Apologies, goal setting, and triathlons

I feel the need to apologize to both of my faithful readers for the lack of “startup-related” posts the last month or so.  My original intent when I signed up to be a book review blogger was to write some insightful posts on how the book related to entrepreneurship and fit with my journey, but blogging is hard work!

Anyway, I wanted to write a brief post to break up the mass of book reviews that have and will continue to deface the front page of this blog…

My triathlon

I haven’t blogged about it here, but over the past few months I’ve been training for a triathlon.  I actually completed the race last weekend (my first ever race of any sort), and the whole journey taught me quite a bit about goal setting.

First, I was amazed at how much more motivation and focus I gained from actually signing up for the race.  Never mind the fact that I had been training for three months — once I mailed in my registration form, suddenly everything I did was going to impact my performance on race day.

I thought about my nutrition, my training, my downtime, my sleep in a whole new way.  All of my energy could be focused on one goal, and it was powerful.

It also helped to have a specific day that I was training toward and approaching.  It gave all of my workouts much more meaning, knowing that I was doing something to improve my time.

I’ve thought about applying this to my next development sprint with ClimbPoint, though at the moment I’m lacking motivation.  I guess I need an inciting incident (the equivalent of a race registration form) to get me started, to move me to identify and start pursuing my next goal.

Which reminds me again how great A Million Miles in a Thousand Years is.  Go buy it and read it if you haven’t yet.  It’s a quick read.

Software that works for everyone, even non-admins

So forgive me if I wax technical here for just a sec…

I’ve seen my good friend Brandon suffer headaches from running software as a limited user in Windows (e.g. not as a machine administrator).  Sometimes the software just wouldn’t install or run, but often it was crippled in some strange way.

My thought was that any developer worth their salt would have tested for this and supported non-admin users, and would allow installing the program somewhere other than the C drive (I am looking at you Google Chrome).

Sadly, I am part of the problem…but no more!  The latest release of ClimbPoint fixes the LUA bug, which incidentally is the only complaint that I’ve had from people using the program.  With that problem solved, I decided to make ClimbPoint available for download to anyone.  The latest version, despite it’s codename (Dicey at Best) is pretty solid if I do say so myself.

This post on StackOverflow motivated me to create a fix, and this guide to fixing LUA bugs was helpful in carrying it out.

Wisdom applied to starting up

As I write this, I am right in the middle — man am I ever in the middle — of a huge push to release the next version of ClimbPoint, which will blow people away and remove all sorts of reasons people have had not to shell out the cash for the product (pie in the sky rah rah pitch courtesy of the FogBugz 7 vision statement).

Last month I decided that I would apply a little wisdom in releasing the new version (Dicey at Best) by August 15.  I’ve been reading Proverbs lately, and that’s one source of my idea for a development sprint (also inspired by fellow entrepreneur Tim Haughton).

Proverbs 14:23 – All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty.

I’ve also been inspired by the ideas of Earl Nightengale in Lead the Field, where he talks about reward being in proportion to a person’s service to others.  So in laying out the features I’d include in the next version I’ve picked the ones that I think will serve the greatest number of potential customers (kind of a no-brainer, huh?).

Anyway, in completing my development sprint I’m focusing on just two keys for success:

Work every day

Every day I’m aiming for only 30 minutes of focused work.  On most days I’ll end up working for a few hours, but none of that can happen without those first 30 minutes.  I find 30 minutes manageable, especially on those days when I feel swamped with other responsibilities.  I picked up this idea from Neil Fiore’s excellent book The Now  Habit.

Focus on starting

So my one goal each day is to start at least once.  I find that if I can keep my momentum moving forward, I’ll tend to use my mental free time to think about problems that are holding me up.  I also try to “leave a little in the tank” each day by stopping before I feel I’m stuck and by making a note of the very next thing I need to do when I come back to the project.  This tactic has really helped draw me toward work rather than repel me from it, so thanks to Twyla Tharp and The Creative Habit for that one.

Those are the two main keys, but there are many other ideas that I’ve gleaned from the books mentioned above.  I highly recommend all of them, especially Lead the Field.

Getting my MBA

Earlier this summer I had the good fortune of speaking with someone about entrepreneurship who recommended The Personal MBA, which is a reading list of 77 top-notch business books.

Since learning more about business during graduate school I’ve thought a bit about the possibility of pursuing an MBA — but the reality is, I’ve had all the school I can handle for awhile.  So a Personal MBA seems like a great option at this point.

A couple weeks ago I put my Amazon Prime trial to good use and ordered the four books below with some seed funding from my grandmother . I may order a few more before the end of the year.

• 10 Days to Faster Reading by Abby Marks-Beale
• StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath
• The Art of Exceptional Living by Jim Rohn
• The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes

So far I’m about halfway through The Ultimate Sales Machine, and I recently finished 10 Days to Faster Reading.

I was somewhat skeptical about a book on reading faster, but I can’t argue with the numbers: on Day 1 I was reading 400 words per minute with at least 90% comprehension, and on Day 10 I was at 600 words per minute and 90% comprehension.  Along the way I picked up some useful tips both on the mechanics and proper mindset of reading efficiently.

Of the set of books above, three of them are in the Quick Start category on the PMBA website.  After I finish those I’ll likely move on to a few books from the Productivity & Effectiveness section, plus one on communication:

• The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
• The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
• The Unwritten Laws of Business by W. J. King
• Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson

Finding decent icons for Windows apps

For the last few weeks I’ve been hard at work on a new version of ClimbPoint, and one of the features I was excited about adding was a nice toolbar to replace those tiny menus. Since I’m bootstrapping (and still looking forward to that first sale) I didn’t want to spend a whole lot of money on nice icons — in fact I was keen on finding something free.

There are a quite a few nice icon sets out there which are freely available, but the catch is finding ones that are free for commercial use. Most of the sets I found first, including this set for vista, were desktop icons for personal use. After a bit of searching I stumbled across the Sigma and Sophis sets at iconshock, which were reasonably priced at $130 for the general set.

While I was attempting to decide between the two sets (and justify the purchase) I happened upon a set from glyFX that was free for commercial use. Most of the other free icon sets that I found in my search were lacking at least a few basic buttons, but the Vista Complete Edition seemed to have everything I needed.

A few of the 30 icons in the glyFX free set

I do intend to purchase some icons down the road, but this find helps get me off the ground. Feel free to leave links to other icon sets in the comments, or check them out in action over on the ClimbPoint blog.

SEO for beginners

Let me begin this post by stating that I don’t, by any stretch of the imagination, consider myself an authority on search engine optimization (SEO). I do, however, feel somewhat qualified to write this post because 1. I am a beginner and 2. my site ClimbPoint is second on Google for a couple key searches.

Those who are well versed in SEO probably do not measure success only by their ranking on Google, but I do Anyway, here are a few things that I think have helped me get on Google’s front page:

Write a blog
I know, I know, blogging consistently can sometimes seem like work — but it can also be fun and can serve a couple purposes. First, it can get your site associated with keywords in your industry (assuming that you’re blogging about industry-related topics, which I recommend). Second, Google seems to love websites that are updated frequently, thus it loves blogs (especially WordPress, it seems). Finally blogging can connect you with others who share your interests, and you never know where those connections could lead.

Be smart with your wording
This goes along with the first point, but also applies to your commercial website (assuming that your blog and website are separate). There are a number of articles on seo and keywords, but here is an inadequate summary: titles are important, use headings and links, and format as appropriate. If you’re blogging you can also tag and categorize your posts. This helps your ratings because WordPress tends to create index pages for popular tags, and your posts can show up on these pages, driving traffic to your site.

Show some link love
There are blogs out there that obviously only exist to post links on some topic like insurance or drugs to cure impotence. This is not the kind of link love I’m talking about here. By linking to relevant sites and articles you’ll both increase your site’s authority in Google’s eyes, increase the chances of someone linking to you, and possibly get a few visitors if the sites you link to show pingbacks.

Give it some time
Lastly, even though Google will soon be ruling the world it can still take a few weeks or even a couple months for them to update their indexes of the entire interweb. This means that those blog entries with carefully chosen keywords and well titled pages will take some time to make it into Google’s index. In the meantime, just keep writing — and take note of the sites that are listed on the front page for the search terms you’re interested in.

Again, I’m by no means an authority, but I felt I could offer some advice because of my success to date. It’s probably the case that the keywords that I was interested in weren’t that popular (only 237,000 pages on climbing wall software as of this writing). Hopefully though this post has given you a few ideas. Feel free to post other links and resources in the comments!

Market-driven product development

Over the past six weeks I’ve done more to connect with potential customers and understand the market needs than ever, and it’s beginning to pay dividends in my motivation for product development.

My re-entry into the world of climbing wall management began last month with a trip to Boulder, Colorado for the second annual Climbing Wall Summit. It was there that I began to recognize the growing desire for climbing gym management software. As one conference participant put it, “there is a national unspoken need in our industry for someone to do this [software] right.”

As part of my effort to understand that need I’ve begun following a few climbing blogs, news sites, and forums (see the climbing news in the sidebar). Even the Climbing Wall Association recently opened up an online forum, which I’m hoping will be a valuable resource in connecting with others in the climbing community. The CWA is also planning to form a committee on the development of climbing wall management software, and I’ve thrown my name in the hat as a potential member of that committee.

In addition to establishing connections with potential customers and gaining exposure to real market needs, these sorts of interactions have helped make what I’m doing relevant. As a software developer it can be easy to become isolated from the users of the software and the market it serves. When that happens for me I tend to lose a little motivation, so I’m beginning to see the need for balance between product development and connecting with the market.

As a result of this renewed connection with the industry I’ve begun working on the next version of ClimbPoint, which I’ll document over on the ClimbPoint blog. Included in version 0.7 are a few features requested by my beta testers, and down the road I plan to take action on some suggestions I received while at the Summit.

Even with the launch of ClimbPoint I’m still learning a lot about starting up. I’ll continue to blog here about entrepreneurship and starting an ISV, but product-related news and information will be posted on the ClimbPoint blog.

The ups and downs of starting up

As I reflect on my journey toward product launch it seems to be (among other things) one big emotional roller coaster. I came to this realization a few months ago when I was in a pit of despair with regards to the probability of successfully launching ClimbPoint. Despite the bleak outlook I knew that things would soon enough be on the up and up, so I pressed on.

The diagram below is my take on what I’ve experienced to this point (I’m at the end of the Demonstrating phase now) and what I expect will follow in the months ahead. I think I’ve already begun to accept the emotional ups and downs that go with starting a new venture, but we’ll see what happens. As a side note, this experience has been not unlike the ups and downs of grad school

 


 

The five phases at the top of the diagram correlate to the main phases of Vijay Jolly’s nine phase commercialization process, which I’ve mentioned before. I’m curious as to whether other entrepreneurs have experienced similar highs and lows when starting a new venture. Anyone relate?

Regardless of my current feelings on the potential for success, the stance I’ve taken to this point has been one of perseverance with the intention of taking this project as far as it goes. As I’ve mentioned before, I think getting there is half the fun.

Entrepreneurship and Failure

The prospect of starting a company or developing a product, for me, has led to a bit of soul searching. Why am I really doing this? Do I have what it takes to create something that people will actually want to pay money for? Is there a real need for my product?

I don’t have answers to either of the first two questions, but an article in a recent issue of Inc. has me thinking. The article, Mapping the Entrepreneurial Psyche, states simply that the reason people start companies is to prove themselves superior to others. Now, I don’t necessarily feel the need to prove myself — but I do enjoy a challenge. And I have experienced, as quoted from the article, “the joy of creating, of getting things done, or simply of exercising one’s energy and ingenuity.”

For me the article was an interesting introduction to Joseph Schumpeter, and I was particularly struck by his ideas on failure:

“Schumpeter held the view that failure was a phase through which nearly all people must pass on the way to success. The ability to take a punch, and then get up off the canvas to win the fight was, he thought, one of the defining characteristics of entrepreneurs”

I experienced a sort of failure a few months ago in regards to ClimbPoint wall management software. As I alluded to in the recap of my trip to Boulder for the CWA Summit, I had the opportunity to send a demo version of my software to a climbing wall manufacturer after the conference. They were interested in reviewing the software so that they could, at some point, begin offering the software to new climbing wall customers.

I was excited to have someone else review my software, so we signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement (thanks Nolo) and I sent them a copy. The feedback that I received was mixed. The software seemed too simple, and it was lacking in the area of reporting features. The idea was good, they said, but it needed some refinement.

At first this news was devastating for me. Someone (gasp) didn’t like what I was doing! But that’s not entirely true — they said it was a great idea (why else would they have wanted to try it out), and I got some really good feedback out of the deal.

I’m keeping this experience in mind as I begin to ask others to be a part of the ClimbPoint Beta testing program…I’m keeping things hush hush right now (partially because I don’t have time to post it all) but hope to let you in on my master plan very soon. Stay tuned…