Tech tips for online business success

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Here’s a confession.

I’ve failed at more businesses than I’ve succeeded at. Let me tell you why.

Like most programmers, I have an extreme urge to plan, to perfect, to abstract. And in a new business this is the most illogical thing you can do.

Because all plans made without the benefit of past experience are worthless. They fall apart on their first encounter with the unexpected.

When you’re ploughing new ground, the only sensible thing to do is to leap before you look.

If you know your market reads blogs, start a blog. The topic. The graphics. You can figure it all out later.

If you need to sell, just start calling people. You’ll look like an idiot at first. But who cares? You’ll get better.

The important thing to accept is that starting a business is messy. It’s confusing. It’s a rat-in-a-maze endeavor where the winner will always be the one who bumps into the most walls.

Technorati Tags: microISV, ISV, business of software, business planning

Designing a URL structure for a REST interface is harder than it might seem.

The complexity arises when you’re dealing with relationships.

/guest/123/note/  — is good for listing the notes for a specific guest.

but when you want to delete or update a note

/guest/123/note/456 — the guest id is redundant.

Also, creating a note

/guest/123/note  — means you’re splitting up the data, passing some of it through the URL and some through POST parameters.

SEOMoz just posted this hugely useful chart for keyword placement. You can read the whole article here.

This marketing stuff is stressful.

Blogging. Forum posting. Landing-page-writing. Relationship-cultivating.

The worst part about it is that no matter how much you do, there’s always MORE that you could do.  And for the past few weeks it’s been driving me crazy.

Well, today I decided to start a weekly marketing schedule. I’m hoping that by proceeding in a more systematic way that I’ll get better results with less anxiety.

I’m using Todoist, a wonderful little web app for making lists. Here’s a screen shot of  the setup:

If anyone’s interested, I’ll give an update when the new system’s been in place for a while.

The more I work with Django, the more I realize this:

If you’re building a news site or a CMS, everything’s easy as pie. But if you need to do something slightly different, you’re out of luck.

This morning I needed to do something very easy and reasonable. I needed to add a “total” field to the JSON that Django autogenerated for me. Sorry!

So now I get to write my own JSON serializer.

Do you ever get the feeling that something isn’t right?

That’s how I felt about the conventional wisdom that the right path for any small software company is to find and focus on a niche.

When I came across the article Niches Suck, I had a revelation.

Our obsession over niches is largely about fear, over feeling that we could never compete with other companies (look! they have employees & christmas bonuses!).

So we have to focus on some market so teensey tinsey that nobody else will notice. We imagine that being in such a small market means that marketing and sales will be automatic. After all - nobody else is clogging up the channels.

But in reality, small markets can be very hard to target. If you can’t deliver your message to large groups, then you have to take it to each customer. That drives UP the cost per sale.

The truth is,  The amplifying power of the net doesn’t reach all markets. Even today, the % of drywall contractors reading drywall blogs is minuscule.

So, PLEASE, don’t just choose a niche. Choose a market.

From Joel - who else?

But then, while you’re sitting on your googlechair in the googleplex sipping googleccinos and feeling smuggy smug smug smug, new versions of the browsers come out that support cached, compiled JavaScript. And suddenly NewSDK is really fast. And Paul Graham gives them another 6000 boxes of instant noodles to eat, so they stay in business another three years perfecting things.

There’s a good post about motivation over at the Business of Software. Then Nick Hebb wrote a great blog post with his list of motivational techniques.

Personally, I’ve found that the biggest motivation killer is uncertainty. Not knowing what to do.

And let’s face it. As business owners, we’re hit with about 500 things daily that we don’t know how to do.

I’ve come up with a question that I use to get me past the uncertainty:

“What’s the dumbest thing I can do to get started?”

Try it. It works.

Because 9 times out of 10, problems aren’t as hard as they seem.

9 times out of 10, the dumb solution works.

Lets face it - this blog’s mix of topics just wasn’t working.

Programming & product photography? Come on.

So we’re splitting things in two:

The blog you’re reading now will continue to be an unfiltered, off the cuff look at the building of StepLively.

For more articles about all aspects of running a successful ecommerce company, check out my *NEW* blog at LetsTalkEcommerce.com

You use your laptop at work, at home, at the coffee shop down the street. Having to constantly change your network connection settings can be…..frustrating.

Windows does have a built in “Alternate Configuration” manager. It lets you fall back to a secondary configuration, if the first doesn’t work. But it’s lacking in quite a few areas. It won’t remap network drives. It won’t change your printer settings.

Just today I stumbled across a solution:  the  JitBit NetProfile Switcher. It lets you hot-swap network, proxy, printer and firewall settings.  It’s not free but the price is  very reasonable ($30) . And here at the Lowdown, we support capitalism.