Scrappy Sales

I found myself reading a blog entry about survival. The guy was detailing his military training. They drove him out to the woods and told him to live off the land, then make it back to camp in 48 hours. It sounded like a believable story due to the details. The funny thing about this was the atrocious spelling and grammar of the piece.

This same author was trying to sell his ebooks. I almost went ahead and purchased one. The thing had a free preview, providing you with a PDF of 10% of the book. I downloaded the preview and printed it out to read. I love reading on paper. The first thing that surprised me was the harsh copyright notice. There were all kinds of restrictions on what you could not do with the book. Perhaps this was just for the preview.

I read through the preview. A lot of it was fluff. There were a few memorable quotes. But here in the funny thing. This prose was written in perfect English. There was not a spelling or grammatical error in all the pages. Then I figured it out. This book was not written by the scrappy blogger. He was just selling the thing. That was the end of the sale for me. I liked the gritty blogger. The misspellings and grammar errors actually made him seem more real. If he does publish something he actually wrote, I might buy a copy even if it is in electronic format.

Internet Leeches

I was at work and needed to speak with my mortgage company. Luckily I had my loan account number with me. However I did not have my mortgage company's phone number. That should be an easy problem to solve. I googled them.

The search results were interesting. The first page was a secure log in for the mortgage company. The second result turned out to be the link I needed to get the phone number. However another search result in the top 10 caught my eye. They were a company that was not my mortgage company. However the had a page that was obviously trying to profit off my mortgage company.

Here is the scam. Their first technique was to put some Google AdSense on their home page. That in and of itself is not evil. However their also tried to sell my the phone number for my mortgage company. Can you believe that? Their pitch was that they get a lot of calls from people looking for my mortgage company. And they had researched what the company phone number was. For just $9.95 they would share the number with me. What kind of low life business is this? It was almost embarrassing to read.

Too Many Hoops

I read an interesting blog post on language translation. The author had ads enabled on their page. I decided to click on one of them. First I surveyed all the ads. One in particular stood out. It was a free reading on the numerology of your name. Good stuff. I clicked through.

The landing page asked me to enter my name. That sounded appropriate. Then it wanted my email address. Normally I guard my email carefully. So I put in one of my alternate email addresses. Then it asked for the name on my birth certificate. That seemed strange. So I put in a fake name to test it out. I pressed the submit button. Then I was told to check my email.

I hurried over to my email. It took a while to get the expected email. The contents of the email were disappointing. It told me to click a link to confirm. Ok. I already gave you my name, the name on my birth certificate, my birth date, and my email address. And you are still asking me to fart around and click some links? I don't think so. Don't make it hard for me to become a consumer of your product. You are going to lose me all too soon.

Commercial Product Development

There are many pitfalls to commercial software development. But that's not a reason to go for it anyway. I have read a number of tips from people who created failures in the commercial software world. I am one of them. Let's see what they have to say.

Launch early. Be warned that some software has a long sales cycle. Make sure your product has killer features that the competition does not have. Make sure you need the product yourself. Temper that with the fact that just because you need something, everyone else will not necessarily need it too.

Make sure you learn during the development process. That way even if you fail, you come out smarter and it is not a total waste. Conduct your marketing research up front before you sink unrecoverable costs in development. Be careful of sharing equity with other partners who may not put in as much into the start up. Also beware of potentially high software support costs.

You should try to save up money then go full time into product development. Make sure your market is not too small. A niche is ok, but too small of a niche is death. Talk with actual people during your research. Get feedback from your users early on. Make sure you have enough domain knowledge for the market you are selling to. Consider integration with other software to expand usefulness of your product. Good luck to all.

Marketing to Big Business

There are many pros and cons to selling your software to big business. One benefit is that your price can be higher. The volume might also be higher, making the final price even better. However this comes with some trouble as well.

Companies have lawyers. Legal needs to sign off before some big purchases can be made. You will need a software license agreement. Purchase one of these for a few grand. Best to do it upfront.

Give quotes that last for 60 days. Companies will cut you a purchase order and expect you to ship the software. The game is not over yet. You still need to collect. Luckily the purchase order is legally binding. It will just take a while for you to get your money.

Get to know the payment procedure for each of your big company customers. It will make your payments come quicker. Know this. Companies don't like to pay via PayPal. Make it easy for them to pay you by whatever means necessary, except for Monopoly money.

Snapfish Sucks

Some time ago I signed up for an account with Snapfish. They are a web site which does photo prints for you. I think somebody referred me there and I got free prints and shipping. I tried the thing out and it actually worked.

Later I returned to the site to do some more free prints. Turns out my free prints disappeared. That sucked. But I needed some prints so I paid for them anyway. It was still convenient. However I was a bit disappointed that my free prints went away without warning.

It has been some time since I used the service. I played some online game and got to choose a reward. One of the prizes was free prints from Snapfish. Great. I already have an account with them. I spend a bunch of time uploading my prints to them. I go to check out and use my free prints. Bam. My code does not work. All I get is an "oops" error message. WTF? The web site continues to find new ways of disappointing me.

Top Students

What predicts whether somebody will become a top student or not? You might think it is how smart they are. But researchers from the University of Pennsylvania discovered otherwise. It is not a person's IQ that accurately predicts how well a student they will become. It is their self discipline.

That sounds like a nice discovery. You want to believe that with a lot of hard work, anybody can rise to the top. It is not fair that some people are smarter than others. This is not something you can control. But you can have grit and will yourself into a better student.

Here is what strong self discipline will improve: standard test scores, quality of schools accepted into, number of school absences, amount of time spent on homework, and amount of time spent watching TV. Not only will self discipline improve these things, it will itself gauge how well you will improve in each of these areas.

Not many of the tired old excuses apply to success in school. Don't blame large class sizes. Don't blame books that are not interesting. And don't blame the teacher. You have the ability to improve your self discipline with some hard work. It will pay off in the end. Academic research backs this up.