Entrepreneurial Seduction

He Was Too Young To Die

2011-10-06T08:07:00.001-05:00

It was 1967 and I was a five year old boy in a hospital room watching my family break down after hearing the news that my brother was dead. This reality was too hard for me to face at such a young age, so I chose to believe that my brother really wasn't dead. In my favorite cartoon at the time, Racer X was Speed Racer's brother, Rex, who was thought to be dead. I imagined Bobby also was just hidden from me.

By the age of twelve, I finally had a good cry about my loss when it struck me that 19 was too young of an age to die. My big brother had so much more to give and his passing left a huge void in my life. I was inspired to be a better son and try to fill the void for my parents.

In December of 1980, I was stunned by the news that John Lennon had been shot. I wanted to be a rock star, but my weak guitar skills and weaker singing voice forced me to choose a different path. I had just made the decision to go to college after a semester break. Graduating high school, the last thing I wanted was four years of college followed by a boring 9-to-5 job. My heroes were musicians and I wanted to inspire people like they had inspired me. The death of Lennon ripped a huge void in my life. He was who I wanted to be—unconventional, a person who changed the world. He was back in the studio recording music and had so much more to give us. John was too young to die. I was inspired to find a way to change the world in my own way even if it wasn't on a stage.

In March of 1984, my father died. I was 21, newly married, and ready to show my personal hero what I could do when he left me. This void was cavernous. He was 60 years old and too young to die. My dad's scope of influence was much smaller than Lennon's, but to me he was just as inspiring. He challenged me to be smarter, stronger, and to take risks in life. I lived to make him proud of me.

His funeral was followed by a proper Irish wake, which meant dozens of family and friends raising a glass to Fran Hoctor and telling stories of his life—I was too angry to join in much of it. Later that day, I got a call that my Macintosh had arrived and I should come pick it up. It felt wrong to be excited, but I couldn't help it. I had spent the last three months waiting for this and had become fascinated by the story of Steve Jobs and his pirate group at Apple who created this computer.

When Jobs stepped down from his CEO role, I knew he didn't have too much longer to live, but I thought we would get a year or two more from him. When I heard the news of his death yesterday, a new void ripped open for me. Steve had inspired me to create better software, to be a better leader, to inspire a team to create something that could change the world. He made me want to make a positive dent in the universe. And like the others, he had more to give us and was too young to die.

Steve was not a perfect man, but then neither were my other heroes. Inspiration doesn't come from perfection. Instead, it comes from the impact that someone makes in your life. Each of these men that died impacted my life deep enough to change my direction. They all inspired me and for that I owe each of them. My repayment will continue to be how I live my life.

Thanks to my brother and my dad, I have a deep love of family, the understanding that moments spent together are precious, and to not assume I will have time later to apologize. Thanks to John, I have a deep love of music and an understanding of how words and notes can move people to action. Thanks to Steve, I have a software company to run today. I will do what I can to honor his vision and create something great—maybe something that can change the world.

Peace.

Thank You Steve!

2011-08-24T18:49:00.001-05:00

In the early 80's I learned to write computer software. I really enjoyed writing software. Then in January of 1984, I touched a mouse on a Macintosh and my world changed. I fell in love with the idea of creating amazing software—code that could change the world.

I ordered my Mac 128K as soon as I could qualify for an Apple credit card.

What Steve Jobs has now—and has always had—is the ability to see potential where so many of us cannot. He wasn't afraid to fly in the face of convention and build something that no one asked for. There was no market demand for an appliance computer. The original Mac was as disruptive as the iPad is today, only the scope of technology was much smaller.

I've probably read too much about Steve Jobs and spent too much time thinking about what he did right and wrong—especially in the early days of Apple—but his tenures as CEO of Apple, NeXT and Pixar have forever changed my world. I have learned from his flaws as well as his successes.

Would I have fallen in love with designing software if I spent years writing command line driven apps? What would the graphical revolution have looked if it was built by people who weren't visionaries? How many years later would Apple-driven leaps in technology have taken?

I honestly don't want to know.

Thank you Steve being brave enough to say no to "good enough" and the vision to show us what's possible. Thank you for making computers fun and exciting. Thank you for putting a huge dent in my universe. May you win the battle over your illness and live to see many generations of breath-taking products built on your vision.

Peace.

A Familiar Place

2011-08-24T14:15:00.001-05:00

I have been here before. This place is familiar to me. Here is where the journey becomes steep, rocky and overgrown with vegetation. To my right is a well-worn path leading gently downhill. The smooth and packed soil looks easy on my legs, but I also know the destination. It's a place of sorrow and regret that saps energy from my soul.

After a moment of weakness, my gaze returns forward as I square my shoulders and seek a foothold. The first few steps cause the most strain, but this decision eases the pain and with every step my energy and confidence grows.

I have been here before and understand its temptations. It lies and deceives by offering a "better" choice but, at least this day, I will not fall for its trickery.

I have been here before and will be here again.

Peace.

Delayed

2011-07-28T18:07:00.001-05:00

I love the Black Hockey Jesus blog post ‘He’s Not My Character to Write Anymore’ not just because it's a touching tribute to his 13-year old son, but because he writes about the struggle of writing. I have too many posts that rot and die in my MarsEdit Drafts folder because I don't like them enough to publish them or I let writer's block prevent me from spending time on a post until it stops being current. I delay them and they die.

The months of silence on this blog also fills me with guilt. I started Entrepreneurial Seduction to help others build their businesses. I wanted it to be more interactive—more raw. It was supposed to a stream of consciousness, as if someone were reading a diary. Unfortunately, I'm a bit of a perfectionist and a harsh self-critic so I hold back my writing looking for the right words or that amazing sentence that everyone will quote. It's a damn shame, too, because so much has happened in the last six months that would benefit fellow entrepreneurs. Delays in writing are a sure sign of rigor mortis settling in.

Typically, the dead zones in this blog align with periods of heavy software development. Let's blame this latest on MoneyWell 2.0, which has been chatted up by me for so long that it was compared to vaporware products TextMate 2 and Duke Nukem Forever. I even allowed the code name MoneyNukem to be bantered about until Duke Nukem Forever actually shipped—and sucked. Then I wanted nothing to do with it.

So what happened to delay MoneyWell 2.0 for so long? To be honest, the 2.0 release shipped two-and-a half years ago—it was just called MoneyWell 1.4 at the time. And then I shipped 3.0 fourteen months later, but called it 1.5. What we are working on now could legitimately be called MoneyWell 4.0. The problem is that I promised too much in 1.0 and felt guilty charging for an update. I delayed incrementing the major version number, which I consider to be a major business mistake.

No matter what we call it, the new version of MoneyWell is late. Why? Because we started it late. The finish wasn't delayed, the start was. Coding on 2.0 didn't begin until October 2010 due to delays caused by our syncing issues and MoneyWell for iPhone, and our current team wasn't coding 100 percent on 2.0 until December. The complete design-development-ship cycle should stay under one year—not too bad for what has amounted to a massive rewrite of my original code. I'm not trying to minimize or excuse the fact that MoneyWell 2.0 has taken too long to deliver. I allowed too many other activities get in the way of building 2.0, which resulted in the release being delayed.

So I need to thank John Gruber and his Daring Fireball post that led me to read the Black Hockey Jesus post, which allowed me to write another blog entry on my own site without a delay. Once MoneyWell 2.0 ships—and it will ship—I'll try to avoid any delays in writing a postmortem blog entry on the project cycle. I think there are lessons to be learned from my mistakes and that is why I started this blog.

Peace.

Making Money Is Not My Focus

2011-02-15T17:06:00.001-06:00

I was incredibly inspired by reading Pixar's Brad Bird on Fostering Innovation (tip of the hat to Wil Shipley). There's so much packed into these nine simple rules, but the final one really struck a chord with me: Making Money Can't Be Your Focus.

I truly believe that rule and try to live by it every day. My little software company was created to make a significant difference in people's lives. For the past 30 years, I have made a decent living writing software, but this time around I wanted to make an impact as well. I do get frustrated when sales are low or when we haven't finished the new major release that will bring in higher revenues, but not because I'm dying to buy a yacht and retire: I want, no, I need to fund more cool software development. It's part of my DNA now.

What we create at No Thirst Software should be seen by our customers as amazing software and no matter how good it is today, I don't feel it's anywhere near amazing. There is so much we can do and so much potential to give people tools that can change their financial future that I physically ache for progress some days. This is why I've reinvested so much of our profits to grow this company even though the risk factor is high. I know that by myself I will never get everything accomplished that I have planned.

We have three major software releases scheduled for 2011 and years of ideas beyond those swimming around in my head. The day I start doing this for the money is the day I need to hand the company over to someone who still has passion for the product. Luckily, I can't imagine that day right now.

Peace.

Mac App Store - Month One

2011-01-28T15:46:00.001-06:00

I've waited to blog about the Mac App Store because I didn't want to jump to conclusions based on just a few days of sales. We're now at the end of the first fiscal month for Apple's newest software store and I'm ready to reveal my findings. Let's start with a graph, because everyone likes a good graphic.

Above is a chart of unit sales for MoneyWell from AppFigures.com, a resource that I highly recommend for tracking your sales. The bar chart shows unit sales and the line charts show ranking. The labels aren't perfect, so I'll explain them. The red line is Top Paid Overall (units), the green line is Top Grossing Overall (profit), the violet and blue lines are Top Paid and Top Grossing in the Finance category, respectively.

For the tl;dr crowd, my overall opinion of the Mac App Store is positive. I think it's already a great resource for increased sales and it will only become better as more Mac users migrate to 10.6.6 and are trained to use it exclusively when OS X Lion ships.

MAS or No MAS

My biggest concern selling my apps on the Mac App Store had to do with cash flow. I recently expanded my development team and we are shoulder deep in MoneyWell 2.0 development, so overhead is up. With a new major release comes a need for newer, prettier pixels, so I've also had to set aside cash to pay a graphic artist. I couldn't afford to have my normal direct sales bank deposits, which occur four times a month, to turn into a 60-day wait for income. I won't receive a dime from Apple on the sales you see in the above chart until the end of February. That's just way too long to go without any revenue when employees and contractors haven't signed up for the same two-month delay.

Besides losing cash flow, I also wanted to be able to compare direct and app store sales. Running both throughout the month of January was very revealing. My direct sales are right on target with my projections for January based on MoneyWell sales in the previous two years. Unit sales from the Apple store are three to four times our direct sales. The two stores seem to be capturing customers independent of each other. Selling my apps through the Mac App Store has almost tripled my overall revenue. I'm not complaining at all.

What's more remarkable is that these sales are all without any significant promotion. I sent one mass mailing to my customer base announcing that we were in the Mac App Store and explained how upgrades and migrations would work, but I did no outside sales promotions. MoneyWell was picked as a Staff Favorite, which lasted for about a week, but the spikes in sales towards the middle and end of the month were strictly from more people finding us in the store.

The biggest boost appears to have come from reviews. MoneyWell received half a dozen 4- and 5-star reviews right before the first spike and doubled those reviews by the second spike. I have not adjusted the price at all; it still sells for $49.99 on and off the Mac App Store. There was a Debt Quencher sale, but that doesn't appear to have a direction relation to the MoneyWell spikes.

It's pretty easy to spot when I offered a limited $4.99 sale price of Debt Quencher on the chart above. What's harder to spot is the next transition from $14.99 back to $4.99. The last three bars show the new price point, which will probably become the new retail price. You can see that there is growth, but without a promotion that has a deadline for that discount, there was no spike. Here's a chart showing Debt Quencher profit.

I'm currently earning less money selling Debt Quencher at the discounted price but I'm confident that sales will continue to rise at this lower price point. Even with the additional sales from the Mac App Store, this will probably never be a product that will cover the company overhead. Later this year, we plan to give Debt Quencher a revised UI and additional features to see if we can push this lower-priced product higher on the Top Paid chart. The goal is to use this impulse purchase product to lead people to our more profitable MoneyWell software.

Topping the Charts

What's most exciting to me is MoneyWell's rank in the overall top grossing list. We've been staying in the top 40 apps and have hit 20 as our peak. This means we get just a bit more visibility when people are looking around the store—the top 30 or 40 show without even scrolling down the page. I think we have an advantage over apps like games because the Finance category fits all its apps on a single page without needing further breakdown or navigation.

The magic number for visibility on the Top Charts page seems to be twelve, which is the number of apps that show before you have to click See All > and navigate deeper. My guess is that those apps are seeing higher sales by a factor of ten—or the square of that if Pixelmator is representative of the high-end revenue. Let's just say that my goal with our 2.0 release is to break into the dirty dozen.

Going Forward

My strategy is to continue to sell direct as well as on the Mac App Store. I see no reason to give up an extra 25% of my profit just to steer customers to the Apple solution. My direct sales through my FastSpring store are highly automated and don't require my intervention to process them. I can also run promotions and bundles on my site that can't be done through the Mac App Store. If my customers prefer to get their software updates from Apple, I certainly won't discourage them from using the other store.

It's really the best of both worlds: My existing sales are staying at projected levels and Mac App Store sales are even higher with an upward trend. If at some point my direct sales drop to near zero levels because everyone prefers shopping in Apple's house, I'll think about turning off my back end. Until then, I'll offer the same upgrades for my products no matter where my customers shop.

Peace.

Building a Bigger Indie

2010-11-17T16:43:00.001-06:00

No Thirst Software LLC has hired its third full-time employee: As of November 22, 2010, Danny Greg joins Michael Fey on my development team. Danny is best know for his work at Realmac Software creating Little Snapper. Here at No Thirst, Danny will be joining us in developing MoneyWell 2.0, which will keep us all very busy for the next few months. After that, our team will shift to development of our MoneyWell iPad release. Now you know one reason I've added two developers this year.

It doesn't matter what kind of company you are running, it's always hard to manage growth. The decision to bring on staff is never trivial and should always be done carefully. My previous company, a dot.com in the late 90's, grew quickly to over ten employees and my company before that expanded to a staff of over 30 people. The latter is still around and doing well and the former popped along with the bubble in 2000. I learned a lot from both of these experiences.

The most important lesson was to take my time picking new additions to a team. The actual phrase I was taught was slow to hire, quick to fire. It means that you should really get to know who you are bringing into a company before you extend a job offer and you should let someone go the instant you know they are not working out. That may sound harsh, but if you made a mistake hiring someone, you're hurting your company by keeping that person around. You're also cheating your new hire from finding a job that fits him or her more perfectly. Don't compound one mistake with another. Being in charge means making the tough choices.

If you have a small company with limited resources, a single interview is not enough to make an important decision like this. In fact, I don't think any company—no matter how big its bank account—should treat hiring casually. Before finalizing your decision, you have to find out how this person ticks and what motivates performance. In my case, I need developers who have a passion for the products I am creating. I refuse to micromanage my teammates, so they need to know how to work autonomously. My job is to inspire, not to babysit. I also want people who won't back down from a fight if they think I'm doing it wrong. I learned a long time ago that I am no where near perfect and I make plenty of stupid mistakes. It's best if I surround myself with people who inspire me to continue to learn and grow.

Before hiring both Michael and Danny, I spent time getting to know each of them. Michael was an early MoneyWell customer that also turned out to be a developer. We talked a bit about development during a small sideline project he was coding and then I was able to spend time with him at a developer conference, WWDC '09, and really get to know him. I discovered what motivates him and why he loves creating software. I also watched him as he designed and released a fairly complex iPhone app for his previous employer. In late 2009, Michael was in the middle of a job change and I was able to bring him on board in January of this year.

Danny and I were introduced when he wrote a review of MoneyWell about three years ago. He and I later chatted during a podcast were were both on hosted by Steve "Scotty" Scott, now the producer of iDTV, which later lead to us starting our own podcast called cocoaFusion:. I paid attention to the projects he managed and the products he released and we talked about development outside of our podcast. Danny was never shy about telling me when he thought some code of mine could use improving or if a product was in serious need of better pixel dressing. I actually tried to coax him away from Realmac Software around the time I hired Michael, but the work environment there is fantastic and he could not be swayed. This time, I threw in a healthy dose of guilt with my offer to get him on board.

The bottom line: I knew who I was getting. There was no doubt about intelligence, work ethic, communication skills, or motivation with these two.

I applied this same process when I hired Tamara Crowe as our contract support person. She was a MoneyWell customer who did an amazing job of sharing and helping on our help center discussions. Tamara had better answers than me some of the time and came across as friendly and knowledgable in her posts. I chatted with her several times before offering her a position and knew by that time that I was not making a mistake.

It was a bit harder when I hired Kevin Kalle to do contract design work for us because I didn't have much time to get to know him. He was referred to me by designers I respected and we began by working together on a trial basis. I explained up front that I wanted him to be strong and opinionated and made sure that he was comfortable with some friction in our working relationship.

For me, the give and take is critical. The best solutions come out of a blending of ideas mixed via a friendly struggle. I hire people smarter than me with different skill sets to offset my weaknesses. I never assume that I have all the answers or can see from every perspective and I listen to everyone's opinions. Conversely, my team knows that I have a very definite vision for what this company is creating and I won't compromise that vision. They also understand that the final decisions need to be mine.

I'm incredibly excited about the team I've assembled and can't wait to show everyone what we are creating. As great as 2010 was for my little indie group, 2011 is going to be even better.

Peace.

P.S.: Stay tuned for my follow-up posts where I'll discuss the financial and logistic concerns of adding employees.

Mac App Store Mania

2010-10-27T09:10:00.001-05:00

It's only been a few days since Apple announced the Mac App Store and there are already predictions of rampant software piracy, Apple locking down future version of OS X to only App Store sales, and price drops to 99 cents. Let's calm down and take a step back people.

First of all, pirates will be pirates and if they want to crack your software, they will. Apple's copy protection will be broken just like every other system out there. This does not mean that your sales will drop. The honest truth is that the dishonest people using pirated software wouldn't be your customers anyway. I've lost track of how many illegal download sites display MoneyWell as one of their offerings, but I also don't lose sleep over this problem.

As to Apple shutting down all sales outside the Mac App Store, can we give them time to get it up and running before we start blaming them for something they haven't done yet? I'm willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt on this one.

Now on to the topic that is a huge issue for me: discount pricing. I can't stand the dollar store pricing on the iOS App Store and it shows because MoneyWell is at the $9.99 price point even though many of its competitors are lower. I think it's worth even more than 10 bucks and the price is more likely go up instead of down as we add features down the road. Our Mac version currently sells for $49.99 and that price will go up when we ship our 2.0 release in early 2011. I'm also not planning to lower it when we start selling on the Mac App Store.

Why? Because our software is worth the price I charge. I also owe it to my customer base to make sure my company is well-funded and continues to provide excellent software and support in the future. The profit curve is not negatively affected by higher prices until you are significantly out of the range of your competition—and by competition, I mean software that matches your software in quality. I've seen too many companies go out of business because they try to compete on price.

I truly believe that the Mac App Store is going to increase sales for every quality Mac product on the market, but we don't know by how much. Assuming that you can cut your price in half because your volume will increase by a factor of five or ten is insane. High volume sales are never guaranteed and you may need the cash reserves you make from an initial sales spike for long term development projects or an onslaught of support.

Just because software is made up of electronic bits doesn't mean that it has any less value than computer hardware or or other electronics. There's an argument that computers have gone down in price and software should do the same, but companies like Apple aren't making less money on each computer sold. In fact, most of the time they work to increase their margins as manufacturing costs drop. Apple doesn't have $51 billion in the bank because they cut their profits in half.

There's an opposing argument which states we can charge a fair price for software because we provide lasting value. What do you pay for lunch or dinner? How about that trip to Starbucks? What's your ROI for that meal or latte and how long does that "value" stay with you? Think about that for a minute. Got a visual? Good.

If I invest in a software tool, I expect it to hang around for more than a day or two and to continue to get a return on my investment of 12-18 months before spending more money on it. Will I pay $20, $40 or $60 for software I use several times a week throughout this timeframe? Definitely. It has real value. I don't buy many games, so most of the software I invest in is either saving me time, improving my communications, or making me money. If I'm using it constantly, I want to use the highest quality software I can get. It should be well-crafted, rarely crash and never lose my data. I'm happy to pay for quality. Building excellent software is hard work and we deserve to get paid for our efforts.

Let's stick to our guns and price our software fairly so we can prosper and continue to give great service to our customers. Let's earn some profits and invest in training to improve our coding and business skills. Let's build some company bank accounts so we can afford to expand our indie companies beyond simple solo acts. Who knows—if we stop tripping over each other to get to the bargain basement—we actually may end up with several hundred more indie developers who can afford to quit their day jobs.

Peace.

If Not You, Then Who?

2010-09-22T10:52:00.001-05:00

Running an indie software company is an emotional roller coaster. Some days the code is flowing like water out of a fire hose and you're breaking sales records while other days are filled with blank stares at a debugger and a strange fear that your website must be broken because no one's buying your software. It can be a struggle to keep pushing forward in the face of bugs and support requests. You work your butt off to produce a product update only to be met with jeers and complaints, "You wrecked my software! It's slow/crashing/ugly now" or, "You gave us features a, b and c but I asked for f and g almost two years ago. Why can't you finish your software?"

Okay, it's not like that very often, but if you're like me, a hundred compliments are negated by one complaint. If you're not like me, be happy you dodged a bullet.

MoneyWell is an especially tricky product when it comes to making people happy. Personal finance software is very… personal. Everyone has their own way of managing their finances and no single tool will satisfy every need. I built MoneyWell for one person: me. There were certain needs I had that weren't being met by my current tool, Quicken, and no other software I tested was idiot-proof enough to help me control my spending. So like a good programmer, I wrote my own. When designing the feature set, I did consider if others would like certain abilities, but in the end I based all my decisions on what worked best for me. That may sound selfish, but I've been in companies where software was designed by committees and frankly, it always sucked.

When releasing version 1.0 of a product, flaws and missing features are often forgiven, "It's a one-dot-oh release, I'm sure it will get better." But as your customer base grows and your product matures, the slings and arrows come at a faster pace and hit closer to vital organs. You might start to doubt your vision or struggle to hear your internal voice over the din of the crowd. You might start to doubt your ability to succeed based on what you have planned or fall prey to feeling overwhelmed.

I've ridden the roller coaster plenty of times over the past four years. There were times when I wondered if my design was correct or if I even knew what the hell I was doing. I'm no financial genius so who am I to tell others how to run their books?

What struck me recently and inspired me to keep on the path was a simple question: if not you, then who? Are there any software products out today that I would use instead of my own? No, there are not. And why not? Why do I still like my finance software better than anything else?

There are millions of software developers in the world and many are better or smarter coders than me, but none are me. None of them have had the same financial failures I have had or experienced the same exact frustrations. No single person has gone through all the same life trials as I have. I'm the only one who has lived my life and that makes me unique. My blend of skills and experiences gives me an edge for the software I'm passionate about.

I'll never write the next great word processor because I don't have a burning desire to build it. I've struggled with debt and blown budgets, not page formatting issues. My software comes from my history. It is better because I care about it and how it can improve my life. My greatest desire is that what I create can also help millions of others as well.

You too have a history that gives you a unique perspective on a need. Your life experiences have molded you to see things that others would overlook. What could you contribute to a software design? What do you desire in a product? What are you passionate about?

In other words, don't build what others have envisioned—create from within yourself. Your design process will be much more enjoyable and the final product will scream "you." This will mean that you'll have to endure complaints and say "no" more than you like to enhancement requests, but you will love your work because it feels organic. And even if it doesn't make you rich, it might make you happy.

Here are the rules in summary:

Seek knowledge from others, but make decisions from within — don't let the noise drown out your thoughts
Ignore the naysayers — haters are gonna hate and there's nothing you can do about it
Believe in yourself — trust that what you have to give to the world is unique and worthwhile
Put passion before a paycheck — doing work you love trumps more money any day of the week and twice on Sunday

Every so often, I get lost and let the one or two negatives swallow up all the good creation happening in my life. It's easy to feel discouraged because your software is in use by hundreds instead of thousands or thousands instead of millions. It's easy to feel overwhelmed because you don't have the time to see your vision in full bloom. It's easy to give up and let someone else deal with creating the solution, but don't do it. You'll be cheating the world out of an experience only you can provide.

Peace.

Indie Multitasking

2010-04-19T06:52:00.001-05:00

As much as we'd like to think that we are capable of multitasking, we are truly more like an iPad than an iMac. We may have a dozen or more things we have in our queue to do at the moment, but we can only focus on one task at a time. To multitask and actually get two tasks done at once, you need to be two people.

For an indie software company, this means taking a large step and hiring someone—either contract or full time.

This is by no means a trivial decision, but eventually one that has to be addressed. At some point the long days and late nights start to affect the quality of your work or destroy your personal life. And whether you believe it or not, sleep is critical to your health.

Adding staff is hard for several reasons:

It costs money

It requires trust and flexibility

It requires management

It requires collaboration tools and processes

Let's take a look at each of these a little more.

Cash Flow

As an indie developer, you probably aren't rolling in extra cash that you can just flash and get more staff. You have to be careful about raising your monthly burn rate. The flip side is that you may be hurting cash flow by doing tech support or marketing when you should be writing code and shipping for-fee updates—I consider myself somewhat of an expert in this type of mistake.

Be smart and take baby steps. Instead of hiring a full-time person, you can pay hourly for contract labor. Last year I contracted with Matt Long to help me with MoneyWell for iPhone development, and recently I hired Ash Ponders, who bills me for the hours he logs keeping our support queue well maintained.

The nice part about contract labor is that you can throttle your spending more with them than you could a salaried employee.

Trust and Flexibility

After I contracted with Matt, I began to think that the amount of code that needed to get written at No Thirst Software was much more than I could do in a timely manner and too expensive as contract work. There was a huge potential for revenue from an iPhone release and a paid upgrade for a 2.0 version of MoneyWell but the overhead of running this company was cutting into my coding time and my schedules were slipping badly. If I had a full-time developer besides myself, I could ship these new releases sooner, which would be a huge win for both the company and our customers.

I've hired developers many times before in my previous companies and I knew the pitfalls. Hiring a skilled developer is important, but even more important is hiring someone you trust and can work with. I've hired prima donnas that code well but are impossible to work with and nice guys that really can't produce the code needed—neither hire is good.

I like to hire developers that I've already spent time with and have learned about how they code and think. That meant my list of potential employees was very short. To shorten my list even more: all of them had good jobs already and didn't have a strong desire to jump ship.

The stars aligned for me and one of them became available at the perfect time. I hired Michael Fey (a/k/a the infamous MrRooni who started a rumor about spotting Steve Jobs at WWDC 2009) as my first full-time employee in January 2010.

Check this out: I first knew Michael as an early MoneyWell customer who was generous and helped out by answering questions on our support forum. I later found out he was a Mac developer and then was lucky enough to spend some time with him at WWDC and really get to know him. This is one more reason why you need to socialize and network. You never know if you are going to meet a future employee or employer. Needless to say, I'm thrilled to have someone who knows our products, is a skilled developer and is joy to work with on a daily basis.

Now, this is where the flexibility comes into play. When you bring in someone else to do the work you once did in your isolated "me" universe, you'll find that they'll do the same tasks a bit differently that you did. If you can't deal with that fact, you can't have employees and you can't ever expand your company. You have to be flexible and accept that your way isn't the only way to get something done. I've learned something from everyone I've ever worked with—without exception.

Managing People and Resources

The minute you add any person or service to your operation, you become a manager. It's your job to steer the ship and control the future of your company. This doesn't mean that you have all the answers, it just means you have to make the final decision. With employees comes payroll. With contract work comes more payables and tax paperwork. There is overhead to even adding one person.

There's also mentoring and training. If you fail to properly mentor your new hire in the company processes or train your support technician in your software, you can't expect that person to perform well. This is your primary job as a leader. and ignoring it is like planting a garden but failing to feed and water the plants. All your initial effort will wither on the vine.

Tools and Processes

Before you expand beyond a one-body shop, you have to invest some time in collaborative tools and processes. For an indie software company, the three biggies are support, bug/feature tracking and source code management.

Email-only support systems are incredibly hard to maintain with more than one person. Did that email get answered? Was there a response? Who's checking for new emails? Has this customer had similar issues before?

We use Tender to manage our support because it gives us a way to coordinate and assign support. It also suggests Knowledge Base answers when customers post questions so some customer get immediate, automatic support. It also has custom queues that notify specific people in our company when help is needed. This way, our frontline person can get emails for all support issues and the rest of us only see what has been escalated. Additionally, the discussions can be public—the customer can choose to make it private—so other customers tend to jump in and help. I'll take all the help I can get and often, our customers know better answers than we do because they have personal experience with the question.

For bug/feature tracking, we chose Lighthouse, which happens to work well with Tender because ENTP makes and runs both. What I needed most in issue tracking was a quick way to create requests when customers report bugs or asked for features. Because Lighthouse and Tender integrate perfectly, creating a ticket in Lighthouse requires only a couple of clicks upon reading the Tender discussion post.

There are many different needs for both these tasks and you may need a more intense issue tracking system. I like to avoid complexity as much as possible and that was a driving force in my choices.

Picking a source control management system is like choosing an operating system or development framework. You're not going to convince a .NET guy that Cocoa is better any more than you can tell someone who loves Mercurial that Bazaar is better. It really doesn't matter what you choose, but pick a distributed system that has a cloud presence. I used Subversion, then switched to Bazaar and finally ended up with Git.

The primary reason for going with git was Github. I had to collaborate with other developers and they were already using Github so I was flexible and adapted. Once I learned the (sometimes weird) ways of git, I was productive and happy. Moreover, my team was able to work together easily. I needed four developers in three different parts of the country to work out of the same repository and Github made that happen.

Galactic Headquarters

The Galactic Headquarters of No Thirst Software LLC are in my home office located in The Woodlands, Texas. My full-time developer is near Syracuse, New York, contract work is done from yet another state, graphic design is coming from Europe and Ash is doing support from who know's where on the planet. I have to admit to a bit of envy towards my globe trotting support ninja.

My point is that the days of renting office space and hiring employees locally so that they can show up to work in a central location are long gone. It makes no sense financially and only offers a slight collaborative advantage over Skype and video conferencing. When you pick tools or decide on processes, make sure you think global.

We have office chatter over Twitter, share documents on Dropbox, manage projects on Lighthouse, review support issues on Tender, share source code on Github and hold meetings on Skype or iChat—our work day revolves around information stored on or shared over the internet. I've never run a company this efficiently with such a small amount of overhead. It's a great time to grow your operation and expand beyond yourself.

Peace.

The Computer for the Rest of Them

2010-01-28T09:19:00.001-06:00

If you're a software developer, designer, or a high-tech computer user—Apple doesn't care about you.

Oh sure, Apple wants you to write, design and create software and products for the Mac, but you are not the target audience for the iPad. I've read so much negative backlash about Apple's latest device and all I can think is, "These guys just don't get it."

As software developers, we thrive on complexity. We have dozens of applications lit up in our Docks. As I'm writing this, I have 20 applications running, each with one or more windows open in four virtual workspaces using Spaces.

I'm a geek. I love this stuff. I even know all the keyboard shortcuts for switching apps and spaces and windows. I am a software developer with an engineer's brain. I am not the person Apple was thinking about when they built the iPad.

So who did they build it for?

The rest of them.

Have you ever watched someone who is not a geek use a computer? I have. My father-in-law lives with us and I'm his support tech, so I get an up close and personal view of the anti-geek at work. Here's a typical session for him:

He clicks on Mail to look at his email;

He reads a few emails and closes the window with the red dot in the upper left corner;

Then he clicks on Safari and looks at some websites in one window;

when he's done, he closes that window with a click in the upper left corner.

He doesn't quit any application. As many times as I've told him that he can simply hold down the Command key and press 'Q' to quit, he clicks the red dot. He doesn't try to multitask, he doesn't understand overlapping windows, and he gets very confused when he moves a window by accident and it doesn't show up well on his screen.

When I showed him the video of the iPad though, he said, "I'd love one of those. It looks so much easier for me to use. My sister could even use one of those."

For my father-in-law and millions of other people, clicking to run an application on the iPad, pressing the Home button to leave it so another application can be run is perfect. Millions of people spend all their time focused on one app. They read email, or browse the web, or live in Facebook, and the iPad gives them exactly what they need to do those tasks. The fast new Apple A4 chip inside makes changing from one task to another quick enough that there is no need for multitasking—especially with people whose eyes glaze over when you start explaining the concept behind running multiple applications.

The fact is: Real people don't try to multitask, so they don't see the iPad lacking this ability.

Personally, I love the idea of the iPad because I do all my RSS feed reading on my iPhone. When I take a break from writing software and working on my computer, I find a comfy place to sit and read on my iPhone. If I can grab my iPad instead, I'll save eyestrain and my iPhone battery while improving my casual time. For me, it's a no-brainer. I want one.

Is the iPad perfect? Nope. I think it needs front-facing video at least, but I do agree with John Brownlee that Apple probably left this out because it would make you look fat. This is the first generation of a new type of computing—the computer for the rest of them. Expect amazing growth in this space over the next couple of years.

Peace.

Indie+Relief: Mac Indie Developers Helping Haiti

2010-01-19T12:08:00.001-06:00

I love the Mac developer community for many reasons and Indie+Relief is just one more example of how great it is.

Much thanks to Justin Williams and Garrett Murray for making this happen and to the 150 or so indie developers that are participating. You all rock!

No Thirst Software is participating as well, so tell everyone you know to hold off and buy software tomorrow, Jan. 20, 2010, if they were thinking about doing it anyway and help heal Haiti.

If you don't want software, but still want to help the Haitian people who are suffering from so much death and destruction, you can find a reputable charity by using Charity Navigator.

Peace

Grabbing a One Finger Discount

2009-11-10T16:53:00.001-06:00

The Mac developer community is so great because of promotions like this: One Finger Discount.

Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software fame decided that while MacHeist was running its promotion giving away free apps, he would start a simultaneous promotion allowing the rest of us to get in on the buzz. All we had to do was offer a 20 percent discount (Get it? Five finger discount = free so one finger = one fifth or 20 percent).

What does Daniel get out of the deal? Nothing. He's just being a generous member of the Mac Developer Community. So creative, so cool. Way to rock Mr. Jalkut!

Now go buy some software before this deal ends. You'll find MoneyWell and Debt Quencher there as well.

Peace.

Good Enough

2009-10-15T16:02:00.001-05:00

My blog posts have been few and far between because I've been facedown in code for MoneyWell 1.5 and the related iPhone release. I have a feeling this won't change anytime soon, but I'm sneaking in a quick post to fill the gap.

This development cycle has been particularly difficult for me because I've had to venture into some uncharted territory. My iPhone development skills are less than expert and MoneyWell 1.5 is my first Leopard application, so the changes to that development are just enough to slow me down slightly.

The combination of acquiring new development knowledge and my tendency to want to do more in a release than is necessary caused several bouts of anxiety and doubt. Stupid questions like, "Can I get all this done in time?" or "Will I get all this working together perfectly?" slice and dice my productivity. My results don't always match up with my vision, which can lead me to mental self-mutilation.

I too often think, "This is not going to be good enough to sell enough so I can continue growing my company." If you haven't guessed yet, I'm borderline insane.

The fact is that there are plenty of indie Mac developers who would kill to be selling enough software to ditch their day job or drop consulting gigs. Additionally, I have probably 20 times more customers than I've had in any other venture I've started. My customer base is, for the most part, very complimentary of our products. This should be indie nirvana but then again... I'm insane, remember.

My "good enough" is most definitely well past a sane developer's good enough. There is no reason to expect a product like MoneyWell to be as full featured as products that have been on the market five to ten years longer or are being designed by teams of developers and designers when I'm still basically a one-man shop. I tend to take every compliment as being too kind and every complaint as being right on target.

Insane.

Software development is iterative. My philosophy matches Apple's: a subset of features should be very well executed and polished; new features won't appear until they can be implemented cleanly; and most people only care about 20 percent of a product's feature set. I could add dozens of new features quickly, but my user interface and flow would suffer and, for me, that isn't good enough.

This philosophy is quite sane.

The insanity comes when I forget that I'm developing software the right way for me: balancing my work and family life while still providing a quality product for my customers. What I have planned for future releases should make 80 percent of our customers ecstatically happy and 20 percent will still wish I had done more sooner no matter what I add to the software. The fact that I don't have every feature I have ever envisioned for MoneyWell finished today shouldn't make me crazy—there should a product timeline for the future.

So, the bottom line is: what I'm doing is good enough to keep my software company growing and the majority of my customer base happy. I don't need to lower my standards but I do need to reassess my expectations of what I can accomplish given that eating and sleep seem to be a necessary evil.

I have already taken steps to offload some support and even brought in help to code MoneyWell for iPhone so it can get finished soon. I should probably have been finishing a 2.0 product instead of a another minor release, but I can't go back in time and retract promises I made. I can only watch my comments and promises for future releases.

If, like me, you're running an indie software company, strive for excellence, polish every detail of your work, but always make sure to enjoy what you're doing. Shipping any software is always better than coding vaporware. Chances are if you truly care about your customers and the software you deliver to them, what you're producing—no matter how shy it is of your ultimate goals—is probably quite good enough.

Peace

WWDC: Worth it on so many levels

2009-07-23T07:43:00.001-05:00

When I wrote this, it was so long ago that Matt Drance was still an Apple employee and not one of us crazy indie devs. My apologies for the now flashback WWDC post.

Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) was earlier this month from June 7 through 12 and I was thrilled to be in attendance for my second year.

The official main reason to go to WWDC is to get edjumacated on all the new Apple hardware and software. My main reason is to connect with other developers. The information about new technology and APIs is critical, don't get me wrong, but I can't watch videos of me hanging out with newfound developer friends—or at least I hope I can't. I'm not sure I want those published. The sessions, on the other hand, are published by Apple so I can watch some that I missed.

This year was even better than last because I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Last year I was following the advice of others; this year I was on a mission to really enjoy every moment of the trip. I knew enough to arrive on Saturday so I could relax and wander about San Francisco a bit before the chaos of the week began. This enabled me to register early on Sunday and meet with people on that morning and throughout the day.

Making Connections

A smart move on my part was putting together the cocoaFusion: podcast with Danny Greg. It's not like I planned that far in advance for WWDC but having that podcast gave me a chance to meet more developers through the "I listen to you on cocoaFusion: introduction" and it also opened up doors for a couple of non-Apple activities.

Since Danny works for Realmac Software and André Pang used to work for Realmac but now works for Pixar, I was invited to go with them to visit this animated movie wonderland. It was a great tour and André was very generous with his time. They also slipped me an invitation to the Pixel Assembly party that was co-hosted by Realmac and I was able to hang with the ADA award winning Sofa crew. At this event, I also sat and talked with an Apple Xcode engineer and another fellow that worked with Apple on its website store. Both these gentlemen were great to exchange information and ideas with and further proved that not all technical help comes from WWDC sessions or labs.

Not everything went smoothly that night. At this party, I had an Eric Stratton moment when I met Craig Hockenberry, "Hi, Kevin Hoctor, MoneyWell, damn glad to meet you." So eloquent. Such a firm grasp of the English language and so very interesting to listen to. Sorry Craig, I'll step it up in 2010. In my defense though, your fame and your height were both a bit intimidating.

Unplanned and Unexpected

Sometimes, cool things happen at WWDC without your even having to make them happen. For example, young Mr. Greg tweeted that he was going to a Core Data Lab so I asked if he would mind me lurking on his session. (I didn't have any questions on my own but thought I could learn from his.) He said no problem so I went down to the lab to meet him. As it turned out, he was delayed so I thought I'd park myself at the dining tables near the lab and get some work done. As I wandered over, I saw the Karelia Software guys, Dan Wood and Mike Abdullah at one of the tables so I plopped down across from them. As it turns out, I had a great discussion about how to hire a support person and their feedback on the whole experience. Unplanned, unexpected, yet invaluable advice.

Several other serendipitous situations like this one occurred throughout WWDC with me on the giving end at times. Hopefully I was as helpful to others as they were to me.

I finished up the week in style by standing outside Moscone West talking to Matt Drance, Mike Lee, and Scott Stevenson then I turned around to say hi to John Gruber (just happened to have one of my Daring Fireball T-shirts on so I looked like a proper fanboi) and then proceeded to make a fool of my self. The person to the left of John said he had several people talk about who they met at WWDC and Kevin Hoctor was in their list. I said, "Thanks, and you are?" and then Brent Simmons introduced himself.

Now this would not have been so embarrassing if I hadn't spent nearly an hour last year at the Chieftain talking to Brent who came over to our table to ask who we were and what we did. I apologized and said that he looked different and Gruber came to my rescue saying that Brent has lost weight. You are looking really good Brent. I'm still an idiot but lets call this one your fault anyway, okay?

Good Times

In addition to learning plenty and making a fool of myself, I had a ton of fun. My most memorable moment is probably standing in line for the Keynote with several of the Realmac guys, Mickey Roberson, and Michael Fey (a.k.a., Mr. Rooni), who started the infamous Steve Jobs rumor.

Whether it was sharing software ideas or code, checking out early versions of iPhone apps, or just enjoying great food, drink, and conversation, there was a constant stack overflow of good times. Thanks to all the guys and gals that took time to say hello to me (even the quick 'hi' by Sophia Teutschler on her way to the bathroom).

If there was any concern that my second year at WWDC wouldn't stack up to the first, that's been eradicated. Barring natural disasters or loss of limb, I'm planning to make sure I set aside the time and money to make this event every single year.

Growing Pains

2009-06-21T12:34:00.001-05:00

I believe the two hardest periods of a new company are when you first start it and when you grow beyond being able to handle every task yourself.

When you give birth to a new business, you have to work hard to save pennies and handle as much of the operations yourself to survive financially. This is good because you get to design every part of your new venture and structure it to be mean and lean.

For a software start-up, this usually means automating as much as possible. As sales grew with No Thirst Software, I went from hand generating license files with AquaticPrime to PHP scripts that generated and emailed those type of files to a full database back end that simply emailed license codes and sent the license files directly to our software when it pinged the server.

This was easy automation to do because I'm a programmer; I write code and this was just code on a web server talking to code in my Mac software. No big deal.

Other roles are harder to automate. I have a CPA to file my tax paperwork and do the heavy lifting in accounting, but I still have to maintain the books, track expenses, and fill out paperwork (and I hate paperwork). The bookkeeping automation really needs a person, which means hiring and management duties. It's not as comfortable a task as adding some PHP scripts. I'd love to have my wife, Judy, jump in here and tackle this role but she's pulling in a steady paycheck with health insurance benefits for the family so that's a tough call. Are we ready to completely depend on our little company for all our financial needs?

Another time sink is support. I love doing support because it helps me understand how our customers use our products and I find ways to improve them. MoneyWell would never have grown as fast as it has in the direction it has without me doing tech support. I have been toying with the idea of delegating some of this to a part-time person for a while but it was incredibly hard for me to let go for several reasons.

Fear and Workflow

The first was a concern that our support quality would drop. I worked hard to create a reputation for outstanding support and I didn't want that to get lost.

The second concern was my time to train a support person. Handing off support is great if the person taking it can answer the questions asked. Delegation without education is like asking my CPA to finish my Objective-C code—both crazy and stupid.

The third concern was workflow. My workflow was impossible to scale up past two people and even then not really effective. I used IMAP services to file emails into various folders for resolved issues, those needing action, and those needing to be fixed via code changes.

This workflow issue was the biggest of the concerns by far. If I couldn't automate the workflow more, I couldn't hand off support. In the past when I had a larger company with a few dozen employees, I wrote my own customer service system. I liked it because I had control over it and could improve it whenever we needed new functionality. Today, I have plenty of software to write that could be making me money so the thought of spending my time writing an internal app was out.

I looked at other products I had used in the past but they didn't fit my desired flow. I also looked at FogBugz, but the design felt too complicated and alien to the simple design of both MoneyWell and Debt Quencher. I really tried to like it but I knew that I'd never adopt it.

Then I started to use Lighthouse to track my bugs and features because there was a cool OS X front end for it, Lighthouse Keeper. Even without Martin Pilkington's desktop interface, Lighthouse was really nice to use. It didn't have every feature, but what it did have was implemented nicely.

I found out that Active Reload/ENTP was creating a customer support system to match up with Lighthouse. It was still in beta so I held off riding this bleeding edge of technology and pushed the task of delegating support onto the back burner.

The Wakeup Call

My wakeup call came in two parts. First I was asked to include MoneyWell in the MacUpdate MUPromo Spring 2009 Bundle. About 43,500 bundles later, I learned a lot about how well my sales and licensing automation was built and how little code I was writing when handling a minor avalanche of support. Halfway through this bundle, I left for San Francisco to attend Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC)¹ where I fully woke up.

It was in a talk given by Wil Shipley at an overcrowded Cocoaheads meeting held at the SF Apple Store. Even as Wil talked about not doing support as a developer, I resisted. In my head I kept saying, "I need to stay connected to my customers. This has helped me improve my software." He finished and I pretty much had blown him off. Then later that evening I started thinking about all the code that I was not writing and how I was cheating my customers of new versions. I wasn't as worried about my competition as I was about not shipping the very best products because I was devoting my developer skills to support instead of new code. Late that night, I pulled up the Tender Support website and signed up.

Letting Go

While at WWDC, I talked to Judy about hiring a support technician. We tossed around a few ideas and I resolved to make sure it happened once I got back home. Four days after I landed at Houston Intercontinental Airport, I had a support person—my son Patch. He had worked with me before redesigning the No Thirst Software website so I knew what he could do when he put his mind to something, but I wasn't going to push him into the business if he wanted to go a different direction. Thankfully, Judy had discussed this option with him while I was away and he came to me asking if he could help.

This made sharing the support role easier. It wasn't going far, just to another room in our house, and I could pull Patch into my office to give him training whenever necessary. If he hadn't stepped up, I would have advertised on our company user forum and this blog for a person to fill the role. After Patch, my preference would have been a MoneyWell user that didn't need training on the operation of our flagship product.

Tender Support

It's only been a week of working with Tender and a few days of having it live for our customers to use, but I'm thrilled with it. The discussion forum is much more structured than our old Google Groups forum—we can mark issues as open or resolved, assign priority queues to issues, and, best of all, support emails go to the forum so they can't get lost in a cluttered inbox. It's not as large and in charge as FogBugz, but that's part of its appeal. We're even more committed to offering timely and effective support as our customer base continues to grow, and Tender will help us stay on top of our game. My next blog post will talk more about this customer support tool and why it fits No Thirst Software so well.

1. If you're a developer on the Mac or iPhone and you haven't attended WWDC yet, put it on your calendar for 2010 and start saving money now.

Sharpening the Saw

2009-02-19T10:52:00.001-06:00

As a Mac ISV, I'm fairly isolated here in The Woodlands, Texas. That's why I love it when I get a chance to get out and meet with other developers and small business owners to discuss ideas and sharpen my skills.

Last year was my first time to attend Apple's WWDC and it won't be my last. There was plenty of learning to be had from the speakers at the conference but I gained just as much knowledge, if not more, from other developers who I met there. The fellowship was worth the price of attendance alone and the connections I made are still reaping rewards.

One conference that I'd love to go to but just don't have the time and budget for right now is the NSConference run by Steve "Scotty" Scott of The Mac Developer Network fame.

The speaker list is great and there are so many developers that are going to be there that I'd love to hang with. Unfortunately, I don't think I could sneak away to Europe again without taking my wife (I've been there several times and she hasn't at all). I think my daughter would have a throw down fit too so the budget wouldn't be just the inexpensive conference and lodging costs plus a bit of airfare but instead, it would turn into a family vacation with all the requisite tourist activities—more than I care to spend right now.

But if you are in Europe or can invest a little time and money on travel, plan on attending this conference. Then you can come back and leave comments here about all the cool stuff I missed and make me very, very jealous.

Peace.

Giving Back by Podcasting

2009-01-09T14:57:00.001-06:00

The Mac developer community is amazing. So many developers share ideas, advice, and even code that I felt immediately indebted to do this myself after being helped by so many of them.

Unfortunately, it's hard to share advice when you're not sure if you have any but after a couple years of coding Objective-C, the OS X language of choice, and Cocoa, the OS X development framework, I'm excited to become more like those generous code warriors.

With a lot of help from a very bright, young Mac developer, Danny Greg, my contribution to the community is a developer podcast that has just gone live. Check out cocoaFusion: and let us know what you think.

The goal is not for us to come across as "experts" in the field of Cocoa development but instead to share our struggles with this framework and solutions we've found. Hopefully, this will be a good start to giving back to the community that has given so much to us.

Peace.

P.S.: I also have to give huge props to Scotty (a.k.a., Steve Scott) at the Mac Developer Network for introducing me to Danny and for creating such enjoyable podcasts that I wanted to follow in his footsteps. If you're a Mac developer and you're not signed up for MDN your a) insane, and b) missing out on a wealth of knowledge in a very entertaining format.

Free or fee?

2008-12-23T10:06:00.001-06:00

It's impossible to survive in the software business without charging for updates. Early on in my career I remember thinking, "We'll have so many customers that we can offer free updates and support for life!"

I don't remember doing drugs at the time but I must have been pretty stoned to believe I could get away with that concept.

The fact is that software development is hard work and certainly not free. It takes time, research, buying books/training videos, more research, conferences and travel costs, still more research, and plenty of caffeinated beverages. And that's just to create the product! There are many other costs in order to support and market your software and to run your business.

So if you charge $40 for your software and sell 2,500 copies, you gross $100,000. Sweet, right? But subtract taxes, operation costs, outsource fees for services like graphic artists, web development, credit card processing, and accounting and the picture starts to look a bit less bright. Remember too that you took eight to twelve months to get this software out the door and you weren't making a dime on it during that time period and sales from these 2,500 customers happened over several months, so you might have to divide your net income over 24 months.

After shipping 1.0 you have to change hats and support the software by answering customer emails or forum posts, creating tutorials, and pushing out bug fixes. This all costs money and even if you do everything yourself, your time can't be considered free.

You might even be tempted to price your software lower so you can sell more copies. Don't fall into this trap! The more customers you have, the more your support costs rise. Even the best designed software has bugs and even if you squash all the bugs (you are my hero if you achieve this goal), you will want to add new features or adapt the software to a changing operating system or framework.

Remember that software is never finished—developers just take occasional breaks in coding to ship it.

So how do you cover the rising costs of support and the extended development for major changes to your product? Simple: You charge for updates. Now you can't charge your customers for every single change or your software company will die a very public death with a lynching on your user forum and every blog in existence. The trick is to only charge for the big updates and to space them out well.

On the Mac, software convention states that you version your software with at most three numbers separated by decimal points: major, minor, and patch. This means that 1.4.2 is the second patch on the fourth minor release of the first release of that product.

Here are my rules for numbering:

Patches are for urgent bug fixes and should always be free. These are supposed to be small and easy to test so you can get them out quickly. New features should only be included if absolutely necessary to fix a feature that went very badly in the last release.

Minor releases are for features and less urgent bug fixes. It feels wrong to charge for minor releases.

Major releases are for more dramatic changes to the product and usually are only free to new customers who purchased the previous release within a grace period.

Version numbers are not pure science; they are really for marketing. Developers have build numbers for tracking the absolute order of code changes so we don't need the version for code management. Since the versioning is for the public then, why not plan your development based on a marketing timeline. Version 1.0 will be released in January 2009 with three or four minor releases to follow and a 2.0 release in July 2010. And you can charge for version 2.0.

Your schedule may get messed up if you are basing your 2.0 release on new features in OS X and Apple delays its release but overall, you can timeline your software changes and make your customers happy while providing your business with enough income to thrive and continue.

How much should you charge for a major release? I like the 40 percent rule of thumb. If you charge $50 for a product, you can charge about $20 without upsetting your customers. If you have done some amazing updates in software functionality, you can even charge more than that. If you're Apple, you can charge the list price.

That's not a cheap shot at Apple's iWork and iLife suites; I have happily paid for updates to those (not each one, but many of them) because the changes are typically significant and the original price was a bargain compared to products from companies like Microsoft and Adobe. To paraphrase Mel Brooks, "It's good to be a hardware company."

How often do you ship a major release? Every 12 to 18 months is a safe bet. If you do it more often, your customers will feel like you are taking advantage of them and too much longer than that period and you'll probably be running low on cash flow. Remember that you are trying to give your customers significant improvements in your products with a major release so they feel good about paying for that update. This means that you'll have to spend significant time in design and development.

You have to balance your geeky code persona with your public marketing face. Every time you go into a coding phase, you need to think about how this affects your release cycle, which for microISVs is our marketing plan. My marketing plan for MoneyWell has been planned out through the 2.0 release.

When I released MoneyWell 1.0, I had a certain feature set in mind for that product. Naturally, I couldn't fit all those into the first release and I had a deadline to meet so I shipped it without everything in it. I decided at the time that I would charge a discounted introductory price of $39.99 instead of the $49.99 I had planned and would raise the price once the feature set was complete.

Development went slower that I wanted so it took until this month and the 1.4 release to meet my initial spec. Instead of eight months, I burned fourteen. It's not the first time I've been behind on a schedule and won't be the last. The upside to this release was that many customers were shocked by the magnitude of features in it. They couldn't believe that I wasn't charging for this release and calling it 2.0.

I probably could have, but I was sticking to my original plan. MoneyWell 1.4 was designed to work under Tiger and the 2.0 will be Leopard specific—I wanted my Tiger customers to have direct connect banking and several of the other 1.4 features. I'm hoping by the 2.0 release that most of them will have decided to move to Leopard and will be able to enjoy the cool stuff I have planned for that product.

In between the 1.4 and 2.0 releases, I'm developing and shipping MoneyWell Mobile for the iPhone. Since it will sync with the desktop version, there will need to be a MoneyWell 1.5 release. MoneyWell mobile will not be free but the 1.5 minor release will. By the time 2.0 ships, our customer base should be large enough to allow the small upgrade fee to cover the development time and expense that was invested in 2.0.

The bottom line: Plan your releases. Plan to charge for some of them. Plan to spend more time and money on all this than you originally planned, and you'll have a business instead of a non-profit organization. The best way to serve your customers is to stick around as a software company so you can give them what they need. They won't mind paying for great service.

Peace.

Let's Talk About Marketing

2008-11-11T10:16:00.001-06:00

If you're interested in marketing at the microISV level or just like listening to geeks trying to sound professional while talking over Skype, check out the latest installment of The Mac Developer Network Year One podcast hosted by Keith Alperin of Helium Foot Software:

Mac Software Business Year One Episode 3: Marketing

In addition to Keith, Steve "Scotty" Scott and Gus Mueller return for this third installment to discuss their marketing efforts and related microISV wisdom. Of course, I'm in the mix too (probably talking too much) but don't let that stop you from checking it out.

Also while you're there, make sure to join the The Mac Developer Network and support all the wonderful content that Scotty and his crew collect and produce for the Mac developer community. It's great stuff!

Peace.

Fighting the Fear

2008-11-07T08:48:00.001-06:00

I have a confession: I'm afraid.

After all my bold statements that the only true failure is quitting and doing nothing, I'm a bit paralyzed by fear trying to ship MoneyWell 1.4. There's the fear that I didn't do enough to make this an amazing release. Fear that the known issues are deal breakers and will cause negative reviews. Fear that there is an unknown issue that will turn out to be a huge bug and cause major support issues.

Insidious fear. Fear that causes my world to feel cold and dark.

Of course this is crazy thinking but because my brain is dealing with it, I have to do something about that. My wife's suggestion was to blog about it, and since she's usually right about these things, here I go.

I do know that the best way to eliminate fear is to expose it to light—fear hates the bright light of truth.

FEAR: I didn't do enough in this release.

FACT: The feedback from beta testers is that 1.4 has so many enhancements and additions that they can't believe this is a free minor upgrade instead of a 2.0 release with an upgrade fee.

FEAR: Known issues (a.k.a. bugs) will be everyone's focus and cause negative reviews.

FACT: Yes, there are a couple of features that I wish worked better, but there are too many great new additions to let these problems stop this release from happening. If these problems keep 10 percent of the customer base from using a feature but 90 percent still benefit, then why shouldn't I ship and help the majority? The truth is, there isn't a good reason.

FEAR: An unknown bug is going to be big enough to hurt customers, cause mass complaints and refund requests, and bring down the company with it.

FACT: Every software product has bugs and historically I have fixed the bugs in our products very quickly with patches. The reason MoneyWell is built with an automatic update service is so customers get the latest and greatest release as soon as it's published. Plus, version 1.4 has had the longest beta cycle of any product release and has had over 200 beta testers actively using it—the most we've ever had!

Being afraid is natural. Letting fear dictate what I do or don't do is just plain nuts. Writing about it makes me wonder why I even gave fear this much time and energy when I have so much productive work to complete.

That said, there are some new toolbar icons being designed by a talented graphic artist to replace my amateur hack job and lots of documentation to finish. It's no longer fear keeping me from pushing the button. Once these two tasks are done, so is MoneyWell 1.4. Glancing out the window, I just noticed it's a beautiful, sunny day. Life's looking pretty good right now.

Peace.

Where'd You Go?

2008-10-28T09:00:00.001-05:00

No, I didn't die and I'm not in a coma, per se. I'm trying to finish MoneyWell 1.4 and ship it.

This has been a very difficult release because I started the beta process very early. There was a method to my madness though: I wanted people testing the new direct connect downloads from financial institutions, so I added that feature first and published a beta.

Our beta testers, therefore, have had to put up with several "alpha" cycles of MoneyWell that normally aren't pushed to the public. Normally when I develop software, I try to put all the features in it before beta so that everyone knows what the final release looks like and they are just waiting for the reported bugs to be fixed. This has not been a normal beta test.

If you're a developer and you want to get really sick of looking at your software, just try testing it for over three months straight. I rarely even run the 1.3 release so I've forgotten how much has changed in the new version. I keep thinking, "Did I actually do anything in this release?" Glancing down the new feature list helps me realize that I have and that this will be a very good version of MoneyWell.

I've also been blessed to have a great group of beta testers. Not only is it the biggest I've ever managed (over 200 people have tested 1.4), but they have been very quick with bug reports and have given me great detailed steps and sample data files. If this were a movie, someone would be standing right now starting that slow clap for the MoneyWell beta team while everyone else stood to join in.

I will do a proper blog post after this release is out and try to avoid another coding coma. It will be hard though since I'm already working on the iPhone version of MoneyWell and that will most likely consume my time through the end of the year. And we have lots of video tutorials and web site enhancements planned. And then of course coding will start on MoneyWell 2.0. And there's also…

Let's just say, I don't foresee any boredom in my near future.

Peace.

The Secret of Success

2008-08-19T19:42:00.001-05:00

So many books are written about how to be successful. There are plenty of webinars and seminars you can attend. Their pitch is that there's a "secret" to success and all you have to do is pay a few dollars to hear it. Trust me, the secret is not that mysterious. In fact, I'll give you the answer for free.

The secret of success is never failing.

Wow! Really Kev? Is that all there is to it? Man, I'm gonna get rich now with that fantastically sage advice!

But seriously, that is the key. Making mistakes isn't failing. Having to change directions isn't failing. Losing battles isn't failing. You only fail by coming to a complete stop.

No matter how bad it gets you can never, never, never stop pushing forward. There can be no option for failure. The problem is that people don't really understand the true meaning of failure. They think that success is getting rich in six months without any pain or problems. They think successful people have some magical skills that keep them from making big mistakes. They think admitting you did something wrong is the same as failing.

Pursuing perfection is great. Requiring perfection is crap. It's an excuse to quit. Successful people fail often, they just don't slow down long enough to let anyone know it. You could say that success is movement.

In a previous company of mine, I had to shut down an online service in which we had invested more than a million dollars of effort and equipment. It was painful and embarrassing but it was not failing. The service was flawed and was bleeding cash. The solution became very obvious to me one day: We had to kill it to keep the company going. In that case, failure would have been hanging on to that boat anchor and continuing to swim with it.

I had a sales trainer who made the analogy of success being similar to a flight from Los Angeles to Honolulu. In the beginning, the pilot and navigator chart a southwestern course to their destination but the runway used required a takeoff facing east. After the plane took off, they make a banking turn and head southwest towards Hawaii. During the flight, they run into wind shears that cause them to head due south for a while and then due west after that. Several more course corrections are made that take them off their exact planned flight path. Should the pilot have given up and shut off the engines because the plane wasn't always facing directly towards Hawaii? Certainly not. I believe stopping in mid flight would definitely qualify as failure.

The same goes for a business. There will always be something that makes you want to shut off the engines and walk out of the cockpit. Sales are lower than projections, milestones are missed, technology gets in the way—all these and more will make you feel like failure is giving you the stink eye. The trick is to flip each and every one of these around and use them to your advantage.

Low sales are a chance to reinvent your marketing or products. Missed milestones give you an opportunity to learn to set more realistic dates the next time. Technology glitches? Yeah, they just suck. But knowing that they happen and will continue to happen gives you an edge over those that will give up when they hit the same wall you did. Think about it. If you know that most people give up and let a business die when things get tough, you can zip past them just by not stopping. You can even crawl and win a race against a corpse.

We hit a small wall this week and it was not fun, but it has only hardened my resolve to charge forward. My first employee was hired away by a large corporation. This was our decision and not some corporate espionage. It takes a lot of cash flow to run our household of three older teens, and even with cost cutting we knew we couldn't continue this burn rate very much longer. Our compromise was to have Judy get a job closer to home with shorter hours so she could continue to help with No Thirst Software and also contribute to our financial needs.

The tough part is that this felt like a failure on my part. Things may have been different if I had stockpiled more cash in the last two years or cut expenses earlier or programmed faster so we were selling MoneyWell 1.4 and an iPhone version. These are all great ideas, but also all in the past. I can't change any of them now and lamenting about what didn't get done will not help us on our success path.

We are successful. We have a great product lineup that is only getting better with each release. We have thousands of customers praising our work and asking for more. And the greatest success: We had a chance to work together for weeks and strategize about how to improve operations and the company in general. What was done and learned in that short period of time has strengthened our microISV beyond any financial investment.

What's the secret to success? Stay positive. Learn from everything you do—and fail to do. And most of all, stay the course. You and your passengers are not going to be any happier if you shut down your engines at 20,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean. Success is simply continuing forward. Never stop.

Peace.

Download a Beta and a Podcast

2008-07-21T14:10:00.001-05:00

It feels as long as an iPhone NDA since MoneyWell 1.3 shipped but it's actually only been three months. I guess the feature set for the next release has been in my head for over a year and that's why I"m confused. No matter, I am thrilled to announce the first MoneyWell 1.4 beta build has been released. This is an incredibly important milestone because it implements something that I've wanted since version 1.0: Direct OFX downloading of transactions.

Being able to click a button and have my transactions list updated is the last feature that I've missed from my days as a Quicken user and now I have it—and, as of today, so do all our beta testers! In addition to direct downloads, MoneyWell also will query your bank for all your accounts and automatically create and populate them with transactions when you add a new document. It even automatically calculates the correct starting balance transaction for you. Even though it's the first beta build, it's working smoothly with my accounts. I'm hoping that the people beta testing will have similar good results.

MoneyWell 1.4 also has some dramatic interface changes in the accounts and buckets lists. They are more compact and have a much higher contrast between buckets that have money to spend, are empty, and have been overspent. Several more features are already active and even more are planned for upcoming builds.

This is an open beta right now because I desperately need confirmation that MoneyWell can talk to lots of banks and not just mine.

In addition to getting a beta published, I also had the privilege of being invited back for another Mac Software Business podcast, this time about the tricky matter of pricing software. As usual, Steve Scott, better known as Scotty, leads us and does a wonderful job. Joining in the discussion were Gus Mueller and Alex Lindsay. I learned a few things so I hope others will as well. Head over to Scotty's place and have a listen.

All in all, it's been a pretty good week. I could not have done all this so quickly if it wasn't for Judy's coming on board. Because of her help, the beta builds will appear more quickly as well as the final release. To save me from having to answer the question of when 1.4 will ship, I'll throw out a guess that it will happen in late August. No guarantees of course.

And to answer that other question: Yes, I love working with my wife and we could never spend too much time together. It's been wonderful.

Peace.

Over-the-Top Customer Service

2008-06-26T12:02:00.001-05:00

I love writing great software, but producing software is only one part of a successful software company. Lots of developers ship software—some of it is pretty good too. When you have a prospect looking at your product and comparing it to half a dozen others, you need to stand out somehow. Features in a product may make headlines, but customers won't hang around if they don't get quality service and support.

I can't blame them. One of my pet peeves is poor service. I knew that I couldn't create perfect software—no one can unless it does little or nothing—so the next best things would be to fix problems quickly and respond to requests promptly. So don't spread it around to the competition, but our secret weapon is over-the-top customer service.

What does it mean to be "over the top" with service? It means that email requests are handled within minutes, when possible, and within a couple of hours during crunch times and off hours. It means that we offer a 60-day money back guarantee without requiring any proof of problems—we do need your feedback though, so please tell us why our products didn't work for you. It means that we won't create ridiculous copy-protection schemes that make you jump through hoops to run our software on your computers. It means that we actually care about our customers and their well-being.

Now this doesn't seem so tricky, but the fact is that many, many companies blow it when it comes to customer service. They don't answer emails, don't give refunds, are suspicious about customers stealing licenses, and frankly, some even see dealing with customers as a burden!

The choice to offer great service or not is pretty simple. As a microISV, we can't afford bad press. Our marketing budget is tiny; therefore, we rely on word of mouth and comments posted on the web and in print. If the comments are negative, then we just bought some lousy advertising with our actions or lack thereof.

When I started developing MoneyWell, the personal finance software market on the Mac was pretty crowded but not so much that I was concerned about MoneyWell standing out. It has a pretty unique design and the envelope budgeting methodology was not widely implemented. By the time MoneyWell shipped, it felt like the competition had doubled and, in the nine months since, it's grown even more packed. To stand out, we needed more than just a great feature set, we needed a great company. Apple gets a ton of free advertising because it has a zealous fan base so why not try to duplicate that marketing method.

In order to balance my time for design and coding with handling support emails, I had to make sure I was very disciplined. First, I made sure my inbox was kept as close to zero emails as possible. I couldn't afford to feel overwhelmed by the sight of hundreds of emails. I became very good at email triage: deleting or filing emails that just didn't need to hang around and answering the short tech support questions quickly.

Next I watched for patterns of tech support questions and looked for solutions that didn't require me to repeat the same answer over and over again. Sometimes this meant changing the software and putting out a quick patch. Other times this meant posting an FAQ or tutorial on the website. I started trying to write detailed step-by-step instructions and then I found that these took up a lot of my time and confused some customers. The solution was to do video tutorials or screencasts.

People love our video tutorials and I love being able to redirect them to these before having to write lengthy email responses. Video tutorials are relatively quick to do. I write a script, record the voiceover and then record the software in action. It helps that my wife, Judy, is a trained voiceover artist, but the bottom line is that customers can watch a tutorial over and over until it sinks in. We produce it once and it get used thousands of times.

As an added bonus, these videos are also used for marketing MoneyWell.

This really is the key to excellent customer service: What can I do to empower my customers instead of making them always reliant on me?

The best service is when we don't have to do anything at all. Just by going to our website, an answer is found. Just by opening our software, the customer is notified of an update. Just by posting a question to our user forum, other customers jump in to offer help.

Service is also about honesty. If I make a mistake, I need to fall on the sword. Most people are going to rush to my defense when I don't try to make excuses and shield myself from criticism. I can't tell you how many times I've immediately apologized for a bug or a missed response only to have a customer write, "Hey that's fine. You're doing a great job. Thanks!" At times, the hardest thing for me to do is swallow my pride and take the blame but I know it's the right thing to do. All I have to think is, "Would I rather be right or have lots of happy customers?" Uh, let's see... yeah, gimme the happy customers.

When I hear other companies complain about their customers, I cringe. Even if those comments don't get back to your customer base, your bad attitude will seep through during your conversations with them. If you don't deal with people well, then you'd better hire someone who does. You can't afford to play the part of the "Soup Nazi" unless you have a product that has no competition.

I have built companies with 40 or more employees and it is difficult to keep the quality of service high as the layers between me and the customers increase, but I'm very determined this time to keep any loss of service to a minimum. Judy starting full time with No Thirst Software on July 1 will help immensely and we won't hire our first tech support person unless he or she is passionate about our products.

By focusing on our customers' happiness and well-being, everything we do is affected. We can't control our incoming cash flow directly because we can't force people to buy our software and affect sales directly. What we can do is take excellent care of our existing customers and optimize how we spend our time. I believe creating great software and supporting it with over-the-top customer service is the best way to grow this company.

Let me know if you see us dropping the ball on this and we'll get to test out how well I fall on the sword.

Peace.

Was It Worth the Money?

2008-06-24T17:43:00.001-05:00

I'm a little late with my wrap-up, but better late than never, right? And before my wife says it, I'll say it—this blog entry may be considered at geek level orange. So if you don't like the typed content, there are links to pictures throughout.

Going to Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) is by no means cheap. It's close to two grand before you add in airfare and a hotel room for six nights. So now that I've attended my first one, the most common question I get is, "Was it worth the money?"

Absolutely! Without a doubt. No question in my mind.

Your mileage may vary, but I got so much out of this trip that I will do it again in a heartbeat. Let me break it down a bit to examine the benefits for me.

Keynote Address: Out of everything at WWDC, this was only marginally better than watching a text feed from my computer at home. Yes, Jobs RDF (reality distortion field) was present, but not very powerful. Maybe because everything announced was already rumored. Maybe because the iPhone product demos went on and on and on and on. They counteracted any excitement that Steve built up.

Sessions: I was pretty lucky and picked many great sessions. Sure I can watch them later on ADC iTunes but the Q & A after each session is missing from those recordings and many of those were golden. Developers—smarter than me—were asking questions that I wish I had the wherewithal to ask at the time. I only felt the need to walk out of one session—and did. Thanks to the MacDevNet podcast that recommended it was okay to do that.

Labs: These were great. Having the ability to monopolize a Core Data engineer and bombard him with questions was invaluable. I only wish that I had been more prepared with questions and could have taken advantage of more labs. Of course, I have plenty of questions now that I didn't ask. Next year I'm taking a few days before WWDC to prep with code samples and questions for these labs.

CocoaHeads: Several top notch Mac developers put on presentations at the SF Apple store. Unfortunately, I arrived way too late to see anything but the top of the screen and the back of the SRO crowd. Another mistake I will not make next time around.

Parties: The parties were good, but not great for networking. Too loud and too crowded to really talk and get to know someone but lots of fun and helped me meet a few people that I only knew via Twitter or email. Apple's Bash was easier because it was outdoors. Still the best conversations happened at the more personal outings at local bars like the Chieftain.

Networking: Outside of the parties is where the majority of the networking happened. It started early on Sunday during registration. I saw a tweet that Fraser Speirs was sitting in the registration hall. Trying to be social, I approached someone that I thought looked like Fraser (I only know him from a tiny Twitter picture) and talked to the wrong person. Of course as I walked away and checked Twitter on my iPhone, Fraser tweets, "Some guy just asked someone two people down from me if he was Fraser Speirs." Nice. I'm outed on Twitter, so I owned up to it publicly and then went back to give Fraser a hard time for letting me walk right by him.

I knew at this point that it was going to be fun coordinating meetings over Twitter. Many of us posted information about what session we were in and where in the room we sat, along with the "shirt of the day" tweets. It's a good thing that Twitter reinforced their servers for the conference (Twitter tends to go down more than Yahoo's stock price) or we would have been lost.

It took every single day that I stayed in San Francisco to meet everyone on my list and I still missed a few. We talked between sessions, ate lunch together, shared code, and opened the door to several opportunities to connect our products. If the only benefit I got out of WWDC was the networking, I would say the trip was worth it.

MacDevNet Roundtable: Scotty held the first Developers Roundtable around an actual table (oval, not round, but that would be picking nits) and I was invited to sit at it. Doing a group podcast with the actual people present is so much nicer than negotiating for your chance to speak on Skype. Have a listen if you haven't already heard it. Besides me, Scotty hosts Dan Wood, John Fox, Daniel Jalkut, and Craig Syverson. Somehow, I even got labeled as the "fanboy" in it.

I did take some pictures with my handy-but-not-good-in-low-light iPhone. Next year I'm taking a real camera and getting better photos. I guess I have a lot of "next year" vows. I hope I remember to read this and do them.

Peace.

What's a WWDC?

2008-06-05T11:16:00.001-05:00

If you're a Mac software developer or a die-hard fan, you probably know that WWDC is Apple's World Wide Developer Conference. For developers, this is the place to go to suck in as much knowledge as we can in a five-day period. Apple hosts sessions to teach about development tools and related topics and they also give us labs to sit and talk to the people that designed the Apple's systems. It's geek nirvana!

It's also a chance for developers, who are spread around the world, glued to their computers, and typically carry on conversations limited to 140 characters at a time, to actually sit face to face and have a real conversation. This is my first time to go, so I don't know which I'm looking forward to more—the schooling or the socializing.

The Mac developer community is so giving and open and has helped me tremendously with my development of both Debt Quencher and MoneyWell. I'm not sure I've sold enough copies of both to pay for all the drinks I owe these guys, but I'll do my best to pass around my gratitude. I'm more excited than my daughter if she were told that everything is now available in pink... and free. Just yesterday she asked if we could get a ping pong table... in pink... with pink paddles... and zebra striped balls. The girl scares me sometimes.

The only difficult part is continuing to run a microISV company while I'm MIA. My wife, Judy, is set to come on board full time to work with me at No Thirst Software, but that doesn't happen until July 1, and I'll be at the conference from June 7 through June 14. This means that my average one-hour response time for support will suffer a bit. It will be worth it, though, because what I learn at the conference should greatly accelerate our two pending MoneyWell projects (2.0 and iPhone versions), which means more software goodness for our customers.

Even if you're not a geek, you should pay attention to Steve Job's Keynote on Monday morning. What he announces may very well make you want to create a new expense bucket in MoneyWell.

Peace.

The Lone American

2008-05-23T08:38:00.001-05:00

Scotty's latest MacSB Podcast is out and I'm the lone American on it. Sharing the mic space with me are Danny Greg and Fraser Speirs, as well as our host, Steve "Scotty" Scott.

We chat about Licensing and Serials and I learn a few British terms, like "wash up," which I thought was Scotty giving us a TMI moment but really he was just going to clean some dishes. Silly American.

Peace.

Hold on to Sixteen as Long as You Can

2008-05-08T14:50:00.001-05:00

Little ditty about Jack and Diane...

A favorite John Mellencamp song popped on the radio as I left for lunch today after shipping a new release of MoneyWell.

Two American kids growin' up in the heartland.

It followed a ZZ Top song and the two songs sent me back to my days in college. Everything was so possible. All the doors were wide open and we could do anything we wanted. We just had to try.

Jackie gonna be a football star...

None of us had any history of business failure or lost career opportunities. One of my best friends in college was a fellow Computer Science major and we constantly competed for top grades and the highest bonus for handing in our projects early. We also had hacked the college's computer system and had the passwords for all the operators and even created our own teacher account so we could have higher access rights. Fred Dartner was one of the nicest math teachers at Erie Community College—he never failed a single student. We were big fish in a very little pond.

Oh yeah, life goes on... Long after the thrill of livin' is gone...

But then the real world hits and the self-assuredness of academia fades as rejections and failures pile up.

Oh yeah, life goes on... Long after the thrill of livin' is gone. They walk on.

Many people forget that there are no limits to what we can do. We are only limited by our imagination, desire, and faith. That by serving the greater good, we too will be taken care of and will survive.

Jackie sits back, collects his thoughts for the moment. Scratches his head and does his best James Dean.

I was thinking back to a year ago, before MoneyWell 1.0 had shipped, and how I felt at the time. This was after many months of design and coding and I wasn't quite sure how it would be accepted by the marketplace. But there was a glimmer of hope that I was on the right track.

Gonna let it rock, let it roll. Let the Bible Belt come and save my soul...

Now with the release of MoneyWell 1.3.3, thousands of customers, and a vivid vision for what is planned in the 2.0 release, I feel rejuvenated. Full of hope. Ready to take on any challenge.

Hold on to sixteen as long as you can... Changes come around real soon make us women and men.

There was no fear when I started my first company in college—I had more guts than brains. There was a ton of fear present when No Thirst Software launched—I had more failures than successes. But now, it's almost two years since I started this blog and caught the bug to go out on my own again and I'm happier than ever.

Little ditty about Jack and Diane...

Because I know that anything is possible.

Two American kids doin' the best that they can.

Peace.

Still Sitting Comfortably After Shipping MoneyWell 1.3

2008-04-17T17:50:00.001-05:00

MoneyWell 1.3 is out the door. Elvis has left the building. The bell has been wrung. The bullet has exited the chamber and there's no stopping it now. That last analogy is rather appropriate for the process of shipping a new software release. I'm never really sure if I'm going to hit a target dead center or shoot myself in the foot.

When I update my website or even this blog, I can fix errors and the impact is minimal. On the other hand, a new application is downloaded by thousands of users, installed on their Macs, and is out of my control. Sure I have Sparkle, the coolest automatic update utility, built into MoneyWell, but that only notifies the user that there is an update and doesn't force an install. If there is errant code in the software, it's in the wild and potentially annoying customers or prospects—or even worse—corrupting data—my worst nightmare.

That's why creating a significant update to MoneyWell is such a gut-wrenching process for me and why I made sure there were plenty of active beta testers using it before it went live. Testing the 1.3 release was especially critical because it uses an update file format and has to convert existing 1.x MoneyWell documents. You really only get one shot at a conversion. If the data gets mangled, then the developer (a.k.a. me) gets his butt (a.k.a. my butt) chewed off in very nasty emails. Not that I care that much about what my posterior looks like, but as a software developer, I'm on it a lot and it helps if it's symmetrical and lacking divots.

This MoneyWell release is cool because it has some of the most requested features by customers, and those same features were ones that I've wanted in there from the start. When your customer base is on the same page as you, it's a beautiful thing. This causes an extreme sense of excitement and purpose during the first few stages of development. Life is good.

Then after working with a new release for a while, I forget how much has changed since the shipping release and I start panicking that I didn't put enough into this new version. I have to go read my feature list to calm down again.

If the development/testing process drags on longer than expected, as it did with 1.3, I start to get anxious and want to get it out the door. Naturally, I'm concerned that there are no significant bugs, which makes me want to hold onto it longer to test it more. These two conflict with each other and get me anxious about the release, which of course sends me back to wondering if this version is worthy enough to ship.

Thankfully, I had some amazing beta testers who reminded me constantly that this was a great release and they couldn't wait until it was done so that they could use it in production. They also caught three nasty bugs in the last 48 hours before I shipped and saved me from having to purchase orthopedic seating. Of course this also made me question what else I may have missed.

No matter how crazy I sound, I am experienced enough to know when I need to ignore myself and ship the software, so yesterday I shipped MoneyWell 1.3. After a mad dash of updating web pages, download sites, and pushing a press release out through prMac, I was able to breathe and check my foot for holes. So far, I am still sitting comfortably and I don't need new shoes.

If you haven't done so already, check out MoneyWell 1.3. It has dozens of new enhancements including scheduled transactions, multiple currencies, exchange rate conversions, new reports, and many more. And if you happen to already know all this, then tell your friends about it—just leave out the parts about how the guy developing it is a bit neurotic. I appreciate your covering for me.

Peace.

Mac Software Business: Year One Podcast

2008-04-08T13:56:00.001-05:00

Keith Alperin has just published his debut podcast and graciously invited me to be in on it. Gus Meuller of Flying Meat and Steve "Scotty" Scott of mamooba and the Mac Developer Network are fellow panel members.

The four of us take turns talking about the process of starting a Mac ISV along with our motivations and experiences. You'd never know that this was Keith's first time in this role, he did an excellent job. I on the other hand had a bad case of the "ums." Let's just blame it on the fact that all four of my brain cells were quite busy trying to finish MoneyWell 1.3.

Speaking of which, the beta for 1.3 is nearing an end. I'm working tirelessly to publish a release candidate this week. There's so many tasty new features in this release that I can't wait to experience the public response. I know it all can't be positive so I'll take gobs of new sales to balance out the potential critics. It's only fair, right?

Peace.

There's Something Different This Time

2008-03-23T14:08:00.001-05:00

This blog has been fairly quiet because I've been face down in development of MoneyWell 1.3, which is currently in beta test. Here's a peek at some of the changes:

Added scheduled transactions with user-defined repeat periods

Added ability to set a different currency for each account

Added currency exchange rate table and conversion

Added ability to hide buckets and accounts

Added ability to reconcile out of range transactions without affecting date

Added context menus throughout main window

Added ability to set bucket as optional on a transaction

Added ability to set date range for reporting

Added Transaction Report with subtotals

Added Bucket Summary Report

Added Tax Detail Report

Added Tax Summary Report

Added Combined Income Buckets option to Allocate Income

and many more...

It's shaping up to be a pretty nice release, but what has really impressed me is my beta test team. Posting a product for beta testing is a very iffy deal. When I post a beta, I hope that some testers will catch bugs I've missed and provide feedback on new features, but I keep my expectations low because people are busy and don't usually end up participating much in the testing. Once in a while, I'll get one or maybe two active testers.

This time it's very different. Not only do I have almost 50 beta testers, 20% of them are actively testing and giving me feedback. There are still a couple of stars that do the majority of the heavy lifting, but this time they are not alone. I'm thrilled and blessed to have such an enthusiastic group to make my job easier.

Not only am I getting excellent bug reporting and feedback, but I'm getting emails that are filled with words of encouragement and pats on the back. I couldn't ask for a better group. In previous companies, I've had employees that didn't give me this much time and effort. This is a public thank you to all those who are contributing to making MoneyWell a better product!

I'm pretty sure I know why this is happening: People respond to passion. They see that I'm not just building a product to earn money. They respond to craftsmanship and hard work. There are always going to be people looking for the lowest price or a "good deal," but that's not the customer base I want. I know that I'll lose them to the next lowest bidder and quality just isn't very important to that crowd.

Here's how to build a fantastic customer base:

Create excellent products that solve real problems

Care about the fit and finish and not just the features

Eat your own dog food—you should be using what you create so you feel your customers' pain when there are problems

Answer emails quickly and genuinely—don't send automated responses

Listen to your customers: You don't have to add every feature requested, but you should respond to why you won't add something (people will understand when you do something for the greater good of the customer base)

Be honest and don't be afraid to fall on the sword, "I screwed up and broke this release. It's being fixed in the next patch. Sorry for any trouble this has caused you."

You have to honestly care about your customers—the passion has to be real or you'll come off as a con artist

What has also helped in my case is this blog. People know more about my life, my history, and my ambitions for the future of No Thirst Software. They know that I'm in this for the long haul and that this isn't just a college sideline project to make a few extra bucks. There are six people in my family that depend on this company growing and thriving (and hopefully a few thousand customers care too).

If you want to have a great company, with great customers, you've got to go "all in."

Peace.

Christmas in March

2008-03-09T13:03:00.001-05:00

This past week, Apple announced iPhone 2.0, the iPhone SDK for developers, and a little thing called App Store. I believe that most, if not all, Apple developers were tuned into the live blogs posting details of the event as it happened. I know we crashed Twitter chatting about it during the show.

What is all this and what does it mean? You can read about the enterprise extensions for the iPhone coming in June (or watch the presentation—it's gorgeous in HD), but for me and many other developers, the big news was the SDK—our ticket to writing software for the iPhone. The App Store is how Apple will distribute our applications and it's pretty sweet too. There's been some quibbling about the 30 percent that Apple will take for handling the process of selling our products through App Store, but I'm fine with it because I happen to love the way Apple Downloads works now with the publicity it gives our software and that's only one tiny piece of what App Store does.

Basically, App Store will give our customers a simple way to find software we have published for the iPhone, purchase, install, and license it. Then, when new releases are posted, App Store will make sure our customers get the latest versions of our iPhone applications. It's a very clean concept and, since iPhone software is not going to be our main business, one less thing I have to worry about. I can focus on creating a very cool version of MoneyWell Mobile and hand off the rest to Apple. There are still plenty of questions about beta testing, trials, returns, and other phases of the development and sales process, but that hasn't dampened my excitement one bit! Just knowing that nearly 100 percent of all iPhone users will go to this one place to find iPhone software simplifies my life. Who needs to pay for Google Ad Words, which can easily add up to more than 30%, when they are already in the store?

I also think that iPhone 2.0 will storm the enterprise and replace a healthy percentage of RIM phones. There are analysts that claim the iPhone is too expense or still has security holes compared to the RIM Crackberry, but they are way off. They are underestimating the power of great software—and there will be thousands of great software products available when this new iPhone software is released in June. Even if the corporations don't buy phones for their employees, the iPhone will be pulled into the enterprise by employees that want to be more productive. This can easily happen without direct intervention of the IT staff because Apple is tying the iPhone directly to corporate Exchange mail servers and IT doesn't need to do any heavy lifting.

I can't wait to see what happens. It's a very exciting time to be a Mac developer! I feel like a kid at Christmas after finding out my parents just won the lottery!

I've got way too much work to finish on MoneyWell 1.3 to start playing with the SDK now (okay, I did make one sample application just for kicks), but all the latest tools are installed on my iMac and available when I'm ready to code and that's even more incentive to finish and deliver this release of MoneyWell.

What's in store for MoneyWell Mobile? It's too early give details but expect the iPhone version to make it easy to view and update your spending buckets while on the road.

Peace.

Chatting with Aaron, Marcus, and Scotty

2008-03-04T11:07:00.001-06:00

I had the privilege of being part of a Developers Roundtable hosted by Scotty. This roundtable podcast includes veteran Cocoa developer, Marcus Zarra and the man that taught many of us to write Cocoa applications, Aaron Hillegass. We were able to toss around our opinions about coding data storage on the Mac and Aaron does a fine job of depressing us by dangling something in front of us that we could have had instead of Core Data but don't.

Listen to it now at The Mac Developer Network.

Peace.

Dealing with the Business of Emotion

2008-03-03T11:53:00.001-06:00

Perfectionists are losers: "The problem is, most people don't understand that extremely high quality work usually results from a practice my father taught me from photography: bracketing.

Bracketing is a general technique of taking multiple frames of the same shot of the same subject using the same or different camera settings.

I used to think that professional photographers took award-winning shots with every click of the camera. As seasoned professionals, they surely did not have the same out of focus/finger in front of the lens or poor lighting problems that plagued my amateur shots, right? Wrong. Great photographers might pluck one great shot in the middle of 99 mediocre ones. They know that it is impossible to get the perfect shot in one try, so they take lots and lots of pictures of the same thing with the hope that one frame will come out perfect."

(Via Escape from Cubicle Nation.)

Pam Slim is the author of the above blog and, after having a baby and spending some time adjusting to the extra responsibility of a new child, she just recently returned to publishing her podcasts that go along with her excellent blog. I enjoy her blog, but hearing her podcast again reminded me of why I love it so much.

I've spent years reading books on business techniques, quality management, software design, and anything I thought would help me improve my ability to design, create, market, and sell my software and run my business, but the fact of the matter is that all this is useless if you don't have your emotions in check as well. Pam is that missing link to that other side of our business: Our emotional well being.

It's hard to wake up each day as a microISV owner knowing that I have to wear almost every hat in my company. There's tech support waiting for me, design work that I don't have crystal clear yet, code that is buggy, marketing efforts to promote, sales to track, and plenty of operations issues calling my name. If emotionally I'm not rock solid, all this can make me want to turn around and jump back into bed.

My biggest problem is feeling that if I don't do it all perfectly, then my business will come crashing down around me and all that hard work and effort are for naught. The truth is that I make daily (and/or hourly) mistakes but I'm not seeing piles of rubble and sales still continue to flow. I'm better about this perfectionist garbage than I was in the past. About 20 years ago, I was a classic perfectionist: I'd plan and design so much that nothing ever really got done. I've found a balance now but it's like any addiction—you're only in recovery, not cured. It only takes one tech support issue to hit one of my tender spots (i.e., features that I have wanted to implement, but haven't yet or flows that I haven't been able to make smoother) and send me reeling in panic. My brain shouts, "It's over! You didn't do that well enough and now that the flaw is exposed, all hell will break loose. I told you this day would come."

Yeah, I have a sick mind.

But this same drive for excellence serves me well also. I consider it a gift—just one that I have to feed, water, and keep trimmed lest it get out of control and consume the very productivity that it allows me to produce. I never thought of myself as an artist, because I can't draw, paint, sculpt, or play any instrument well, but after taking a step back and looking at how I create software and the mood swings that accompany that process, I think I may qualify. MoneyWell will probably never be seen as a great work of art, but I've rode some emotional roller coasters in the past year of its development that would have made van Gogh proud. I think these artistic fits of highs and lows will also, if ever properly documented, secure the title of "Saint" for my wife, given that she still enjoys hanging around with me despite the chaos that I generate.

Make sure you give Pam's post a full read and, if you haven't already, make sure you subscribe to her blog and podcast. Don't be fooled into thinking business is just about business. Business is personal, emotional, and takes more than facts to do right. Now excuse me while I go write some more code to quiet the voice in my head screaming, "It's too late, you're not going to finish 1.3 on time!"

Peace.

Taking Care of the 90 Percent

2008-02-27T20:21:00.000-06:00

I guess MoneyWell has hit the big time: it was [k'ed]. That means that some sad individual spent his or her time breaking the copy protection and posting it for the 10 percent to use without paying. I won't bother giving the thief or the download sites any publicity, but someone else was kind enough to point out that this had happened and I do appreciate that very much.

I've written before about my opinions on software copy protection. Yes, it is a necessary evil (just like the ancient adage: Trust in God, but tie up your camel), but copy protection shouldn't hamper honest users from enjoying a software product.

Because I believe that 90 percent of my customers and prospects are honest individuals and will happily pay the small amount I charge for MoneyWell and Debt Quencher, I'm not going to spend time trying to defeat the efforts of the 10 percent that are living a life of scarcity and choose to steal. The 90 percent deserve new features and software refinements and I won't deprive them of those by working on layers of protection that will be cracked by those that are determined to do so.

But this morning, I couldn't stop thinking about who these people are that steal software. They obviously think that just because software costs little or nothing to distribute, there's no physical theft. Excellent software takes months of effort to code, years of experience to design, and dedication to polish and perfect. What do the 10 percent do for a living? Would it be okay if someone where to take forty bucks out of their pocket every few hours? Does that sound fair? I can't help thinking that these people have been really hurt in their lives and they feel that everyone around them should be in pain as well. Or maybe, they are romanticizing this theft by envisioning themselves as a modern day Robin Hood. Let me tell you Bucko, the tights don't look good on you and the microISVs you're robbing from are not "the rich."

Does that mean that big iron companies like Microsoft and Adobe deserve it because they are rich? No. Absolutely not. There is no justification for software theft—it's wrong no matter how you hold your bow.

So to end this on a positive note, there are rewards to living a life of abundance—a life where there is always enough to go around and someone else doesn't have to lose for you to win. If you believe that by giving you will be rewarded tenfold, then it is true. We do more with our attitudes and actions to shape our own futures than the cynics of the world would like us to believe.

I've seen the proof of this in my own life, over and over again. When I live in fear of losing my money, time, or love, that which I most covet always slips through my fingers. When I love without requiring love, tithe without fear of want, or volunteer without expecting a reward, I am blessed with more love, money, and productivity than I expect or can explain. The math doesn't make sense (x - 10% = 10x), but somehow the test is easy to pass.

Live in the 90 percent and enjoy all of life's blessings.

Peace.

It's in There!

2008-02-22T11:37:00.001-06:00

I love creating new software releases—especially when I get to give customers the 1984 Prego response: It's in there!

"Hey Kevin, it would be great if we could select a different currency for each account. Is that planned for a future release?" It's in there.

"Is there any way to hide accounts or buckets that I no longer use?" It's in there.

"What about scheduled transactions?" It's in there!

With every new release of MoneyWell, the product moves closer to my original vision for it. Managing finances and cash flow was never easy for me—partially because I didn't like being told that I can't buy something for someone. I'm pretty good at denying myself stuff, but not so good when it comes to my family. I need structure and easy access to financial figures to help me behave myself and running a Quicken budget report didn't cut it.

My initial vision for MoneyWell was a single-window interface that could tell me quickly what I have to spend for each type of expense. The "envelope" system of allocating your income into various containers, each marked by a spending category, was ideal. If I could pull up MoneyWell and see immediately that I only had $20 left to spend on dining out, I would either be able to say, "No, we can't go out tonight" or see that there was more money left in the entertainment bucket that we could use for dining instead.

This part of my vision is complete and I know that I can't just look at my bank balance anymore and say, "Hey we have money! Let's get you that iPhone today!" I watch my buckets instead because managing cash flow is more than the act of asking the ATM how much is in there.

What's coming in the next few releases? More visuals about where cash is going and more planning tools for future spending. Now that I have today under control, I want to know what my spending is going to look like over the next 12 months or more. How much can we plan to spend for a vacation this summer? When are the big property tax bills due? How fast can we eliminate the last of our debt? Should we put more into savings or other investments?

Software and cooking are very similar. The trick is to put all this stuff "in there" without mucking up the look and taste of the sauce. What happens when you put too much salt in it? Or too much tomato paste? Or too much garlic... actually I don't think you can add too much garlic. Scratch that last example. For me, it's vital to remember what I was cooking in the first place. That's why MoneyWell 1.3 is simmering a bit longer. I keep running it through strainers and taking taste tests until I think it's ready to be served. I hope everyone enjoys the next course in the meal. I know I can't wait to serve it!

Peace.

Taming the Monkeys

2008-02-04T08:45:00.001-06:00

Running your own business can feel like you've signed up to babysit four hyperactive monkeys—especially as a microISV.

There's the sales/marketing monkey that constantly needs to be fed or he starts taking chunks out of you and you die a painful death. Then there's the operations monkey that wants the books kept in order and paperwork filed or he ties your shoelaces together when you're not looking and you end up doing a world-class face plant. And we certainly can't forget the support monkey that sleeps for a while and then wakes up with night terrors and blood-curdling screams. He's the one that will give you a heart attack if you don't attend to his every need.

Lastly, and most importantly for a software company, is the development monkey. This little guy is your favorite and the reason you started a microISV in the first place. You want to give him the most attention and normally he rewards you with much affection, but he's a bit psychotic. One moment he's all happy and content and the next moment he's pulling out your hair, throwing food (or worse) at you and giving you wet willies.

And all these little guys want to hang around on your back and shoulders all the time. It can be hard to find time for yourself and your family, but you have to do it. It's essential to your sanity and survival. The trick is to keep each monkey entertained on a nice rotating schedule so that they'll leave you alone.

My method is to revolve everything around development. I get up in the morning, check on how sales are doing, look at my support emails, answer any that I can quickly, scan my RSS feeds for news and get on to development. During think breaks in coding, I check the support emails and answer them. Sometimes I can't give a complete answer without more investigation, so I try to at least move an issue forward by requesting more details. This usually works out nicely and I haven't had to deal with many night-terrors sessions.

My sales and marketing tasks are usually saved for later in the day when my three teens are home. I need less focus for doing this work than coding so the interruptions by my kids aren't as bad as when I'm fighting off soggy fingers in my ears. Unfortunately, my carpeting is littered with impressions of my nose because I just don't want to tend to that operations monkey as often as he needs me.

One thing that has helped me tame a couple monkeys is my iPhone. It lets me run errands and taxi my teens to events and still stay on top of support and sales. I can also read my RSS feeds while I'm away from my computer and I feel less guilty reading news and articles. When I'm on my iMac, it seems wrong not to have Xcode as my current application. There's so much code to write (because software is never finished), that I need to give that little chimp as much time as possible.

Lately, I've been using Google's new mobile RSS reader. They updated the interface last month and it made it much easier to use on the iPhone. Unfortunately, it wasted some of my precious "between monkey" time because I couldn't quickly tell Google that I already looked at most of these articles this morning in NetNewsWire and I don't want to see them on my iPhone now—it only allowed me to mark a page of feeds as read.

Just this morning I read NetNewsWire + NewsGator Mobile in Brent Simmons' blog and discovered the joy of NewsGator NewsGator Mobile for the iPhone. Wow! I feel like I just I was given a huge gift of time. It syncs my two readers (along with my clippings) so I only have to mark an RSS feed as read in one place. I don't know why I didn't try this before. I know that this is one of the strengths of NetNewsWire and one of the reasons I bought a copy (yes, right before it was released as a free product, I paid for it. Buy high and sell low is my motto), but I just didn't get around to trying it.

This may not seem like a big deal to you, but it's pretty huge for me. I love reading and I'm a big fan of several bloggers and news sites, but I only give myself small slices of time between monkeys to enjoy this activity. With the added time savings of having my feeds synced on my iMac and iPhone, I can spend less time paging through read feeds and more time reading new stuff. Shoot, I may even be able to subscribe to some feeds I had to drop because they clogged up my iPhone Google Reader. My break times just got more fun. Thanks Brent!

I have to go now, the programming primate just hit me in the back of the head with something... and it doesn't smell like food.

Peace

I'm Really Not Good at Some Things

2008-01-29T10:36:00.001-06:00

Yesterday was a full day of visiting with my CPA and his staff to get my tax paperwork and corporate bookkeeping current. I really suck at managing IRS paperwork and dealing with corporation stuff. It's not that I can't figure it out or don't see what needs to be done, but given the option of putting some cool new features into one of my software products or reading through tax information, I'm afraid I'm always going to choose the former, so I'm always playing catch-up with the latter.

Now that would be fine if our government rewarded me for good intentions and gave me a break for being busy but, the last time I checked, that wasn't the case. They are rather fond of just tossing late fees at me.

So here's my "do as I say, not as I do" advice for fellow microISV owners (and small business start-ups in general): Get a really good CPA—one you are comfortable with and can trust—and do it at the inception of your business. And, if you're an immersive individual like me, outsource the corporate bookkeeping/paperwork so you can focus on what you do best. It's okay to spend money on help running your operations if it frees you up to do tasks that make you more money.

Hopefully, I'll take my own advice.

Peace.

Quicken taking on MoneyWell?

2008-01-19T14:14:00.001-06:00

Okay, this is too funny. I just got done being interviewed by Scotty about Battling Big Iron Software Companies as a Micro-ISV and then I read this article on MacRumors about Intuit rewriting Quicken to be more Mac-like. Like MoneyWell, it will be Cocoa-based and use CoreData for storage. Unlike MoneyWell, it will only be for Leopard.

Here's the quote that killed me:

Because the application is being built from the ground-up, it will initially contain only a subset of what is currently found in Quicken 2007 for Mac. While it will fully support cash-flow accounts (cash, checking, savings, credit cards), it will start with extremely limited support for investments, though you will be able to track your balances and holdings and calculate your net worth.

I'm sorry, I really don't think Intuit is looking at No Thirst Software and getting worried, but it's just a cool coincidence that yesterday I talked about how MoneyWell is young application and doesn't have as many features as Quicken, but takes better advantage of Mac technologies like CoreData and Cocoa and now this announcement comes from Intuit.

All I can say is bring it on!

Peace.

Chatting with Scotty

2008-01-18T19:09:00.001-06:00

I had the pleasure to be interviewed by Steve "Scotty" Scott today for his Mac Software Business (MacSB) podcast. If you develop software for the Mac, Scotty's podcasts are invaluable. In addition to this business focused podcast, he also produces Late Night Cocoa and Mac Developer Roundtable. I've learned so much from all of these!

You can find this newest podcast episode here on The Mac Developer Network site. I haven't listened to it yet, but I'm hoping something I said will be helpful to another developer. It's great to be able to give back a bit.

Thanks Scotty for making the interview so relaxing and enjoyable! It's gotta be your accent.

Peace.

Enlisting Digital Helpers

2008-01-14T12:18:00.001-06:00

I really love having to solve problems that come from too much business. I had a business partner one time that bragged one year about our company not having to pay taxes. I said, "You're excited about not making enough profit to have to pay taxes?!?! I think we have a problem here."

Since the last week of 2007, sales have doubled overall. Don't ask me why; I can't find a solid statistic to justify this but my best guess is that I used prMac to pump out many more press releases for the MoneyWell 1.2 release. It could be that it was a cumulative effect (as Guy Kawasaki likes to quote, "Let a hundred flowers blossom"). In any case, with increased sales (yea!) comes increase support requests (ouch!) and I haven't managed to sell off any of my teenagers, so my available time has remained static. You do the math.

There were a couple of potential solutions: I could either hire someone to help with tech support or improve my efficiency with better software. Since sales and support emails aren't really high enough to warrant a full-time tech person yet and I happen to write software for a living, I chose the latter.

I took a look at the most common support questions. There turned out to be two basic categories of problems:

"I didn't get my license email," and

"I can't figure out how to..."

Even though there were more "missing license" issues, each of these weren't very time consuming to handle and the solution was more technical and, therefore, more time consuming. The second issue could be solved by recording more video tutorials and the videos can be used for marketing as well as training so that's what I did first. The only hard part about doing videos is having to continually redo them because MoneyWell is evolving so quickly. Judy and I managed to get a few tutorials done over the Christmas break.

I tackled the first issue this past week. This is not a developer blog, so I won't go too deep into geek speak. From day one, I've used code from Lucas Newman (AquaticPrime) to generate a license file and attach it to an email to the customer. My web server takes care of this so that the customers don't have to wait on me to get their licenses. As soon as their payment clears, the email gets sent.

In theory, that should be all there is to it but in the age of spam, spam, spam, and more spam (cue the vikings), many people block emails with attachments—including MoneyWell and Debt Quencher license emails. Unfortunately, many customers don't even realize that their license has been blocked and wait days before letting me know that they have a problem. This was unacceptable so I had to get rid of the license file attachment on the email. The best way to do this was to have our software get the license directly from our web server.

It took a little effort to add a database back end and rework the emails, but I'm very happy with the result. Now when MoneyWell or Debt Quencher launches, the customer sees a "Trial Mode" window that also doubles as a way to get a license.

The customer simply enters the Receipt Number that is located in their confirmation email and MoneyWell locates and installs their license. No problems with spam filters, no corrupted attachments, and no loud vikings. It's all good.

Now I have more time for development and to handle the tech support issues that directly relate to the software instead of an email server. As a bonus, I also have more tracking and reporting ability for No Thirst Software sales activity.

Peace.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

2007-12-23T09:43:00.001-06:00

I can't believe 2007 is almost over. I'm still having to think about which year to put down when I write out a check (yeah, that's sad—but that's me). My Christmas wish is simple: I want to have thousands of new satisfied customers for Christmas!

That may be a tough one for the elves to hammer out, so I will have to take this wish over Santa's head. And it's really not a greedy wish, right? I am asking for "thousands of people" to be happy with MoneyWell and/or Debt Quencher. Shoot, this is almost like asking for world peace... just on a much smaller scale. It's a win-win situation if I can grow my company while helping customers to dig out from the spending they did over the holidays, right?

But seriously, I am feeling very blessed that No Thirst Software had such a great first official year. 2007 gave me the opportunity to build a company the way I wanted to and I've been blessed with so much positive feedback from our customers. There has been tons of support for the software and support we have provided, and this is only the beginning. 2008 is going to build on this solid start and grow even greater software.

I want to wish all of you a very Merry Christmas and the Happiest of Holidays! May you be blessed with awareness and appreciation of the many blessings that surround you and pour through your life.

Peace.

Gasping for Air (or MoneyWell 1.2 has been Released)

2007-12-13T08:48:00.001-06:00

For me, there's nothing more satisfying in business than releasing a software update. It's like holding your breath underwater and then, just when you think you can't hold it any longer, you break through the surface and enjoy a huge gulp of air. You're exhausted, but also energized and relieved to be able to breath freely.

After the release of MoneyWell 1.2, I did a ton of breathing yesterday and not much else. I tried, but it felt like I needed to just catch my breath.

When the testing is coming to a close and the help file is almost updated, the urgency increases. A press release needs to be drafted (and then reviewed by my wife because my first draft of almost everything sucks) and then rewritten. The website needs to be updated, all the download services notified, and their listings updated. Lastly, the XML file for the Sparkle appcast (the thing that tells all our existing customers that an update is available) is updated and everything goes live.

It's that anxious feeling you get when you know you're close to the surface and you just can't wait

one

more

second.

But today it's back to work. The website needs lots more content because MoneyWell has lots more functionality and there's more video tutorials to record. Check out the press release and tell everyone you know to try MoneyWell—because the second most satisfying activity in business is watching the sales roll in.

Peace.

Passion

2007-12-04T15:41:00.001-06:00

I tell my kids that once you find something to be passionate about, you'll experience joy in what you do. It may be your career, your mate, your spiritual life, an outreach program, or, hopefully, all of the above. No matter what you do, when you're passionate about it, then you'll find the energy and drive to do it better and it won't feel like work.

I've been blessed with an amazing wife who allows me to follow my passions despite the years of living with the insecurity of being self-employed. It would have been so much easier on her if I would have taken a more conventional path and had a steady paycheck and pension to rely on, but she married me and has been stuck with my ways.

There have been times in my life when I had the money and time to start my own company, but I just couldn't. Even after I had done it four times, I struggled at one point to do it again and I couldn't figure out why. The reason was simple: I wasn't passionate about anything at the time. For me, owning my own business is not about the money. I like earning money and I really, really, really like to spend it, but that's not the driving force for me. There needs to be a higher purpose.

With No Thirst Software, I feel a purpose. Debt Quencher is a simple solution to a very common problem of dealing with credit card debt. MoneyWell is a companion product that empowers people to control their spending. I have no medical degree, but in some small way, I am helping cure people of problems they are experiencing. Being in debt or having financial troubles can cause serious health issues and enormous pain, and helping to relieve that suffering in any way fills a need in me.

There's also a geekier side to my passion: I love when technology works well. I'm not a gadget freak, in fact, I'm very selective about my technology. That's probably why I'm such a fan of Apple products—Apple has a history of producing products that have elegant designs, are well-crafted, and are comfortable to use without training—even though they are high-tech products.

I recently added several features to version 1.2 of MoneyWell that I feel have elegant designs and are comfortable to use immediately. That version is now in beta testing so I'll find out soon if my beta testers feel the same way. It's hard for many people to control their spending. For some of us—like me—we just don't want to even know how much we spend because we'd have to change our behavior and that sounds like a drag. But with the latest version of MoneyWell, I'm excited about recording even my cash expenses. With MoneyWell, it's finally simple enough to do that I can get my lazy butt to do it.

It's been years since I've been this passionate about software development. It's a combination of being able to solve a pain in my life, being able to positively affect others' lives, and having the right tools and operating system. I lost my passion for writing Windows software when I had to spend most of my time coding to work around bugs and quirks in that operating system. Now with Mac OS X, I'm coding for a system that was developed by people with a passion for excellence.

It's a lot of work to design and write software, create websites, documentation, marketing materials, and the rest that goes with being a micro-ISV, but it doesn't feel like work to me. I wish that everyone could find a passion in their lives and experience this type of joy. Passion is an amazing blessing.

Peace.

MoneyWell Maturing Quickly

2007-11-12T17:21:00.001-06:00

I love the internet! Not so much for the shopping, surfing, and news gathering aspects, but for streamlining my business.

There is no way I could have created No Thirst Software ten years ago and have it run this lean. We were still shipping software on floppy disks and mailing everything. Updates were time-consuming, expensive, and a major hassle. There were several times that late testing caused us to trash a set of disks that came back from the duplicator and start over. There was no such thing as posting a patch for downloading and we certainly couldn't afford to do a second mailing.

Now I know some of you are thinking that we tested software better back then. You'd think so, but no. We just spent more money fixing our mistakes. My software today is tested much more thoroughly than it was in the past. I can run a beta test, where a select group of users get early versions of a software product, and give my testers daily updates as they report problems. Testers can give me problem reports several times a day by sending an email to a list that notifies all the testers of a found bug. It's a beautiful thing!

After shipping MoneyWell 1.1, a couple of problems were found. One had to do with Leopard and another with a specific type of OFX import file. Within 24 hours of hearing about these bugs, a patch was posted. Then another issue was found on Tiger and quickly resolved with another patch. Please understand that I'm not bragging about having to ship two patches within a week of shipping a product, but the fact that I had the infrastructure to do this is wonderful. This means that when customers have problems, I can fix them and alert everyone using the software immediately by updating a single file on my website (still lovin' your Sparkle, Andy!). I sleep better at night knowing that this is possible.

The ability to deliver software via a website posting gives me freedom to throw away the old model for maturing a 1.0 product. When shipping a product was expensive, we had to plan for 6- to 8-month delivery cycles (which always turned into 12- to 18-month cycles). This meant packing in enough features to warrant spending that much time in development and testing. Now? Fahgetaboutit! Let's talk 6-week delivery cycles for minor updates and shipping on time because we can cut features without feeling guilty. The missing ability will show up in a couple of months so it's no big deal.

Case in point: MoneyWell 1.0 was shipped the evening of August 31, 2007. The first minor release followed on November 7, even though there were delays for Leopard compatibility testing. MoneyWell 1.2 will be out before the end of the year and it will be a much more mature product than the original release. That's a 4-month cycle to mature a software product! This really blows my mind (yeah, okay so it's not hard to shake up my remaining half-dozen active brain cells—I'm easily excited lately).

Much of this has to do with the internet providing a rapid two-way street for information. Customers email me with ideas and requests or post questions on our user forum and I can start a dialog quickly to discover if design changes are necessary or if I simply need to re-prioritize features. There's a good amount of discipline required to stay on task with all this electronic and mental traffic flying by, but I wouldn't trade it for the dead silence of the old days—wondering if anyone has installed the latest update and whether or not they liked it.

The internet also helps me adapt quickly to the rapidly changing landscape of the computer software industry. As a Micro-ISV without a large staff, I need to constantly learn better ways to code my software, structure my company, and market my products. Most recently, I've stumbled upon Late Night Cocoa to improve my Mac OS X programming skills (excellent work, Scotty!) and I'm still hanging with the MacSB group and monitoring several blogs for the latter two.

What does all this mean for our customers? It means MoneyWell is quickly becoming an excellent product because my 25 years of software development is greatly amplified by the wealth of knowledge being shared on the net and the immediate feedback from each customer or prospect who uses it.

Peace.

MoneyWell 1.1 Is Out! (And I'm About To Pass Out)

2007-11-07T21:24:00.001-06:00

It's out the door! MoneyWell version 1.1 was released today and, frankly, I'm exhausted, thrilled, a bit nervous (did I test enough?!?!), and exhausted. Did I mention that I'm a bit tired?

So, I'll write more about this release later, but I just wanted to say that I had an excellent group of beta testers on this release of MoneyWell. Normally, I don't expect much from a beta test, but there were some very passionate users that caught several critical bugs I may have missed. Every developer should be blessed in this way!

Tomorrow is a full day of press releases, web site updates, and marketing. If I wasn't so exhausted, I'd start right now because it sounds like fun (seriously, it does!). That's what I like about being a Micro-ISV: I get to switch hats and keep from getting bored doing one task over and over.

Spread the word about MoneyWell!

Peace.

Leopard Bites My Beta

2007-10-31T15:08:00.001-05:00

I apologize for the lengthy delay between posts, but I've been face down in code trying to get the next release of MoneyWell finished.

MoneyWell 1.1 has just entered its beta test phase. This is the final step before a software product is released, which means everything is complete enough to have customers test it and give feedback. It's a bit of bad timing on my part, because Apple just shipped OS X 10.5 (a.k.a. Leopard) and customers found a couple of MoneyWell features that don't work right under Leopard. The fixes for these are just time consuming enough that releasing a patch isn't going to be much faster than adding them to the 1.1 release. This has added more pressure for me to resist adding one more feature and get this bad boy out the door.

If you're interested in checking it out, the MoneyWell beta was opened up to members of the No Thirst Software User Forum. Feel free to stop by the forum and join. This beta shows off some very critical new features, including: OFX/QFX import, password-protected documents, per-month spending plan amounts, and a real reconcile mode—a healthy chunk of what I had planned and pre-announced. I think these features will help more people make the choice to buy MoneyWell. It certainly won't capture everyone that looks at it though. I've found that many people expect MoneyWell to be clone of Quicken with a more Mac-like interface—it's not.

MoneyWell is not a cookie-cutter finance package. It doesn't look or act like most others and that fact alone causes some people to express disappointment with it and ask me to change the way it works. It's tempting to cave and toss in poorly designed features, but that's just not my style. I know there's no way to make everyone happy, but what I can do is trust that the design I've started with is good and certain customer suggestions will fit with that design, while others will not. Certain customers will love MoneyWell and keep it, while others will decide to use something else. It's so hard for me to say "no" and watch people walk away, but I truly believe the software I create is better because of it.

The upside to sticking to my guns and focusing on my design philosophies is that I can create user interfaces that work perfectly for my needs and, hopefully, many others will agree that it's worth learning some new workflows to improve their lives as well. A good example is the new reconcile feature. It's not all that radical, but—for me—it fixes all the complaints I had with Quicken's reconcile.

I didn't want to have to look at a subset of my transactions list in a separate window, but I wanted to easily see what transactions fit into the reconcile date range. I also wanted MoneyWell to tell me if those same transactions added up to the statement difference so I could just check them all—with one click please. Lastly, I wanted to be able to easily review previous reconciled statements.

Oddly enough, I got what I wanted. Clicking a single button switches the main transaction list into a reconcile mode that, instead of hiding transactions not in the statement date range, fades them to gray. It also uses red and blue rounded rectangles to show which transactions are reconciled and which open, respectively. Helpful graphics appear to indicate when I can reconcile the statement using one click and when I am done reconciling. It's also easy to quickly pick a previous statement from the pop-up list and review it. It's amazing: Almost like this developer could read my mind!

I've got to get back to coding, but know that MoneyWell's release schedule will continue like this: rapid releases with significant, well-designed features. Keep sending me your requests and I'll keep working to find a cool way to implement them.

Peace.

P.S.: One of the great rewards of being a Mac developer is being accepted as a member of the generous developer community. Code sharing is very common and I've learned so much from other developers. One such developer is Joe Goh. He liked my graph in MoneyWell and asked if I would share my code with him. I did, he made some massive improvements, and shared right back. Check out the video of his new release of Phone Journal. You'll see a really slick rewrite of the MoneyWell graph that will surely affect future visuals in MoneyWell. Thanks Joe!

Are You Offended by the "F" Word?

2007-10-21T14:11:00.001-05:00

Lee Falin just posted a blog entry that's sure to stir up some controversy. He's suggesting that we can communicate better with out the use of swear words and offensive language.

I agree and I support Lee's position 100 percent. For me, this is a no-brainer. I am forced to dig deeper and stretch my vocabulary if I avoid the easy road of cursing to get a reaction. The analogy I like to use is that eating fast food is very similar to cursing. The more often we consume fast foods, the faster our health will degrade. Our palate becomes numb to fresh, healthy foods and we desire the fatty, salty menus instead. We even find ways to defend eating fast foods: "I don't have time for healthy meals."

I make no excuses: I eat at fast food places often because I'm lazy about making lunches and I don't schedule time to take better care of my body. It's a constant battle for me to eat healthier because I've damaged my own palate from constant abuse of tacos, burgers, and fries. Now I'm paying for it with tight jeans and more frequent health issues.

Language is the same. We can choose to take shortcuts with offensive language or we can work a little harder and find a richer vocabulary to express our emotions. The more we swear as a writing technique, the less we'll work to find alternatives. Cursing numbs our brains and encourages greater sloth.

This is not why I'm writing this entry though. I'm more concerned about the first comment to Lee's post. Jonathan Wight says:

While I can kind of appreciate your motive, you really lost what little sympathy I had as soon as you dismissed the argument by referring to your “higher power”. Personally I find discussion of personal beliefs and opinions in technical blogs annoying and often (as in this case) offensive.

So the "faith" word is offensive in a tech blog? You can talk about your personal motivation for writing software or creating a micro-ISV as long as you don't bring religion into the blog? That's a disturbing stance.

The only thing that keeps me focused on creating better software is my faith. I would never have been able to leave my well-paid, salaried position and head out on my own without prayer and the support of my friends at my church. This is not truly a "technical" blog like the others Lee points out, but it is a blog about what motivates my development of Mac software and the goals of my venture.

We're in serious trouble if we offended by a quote from the Bible more than a blog peppered with f-bombs. I promise, you don't have to convert to my religion just because I talk about it any more than I would feel the need to switch to your brand of energy drink or style of music that fuels your development efforts.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to force myself to eat some fresh fruit.

Peace.

Why Wouldn't You Give a Refund?

2007-10-17T09:05:00.001-05:00

I'm amazed when I hear from people inquiring about MoneyWell that XYZ company wouldn't give them a refund. To be honest, part of me wants to keep quiet about this and not help my competition improve, but I'm not sure anything I'd say would matter anyway.

I think that some businesses feel that the customer is trying to screw them by using the software and then wanting their money back. It's a bit like the argument for stronger copy protection on software. I don't think that you can stop real software thieves, which means you're only hurting your honest customers. Unfortunately, so many people feel attacked personally when someone takes advantage of them like this. It's really not personal; some people don't feel guilt stealing software and other people legitimately need to return software because it doesn't work for them.

But what if they are getting a refund and continuing to use the software? So what? Again, some people don't feel guilty about using what they don't own, but I believe that 90 percent are honest and I'm not going to ruin their experience with my company over the 10 percent that are dishonest.

And let's face it, if you burn someone over $40, they are going to complain about how XYZ company screwed them and how your company sucks to dozens of people—or worse thousands because they posted rants on the internet—is it worth the money? Was all that bad press worth whatever you charged them for your product? Not for me.

That's why No Thirst Software offers a 60-day money back guarantee and on day 61, you're still not going to get a fight from me if you want to return one of our products. I'd rather win a customer over with great software and stellar service than quibble about contractual obligations. If you don't like our software for some reason, tell me and I'll try to improve it. If I can't make you happy that way, then simply ask for your money back. I've had some great emails from customers who were amazed and thrilled at how easy it was to get a refund from No Thirst Software and they may just tell a few friends about that. It sure beats the scary comments I read about other software companies that didn't give a refund.

So if you're a Micro-ISV and you're not making it easy for customers to get refunds, think about what you are doing to future sales for a few bucks today. And, if you happen to be one of my competitors... just keep up the good work.

Peace.

I Love Elegant Solutions!

2007-10-13T16:20:00.001-05:00

I'm not lazy, but I can't stand to do repetitive tasks. They drive me nuts! When I first learned to program, my dad asked if there was some way to type out labels for an event he was running on that "fancy computer" at the place I worked. I said, "Sure, we have a fast 40 characters per second daisy-wheel printer!"

Now, I could have sat down, opened the Scripsit word processor on our cutting edge, TRS-80 Model I computer and just typed the 40 or 50 labels, but the thought made me cringe. It's doing the same thing over and over and over again. So, my solution was to write a program to do this mundane task.

The program took me longer to write than actually typing the labels would have taken, but I enjoyed writing the program and hated the thought of repetitive typing (this was before copy and paste so I really would have had to type each one over and over). For me, this was a more elegant solution.

Fast forward a quarter century and I had a similar problem while working with importing banking transaction into MoneyWell. Most U.S. financial institutions use the QFX/OFX file standard. These formats are better than the ancient QIF format and provide more information to MoneyWell, but both are total different and my QIF parser code is useless with them.

After reading the OFX specification (yes, of course I read all 665 pages—it was gripping prose) I thought I could use nice set of Apple routines to read these files since they looked to be in XML format (this is is arguably the most common format for transporting data between systems on the internet). Unfortunately, the older QFX format predated XML and dashed my hopes of not needing to write my own parser. It sounded mind-numbingly boring to have to do this, so I solved it by procrastinating and looking for someone else's code as a solution. Of course I didn't find any code that I liked or trusted.

I stared at the QFX files and spec until it struck me that the SGML format of these files is very close to XML, it just needed a little reformatting. How hard would it be for me to write code to do this? As it turns out, not very hard. It took about 20 lines of code. How perfect! That wasn't boring at all; instead it was a fun challenge to write a small efficient routine for this conversion and, when I was done, I had XML formatted information to feed to Apple's framework.

The non-technical summary is that I thought I had to deal with many different versions of files to import transactions into MoneyWell, but through a little thought (and a huge aversion to boring work), I was able to consolidate these into one file type. MoneyWell now reads all popular variations of U.S. bank files. It feels good to have found an elegant solution!

I may even release version 1.1 early with a limited set of this new functionality since it is working so well already. We'll see how well the testing goes.

Peace.

P.S.: Due to popular demand, No Thirst Software now has a user forum. Check out our support page for more information.

Video Killed the Manual Star

2007-10-08T12:57:00.001-05:00

The title is a play on an old video from The Buggles. I guess I'm showing my age to say this, but I remember being in college and seeing this video when MTV first signed on. It's a long, long, long time ago when MTV actually played videos. Don't get me started.

Anyway, that's not the topic of this entry. The topic is about using videos to educate customers. I love Apple's video's showing off the iPhone features and I wanted to do videos to show off MoneyWell (Debt Quencher could probably use a couple too, but it is much less complicated to use and needs them less). Then I read "RTFM is so over" by Bob Walsh and I knew I needed to do it now. Bob's article reminded me that SnapzProX makes it easy so I had no excuses.

He even had a follow-up article about posting your videos to YouTube. What a cool idea! Use Google's bandwidth and maybe get some viral marketing out of it. This pushed me to get it done. Actually, this pushed me to talk to Judy about it and she pushed me to get it done.

Recording the video was drop dead simple, but I found that I needed to write a script first (because I kept screwing it up). This also made it easier for my wife to do the voiceover for the video while I ran MoneyWell. It's really nice to have someone in-house who has worked as a voiceover artist.

When I posted our MoneyWell video to YouTube, the results were less than stellar. The problem is that YouTube shrinks the video dimensions down so much that it's hard to see the text. This is fine if you're zoomed into a small area of your program or you don't have to show fine details, but we couldn't do that with MoneyWell. I tried the SnapzProX function that pans the screen with the cursor, but even with the smooth pan on, Judy said that it still made her dizzy and sick to her stomach. This made me want to play it back a few more times just to drive her crazy, but I didn't... I only played it once more.

So, I ended up leaving the video on YouTube, but I'm hosting a better resolution version on my own server. We'll see how heavy this becomes on bandwidth and if I need to change anything in the future. I definitely want to get more of these videos posted. I agree with Bob that people don't like reading manuals and step-by-step web tutorials can be hard to follow. We live in a great time of simple recording tools and high bandwidth. Praise God for broadband!

Peace.

Perfect Fit Software

2007-10-06T14:14:00.001-05:00

After a few days of solid pushing, I've given birth to Debt Quencher version 1.2. This is an update I've been wanting to ship since last month, but MoneyWell consumed all my time. It's a good thing I didn't ship it before MoneyWell, because I ended up using much of the cool new MoneyWell code for Debt Quencher.

Debt Quencher is in some ways a perfect application. No, it doesn't do everything that users have requested, but it does what it does in a very direct and simple manner that makes it friendly to use. I love applications that do what they are supposed to and don't make you climb over a clumsy interface overloaded with half-baked features.

One such "perfect" application is Coda from Panic. It certainly doesn't have all the web design tools of Dreamweaver, but it made my life so much easier yesterday because it just works so cleanly. The interface is pristine and well thought out. The features are ideal for hand-coding web sites—something that I never thought I'd enjoy as much as I do. After using Coda, I have no desire to subject myself to any other web tool. I don't know if I could have updated both the Debt Quencher help file and the web site in half a day if it weren't for Coda. Its $79 cost is also in my price range (actually I paid $69 because I already owned Transmit 3).

Another "perfect" application is MarsEdit from Red Sweater Software, which I'm using to write this blog entry. It too is priced right at just under $30 and fits a singular task wonderfully. I didn't even know I needed this application. What's wrong with editing blogs with a browser? It works just fine, right? It does, but MarsEdit makes it better. It took reading about several bloggers who depend on MarsEdit in order to get me to try it. Now I can't imagine having to deal with the clunky browser-based editors. Just because you can do something without buying the right tool for the job, doesn't mean you should subject yourself to that torture.

It's like the time that this guy rated Debt Quencher poorly on MacUpdate because he said he could do the same calculations in a spreadsheet. Sure, you could do that, but the results aren't close to being equal. First, you'd have to know how to calculate credit card interest, then create some fancy equations to evaluate the best method, plus format the worksheet nicely so it all is there on one page, and in the end you don't even have the nice reporting. Why bother? Debt Quencher is $15. I just spent more than that feeding Chipotle burritos to my two boys.

MoneyWell's a bit trickier to keep right-sized. There are plenty of features that go along with managing your finances and I can think of a good argument for including 80% of them. So the trick here is to make MoneyWell feel like these other applications, but give it more depth. Conceptually, this isn't a problem for me. In my head, I have most everything worked out; but then again, in my head I'm still a 22-year old developer than can eat a whole pizza without gaining a pound. In reality, the burrito I inhaled last evening probably will keep me from donning my favorite jeans comfortably and if I'm 22, then Ronald Reagan just won his second term as president.

There are plenty of other applications that are perfect for tasks like LicenseKeeper and even larger apps like the iWork suite, but my point is that we need to be picky about our software choices. Demand tighter, more focused applications. Don't put up with feature bloat! Find software that is a perfect fit for your task.

Speaking of bloat and perfect fit, I really need to jog or something. Seriously, the pants are way too tight after spending months sitting in front of this computer writing code. Maybe my next project should be a program to manage my eating and exercise. Hmmm... maybe after a few more releases of MoneyWell.

Peace.

It's All About Balance

2007-10-02T12:09:00.001-05:00

Running a successful micro-ISV (a small independent software vendor) business is all about balance. I have to be very careful about not getting trapped in any one activity too long.

For example, I am working very hard to build a reputation as a responsive software company, so tech support emails are high on my list each day. I try to cycle in time to answer questions during my breaks from coding or design work. But I don't want to be stupid and answer the same question over and over again, so I have been building tutorials for MoneyWell. But I can't spend too much time immersed in these because there is code to write.

And, there are two products now for No Thirst Software, so I have to balance out my coding time between MoneyWell and Debt Quencher. The latter is the primary target for code right now because I owe those customers an update. There are some bug fixes, a few small features, and a revised look to match MoneyWell a bit more. On the right is a sneak peek at the new icon I designed for Debt Quencher.

Now I'm no graphic artist (as many of my developer pals remind me... often... sometimes too often) but I'm not organized enough to outsource this process yet (you have to know what to ask for) and the company isn't producing enough cash flow to warrant hiring a person to spend quality time with me to dig ideas out of the scrambled egg, gray-matter that passes for my brain.

Oooo... cash flow! That's a huge balancing act. My company (finally) paid the bills last month, but that's no reason to get cocky and think that this will be the monthly norm from here on out. There was a lot of marketing splash last month with MoneyWell because of its top billing on Apple's downloads website. I don't have that prime real estate anymore so I have to assume that I will need to start building a war chest for the dry months. This company was inspired by the design of Delicious Monster, shortly after I finished listening to Wil Shipley's now famous WWDC speech, and it has very little overhead, but there are still operational costs because this is not a part-time business. No Thirst Software is my only job and I have no desire to update my resume at this point. That's why I have designed it to go the distance and weather any storm the computer market can throw at it; short of Apple going belly up, but let's not even think about that. <shudder>

Where was I? Oh yeah, balancing the multi-tasking. Many micro-ISVs are one or two people in size so many hats are worn every day. We have to manage marketing, track sales, handle returns (which are a huge opportunity to build future relationships), update your website, keep the books current (get a CPA for this or you'll hurt yourself worse than a razor blade taste tester), take care of support issues, and maybe even write some software.

This last item is obviously the trickiest, but not for the reason you may think. It's easy to write software—millions of people do it all the time. It's harder to write great software and harder still to write great software that has a future. For software to be sustainable, it has to solve a problem in a market space with a significant number of consumers and have a good balance between features and interface. Why is the iPhone so revolutionary and successful? Not because of its feature list (just ask Nokia), but because of the interface used to expose its features. When I design software, I think of the task that needs to get done, prototype an interface, and then spend the rest of the time trying to remove as much of that interface as possible. It's almost as hard as getting my teenage boys to clean their computer desks (almost).

In addition to working on new releases, I have to balance the effort spent on feature releases and patches. When a bug crops up in the wild and the tech support emails start piling up, an urgent patch may be necessary. This derails a feature release for a bit, but the only alternative is to write bug-free software and I don't think that's possible given the complexity of operating systems these days. It's just best to plan time in your release schedule for a patch or two after the initial delivery and be fast with coding, testing, and shipping updates.

And, finally, this business balancing act comes third in my life. I was taught by a sales trainer, in one of my first jobs selling table appointments (china, crystal, tableware, and cookware), to always put faith and family before finance. He said, "My sales team can't be miserable in their personal lives and then come to work and be successful. Go home and spend time with your family." Coming from a guy that could sell carpeting to a tap dancer, I thought that was pretty generous advice and so I've held onto it—tightly.

I know I have my balance correct when I feel like I've fit a week's worth of activities between sunrise and sundown and yet I'm not exhausted. Man, I love those kind of days!

Peace.

Where Did the Name "No Thirst" Come From?

2007-09-28T16:42:00.001-05:00

Back in early 2003, my wife, Judy, and I were consuming self-help tapes and dreaming of a brighter future. I was emotionally drained from working as an employee for a company where I was once a founding partner and we were drowning in debt. The wellness industry was exciting because we were trying to get back in shape (in more ways than one since wellness covered physical, emotional, mental, financial, and spiritual health). We thought that there must be a way to help others heal and improve their quality of life as we helped ourselves.

One day, Judy was thinking about "wellness" and was led to the scripture story about Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well. The key part of this Gospel from John is in chapter 4 verses 13-14:

Jesus answered and said to her, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."

NoThirst.com started out as a small wellness site with articles about improving spiritual, physical, and emotional health, but never really grew to fulfill our dreams of helping thousands of people. In early 2006, I was sick and tired of being in debt and of performing a job I no longer enjoyed. This was the incentive I needed and I vowed to do whatever it took to turn around our finances and find joy in my work. The first step was to stop our financial bleeding and get some controls in place.

We read conflicting opinions on the best way to eliminate debt. Some said to pay the lowest balance first, others proposed getting rid of your highest payment first, and some wanted the highest interest cards paid before the rest. Just paying a random amount (or at times the minimum payment) on our credit cards wasn't much of a plan. I couldn't find a program that easily solved this problem, so decided to create one. For years, my career focused on building Windows software, but my heart's desire was to create software for the Mac. It had been almost 20 years since my last Mac shareware program was sold and it was invigorating to be writing cool software again. We re-branded the NoThirst.com site as No Thirst Software and released Debt Quencher in October 2006 under our new company.

Soon afterward, I felt a push to create another personal finance software product and, again, it came out of personal need. Judy and I had been married 23 years, but we had yet to develop and stick to a workable budget. Of course, this contributed to our debt problem, despite using the budgeting tools in Quicken over the years. Both our parents had used the envelopes method for budgeting, but that wasn't going to work with debit cards and checks in our virtually cashless society. Many products on the market claimed to help control spending, but nothing came close to doing the types of things I envision for MoneyWell.

I have to give all the glory to God for both these products, but especially for MoneyWell. I'm not quite sure how the design ended up being clean enough to get people excited about the product because my original screen layout was not at all what we sell today. My prayer is that I can touch thousands of lives with No Thirst Software and ease their financial pains while I continue to provide for my family with this venture.

Peace.

P.S.: This is also posted on the No Thirst Software site.

What's Coming in MoneyWell 1.1?

2007-09-26T10:32:00.001-05:00

Everyone wants to know what's coming in future releases of MoneyWell. I think that's a reasonable request. We all have a natural curiosity and a desire to know that the software we buy has a bright future and will grow to solve more problems for us.

Now the experienced software developer in me is screaming, "Shut up! Don't promise anything that's not already in final testing. Do you want a Longhorn/Vista disaster on your hands!?!? Geez, have you learned nothing from Bill and Steve's joyride over the software precipice?" But I'm thinking, I can talk about some of the plans. I mean, what can it hurt to let you peek behind the curtain a bit, right? Wow, that voice in my head is really loud and annoying. Okay, here we go...

OFX/QFX Support: I wanted this in 1.0 because I have a ton of transactions per day and QIF support is marginally okay for bringing bank transactions into MoneyWell for me. I've also had several requests for comma-delimited file support from Europe and Canada, this type of import may not make the first update but it will not be forgotten.

Duplicate Transaction Detection: This goes hand-in-hand with the previous pain. I don't want to have to delete duplicate transactions by hand and neither does anyone else. (If I'm wrong about this and you do enjoy boring, repetitive tasks, please contact me about being a beta tester.)

Account Reconciliation: This is another feature that was cut from 1.0 to get it out the door. How are you supposed to track all your transactions if you can't reconcile your account to make sure none are missing? Of course this is coming.

Printing: We love paper! Back in 1986 when the Mac was supposed to help us create the paperless office, we started the greatest increase in personal printing in all of history (and it's not slowing down). You won't see a huge array of reports, but you will be able to get a nice-looking printout of your filtered transactions. More diverse reporting will come in the future.

Per Month Planning: Here's another sliced outta 1.0 feature because I couldn't get the interface working the way I wanted. With this you'll be able to set a unique spending plan amount per month per bucket.

Repeating/Pending Transactions: There's lots of code in MoneyWell already for this and it hurt to rip it from 1.0 so I'm going to work hard to get it into the next release.

Money Flow Editing: Having rollovers and money flows automatic is very nice, but there have been enough customer scenarios already to warrant adding the ability to change dates and amounts of these operations.

Enhanced Transfers: Allow transfers to be created/changed from the transaction detail. This will allow you to use transfers in a more flexible manner.

Exporting: This is a long shot for the next release, but if it misses, it will be high on the list for the next release.

Okay, that's plenty of rope to hang myself. I think I'll add a disclaimer just for good measure.

Disclaimer: Remember that none of these features are guaranteed to be in the upcoming release (or any release for that matter) and I have the ability to edit this blog entry in the future if anyone tries to use this information in any sort of extortion scheme.

Just know that my primary concern is the smooth operation of MoneyWell: Jamming a bunch of poorly executed features into software doesn't make it better, it makes it Windows Vista. (Did I just say that out loud?) My secondary concern is prompt delivery of an update: I want to have this out by December so I will cut what I have to so this will happen.

Now, feel free to pray that most of these make the release and I don't regret this curtain peek in a couple of months.

Peace.

Business Decisions

2007-09-23T11:13:00.001-05:00

First let me say that I released MoneyWell 1.0.3 yesterday and I'm ecstatic about it! The release is a very nice version, but I'm more excited that it is out the door so I can focus on a patch for Debt Quencher and the next release of MoneyWell. It took me longer to release this patch than I wanted, but sometimes you just don't have control over decisions like that—you have to hold off shipping software until the bugs are fully squashed and you can't do anything else because customers are in pain. I hate knowing that my software could cause anyone any pain so this decision was a no-brainer—get the patch done!

Other business decisions aren't so cut and dried. Deciding the best way to market your products or handle the sales or when to bring on new employees is tough stuff. There's no single right answer. Even now I have to make decisions about my time. How much should I spend updating the website? Should I explore new ways to market my products? Is my time better spent writing code for new versions? How shall I punish my daughter for trashing the kitchen last night while I slept?

Okay, that last one has little to do with business except that I run my company out of my house and the war zone that used to be a fairly clean kitchen is a huge distraction. So let's put a pin in that one and get back to it later.

For every other business of mine, I've had a partner or two. This meant that business decisions were either a tad easier (you handle that one) or much, much harder (I really don't think we should go that direction). Now that I get to make the final decision, the business of business is much more fun for me. My focus has always been on making great software and providing fantastic customer service. That may sound simple and obvious to most of you, but over the years I had to fight battles over compromising functionality to appease strategic alliance partners, supporting craptastic versions of Microsoft Windows (we really should support Windows 95 in our new 2005 release), staffing and outsourcing, and my biggest fight: designing better copy protection.

If you've read my earlier blog posts, you know I despise copy protection. It's one of those necessary evils in the software business, but I don't want to spend all my time fighting the bad guys who try to get free software, which in turn, punishes the good guys who are my customers waiting for cool new features. Now I've been able to control that decision and put just enough protection in my products so the honest folk will get a gentle nudge to pay for the product but after that, they just don't have to deal with it. There's no business partner screaming at me to plug more holes to stop the software theft.

To be perfectly frank, I really do have a partner this time; but my wife, Judy, is still working her full-time job so she's more of a silent partner. Hah! (the water I was drinking almost came out my nose) I guess that's a bit of an oxymoron. Judy is anything but silent and I thank God for her strong opinions. She has saved me from making stupid decisions more times than I've had to yell at the kids to do their chores. The difference is that she trusts my years of experience in the software business and believes that I have learned from my mistakes. I know that she has our best interest in mind when she challenges one of my choices or suggests a new direction and I have learned that she is very skilled at presenting an alternative perspective. When there is a high degree of mutual respect between partners, business decisions are easier to make and delegate.

So it's the day after the patch and the dark valley that was last week—when I couldn't figure out how to solve a couple of frustrating bugs—is over and I'm ready to make some decisions and write some new code. Life is good.

Peace.

Day 20 - It's a Bit Surreal

2007-09-19T10:10:00.001-05:00

It seems longer than 20 days since I launched MoneyWell. So much has happened so quickly that I'm struggling to keep it all in perspective. Maybe it's because the desire to have my own software company has been burning in my heart for so long. To have it now be a reality is almost surreal.

I started working on Debt Quencher in January, 2006, which at the time was called "Zero Debt" but I couldn't get close to that domain name. By October, I had a finished product and I was deciding if I should risk my financial security—or at least what little there was at the time—on another start-up. After much prayer and thought, I went for it.

Now 20 days after releasing MoneyWell, the flagship product for No Thirst Software, I'm actually paying the bills without the aid of a business loan. The reality is just setting in.

There is much to do still. I've had to change some design patterns in MoneyWell (tech speak for redoing whole segments of code) to get around the bugs that popped up and caused me to create a third patch for the initial release and I'm not done with that yet. Then there's the 1.1 release that's crying for my attention. Lastly, I'm dying to create additional tutorials and add enhancements to my web site. I don't see any boredom in my near future.

Due to popular request, I'll talk about what's planned for MoneyWell 1.1 in an upcoming blog entry.

Peace.

It's a Marathon, Not a Sprint

2007-09-13T19:49:00.001-05:00

You know the high you feel when you devour six chocolate bars and then wash 'em down with an energy drink? You're so wired that you can conquer the world!

And then 45 minutes later you're depressed enough to install Vista on your iMac.

Extend that feeling about a week and you have the MoneyWell product launch. Every day was a rush of sugar and caffeine seeing 18 to 21 thousand downloads each day and then, after losing the Apple place of honor, it dropped to around a thousand. I can hear B.B. King growling, "The thrill is gone baby..."

Where is that friggin' Windows CD anyway... (Don't worry, I don't even own a copy of Vista. The last Microsoft OS I bought was Windows 2000.)

So, I'm working on MoneyWell 1.0.3 to cure the problems I let slip by in 1.0.2. This patch is getting double the testing because I hate feeling good about a fix that isn't a fix. After this is done, I have some FAQs and tutorials to post to the website and a patch to put out for Debt Quencher.

Then it's on to MoneyWell 1.1 development. Just thinking about it is like having a mouthful of chocolate!

Peace.

P.S.: Thanks to Paul Robinson for the interview. I'm honored that he took the time and blog space to record my less than mainstream thoughts and comments.

It's Out (With 1 Hour to Spare)

2007-09-11T23:07:00.001-05:00

Just under the wire, I released MoneyWell 1.0.2 (39) this evening. Bugs have been swatted and small features added. Overall, it's a pretty nice patch (if I do say so myself). Run MoneyWell and you should get an update notice that looks something like this:

Version 1.0.2 (39) changes:

Added user preference "Localize date for QIF import"

Added ability to revise the initial rollover amount

Added QIF support for FI using currency symbols in amounts

Added large splitter handles to bucket and graph bars

Added show decimals preference on spending plan panel

Window size and position now remembered per document

Accounts now sorted by type and name

Initial rollover timer disabled; activates with allocate income

Changed initial rollover suggested amount to never be negative

Transaction filter cleared on new transaction or account

Fixed removal of bucket assignment from a transaction

Fixed buckets view on New Money Flow Panel dropdowns

Fixed buckets sort on New Memorized Transaction Panel dropdown

Fixed invalidated object error

Fixed initial rollover not saving amount without tab or enter key

Fixed name sorts to be case insensitive

Fixed edit commit failure on account change

Fixed auto-save failure after undo of memorized transaction update causes

Now that I have that patch put to bed, I'm going to put myself to bed. G'nite all.

Peace.

Just Because I Put a Date on It!

2007-09-11T08:51:00.001-05:00

I was reminded this morning that I told people a patch for MoneyWell was going out yesterday and that I shouldn't talk about a release if I'm not going to deliver. He's right of course, but I was so sure it was going out. I don't know why this always happens when I publicly announce a date for a release.

Here's how it goes:

You plan for what needs to be fixed in a patch

You begin to code the patch and unit test each fix

You test the program overall to make sure nothing else was broken

You release the patch

See, in the case of 1.0.2 (39), step 2 was going so well. I made it through all but one of the fixes in a little over a day. How could I not finish that last item, I had all day!

I didn't finish that last item. It's just being stubborn.

So I'll work on getting it out again today, but no promises this time (maybe that'll help keep Murphy off my back). It's a really good patch, so hang on and I'll get it to you ASAP!

The upside is, I have a real download stat still (118,000+ copies). Judy also noticed that I lost my featured product status on Apple's all categories page (Toon Boom Studio snatched it away), but I still have the business and finance page and I'm still near the top of the most downloaded list. That means I have a little more time to work out my marketing plan for after I lose the cherished Apple spot.

Peace.

Over 102,000! How About Trying to Bring Down My Server?

2007-09-10T10:42:00.001-05:00

Downloads and traffic to the No Thirst Software site have been trending down (from 20,000 per day to around 18,000) so I didn't expect the 21,000+ bonus that happened yesterday to put downloads up over 102,000 just before midnight.

This will probably be the last new prospect/customer trend I will be able to record with any accuracy because I'm going to release the 1.0.2 (39) patch today and all the people that have MoneyWell will get an automatic notice to download the new version (Thank you Andy Matuschak! You deserve an award for Sparkle!). These repeat offenders will skew the trend to look better than it really is, but part of my brain will just continue to think these are new views and be giddy all over again.

I'm excited about this MoneyWell patch because it incorporates many of the bug fixes that people have reported and also finishes up some features that I had to cut out of the 1.0 release due to time constraints (saving window size/location, large splitter handles, etc.). MoneyWell has two more additions to QIF importing that should make it able to read just about any QIF file out there.

Now I know that I've just opened the door to be proven wrong by the first new customer that uses it, but I'm getting used to being proven wrong—that's either humility finally sinking in or I've been broken by the tech support emails over the past week.

Actually, I have no reason to complain about the support email traffic. I think God knows that I can only handle so much at one time and He throttled this down for me. Almost everyone has been very polite with their bug reports and the feature requests have all been very consistent. There is a common set of requests that just happen to match what I have planned for the next couple of minor releases. I couldn't ask for a more cooperative customer base!

Now I have to get back to testing the patch so I can release it today and pretend like I'm getting double the downloads from new prospects. In fact, would every one of the 102,000+ downloaders please just run MoneyWell once after the patch is posted and update to 1.0.2 so I can stress test my hosting service? Server Logistics has been so good so far, I want to see what they can handle (don't worry Aaron, they all don't read this blog).

Peace.

I've Never Really Been Popular Before

2007-09-08T13:04:00.001-05:00

You know those kids in school that are a little too straight-laced and quiet to be popular? Yeah, that was me. I just never was popular.

This morning I looked at Apple's "most popular" section of their downloads page and I see the following:

iTunes 7.4

Quicktime 7.2

Safari 3 Public Beta

MoneyWell 1.0

Windows Media Player for Mac OS X 9.0

How cool is that?!?! MoneyWell's not only popular, but the three products more downloaded than it are free stuff from Apple and it beat a Microsoft product (okay, that last one isn't so hard to do on the Mac)!

Does that make me popular?

Probably not. I still have to rub my dog's belly to get her to even hang with me. But I'm just that desperate to take this as being popular by association. W00t!

Peace.

One Week Can Make One Weak

2007-09-07T23:17:00.001-05:00

It's been a full week since I released MoneyWell and I'm as happy as I am exhausted.

Starting a micro-ISV is so wonderful because you have full control over your product. There's no corporate committee deciding features or a sales department making outrageous promises—it's just you and your ideas.

And starting a micro-ISV is so incredibly tough because you have to wear every hat. There's no marketing department, no sales force, no operations person—it's just you and maybe some generous friends throwing their talents your way.

If you've read an of my previous blog entries (you brave soul you), you'll know that this is not my first time starting a software company. I've been in this business since CP/M was the hot operating system and I've been blessed with a second chance (four times actually). Some people say I'm persistent, others are closer to the truth when they say I'm an idiot.

Luckily, I'm an idiot that learns from my mistakes. No Thirst Software is very close to the perfect company for me. If it wasn't for Judy, my wife, and lots of great friends that prayed for me and supported me, I wouldn't have lasted the whole year that this has been going on and I certainly wouldn't have had the guts to launch MoneyWell by myself.

After having to learn Cocoa and Objective-C, redoing my website four times with four different tools (I've settled on Coda and hand-coded CSS/HTML, which I now love so much more than using big iron web tools), creating lousy graphics with my poor Photoshop skills, creating better graphics with my poor Photoshop skills, and finally, creating acceptable graphics with my still poor Photoshop skills, I was able to pull together enough to launch a mere seven days ago.

But now I feel I've run a marathon at sprinter speeds and I'm a bit worn out. If tomorrow morning's statistics are even close to as good as they have been over the last two days (over 20,000 MoneyWell downloads each day), I'm sure I'll be riding high, coding like it was day one again and ready for week two.

God bless everyone who has given me feedback (positive and negative) and all those who encouraged me to keep going forward. I am truly blessed.

Peace.

My Mini Keynote Address

2007-09-06T10:08:00.001-05:00

Okay, pretend I'm rich, run the coolest electronics company in the world, and I love black mock turtlenecks. I want to do this blog as if I was Steve Jobs giving one of his famous keynotes.

(Warning by Green Day ends)

I'd like to welcome you all here today. Today we get to talk about MoneyWell, so let's get started.

It's only day six since MoneyWell 1.0 shipped, but I'd like to give you an update on our progress. When we shipped MoneyWell, we started to get some downloads and we were pretty happy about that. In the first five days we had over:

5,000

Downloads

We think that's great and we are really excited. But we think that our presence as a featured product on the Apple downloads site is really going to give us a big lift. And you know what? We were right. On day five alone... (pause)

We have had (pause) over:

20,000

Downloads

This is amazing. We've increased our downloads by a factor of 5 in one day. We are really very excited about it and we feel this is only the beginning. Stay with us, because we are going to continue to have amazing results like this. Talk to you soon.

Peace.

Featured Download - MoneyWell

2007-09-05T08:06:00.001-05:00

It's always exciting to get good press for your products or your company. When you are developing software for the Mac, one of the highest honors is to be a Featured Product on Apple's Downloads site.

Today I woke to see that MoneyWell is not only the featured product in the business and finance section, but the main featured product when you go to Apple's download page. There are so many great software products coming out for Mac OS X right now that one product can't hold this spot too long, so I'm making the best of it.

I've added a "60-day money back guarantee" to my MoneyWell page and I have at least one tutorial up for people to look at. An added bonus is that Apple has some big announcements today, which means their website is going to get more traffic than usual. What perfect timing!

It's hard to describe the difference between churning out code for Windows and creating software for Mac OS X. I was very proud of some of my creations for Windows, but the development process was always frustrating. Now, even when I'm struggling with some Objective-C code in OS X, I know that the final solution will end up being elegant and the resulting product light years ahead of anything I would be building in Windows.

Plus, there is just no good "featured product" section on the Microsoft site. Thank you Apple! You rock!!!

Peace.

Going International

2007-09-03T15:30:00.000-05:00

It probably has something to do with the fact that I released MoneyWell on a US holiday (Labor Day Weekend), but I am shocked at how many prospects and customers have come from overseas. Many of them wanted me to localize the date and currency information in MoneyWell (localizing is designing the program so it knows how to display dates and numbers using the local rules).

So to satisfy my international clientele, I have released MoneyWell 1.0.1 (38). It has the requested localization and fixes bugs found in QIF imports as well as a few other changes.

There has been negative and positive feedback, but the positive stuff has been so great I'm hardly affected by the negatives (I only briefly pouted, then I got back to coding). Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to tell me about bugs and compliment my efforts.

This cycle seems to be typical for me. I get a release out and have to push out a patch soon after. Now that I'm past that required act, I'm back to the website tutorials. Part of me is exhausted from the long hours, but this is so much fun that I can't wait to do more! I feel like I'm living a Tony Robbins success story!

And this is only the beginning. How freakin' cool is that?!?!

Peace.

Now It's for Real...

2007-08-31T19:09:00.000-05:00

MoneyWell shipped on August 31, 2007 at 2:40 PM Central time!

It's been posted to all the usual download sites (Apple, MacUpdate, VersionTracker) and press releases were sent to the top Mac news sites (MacNN, MacWorld, MacLife, MacMinute). The No Thirst Software website has had some updates to reflect the new product (with more site updates pending) and sales are already coming in. Life is good!

But, now everything has changed. MoneyWell is no longer a hidden development project or a limited beta test, it's a living, breathing product with customers that need support and will be asking for updates. That changes the tone. If there's a bug in the beta version, you tell the beta testers, "Sorry, delete your data files and start over with the new build." That option is off the table now.

Is that scary? Not really. I remember my dad, who was a merchant marine sailing the North Atlantic in WWII, telling me, "You can't be afraid of the sea because you'll never be able to do your job, but you can't pretend its not powerful enough to kill you either. You just need to learn to respect it."

I respect my role.

Peace.

Check the Fan... See If Anything Hit It Yet

2007-08-30T12:39:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was crazy and today is double-super crazy. I posted two release candidates of MoneyWell yesterday and plan to release the final version today (if I don't blow a gasket first). What seemed so organized just a couple of days ago is now a huge messy pile.

As always with software development, there's one last bug to fix or a critical missed piece of functionality. The trick is to know what to touch and what to leave alone for now. I think I made it through the important fixes yesterday, but I didn't get to much else on my list, which is now long enough to make me want to run out of my office screaming until I knock myself out by hitting a signpost in the street. This is not a cartoon though and I really don't have time for a hospital run.

Let's see what's in the pile:

The web site needs the final page designs completed and posted (pretty critical)

My PayPal payment system needs to be updated (oh crap—must have a way to pay)

I still don't have my final discount processing system in place for Debt Quencher customers (double crap)

The online tutorials aren't done yet (that ain't happenin' today)

The press release still needs final editing (that's gotta happen today)

I need to retest the licensed and unlicensed modes (mega high priority)

I'm pretty sure I'm missing something, I just hope it's not a biggie.

Release day is a blend of anxiety and excitement that is hard to describe. If I survive it, I'll post more entries about how it went. If not, look for me unconscious in the street.

Peace.

How to Brighten Someone's Day

2007-08-29T10:06:00.000-05:00

How do you feel when someone gives you a sincere compliment?

Doesn't the world around you immediately change? It does for me. I have been putting in some long hours lately trying to launch MoneyWell and it has been exhausting. Some nights I feel a heaviness (on top of the literal heaviness because of too much fast food) and I lose sight of the purpose behind all the effort.

Then a compliment comes my way, "Your program looks great!" and everything changes. Then another drops in from a beta tester saying, "Very polished and quite like an Apple app" and another saying, "I've been looking for something like this on the Mac ever since I bought it." Or a comment on this blog offers more positive feedback (no, I'm not fishing for compliments... really, I'm not that needy... well, maybe I am that needy, but I'm still not fishing) and the weight is gone (still talking metaphorically here, I do have to eat more salads). The world seems brighter and my purpose has been restored.

Now it's very possible that I'm just more fragile than most and I dent and ding too easily, but I think that the majority of people need to hear more positive feedback on a daily basis. Is there anyone you can compliment today? Your spouse, kids, or a coworker? Instead of just criticizing their mistakes, compliment their accomplishments or behavior. I'm quite sure you'll benefit from it too!

As for me, I'm riding pretty high right now on the recent compliments that have been graciously given to me. I know much of the feedback I'll get after releasing MoneyWell will be on the negative side because there are plenty of things to be added and enhanced and I have to keep reminding myself that it's just a 1.0 release. I'm also sure there will be bugs that slip through the testing and I'll have to handle those, but my release deadline is now two days away and I can't worry about what is lacking or the responses from customers. I know now that I'll get enough positives to offset the negatives and those will energize me to push forward with updates to satisfy the masses. Thanks to everyone who has helped me get through this process!

Peace.

I Am Embarrassed!

2007-08-27T06:06:00.000-05:00

For many software developers, the hardest part about writing software is shipping it. Software is never, ever, ever, ever done. That's why I fell in love with creating software—I could make it better just by thinking of a better design and then coding it. There was no cost of materials, just the task of finding enough active brain cells to produce the proper code. But if you can't find a stopping point for your 1.0 release (or even 2.0 or 3.0), you'll never ship, which is all good if you're independently wealthy and don't need the income.

I'm by no means independently wealthy. The reason I wrote both Debt Quencher and MoneyWell in the first place was to give myself better tools to battle poor spending habits. But that's off topic a bit. Maybe I'll embarrass myself more by talking about my bad financial behavior in future entries.

MoneyWell is a product with lots of potential. I have so many ideas and designs for it that I really struggled where to draw the line and call it 1.0. A big help was reading If you aren’t embarrassed by v1.0 you didn’t release it early enough. I didn't even need to go past the title to get it. I've been writing software for a quarter of a century and I know how horrible the disease "feature creep" can be. It's a gnarly, nasty, blood-sucking disease that can bring down the biggest software companies.

So when I read the phrase "If you aren't embarrassed by v1.0" I knew I had my litmus test. The features I had in my in-house testing version of MoneyWell already worked better for me than my copy of Quicken 2007. I certainly didn't have close to all the features of Quicken, but that wasn't what I was shooting for. What I wanted was a more effective way to track my spending and that was already in the code. So I pushed it into beta and moved features from my 1.0 list to my future list. It was like a flashback of when I was a kid trying to make myself eat the sliced canned beets on my plate that had now grow cold and had stained my tasty (but overcooked) pork chops, yet I managed to do it.

Am I embarrassed by version 1.0 of MoneyWell? You betcha! But only because I know what I have planned for future releases.

Does it kick spending plan management butt over every other personal finance package out there? You betcha!

Peace.

When It All Clicks

2007-08-25T08:52:00.000-05:00

When you're developing software, you can find yourself in some nasty situations. Sometimes the technology doesn't work the way you expected or a concept you had for a design makes people scrunch up their faces during testing like a rotting tomato. The worst is when you have a bug that just won't go away. During the development of MoneyWell, I had the pleasure of all these issues and more.

For me, the trick is to keep encouraging myself to push past these issue. One of my favorite blogs is Pam Slim's Escape from Cubicle Nation because she focuses on the psychological problems related to starting your own business. Pam's talked about Seth Godin's new book, The Dip in this entry and it made so much sense: Every project I've ever done of significant magnitude has experienced a dip. Many times I've thought about quitting because, "This is just too friggin' hard!" But if I push through this dip, things seem to click.

In the past few months, I've had some scary moments. The question, "Will I ever get this into beta?" has popped up many times. Of course when I got MoneyWell into beta (this is the final stage of software testing before release), I wondered if it would ever ship. There was so much to do: finish features, cut features, fix bugs (nasty nuclear-holocaust-surviving-roach type bugs), write a help file, finish the web site, and more. It sent me to dark places at times.

Now I'm about a week away from release and everything is falling into place. I was able to push certain features out to a 1.x release, other functionality started working the way I envisioned, and (with the help of Apple's Developer Technical Support) a couple of glowing roaches got smashed. There's still some documentation and marketing to do, but everything is clicking so that work seems no more ominous than a few dedicated days of effort.

What pushed me through my own dip was my faith, family, and friends. It's critical not to do this stuff alone. This has been as much a spiritual journey as it was a business event and a development project. No matter what happens after I release MoneyWell, I'm confident that taking a chance with No Thirst Software and this latest project has all been worth it. I'm a better person—stronger, more confident, and more aware of my blessings.

Are you avoiding doing something that is on your heart because it may fail and there may be pain involved? Don't let fear ruin your life. All the pain and failure is worth it when you get to the other side and it all clicks.

Peace.

An end and a beginning

2007-08-17T14:30:00.000-05:00

It's time for me to get back to blogging. I stopped because I was just way too busy to continue this and my software development at the same time. Considering this pays no bills and my startup company, No Thirst Software, was far from paying all the bills, I chose to dive into development and forego the writing.

I've missed it though (even if I was writing for a tiny audience of one or two). So I'm back, not because I have so much time now or because the bills are paid, but because I'm nearing the end of one journey and starting another. Since December 2006, I've been trying to finish MoneyWell. It's personal finance software that competes with the likes of Quicken—yes, I'm just that crazy.

Actually, I always said that I would never write accounting software because everybody and his sister was writing it. Also, the 800 lb. gorillas like Intuit and Microsoft occupied this space. But last year, when I was scrounging for a purpose and direction in my work life, I was drawn to solving a pain in my personal life: debt. I hated being in debt and even though I was working my way out of it, the software I had to use was crap.

The one tool that I used to manage my credit card debt was a poorly designed Java tool and the company had disappeared—no website, no contact information, nothing. In response to this very personal need, I wrote Debt Quencher. I wanted it to be drop-dead easy, attractive to look at, and very Mac-like in operation. Even though it was a relatively tiny program, I wanted it to be great. It was written during the same time period that this blog was started and was finished about the time that this blog helped me get out of my corporate position (yes, the boss read my blog, which was brilliantly plastered with my name and my job complaints).

This mildly successful product lead me to dive deeper into why I was in debt. I have used Quicken for years to manage my finances and balanced my bank statements religiously. I even tried to create budgets with it and stick to them, but it was so painful that I just couldn't do it. This pain inspired me to write MoneyWell. I didn't want it to just track my finances and reconcile with my statements, I wanted it to keep me out of debt and enable me to control my spending. I'll write more about this inspiration in future posts.

So now I'm finishing the beta test for MoneyWell and about to begin the process of marketing and selling this product. I have faith that great things will come of my efforts (and my family suffering through another one of my startups) because I have a higher purpose than only to make money (but I'm all for quick elimination of my debt after its release). Hopefully, tracking what happens during this new beginning will be entertaining and educational for my readers.

Peace.

Oh, I'm Out There Jerry ... and I'm Lovin' It!

2006-11-01T11:58:00.000-06:00

Do you remember that commercial a few years ago (I think it was a Superbowl spot) where a group was huddled around a computer screen watching the hit counts go up as their website was launched? The hit counter went 1 ... 10 ... 500 ... 10,000 and they went from elation (we have customers!) to panic (can we handle the bandwidth?!?!) in a matter of seconds. We'll that's what I've been doing this morning—watchin' the numbers tick up (with no concern that I'll reach a panic state).

I published Debt Quencher 1.0 yesterday and posted it to Apple's download site first. That was a non-event, because it's not up there yet, but their e-mail did say I could repost it in 90 days if it doesn't show up (90 DAYS?!?! Wassup with dat? They do know the internet is designed for immediate information exchange, right?). I proceeded to post it next to MacUpdate and VersionTracker which both went live this morning.

At first I was shocked to see even a couple downloads on MacUpdate, then I nearly wet myself as I refreshed my VersionTracker page and saw the 7 switch to a 13 (I didn't even see the 7 downloads happen). I e-mailed my wife at work and she started watching the numbers climb as well. Oooo look, 15! Hey, it's up over 20 on that one! Wow, almost 60 downloads in three hours!

Now, none of this equates to money at this point, so it's the equivalent of watching your horse pulling up along the outside in a race that you have no bet—exciting even without the hope of a payoff. I'll probably be twice as giddy when the first purchase hits my account, even though it's gonna take an awful lot of $14.99 customers to pay the bills around here.

For now, I'm just enjoying being out there. Thanks to everyone who downloaded a copy and made my morning!

Be Careful What You Pray For

2006-10-13T16:04:00.000-05:00

I'm a firm believer that God answers all prayers—many times the answer is just plain "no." There are times though when he says "yes" and your world changes in an instant. That's what just happened to me.

What better way to tell your boss that you'd like to leave your job than to start a public blog and sign your real name. Just make sure you're subtle about how you feel (Don't Hate Me Because I'm Your Job!) and only hint that you may want to do something new (The Smoking Gun). Naturally, I'm neither subtle nor smart about these kinds of things so when the owner of the company came in with a printout of my blog, why was I surprised?

So fast forward three weeks and here I am on my own and ready to change the world. Okay, maybe I need to scale that back a bit. Here I am on my own and ready to find a way to keep paying my bills! Yeah, that's reality. I'm banking on No Thirst Software to pay the bills. It's not a horrible bet, even thought the past month has been nothing but distractions, I have Debt Quencher nearly ready to ship and I'm working on a much larger application with about three months to pull it all together.

I'm just wondering if this is going to be a three months of "I'm waiting for OS X Leopard to ship" or "I have three months to live." Obviously the former will drag and seem like an eternity and the latter shoots by like a bullet train. What I need is the patent-pending Ronco Time Squeezer:

Are you still getting the most of your days the old-fashioned method: squeezing out extra minutes by hand? Why not try the new Ronco Time Squeezer? With the Ronco Time Squeezer, you can turn minutes into hours and hours into days! Hate that last minute rush trying to get that report done on time? No problem! Just a few twists of the Ronco Time Squeezer and you'll have plenty of time to finish and spend a relaxing afternoon in the hot tub! No more stressing over deadlines or lost productivity. The Ronco Time Squeezer can give you back control over your life.

Now how much would you pay for this peace of mind? $1,000? $1,000,000? How about just three easy payments of just $19.95 plus shipping and handling? But wait! There's more! Call in the next five minutes and get the equally amazing Ronco Time Compressor for just one additional payment of $19.95. Why agonize waiting weeks or months for the Apple iPhone announcement—a few cranks of the Ronco Time Compressor and POOF! you've got the worlds coolest phone! Can't wait for Vista to ship so Microsoft can stop pretending it's going to be an amazing success? Put Billy G. out of his misery and crank away a few months so we can all watch the Windows hit the fan.

Act today before this offer goes away!

Yeah, I don't have any handy Ronco products right now. I guess I'll have to just work my butt off and not waste time. How lame is that?

The upside is that I am where I wanted to be. Once again, I have the opportunity to create great software that is only limited by my imagination (oh crap) and my skills as a developer (double crap). I've been generously given a chance to take over the driver's seat and steer my own path to financial success. I know I'm going to win out of this deal. I'll either gain a ton of knowledge because of my efforts or find my way to abundance highway—who knows, I may even get both!

Big Dog Protection

2006-08-30T14:21:00.000-05:00

I can't stand wasting development cycles on copy protection. For me it's like spending money on heavy duty locks and security systems for your house when you know that the professional criminals will simply knockout a pane of glass and be in and out before anyone responds to the alarm. Those TV commercial criminals that scram the instant The Clapper turns on the house lights are jokes—real crooks get the job done first.

My solution for home protection is a big dog called Magic. If she doesn't know you, you're not getting in the house. If she does know you, the worst you'll suffer is a case of severe slobber contamination (unless you properly pet her belly).

I wish I had the software equivalent of Magic. Not that I want my users to end up with drool on their hands, but I'd love to have simple, friendly protection in Debt Quencher. I know that any casual effort I put into protecting it will get broken by serious hackers and too much lock down will frustrate the honest buyers.

At my current job, I've fought against some of the extreme protection schemes that require users to have hardware dongles or to allow periodic "phone home" cycles. I keep losing the battle to refocus development time on cooler features instead of stronger window bars. For my own products, I'm determined to spend less time worrying about who is ripping me off. If someone can steal stuff and still sleep well at night, I'm not going to lose sleep thinking about them.

I'm also not stupid enough to think casual theft doesn't happen. I subscribe to the old proverb: "Trust God, but tie up your camels." Many of us would "forget" to pay for software unless encouraged to do so. I'm planning to limit features until the software is purchased as my encouragement. The protection will be non-invasive and nearly as friendly as Magic. Unlike my dog, I'll make sure the software doesn't leave warm gifts in the back yard or bark at rabbits in the front.

The Smoking Gun

2006-08-01T16:20:00.000-05:00

It's official. I've pulled the trigger on the Debt Quencher beta. Hear the crickets?

Of course it's a non-release at this point. I haven't announced it yet to anyone except my friends and family—and only the techies in that group understand what I'm talking about. The others just give me a passing, "Way to go Kev!" as if I scored a turkey in bowling. (Did that bowling comment just ruin my street cred?!?!) Uh, I really don't bowl much. Okay, I own my own ball and shoes, but it's not like I hang out at the lanes or anything.

But I digress; this post is about the beta.

I'm working on the press release (my first five versions sucked in various ways, shapes and forms) and hope to have that out by tomorrow so there is at least some chance for traffic to my site. The No Thirst Software site is getting better as I have time to primp it. I have some articles to post that will work with Debt Quencher and help people move towards a cash positive future. I want this to be a full-service company. I envision the No Thirst site being useful even if you don't purchase anything (but please purchase something!). I have high hopes that I will make a positive dent in the universe with this enterprise (and a positive dent in my cash flow as well so buy my stuff!).

During this beta period, Debt Quencher is free. I'll set the final price next month when I release it. Feel free to chat with me on the newly established beta test e-mail list. You can sign up for it on the Debt Quencher beta page.

And if you wouldn't mind... keep it quiet about the bowling equipment. Thanks.

"Did you release the software yet?"

2006-07-24T16:37:00.000-05:00

You know how kids can be: You're on a trip and—just after you leave your neighborhood—the question, "Are we there yet?" rings out from the back seat. I've pretty much trained my family to not do that when we are on the road. I think the threat was, "Ask that one more time and you can walk the rest of the way to find out just how far we are from done!"

Well the new question from my urchins is, "Did you release the software yet?" Now I can't really complain about this one. I was supposed to start beta testing it three weeks ago, but life keeps getting in the way. Besides the full-time job and the three teens to manage, I have commitments at my church and random chaos issues. One of those issues had to do with my web development.

I was using a nice, simple tool to put up a nice, simple website. Unfortunately, I'm a bit of a control freak and the nice, simple tool was not letting me change certain things in either a nice or simple way. This caused me to research more annoying and complex ways to enhance the nice, simple tool so I could finish my nice, simple website. Long story short: the nice, simple tool is out and I'm back to using a big iron web publishing tool that lets me have full control.

Anyway, I have the site up and I'm nearly ready to pull the trigger on the beta. Introducing No Thirst Software.

The site is tiny and the content MIA, but I'll get back to that soon and start publishing articles I have wrote along with more details about Debt Quencher once the beta is in full swing. My goal is to have shipped the 1.0 product by mid-September. This should be very doable as long as I stay focused and on course.

So keep your seat belts on, quiet down and for heavens sake stop teasing your sister!!!

A Higher Purpose

2006-07-04T15:10:00.000-05:00

My wife's a pretty smart lady: she certainly knows how to get me back on track with a few choice words.

All too often I exhaust myself with concerns about minutiae that don't matter. I can take a perfectly nice day and spin tiny incidents into major harbingers of pending disaster. I trip over a wrinkle in the carpeting and decide that the flawed flooring is a sign that buying this expensive house—that can't be sold for the mortgage owed—was a huge mistake and replacing the carpet is now impossible because I have zero excess cash flow and that is not going to change anytime soon, which means, I've failed to live a simple, virtuous life and now I'm a slave to material things that are ruining my quality of life instead of improving it, but I don't have any answers to get myself out of this so I'm doomed to eternal entrapment and suffering no matter how I try to wriggle free.

Yes, I am as nutty as a pecan tree in September. No, this really did not happen; but something pretty close to it did, and continues to happen on an all too often basis.

So how does Judy shift me back on the right course? Two simple words: higher purpose. It's not about what I've done wrong or my missed opportunities; and it's especially not about what I've done right. Regardless of my definition of "worthy," it's about continuing to move forward because what I do is meant for a higher purpose than I can know or understand. If that's true, then everything I do is designed to affect someone else. It's not about me (oh, poor me and my financial foul-ups) and it's not about how successful I am at delivering the next great software product. The software may not sell, the business may bust and I might fail financially, but someone may be saved from suffering because of my experiences. I just may never know if or when this happens. I have to keep getting back up and moving forward assuming that the higher purpose is being fulfilled.

So how's the company launch coming along? Actually, everything is pulling together rather nicely. I'm in the final stages of debugging my software, the feature set is complete, the company logo is done and so is most of the polish on the product. I just have to finish the web site and implement a purchase system for the software to complete the launch. You'd never know it by the way I'm behaving, but an objective observer would probably give me high marks for staying on schedule and focused. Captain Nuttree would tell you that everything is tearing apart at the seams, but why would anyone listen to a loon like him. Instead, just ask my wife, keeper of the Hoctor household sanity: She'll tell you that the higher purpose is being satisfied.

Know Anyone with a RALF?

2006-06-28T08:29:00.000-05:00

I'm constantly amazed by people that have can have a conversation with me but hear something totally different from what I am saying. I can spot them pretty quickly now. All I have to do is start talking about a topic that concerns someone other than the person I'm talking to and SNAP! Immediately their face or voice changes.

After careful research, I've discovered how they do it. They each own a RALF (Reflective Audio Listening Filter). It's a device they have installed into their ears that reflects their own words and thoughts back them the instant it senses audio that doesn't match the content of the wearer's brain. It's an amazing technology that is packaged so small, you can't even see if someone is wearing one. Oh, but I can give you the indicators of a RALF user:

If a person asks you a question, but doesn't let you finish your answer; he's got a RALF
If a person goes glassy-eyed during your conversation until you mention her; she's got a RALF
If a person can always connect a tragic world event mentioned in a conversation to a not-so-tragic event in his life; he's got a RALF
If a person can't get through a conversation without talking about herself; she's got a RALF

RALFs can't be too expensive, I've run into dozens of people that own one. RALFs must be really easy to use too, because I know at least two people that can't work a TV remote, but have fully functional RALFs.

Sorry, you may not be able to have a RALF installed. It causes a severe allergic reaction in people that actually care more about others than themselves.

Don't Hate Me Because I'm Your Job!

2006-06-23T10:12:00.000-05:00

HATE. I don't like the word or the emotion. It dredges up ugly images and even uglier feelings in me. Because of this, I work hard not to hate anything or anyone.

I HATE my job.

Plain and simple. I am physically sick of doing what I do. It used to be fun when I first helped start this company. The view darkened when we grew to a point where my partners and I saw different paths for the future of our software shop. Then it was a little brighter when I spun off a dot.com to put some space between me and my partners, but that ended very badly with them firing me. I sold my stock back to them and washed my hands of the place.

Two years later, I came back because the business was in tough financial shape (and my stock payments in jeopardy). Apologies were shared and I was given the role of being in control of all the product development to help get the company on track again. It was weird working as an employee at a company I formerly owned, but I got over it. Now four years later, things have gone way downhill. I'm talking about swimming-in-raw-sewage-while-management-juggles-hand-grenades type downhill. It ain't pretty. I've tried to keep my rants down to a minimum, but that's like throwing up in your mouth and swallowing.

On the positive side, all this aggravation is keeping me focused on quickly being successful at my new start-up. It can't happen too soon. Every day I want to run down the hall into my former partner's office and do some Ballmer-esque chair throwing to get his attention while I shout, "This is no way to run a freakin' software company!!!" I'd probably add comments about removing heads from dark places and other hateful rants. It turns my stomach and I'm annoyed that I let it go this far. I shouldn't hate what I do, instead I should have made a move like this a year ago. Unfortunately that goes in the shoulda-woulda-coulda bucket and I don't have the history-changing ability of Marty McFly. I also can't quit just yet so I'll just have to avoid going postal until my alternate cash flow is somewhat robust.

The irony is that I'm the one always preaching to others that they need to be passionate about what they do. Don't settle for a paycheck. Don't work at a place that makes you want to rush home and down a bottle of vodka to balance out the day. Yet, here I am doing exactly what I've told my kids not to do.

Luckily I haven't gone off the deep end (totally). I still have a soft spot for this company. I want to see it do well and I even want my former partners to succeed. They would need to see exactly where they've gone wrong and have a clear vision of where this company needs to go. I don't hold much hope for that happening though. It's hard to visualize the future when your primary view is the inside of your colon.

Brick Walls Cause Serious Swelling

2006-06-20T23:57:00.000-05:00

I have two nasty welts right now. Okay, so they're not physical manifestations, but I am in real pain.

Weekends are my productive periods. I don't always have contiguous hours during the week to invest in my new venture because I still have a real job. It's incredibly painful when I hit a wall that stops me from doing what I want to do. I had plans for this weekend. I was going to quickly finish implementing an enhanced save routine for my application (by end of evening on Friday), take my newly designed company logo and get a first version of my web site running (half a day on Saturday) and round out the weekend by adding at least one of the two remaining features in my program. By Monday morning I was going to have a nearly feature complete program and a website.

CRASH! My first wall was a bug in my code. I blew most of the weekend on it until I figured out what to ask of the gurus that hang out on Apple's cocoa-dev mailing list. Luckily these people are well-versed in helping Cocoa newbies like me and I had a solution posted for me within minutes.

SLAM!!! The second hit had to do with my company logo. I've outsourced the creation of this logo and spent a huge budget of $150 (huge is obviously a relative term) on it. The group I have doing it may end up giving me a wonderful logo, but my first two rounds with the process have not been as on target as I wanted. I get four revisions for my big bucks, so I'll reserve final judgment until I get to the end of the process. I'll give out the name of the website if they do a good job.

I know the logo is not critical for the success of the company, so I am trying to keep it in perspective. I'd just like to fit the look of my website around the look of the logo, which means, I didn't do anything on the website this weekend.

The good news is that I'm back to making progress on the program. I'm also a bit more confident about my understanding of the Cocoa Frameworks after (correctly) responding to a poster on the Apple list. It's good to give as well as take knowledge.

So after stepping back a few paces, I can see the walls are more like tall curbs and I've merely stubbed my ego a couple of times. I'll survive to continue to fight the good fight.

False Evidence Appearing Real

2006-06-15T17:00:00.000-05:00

FEAR. Nasty stuff happens when I let it into my head. I start going down a negative road littered with potholes the size of Hummers. As the calendar flips closer and closer to my planned launch date for my first software product, I get increasingly nervous that my release will be as successful as setting sail in a ship made of bowling balls.

There's no logic behind this thought process and certainly no evidence to support my fear, but I'm drowning in it anyway. I get buoyed up when I read about software success stories like Delicious Library but then immediately sink thinking my product is just not as sexy. That sends me to that bad place where passionate people get tangled in murky waters of seaweed and are never heard from again. It's not happening all the time, just during occasional moments of panic.

I'll try to explain the feeling. It's like that growing anxiety you feel when you're driving down the highway looking for a rest stop and you finally spot one. As you drive down the exit, the pain in your bladder jumps up a notch. Then as you are walking towards the bathroom you're thinking, "Boy I'm here just in time" only to be frozen in your tracks by the RESTROOM CLOSED FOR CLEANING sign. Now you're left frantically searching for a thicket of trees wishing you hadn't seen this rest area because the problem wasn't this urgent yet on the highway. It's the anticipation of the release that makes your body tense up.

The trick, for me, is to not think about the potential problems and instead keep focused on what is real. I can imagine all sorts of disastrous results, freak out and drop what I'm doing right now because I think I'm the Amazing Kreskin and know the future. Frankly, I don't know what will happen when I open my virtual doors for business. I do know that if I quit now, I will have failed. There's a famous quote from Wayne Gretsky where he says, "I make about 30 percent of the shots I take on goal, but I miss 100 percent of the shots I don't take."

Yes, I am trying to talk myself out of wetting my pants!

As I said, there's no good reason for my fear of failing. This can only be better than my current job (a middle management paper pusher). The worst thing that can happen is that not enough people buy my first product and I have to stay doing what I'm doing for a while longer until I build more marketable software. It's not that bad. It's only been the last couple of years that the pressure to get off this road has intensifying. It's not painful enough that I can't go a few more exits.

Except--I have spotted a rest stop and it looks pretty good to me. I'm all ready to go; and if denied, my fear is that I won't make it back on the highway.

The reality today is that I have created software in the past that people have loved. There's no reason why this story won't have a happy ending. Any worries or fears are based on an imaginary sign denying my success. I need to enjoy the ride and deal with what's real.

Location, Location, Location...

2006-06-13T18:35:00.000-05:00

What's that old adage: The three most important factors for the success of your business are location, location, location. Since my business is computer software, my location is a platform or operating system. Picking a location is an important decision. I've picked Mac OS X as mine.

Yeah, I hear you shouting, "But Windows has the majority of the market share!" And that is true. I started writing software before personal computers were popular but just missed having to deal with punch cards. I learned to code on mainframes and minicomputers—some even using a popular OS for the day called UNIX. I got my feet wet with PCs when I was asked to write software on the TRS-80 Model I (affectionately known as the Trash 80) and the Apple ][. My favorite was a hot new platform called CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers). Then came PC-DOS and MS-DOS. I wrote software on whatever people owned.

My computing world changed when I first saw a Macintosh in January, 1984. The crisp square pixels on the screen and interactive graphics were different than anything else out there. It even made its precursor, the Lisa, look clunky. I bought one of the first ones out and have owned Macs ever since. Around the mid 80's I did some development on the Mac platform and even released a fairly popular—meaning dozens of copies delivered via bulletin board systems (BBS)—shareware application called Evolution (transformed plain text into columnar data—high tech for the time). Unfortunately, my work was mostly on DOS computers so to bring home the bacon I downgraded my development.

I've been writing Windows software for around 14 years and in that time I've become less and less a fan of Microsoft. Windows is a programming nightmare. It's a hodgepodge of technologies and no fun any more. I spend more time fighting quirks in Windows than I do creating features for my products. So, 25 years later I'm back to where I started: writing code for UNIX. This time though it has a clean, graphical interface and runs on a Macintosh.

The bottom line is: You have to love what you do. I love helping people by giving them tools to make their lives better and I love making those products on the Mac. Now if enough people love my products, I'll be able to get this business off the ground.

Enough Mistakes?

2006-06-10T12:53:00.000-05:00

Have I made enough mistakes to put this company over the top? In other words: have I learned enough from my previous flops and semi-flops to do this one right? It's hard for me to live with my mistakes—I'm a recovered perfectionist. I replay my past gaffes in my head all the time. I know I should just learn from them and let them go, but this quiet little voice chants, "If only you hadn't done that." To appease that head whisper, I'm trying to avoid my most recent screw-ups: partners and priorities.

Partners—in general—aren't bad, because they can balance you out. By nature, entrepreneurs are optimists. We think we can alter the moon's orbit if that will help us launch a product. I've read that every entrepreneur should partner with a pessimist: preferably processing payroll and payables (do I get alliteration bonus points?). Too bad partners can also get on each other's last nerve and see totally different futures for the company. It can get (and has gotten) really nasty at times. The last four times, I've struggled with partner-related mistakes. So to paraphrase Mel Brooks (who spoofed a classic): Partners? I don't need no stinkin' partners!

My second biggest mistake in my last venture was my priorities: I built more infrastructure than I needed for the product I had created. I could have sworn I needed a dozen offices and a 200 SF data center to get my dot.com off the ground. Of course I had funding "just around the corner" so my priorities were perfectly in line, right? Stupid optimist! This time my overhead is low and my product is priority. I know I'll still make mistakes, but after doing this for 25 years, I'm motivated enough to recover from them quickly—and that's not just the optimist talking.

Entrepreneurial Seduction

2006-06-09T09:41:00.000-05:00

I'm not a virgin: I'm engaged in my fifth seduction. I've been wined and dined by the alluring world of start-ups many times. At the tender (and relatively ignorant) age of 19, I fell for that old line, "Want to start a business together?" That ruined me. I couldn't remain faithful to any other business after that.

Sure there were years when I toyed with the idea of shacking up with Corporate America, but something was always lacking. It's like being chauffeured around in a Lincoln Town Car--yeah the ride is nice, but what's the point? You're tucked away in the back seat. Where's the exhilaration of flooring it on the freeway on-ramp to try to squeeze into that tiny opening in the fast lane? There's no ability to decide to detour around traffic, no visuals to veer from construction and no inspiration to take the road less traveled. It's a passive relationship that gets you from point A to point B. I need to experience the road first hand.

So here I am blogging (I am a blog virgin so be gentle with me) about my latest start-up experience. I’m building (another) software company, but this time it's sans partners. The process is very exciting, I hope reading about it will be somewhat so.