of course, the best testimonials aren't words. They're green, six by two and half inches, and have George Washington on the front. It's easy for people to say good things about your software. It's only when they pay that it counts.
Or that's what I used to think. Yesterday evening, somebody e-mailed me this video of Rodney Landrum getting a Red Gate tattoo:
Wow.
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It's odd how asking yourself the simple question "What would Bill Gates do?" can bring a clarity-inducing shift of perspective to seemingly intractable problems. I don't why it works, but it does. Depending on the problem you're facing, you can replace Bill Gates with Steve Jobs, or Warren Buffett, or the Pope.
Here are some fictional examples:
Q. What should you do with that troublesome employee who never seems to quite make the grade, no matter how hard you coach him? Should you stick at it, or fire him?
A. What would Bill Gates do?
Q. You're worried about the design of that product. Should you interfere and risk irritating your development team, or let it ship?
A. What would Steve Jobs do?
Q. Should you give up the security of your day job to focus on your mISV, or stay wrapped in the comfort blanket of full-time employment?
A. What would Bill Gates do?
You get the picture.
Got any other problem solving tricks? Post them here ...
Last week, 18 of us gathered for the first ever London BoS dinner. It was a great reminder of how the pub, the pizza parlour and the coffee house - real-life interactions as old as beer itself - trump the web 2.0 pretenders of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Whenever I talk to other ISVs there are two recurring themes: pricing and sales. Pricing is hard, as much guesswork and art as science. And most ISVs - those set up by developers, anyway - don't understand sales.
But help is at hand.
Firstly, check out the video of Paul Kenny at Business of Software 2008 (it's embedded below). If you think that your software sells itself, or find sales distasteful and sordid, then prepare to be challenged.
Paul starts off his talk by asking the audience to agree or disagree with statements such as:
"I really love being sold to"
"Generally speaking, sales people disappoint me"
You can guess how that went. In response, he says:
"What you've experienced in your life are banal, mediocre, inappropriate sales techniques. Over the next hour, I'm going to make it my mission to put you in touch with your inner sales person. I'm going to help you love your sales people a little bit more."
And, dammit, I think he pulls it off.
There's no better time to watch this video: as the economy sours, persuading people to open their wallets will get harder. So selling will become more important. Here's the video:
Secondly, Dan Nunan has agreed to host an online chat about software pricing. He'll cover why you can't sell you product for more than $1,000, the wisdom of free, and tricks for charging a higher price in a downturn without offending your customers. It's at 5pm GMT (12 noon EST, 9am PST) on Tuesday November 18th. Go here to register your interest.
On the forums, Mark Dalgarno asks "Product managers - who needs them (and are they overpaid)?", and John asks how do you promote software in its pre-launch stage? James Moore has, so far, got the best tenuous analogy between the US elections and the business of software with his comparison with HD-DVD and Blu-ray.
Got an opinion about any of these topics? Post it on the forums.
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Last night, at 7:30, six of us were faced with a problem: where to eat? By 7:45 we still had no answer. It was a well-defined, tractable problem with clear goals (eat) and fixed parameters (somewhere close). We were six bright, motivated and increasingly hungry people. But that's the problem with self-directed teams. In theory, they should self-organise, efficiently allocate resources and reach consensus, driving together to a common goal. In practice, they just stand around looking lost.
Leaderful teams are as bad as leaderless ones. If we'd had different, strong opinions about where to eat, with nobody prepared to back down, we'd never have eaten, but we'd be angry about it too. An autocrat would just have bludgeoned everybody into following him to a place only he wanted to go to. Inspirational leaders are even worse - Ernest Shackleton would have inspired us on a doomed, ill-prepared and badly timed death march to Manchester, and then have claimed credit for getting us back alive, but still hungry.
What makes a good team? Or a bad team? What have the best and worst teams you've worked on looked like? Post your comments to this post.
I think it's a complex problem, but not everybody agrees. Watch the video of Eric Sink's BoS 2008 presentation, where he summarises all you need to know about people management on one slide, and compares product management to bringing up a child.
Over on the BoS social network, Andrew Butel asks a similar question. How do you scale up the productive chaos of start-ups, without turning your company into a soulless factory? Got an opinion? Post here.
Elian Chrebor asks whether to use resellers as a distribution channel. In my experience, it's never worked well, but maybe you've got a different story to tell. Post here.
Charles Mills summarises the implications of the recent Bilski patent case. Is this the high-tide mark for the sewage-ridden seas of crappy patents? Read Charles's opinion here.
Dan Nunan has agreed to host an online chat about product pricing at 5pm GMT (12 noon EST) on November 18th. Here's what Dan has to say about the topic:
When Neil asked me to host a chat on software pricing it made me smirk a little. An ancient legend has it that Neil once stated his SQL Compare product to be worth ‘no more than $50’.
There is plenty of advice online about techniques for setting prices – including a few good articles on the Joel on Software blog, but these tend to be focussed on the web based product business. So here are a couple of topics that we will be covering in this chat.
1) Product or Service? – or ‘why can’t I sell my product for more than $1,000’.
2) The wisdom of FREE! – does the freemium pricing model still make sense?
3) Tricks for charging a higher price in a downturn without offending your customers.
Sign up here.
Back in the real world, today is your last chance to sign up for tomorrow's London BoS dinner
There are other events in Mountain View, Cambridge (UK) and Sheffield too. Check them out here.
Interested in building long-term, sustainable businesses? Want this e-mail update weekly? Join the BoS social network.
I've just posted up Eric's talk at Business of Software 2008. I like how he summarises all you need to know about people management onto one slide:
http://network.businessofsoftware.org/video/eric-sink-on-product
There are still a couple more videos to come. Subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on twitter to keep up to date.
I was at the PDC last week. Maybe I was jet lagged, or maybe it's my slow and grumpy decline into cynicism, but I was underwhelmed. My reaction to Live Mesh, Azure and Windows 7 was "so what". I keep thinking back to 2004 when I saw Don Box's passionate and inspiring demo of Longhorn. Don talked about the three pillars of Longhorn: WinFS, a transactional, SQL Server based file system; Avalon, the new graphics framework and Indigo, the SOAP messaging substrate. Plus, much of the new operating system was going to written in .NET. When Longhorn finally shipped as Vista three years later, WinFS had vanished, Avalon had been emasculated, and the operating system wasn't written in .NET.
So when, or if, all the cool new stuff ships, and if Amazon or Google or Apple hasn't already sewn up that market, then sure I'll take an interest. But for now, bah humbug.
The big news of the week is, of course, Barack Obama's election. Foreigners shouldn't comment on US politics, so I'm going to restrict myself to saying this one thing. It's interesting that despite Obama's overwhelming victory (349 votes in the electoral college vs McCain's 162), McCain still garnered over 46% of Americans' votes. I tried to think of an analogy in the world of software where spending vast amounts of money to gain a tiny competitive advantage can result in such a massive outcome. I couldn't, but I'm sure you can. I'll give a small prize to the best, and one to the most tenuous, analogy that you can come up with, or link to. Post here.
Over on the BoS social network, Dharmesh Shah's video from Business of Software 2008 is up. If you've got a spare hour, it's well worth listening to an hour of Dharmesh's low-key, conversational and wide-ranging talk as he discloses everything he knows about startups.
The most popular forum is post is still "How do we make this succeed?" Lots of interesting comments there. Matt Richards asks how do you define success? Dan Nunan asks what's the point? Chris Herbert says I should ask what you all want to get out of it. So what do you want out of it? Post here.
Elsewhere on the forum, Chris Herbert asks if social media can be used as the foundations of a next generation company. Or has nothing changed, and are they just new tools that you can use to do old stuff better? Post your opinion here.
It's the London BoS dinner next week. Sign up to pizza, beer and conversation.
Interested in building long-term, sustainable businesses? Want this e-mail update weekly? Join the BoS social network.
At Business of Software 2008, Dharmesh Shah of the OnStartups blog (you should subscribe to his RSS feed) gave a great talk about start-ups. Dharmesh has a great presentation style - a perfect demonstration of how you don't need soaring rhetoric to create a powerful and engaging talk. When Dharmesh speaks, it's low-key and conversational, as if addressing a small group of friends. It almost seems ad-libbed, but that might just be because he forgot his slides.
Dharmesh has started a few start-ups. Originally, he bootstrapped, but for his most recent start-up he crossed to the dark side and got VC funding. Dharmesh also spent a year at MIT. All this means he has a uniquely informed perspective on the business of software. Well worth listening to.
Dharmesh talks about, among other things:
Interested in building long-term, sustainable and profitable
software businesses? Plus see videos of Jason Fried of 37signals and
Alexis Ohanian of reddit. Sign up to the Business of Software social network.
THE conference for people who care about growing long-term, profitable, software businesses. Follow us on Twitter. BoS Blog.
Joint CEO of Red Gate Software and Founder of the Business of Software conference. Follow him on Twitter. Neil's Blog.
Founder of the Business Leaders Network (TheBLN). Organizer of the Business of Software conference. Follow him on Twitter. Mark's Blog.
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October 24th-26th
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