Tech tips for online business success

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Well, I’ve decided to take my own advice and give my business a ruthlessly critical look. In doing so I realized that:

There was no way in hell I was going to meet my Jan-Feb deadline.

You see, my product was originally going to be an all-in-one contact center for e-commerce. It was going to include live-chat, email, ticketing, web-forms, etc.

Instead of pushing back version 1 until all of those features are added, I’ve decided to break the application up, to focus on one part at a time.

So for now all my attention is going towards making a great live chat product, with a great API (thanks for the advice Ian).

And now that I’ve removed all of my mockups for those extra features, It’s amazing how the whole app has tightened up.

I just wanted to pass along a link to TJ Etherton’s iKollect Blog.

He’s been at it for a while and has some interesting articles. I try to keep up with all the mISV-ers, so I’m not sure why I didn’t find TJ sooner. You should go check it out!

If there’s one lesson that I’ve learned it’s this: business is a head game.

It’s not the work that gets you. In our line, there’s no such thing as hard work. The hours may be exhausting. The pace may be maddening. But the work is easy.

Take my granddad, by turns a sharecropper and mule skinner. Try to tell him that this business of programming, of writing, of marketing is hard. No. The work is easy.

But we do face a problem that he never did. For him a week’s labor produced a week’s results. A month spent clearing land left a month’s worth of land cleared.

But us? We can work day after day, until we’re exhausted, we can put everything we have into a project, and still have nothing to show for it.

Why is that so? Why are business and programming so nonlinear? Why are some people able to push straight to their goal, while others spin in circles, never gaining any ground?

I think it boils down to this – successful entrepreneurs & programmers are able to distinguish fantasy from reality with a better degree of accuracy than their less-successful colleagues.

If you’re a software entrepreneur, chances are you’re a smart, creative, driven person. You have to be! You have to be able to imagine a future that is better than today. Otherwise, why would you bother?

But this can also be your downfall.

Because as you’re imagining a better future, you start to slip. You start to let your desires color what you believe to be possible.

And so you wind up making a YouTube clone, certain that everyone will switch because you have feature X.

You spend 6 months in development, with no though towards marketing. Then you wonder why your product’s not selling.

You waste time struggling with imaginary problems, thinking it’s impossible to start because you don’t have an office, a staff, or a cool-enough web site. (Your only real problem is that you don’t have a customer)

Have you fallen into any of these traps? Of course not. But I know I have.

One of the hardest things in the world is to distinguish fantasy from reality. But it’s a skill that’s not optional.

My app is a bunch of CRUD.

In a typical web app, you  have a standard set of screens for create, edit, etc.

But my live chat / CRM app is essentially a thick client that runs inside of a web browser. It pulls everything from the back end using XHR.

So I was facing the problem of displaying the data vs. editing the data. Initially I’d planned doing a preview pane like the one below. If you wanted to edit the record, you’d open a dialog.

But this was just grating on me. It meant that:

• I’d have the same data in 2 places.
• There’d be an extra step involved in editing
• Switching contexts between the main screen and dialog would be mildly disorienting.
• I’d have to do more work. Make sure 2 panels were refreshed, etc.

Of course I knew that the simplest thing to do was to just display the data in a form. But that was out of the question.

This morning I sat down for my weekly technical review, and asked myself “why?”

The only reason I could think of was that….html forms are ugly.

But here’s the funny part. The styled forms in ext-js look great! I was discounting them based on my impression of forms from 1998. Pretty dumb, huh?

 Nothing wrong with that!

Technorati Tags: live chat, click to call, live sales, proactive sales, triggers, qualified leads, ext-js

Now that google reader has search, it’s almost perfect. But the one thing I wish it would do is let me post comments and manage my conversations. Sure, it may be *technically* impossible for google to get past the 1001 captchas. But come on! They’re not mere mortals, they’re google!

Just thought I’d share this note that I have pinned on the wall right above my monitor.

It works like this.

“Oh - adding group chat to my live chat CRM application will be cool.  I’ll just have to rewrite the……<looks at note>….well damn.”

Here’s a new microISV blog that looks interesting: My MicroISV Journey. It’s by Chris from the BOS forum, and is all about his new work schedule software company.

If you want to get more leads from your landing pages, John Miller has a great list of tips. (original article)

My favorite is #8:

8. Have Reasons to Give Valid Info

After conversion, don’t just hand the offer to the prospect – email it to them. This is a great trick to ensure that you get a valid email address. Also, be sure to place a link to your privacy statement near to where you ask for their info.

One of the first technology decisions I made for my live chat application was to code the front end entirely using Ext-JS. Unlike prototype, JSQuery, and the other JS libraries, Ext isn’t just a collection of helper functions. It’s an honest-to-god GUI framework. More like QT than Scriptaculous.

Well, version 2.0 has come out. And I’ve started porting my existing code. All I can say is I’m amazed.

I’d finally had enough of my office chair - “old ironsides”. It was one of those solid-steel monsters with 50 years under its belt and 100 more to go. But sitting & programming for 8 hours was rough - to say the least.

One of those Herman Miller jobs would have been great. But as a new business with no revenue, I thought the money might be better spent on things like…umm…getting revenue.

After sitting in every chair at Office Depot, I finally found one that was surprisingly good. It’s called the Patriot (which is cool, ’cause I love America). It has more adjustments than any other inexpensive chair I’ve ever seen. Look at all those levers!

It’s been a few days since I got it, and I’ve had a noticeable decrease in wrist and back pain.

The construction seems pretty sturdy. I’m thinking it will last a few years.

Technorati Tags: cheap office chair, programming office chair, programming chair, programmer chair, programmer office chair, office chair, ergonomic chair, cheap ergonomic chair