1. QuickBooks
   Problem: I am terrible at accounting in general, and QuickBooks in particular
   Solution: Spend 10 hours taking free online classes, break this up into one half hour per day
2. Elevator Speeches
   Problem: Whenever I talk to someone about Stronico I start from scratch every time
   Solution: Create 10 second, 30 second, 5 minute, and 15 minute pitches.  Run these by interested parties and refine and rehearse
3. Uneven progress in the Stronico Venture
   Problem: The venture breaks down into long unfocused slogs of marketing and development
   Solution: Create master plan, with deadlines and goals
4. Fame and Goodwill
   Problem: Not enough people know about Stronico
   Solution: Continue prospecting, apply it to the intelligence gathering aspects of Stronico, and make contact with relevant bloggers, then refine the approach.
5. Metrics
   Problem: There are no good metrics for Stronico, either in profitability, marketing, sales, web hits, etc
   Solution: Create spreadsheet listing weekly goals for all of the above, have second row be the actual numbers.

photo credit: JoshuaDavisPhotography.COM

Here I go with my attempt.  I first list the “off the top of my head response” and then the edited response so I can show the evolution:

1. What problem are you solving?
   Original: The problem is a faulty memory for names, faces and connections.
   Edited: People can only remember a limited number of names, faces and connections.  As social networking expands and corporate life gets more erratic we encounter more and more people we will never see again, and could be useful to remember.  The downfall of a large social network is that the quality drops as the size increases.
2. What is your solution?
   Original: Showing the user how someone is connected to him or her.
   Edited: Stronico documents and show the history and context of  how one person is connected to another, as well as companies, events, and families.  This information is usually locked in some gated form in a corporate database – Stronico lets the user own all of his data.  The customer can use all of the social network and the quality of the social network will scale (Editing Note: Perhaps the slogan should be “Scaling the Social Network” or something like that)
3. Who is it right for?
   Original: Salesman, entrepreneurs, and nerds.
   Edited: Primarily it is for people who need occasional close relationships to a large and diverse group of people. At first blush, this means Salesman, entrepreneurs, and nerds.   To use the jargon approach, this is for people who need to utilize “weak ties”.
4. What will it do for those people?
   Original: They can keep track of their social network, they can also play matchmaker and favor-doer
   Edited: They can have a stronger social network.  Social networks build on themselves to some degree –  they can utilize their social network better than normal, which allows them to play matchmaker and favor-doer for everyone they know, making them someone people will go out of their way to meet
5. How does it work?
   Original: A web based system that shows you your social network, as well as how everyone is connected to you.
   Edited: Stronico shows you who and what you know in terms of a social network.
6. What are the reasons someone might NOT buy it?
   Original: Their occupations are not tied to their social network, their life is static
   Edited: Their occupations are not tied to their social network, their life is static, or they are literally anti-social.
7. Why should they trust you?
   Original: I wrote the program for myself, so it was designed to work for someone.
   Edited: They do not need to trust me, the utility of the application should speak for itself.  (This question does reveal a weakness of the marketing plan and product design.  The program grows progressively more useful as time goes by, but how to convince the potential customer of that beforehand?)

I’m ending the editing process now, as I’ve taken up twice the time allotted for this, but it was a useful exercise, and I intend to revisit the questions and make them more coherent over time.

photo credit: robynejay

I had the above thought yesterday as I looked for a missing payment in QuickBooks.  Today I listened to Andrew Warner interview Allen Branch of Less Accounting on Mixergy.  Coincidence?  Yes, but a happy coincidence.    Less Accounting seems to have just the features that I, small business owner, would use in an accounting program, and nothing else.  The price for what I need seems to be steep, (considering I’ve already bought QuickBooks, but that is a sunk cost) but I suppose if it freed up time and energy the program would pay for itself in short order.

Does anyone have any experience with Less Accounting?

photo credit: wsssst

1. Any sentence starting with “I need” – you want, “need” is an attempt to manipulate someone from a position of weakness, and that is how they will think of you in the future-weak.
2. “In the real world” – where else does anyone live?  By saying this you just make excuses for your own failures.
3. “In reality”, or it’s evil cousin “In actuality” – All you say about yourself is that the previous thing you said was not true, which means that you have no interest in describing matters well.
4. “I didn’t have time” – You chose to spend the time on something else, don’t apologize for putting something else first.
5. “But we know more about X than we ever have before” – Possibly true, and probably not meaningful.    Citing unspecified knowledge is a manipulative appeal to authority.  If you had a good reason, you would be sharing it.  If you are not sharing the reason, it is probably not good.

That is my preliminary list.  Can anyone thing of any other counter productive phrases?

photo credit: h.koppdelaney

General Improvements:

• No more smoking (though it did take two months to get my concentration back)
• 8 hours of sleep per night (up from 6)
• Minimal alcohol consumption (I never drank that much, but I now drink alcohol once a month or less.  I think I’m more sensitive to sugars than anything else)
• Six hours or more of intense aerobic exercise a week cycling, and 11 of mild exercise (walking the new dog).    I think I’m close to the optimal level of physical activity for maximum brain function.

Workplace Improvements

• I have  strong “Owl” Chronotype and I now work with that.  I wake up later and work later than previously.
• I discovered my peak creative production hours (defined loosely as the hours where my brain maximizes my working memory) and schedule my hardest work in those hours.  The hours are between 2:00 and 5:00 PM, just fyi.  I do the less creative work in the non-peak hours (such as accounting, tech support, email, etc)
• I use the Pomodoro Technique for everything these days.  I use this online timer.\
• The phone, email, Twitter, etc are turned off while I’m working, the door is closed and the dogs are outside.
• I describe everything I’m trying to do (via the Pomodoro Technique) in writing before I actually do the work.

So far the results impress me.  I work slightly less, but I produce more per hour and I feel less stress or anxiety than I did before I started.

What should I try next?  I still consume legendary amounts of caffeine, and my desk and office are far too messy, but what else besides that?

photo credit: jurvetson

1. Height: Tall / Medium / Short / Unknown
2. Build: Heavyset / Average / Lanky/ Unknown
3. Personality: Type A / Type B / Unknown
4. Brainpower: Dim/ Average /  Smart / Unknown
5. Organization: Unorganized/ Average /  Super-organized / Unknown
6. Effectiveness: Below Average / Average /  Above Average / Unknown
7. Talkativeness: Below Average / Average /  Above Average / Unknown
8. Discipline: Below Average / Average /  Above Average / Unknown
9. Personal Charm: Repellent / Average /  Charismatic/ Unknown
10. Power in Business Organization: Below Average / Average /  Above Average / Unknown
11. Power in Social Network: Below Average / Average /  Above Average / Unknown

Those were just off the top of my head.  What else would the perfect salesman remember about someone they just met?

photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography

When I hear an interview with someone who attended a “top-tier”, “elite”, or “Ivy League” university all the graduate ever seems to mention are the connections they obtained while attending the university.  Ivy League graduates also point out that there is no other place they could have made such connections.  The quality of the education goes unmentioned.  As I am creating a web startup based on connections, connection making institutions fascinate me, but I wonder about the educational value of these institutions.  The institutions select their graduates by exclusive criteria by an measure, but for fields that are not connection based (I am defining connection based fields as government, politics, American big business and the like) I can’t recall that many Ivy League graduates.

I’ve been trying to think of musicians, authors, comedians, software developers and bootstrapped entrepreneurs who attended elite American universities and I’m coming up with very few names.  Are these schools just self-selected connection factories?  Stressing connections over education may well be a more productive strategy for our networked society.  Do Ivy League universities spend much time on teaching the fundamentals of their degrees?  My brushes with Ivy League graduates in the business world (this is quite a small sample mind you) have generated the following observations:

• The Ivy Leaguer will always tell you where he or she attended college with no prompting.
• The Ivy Leaguer will always be young for the position he or she is in
• The Ivy Leaguer will not seem particularly competent at the position
• The Ivy Leaguer will name drop like crazy
• The Ivy Leaguer will mangle the concepts of “Tactics” and “Strategy” to avoid specifics of their ideas

Perhaps creative people don’t need college at all (my thought), or if they do, they don’t mention it anywhere near as much.  The status given to Ivy League institutions could just be a magnifier of that fact.

Just random thoughts on a Thursday morning.

photo credit: rawheadrex

Usually I just hang up on these people, but for fun I tried negotiating with them using the various Jim Camp “No” methods.  To my pleasure I was able to easily redirect questions and build need on my adversary’s part.    I was able to decrease the price (on average) 25% and got several freebies as well, if I ever decided to go through with any of the offers.

photo credit: Unfurled

• In the beginning: web creators used text and html, Advantage Developers
• 1997 – People discover html tables, allowing precise graphic placement.  Placement allowed graphic designers to go nuts with Photoshop – Advantage Designers
• 1998 – ASP, Perl and PHP come about, allowing developers to make content decisions – Advantage Developers
• 2000 – Flash gets easy enough to use – Advantage Designers
• 2005 – Browser standards and search engines become competant, which makes the actual code matter – Advantage Developers
• 2008 – Tools like TypePad, Wordpress, and JQuery automate Javascript, SEO and CSS standardization, which had been a huge part of what developers did on a day to day basis.  The automation allows emphasis to shift to the look and feel – Advantage Designers
• 2010 – Html 5 arrives (sort of), making the web much more of an application!  - Advantage Developers

I haven’t had much time to research Html 5, but I’m impressed so far.  It’s not a sea change from anything that exists now, but Html 5 is an impressive refinement of existing technology.

photo credit: B.K. Ragsdale

• Project managers insist on new “essential” features
• Assistants demand detailed technical explanations for the most mundane of matters.
• Urgent, surprise meetings will be held
• People you’ve never heard of start talking about “revisiting” and “Ten Thousand Foot Views“.
• The main project manager will put the project on hold “just for a little while” until “this is all sorted out”
• The main project manager will decide that every manager in the company must sign off on the project.

The cause of the above is a difference in anxiety between you and the client.  The web developer experiences the highest anxiety and least clarity at the beginning (least specific point in terms of development) of the project and the lowest anxiety and most clarity at the end of the project.

The client experiences the reverse.  The client experiences the highest clarity and the lowest anxiety at the beginning of the project when their assumptions about the problem clear, or at least the assumptions are the most recent and true.

Then months pass as developers work on the project and the underlying conditions and assumptions about both the problem and the solution become less relevant and true.   Eventually the client sees the specific solution to his (at this point) vague problem.  When the specific meets the vague anxiety occurs and everyone panics.   Since web projects are easy to delay the client will relieve anxiety with meetings and modifications.

My solution is to define a “Kill Shot”.  A Kill Shot is a specific, obvious to all, expensive to reverse) event in the project that the client will perform.  I’ve used server upgrades, domain name changes, and scheduled press releases as kill shots.  The specific event doesn’t matter – the important part is that the client is actively doing something specific and not just passively reviewing.   Kill shots keep the client focused throughout the project and keeps the anxiety level low.

FYI – I chose the term “Kill Shot” after watching a History Channel documentary on snipers.  For better or for worse, the job of the sniper has a definite, obvious point that cannot be reversed.

photo credit: ATKR