Business of Software Blog

Is your marketing "Hot or Not"?

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Today’s guest post is by Simon Galbraith. Simon is co-founder and joint CEO of Red Gate Software.

My company, Red Gate Software, has a photo board. When new people start work, someone from HR takes a photo using a digital camera. That photo is eventually replaced by one taken by a professional photographer. The photo board at any one time has mostly professionally taken photos with the recent amateur photos dotted amongst them. To my mind the difference is palpable – people look a LOT more attractive in the professionally taken photos.

This is important for marketing. Photos and images of people are used extensively in marketing and are especially significant in things like blogs, twitter and facebook. The fact that Seth Godin has chosen an iconic, professionally taken, image of himself to accompany his blog isn’t a coincidence.

As I was espousing my professional-photo-attractiveness-is-important-for-marketing theory to a couple of friends who were at my house for New Year, I realised that rather than just spouting off we should do an experiment.

First, some background: like most teenagers, when I was 16 years old I was self-conscious about my appearance. I was convinced that I was the least attractive boy in my class: gangly, crooked-nosed and spotty. One day in math class Mr Ranson conducted an exercise in a statistic module. He lined up all the boys in the class and asked the girls to rank our attractiveness. After standing awkwardly at the front, my worst fears were realised: I was indeed the most unattractive boy in the class. The case for the prosecution was overwhelming, with 12 out of 14 girls supporting the last-place ranking. Mr Ransom then burbled on about different methods of collating ranking but, unusually for me, I wasn’t taking it in. I was absorbing a more painful lesson about the shape of the probability density function of my getting a date within the next millennium.

You can imagine how this might have left me unwilling to subject myself to another public vote on my attractiveness. But the occasion, my theory and the wine led me to shed a few inhibitions and have a go with myself as the guinea pig.

So I’ve created two new characters for the dating website HotorNot, which asks visitors to rate the attractiveness of people on a scale of 1 to 10:

First, meet Jeremy Pemberton, a 36-year-old man based in Cambridge, England:

This is a cropping of a photograph taken by professional photographer Chris Bouchier.

Secondly, meet Aden Pemberton, a 36-year-old man based in Cambridge, England.

This photograph was taken by my wife using a cheap point-and-shoot digital camera after we’d drunk a couple of glasses of home-made mulled wine.

Both photos are of the same person taken in the same house within 4 weeks of each other. After looking at the photos we came up with the following guesses at how they would be rated on average by the visitors to HotorNot:

	Amateur photo	Professional photo
Dave	6.8	8.5
Pete	6	9
Pam*	3	5
Simon	5	7

*This is my wife of 10 years; she feels she can be brutally frank with me without hurting my feelings**

**Which just goes to show that deep knowledge of someone only goes so far.

By the way, both Pam and Pete work in marketing; multinationals like Philip Morris and Proctor and Gamble pay their organisations a king’s ransom for their insights.

I’m going tell you what happened and what my conclusions are in a second blog post. But for now, it would be fun if you could comment with your prediction of the scores. Don’t worry, my feelings can’t possibly be hurt anymore...I think.

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What makes a great sysadmin?

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If you're not a sysadmin then the odds are you deal with one. But makes a good sysadmin, and why are there so few great ones?

For me, an end user, what distinguishes a great sysadmin from a merely competent one is attitude. Technical skills are easy, problem solving ability is harder, but it's great attitude that's truly rare.

Read more on the sysadmin social network...

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Taking the road less travelled by

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Back at the beginning of 2003, Red Gate was doing well: our products were selling, we were profitable, and life was good. Our SQL Comparison tools - version 2 - were popular and, I thought, fully baked. There was very little more we could do with them. Sure, they were a bit slow, there were a few bugs, and we had some competitors snapping at our heels, but there was nothing dramatic that we could add to the products.

We needed a new product. Something that would take us to the next level.

So we had a brainstorming session. Simon and I got everybody together - there were around 20 of us at the time - in a room and we spent an hour writing ideas on post-it notes and sticking them to walls. All good, non-judgemental, brainstorming stuff. At the end of the hour we gathered up the notes, categorised them and got judgemental. Should we do a lint tool for SQL Server, or a test management tool, or something for Oracle or DB2? These were all possibilities, but none of them really inspired us. So we took the easy option and decided to rewrite our existing tools. We threw away all the VB6 code base and started from scratch in C#.

On paper, this was a really stupid thing to do. A classic, unforced error that's killed, or scarred, companies such as Borland, Netscape, Wordstar and Ashton-Tate. Microsoft even took a stab at bizarre self-harm with their initial attempt to write Longhorn (now Vista) from the ground up in .net.

It was one of the best decisions we've ever made.

With the version 2 tools we'd coded ourselves into a dead-end. To get dramatic results sometimes you need to take dramatic action. To get out of that dead end - to radically improve the products, our customers' lives and, ultimately, Red Gate's sales - we needed to do something beyond the incremental. And that dramatic action was to throw away several man-years of work and start afresh.

But that's hindsight speaking. In reality, we rewrote the tools because we lacked the imagination to do anything grander. It was a lucky mistake. If we'd been more adventurous or had had more vision - if we'd tried to break into new markets or create new tools - then Red Gate would probably have been doomed.

Here are a few things I learnt from this.

Firstly, it illustrates how companies abandon profitable markets too quickly. This is, according to some people, one of the classic reasons that companies stall.

Secondly, sometimes it's right to throw away a successful product and start again. Apple did this with Mac OS X, and Microsoft with Windows NT. It's hard, and you're going to irritate some of your customers, and there's a good chance you'll fail, but it can - occasionally - be the right thing to do. If you're down a blind alley, or if the platform you're targetting is changing, or if inaction (which is, don't forget, a decision as much as action is, just easier) is clearly going to lead to failure, then it's an option you should at least consider.

Thirdly, the important decisions aren't always the ones that seem important at the time. Looking back on this decision, it was one of the most important ones that we ever made. But it didn't seem that way back in 2003. There was no sense of urgency, no feeling that this was a decision that could make or break the company. But it was. Not in the dramatic sense of a cause with an immediate effect, but it set us down a path that branched slightly off the alternative and, over time, that route diverged to take us in the happier direction.

It's the third point that interests me right now. So, this week's question of the week is "In building your business, was it obvious when a decision you were making was crucial, or were the forks in the road only obvious in hindsight?" $20 of amazon vouchers will go to the best answer. Post on the Business of Software social network.

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BoS digest: there are no absolutes. Ever.

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Malcolm Gladwell is getting a bit of a kicking right now. It’s all my fault. Well, your fault too. All of us, in fact. We all love it when somebody takes the bitter complexity of the world, breaks it down, simplifies it, wraps it up in a tasty story and places it in front of us with a warm glass of milk for easy digestion. And then we love complaining when we consume too many stories and feel sick.

But I don’t think the problem is one of technique, or presentation. Instead, Gladwell – and many of the authors of well known business books – are fossicking for universal laws where there is really only grit. The truths they are looking for do not exist, or are too simple to be useful.

In the set of all successful companies, some have no assholes but some do. Some rely on shiny new strategies, and some just do the basics better than the competition. Some have humble, thoughtful leaders, while others, well, don’t.

It’s entirely possible for IBM to share some success factors with Microsoft, and Microsoft with Google, and Google with Apple, but for IBM to have nothing in common with Apple. There might be a family resemblance in the histories and behaviours of these companies that allows you to lump them together in the same category of ‘successful’, but not a common theme, much in the same way that the members of a family – sons, daughters, husband, wife, uncle and aunt – can visibly belong in the same group without sharing any single physical trait.

To give rules, you need to be narrow. Examine all companies in a particular sector, at a particular time, and facing particular threats, then you might, if you look closely enough, find a law. But the broader the domain you’re trying to create a rule for, the more banal your law becomes (sometimes people’s instincts are right, but sometimes they’re wrong, and it’s damn hard to tell when), and the more likely it is to be demonstrably wrong (we all need to be more like Enron).

My hunch is that business laws cannot be universal, correct and useful. I can’t prove it though.

The big news this week in the business of software is that the Business of Software 2009 web site is now live, and we’re taking bookings. Plus you can download a free eBook.

On the BoS social network, Greg Atkins asks how he can become a product manager, Matt Richards asks how to deal with domain name squatters, and Steve Schoon would like to know what percentage of sales revenue to budget to technical support. Answer these questions, and others, on the forum.

On Wednesday, Paul Kenny is hosting an online chat about software sales. Sales is a fence most ISVs stumble at, and Paul is an expert, so this chat is worth signing up to.

If you can get to London for February 17th and want to see Seth Godin then there’s a spare ticket up for a charity auction.

Hope to see you in San Francisco!

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Seth Godin and the gorillas

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The good news: Seth Godin - marketing guru, tribal leader and possibly the best speaker I've ever heard - is coming to London.

The bad news: all the tickets are sold out

The good news: I have a spare ticket

The best news: Mark of Evil Genius Media, the organizers, has given me permission to auction it off for charity. Thanks Mark!

So, if you can make it to London for the 17th February, want to spend 3 hours in Seth's company, and want to put in an offer, then send me a bid on Twitter (I'm @neildavidson) and tag it with #sethinlondon

Here are the rules:

• Bids close at 12 noon on Friday 13th February
• All bids must be to me via twitter, and tagged with #sethinlondon
• All proceeds will go Great Gorillas, a charity working to save the world's remaining gorillas from extinction
• Open to all, apart from Red Gate employees
• Your name will go on the ticket. You won't be able to sell it on / give it to anybody else

Bid away!

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Business of Software 2009 - registration open

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I was going to write a long blog post about how wonderful Business of Software 2009 is going to be, but then I realised that no matter what I wrote it wouldn't be as compelling as this video that Lerone did of BoS 2008. It's a couple of minutes long, and I think you'll enjoy it.

The past isn't always the most reliable guide to the future, but it's often damn good. If you want to find out more about this year's conference then go to www.businessofsoftware.org

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