Back in August, I was doing some work in a hotel room on my laptop and things started going “weird”. The system would appear to freeze up a bit, or the colors would go all trippy, or windows wouldn’t refresh. After five or ten seconds, I would see the following error message: “Display driver has stopped responding and has recovered”

*Gulp* That’s not good I thought.

After doing some digging, I found that apparently there’s a known issue that the Lenovo T61p was commonly installed with a faulty video card when it was first manufactured. It turns out that up until January of 2011, Lenovo was offering free replacements. Isn’t it just like a piece of equipment to go on the fritz just after the warranty period ends?

After some more research, I realized that there’s no way to replace it because the video card is soldered onto the motherboard. To fix the laptop would require a new motherboard, which for a four year old laptop is probably not worth the trouble. As a long shot, I checked eBay and there are a bunch of them there… starting at $200+ each. I might be able to get one for a bit less, but it would have taken some time, which wasn’t something I had. The Lenovo could die at any moment and I need a working laptop while I’m on the road.

I’d been on the look out for a new laptop the past several months, so the fact that I needed to buy a new one wasn’t the worst news in the world, but the timing wasn’t exactly the greatest either. Most of the laptops on the market come up a bit short on my list of requirements, which are unfortunately quite lengthy. I’m looking for something that has the following specs:

• 15″ monitor
• 1920×1200 resolution
• Core i7 processor (quad-core would be nice)
• 8GB RAM
• SSD drive
• Is lightweight (under 4 lbs would be great)
• USB 3.0 ports

And the order of those “requests”? Hmmm… all of them are a top priority. Ugh. Basically I want it all in a really tight package and with laptops, you always need to make some tradeoffs. The underlying issue is that I travel a lot so I want something that’s super lightweight. On the other hand, it needs to have some power to it as well. I’m doing a lot of development using Visual Studio 2010, SQL Server, the Azure toolset, etc. So I need something with some oomph under the hood. That’s the technical term for it anyway.

I’ve looked at just about everything including Acer, Asus, Lenovo, Apple, Sony, Toshiba, Dell, HP, and even Gateway. The research I did showed me that the screen was going to be the biggest problem. As the screen size goes up, so does the resolution, but the weight does too. Most laptop manufacturers stopped making 15″ laptops with 1600×1200 resolution several years ago. My Lenovo T61p had 1920×1200 but these days, that screen resolution is typically reserved for 17″ laptops, which tend to be far too heavy for my tastes.

Laptops with 8GB of RAM are becoming more common, but aren’t so common that they are offered everywhere. Nearly every laptop can be retrofitted with an SSD drive, so that was the simplest challenge to overcome. But it seemed as though everywhere I looked for a new laptop, there were always too many things to give up for any laptop I looked at.

However when your laptop is about to die, you need to make a decision as to whether even having a working laptop is more important than not having one at all. I knew that the local Best Buy was probably my best bet for a decent laptop, but I also knew that they never carry anything really top of the line. If I bought something there, it was going to be something to throw away and I wasn’t terribly thrilled with that prospect. So I decided to hit the Apple store to see if the new MacBook Air’s lived up to what I thought it might be for me.

I hit the Apple store in Paramus, NJ and spoke with a business specialist named Bobby. I explained to him what I did, what I was generally looking for, and what my concerns were with the 13″ MacBook Air with the Core i7 processor. The screen resolution was only 1440×900, but after my laptop video card on the Lenovo started to go haywire, I set the screen resolution to 1440×900 to help reduce the stress on the video card. This seemed to work well enough that I could use the laptop. The video card would still reset the driver and hang the system for a short time on occasion, but it was far less frequent.

What I found was that the screen resolution of 1440×900 was surprisingly tolerable. Of course, I had to set some of the toolbars in Visual Studio to auto-hide (which I hate to do), but I could see all of the code that I really needed to see and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I remembered from 2006. Perhaps I’m just getting old and more tolerant of widescreen. Actually no. I still don’t like it, but I can live with it now.

With the screen resolution issues, the SSD, and the weight behind me, I knew that I’d be compromising on the USB 3.0 ports. But I also knew that USB 3.0 on laptops was surprisingly rare, so that was the most likely casualty in any laptop compromise. The last hurdles to overcome were the processor and RAM. These weren’t strict requirements, rather they were general guidelines that needed to be there to maintain the performance of the machine for the work I would be doing. This was especially concerning on a Mac if I wanted to use VMWare Fusion or Parallels. I could have chosen to use Bootcamp again, but in the past I had some driver issues which caused my Macbook Pro to overheat to the point that it would burn my lap. Not much of a laptop at that point.

I voiced my concerns to Bobby, but pointed out that my current laptop was nearly 4 years old, so it was possible that with a processor that was two generations newer than the old one, I might not even notice the slowdown. I already had an SSD, so that was a non-factor. He said “Well, I don’t know anyone who has used it to the level that you have, but you could give it a shot and if it doesn’t work, you can bring it back and you’re not out a dime.”

Hmmm, that sounds interesting… wait. What? Isn’t there a restocking fee or something like that?

“Nope. We got rid of that a little while ago. Apple is so confident that you’ll like it and decide to keep it that if you don’t, you get a full refund. Just take it back to any Apple store.”

Really?

Bobby: “Yep. You’ve got two full weeks and if you don’t like it, no harm no foul. Just bring it back.”

I excused myself to go get dinner at the California Pizza Kitchen to think it over, then returned and bought it. Including the Applecare, it was just over $2,000, which all things considered isn’t a terrible price to pay for a top of the line, super lightweight laptop. That evening, I downloaded the VMWare Fusion trial to the MacBook Air. I used another VMWare tool to do a physical to virtual migration of my Windows 7 x64 laptop to a virtual machine on a USB drive, and then copied the entire Windows computer onto the laptop. It took a couple of hours to finish. Then I ran into a few minor problems with the VMWare image because it had six network cards for some reason. SIX!

One was the gigabit card on the T61p. Two were from VMWare Workstation that I had installed. The other three, I can’t be certain, but I think they were the two wireless cards and maybe the Bluetooth card. I ended up deleting all of the network devices from the VMWare machine and then adding one back in. After that, it worked fine but seemed sluggish. I thought it might be the RAM, so I dropped the amount of RAM allocated to Windows from 3GB to 2.5GB and that seemed to help quite a bit. I think that maybe OSX was choking on being able to effectively run VMWare with only 1GB left for OSX.

It took a few hours to get used to some of the key remappings. I ended up disabling the built-in Mac function keys so that on the Windows side, I don’t need to hold down the Fn key to hit F5. This means that Ctrl+Shift+B will do a full build for me, and Ctrl+F5 will launch the application so I can do some testing. I don’t use the Mac preset functions nearly as often, so I prefer simply using the Fn key instead. As for Windows, I have a second desktop set up that I can switch to by swiping three fingers across the trackpad. It’s kind of amazing to get that kind of flexibility that quickly. People I show it to are usually quite jealous of the power, flexibility, and speed at which it all runs.

And the performance? Well, so far my suspicions have been largely correct. The faster processor really makes a difference in that it has two cores and four pipelines, which is twice as many as my old laptop. The clock speed is slightly slower, but the processor architecture seems to make up for that. In VMWare, I have two CPU’s allocated to Windows 7, so it holds up pretty well. There’s a bit of a delay when opening Visual Studio, but it’s difficult to tell if anything is really wrong. It takes a lot longer than I think it should to open on my desktop too so I don’t think that’s a Macbook Air problem. A full rebuild takes under 10 seconds so I really can’t complain about it. Starting all the Azure related stuff doesn’t seem to perform any better, but I don’t think it’s any worse either.

The one major issue I ran into was when I first took the laptop home from the store. I booted it up and… nothing. I got a grey screen, some music, and a bunch of horizontal and vertical lines through the middle of the screen. I took it back to the Apple store and they immediately replaced it. The new one has worked just fine, so it was discomforting at first, but the ease at which they simply gave me a new one is something I never would have gotten with Dell or any other manufacturer. I know they would have been a real pain in the neck about it. For some reason, you have to be Dell Certified to know anything about how to troubleshoot a computer. In a word… LAME.

With all that said, what’s my final conclusion?

The Macbook Air is a winner, even for hardcore Windows development which needs a lot of system resources. I’m very happy with the performance of the machine, both on the Mac and on the Windows side. The battery life is pretty lengthy, even given the amount of work that I’m throwing at it. I’m just finishing up this article and I’ve been running the laptop for nearly six hours. The battery is close to the end of it’s rope, but given that I have Windows 7 x64 running at the same time, that’s not too shabby. The power adapter is rated for 45 Watts, which is about half of what my T61p was. This means that when I got on overseas flights, my power adapter will actually work to charge the battery, as opposed to simply preventing it from losing battery life. The Lenovo used a 90W power supply and most airplane power ports are only rated for 75 Watts. Somehow, tripping circuit breakers on a plane seems like a bad idea.

The light weight of the machine absolutely rocks. Coming from the Lenovo T61p which weighs close to 10 lbs with the power adapter to a laptop that barely breaks 3 lbs with the adapter, it’s a world of difference. Especially for someone like me who has a bad back.

The other thing that I really like is the screen itself. It’s very bright and crisp. Adjusting the brightness on the Macbook Air seems a lot better than on my T61p, not to mention the backlit keyboard, which is nice when you’re hunting for a key that’s in a different place on a Mac than on a PC, or in a slightly darkened room.

So far, the second best part of this setup is that it’s extremely light weight, has a great looking screen, adequate screen resolution, and runs Visual Studio 2010 with as much oomph as I need it to. And yes, that’s the technical term. Oomph.

Some other awesome stuff?

• Three finger swipe moves me between operating systems as fast as all heck.
• Two finger scrolling works in Windows. Honestly, what’s not to love there? It makes me hate working with other laptops now.

Ok, now for the bad stuff. You knew it was coming.

1. You have to be careful what your power settings are in VMWare Fusion. If Windows and OSX are ever fighting over who gets to use a screensaver or shut down the system when it’s on batteries, you might get the Grey Screen of Death. Basically, the computer will light up when you turn it on, but neither OS is in control. You have to do a hard reset to fix it. I was able to get around this by telling Windows to go to sleep after 10 minutes, but OSX will wait 15 minutes. Also, I always manually suspend Windows when I am using batteries and close the lid. If it’s plugged in and I shut the lid, I get no problems. But if I then open it, then close it, it will go weird on me.
2. The laptop is so thin that it can be slightly difficult to lift the lid. This is for three reasons. First, the lid is really thin and the depth of the indent to lift the lid is really shallow. Second, the laptop has some sort of a magnet mechanism in place that helps hold it shut when you close the lid. It’s not very strong, but it’s strong enough. And finally, the laptop itself is so light that it is just barely heavy enough to counter the mechanism on the lid. Usually, you have to open it a little bit and then pry it open. Now granted, this is minor but some might find it very irritating. However, it’s the tradeoff that needs to be made to make a laptop that’s this light.
3. To run Windows, you have to buy a license for VMWare Fusion (or Parallels, if you prefer). It’s not terribly expensive, but you will need to budget another $50-$100 or so for it, depending on where you buy it from. I would advise against waiting until the lat minute to buy a license. I had a really hard time ordering a license from VMWare’s website around the time my trial expired. It took me a few days to get it resolved. Personally I spent around $110. Then VMWare started running sales and I’ve seen it as low as $50.
4. With all the heavy lifting that I do during my Windows development using Visual Studio, the system does seem to get just a bit bogged down at times. I wish it had USB 3, so I could put my Windows OS onto a USB hard drive and separate the disk I/O from the SSD in the machine to see if that helps at all. I’m not convinced that it would fix the issue, but I’d like to try it to find out and right now, it’s not really an option.

Overall, I’d highly recommend a MacBook Air to anyone, even for Windows developers. I can’t begin to describe how jealous Windows users are when I show them that I get the best of both worlds in a package that’s usually half as heavy as anything they’ve got.

As you can see from the date of this post and the date of the previous post (about 5.5 months between them), my goal of getting AuditShark to alpha status at the end of July was, needless to say, a bit late. In fact, I wasn’t particularly thrilled by the sound of that self-imposed deadline whooshing by. Looking back at it now, I realize that it was inherently unrealistic to even attempt the end of July to get to Alpha.

The thing is, I’ve only ever been able to dedicate about 5-10 hours/week to the software. I’ve taken a couple of weeks off here and there which really helps with productivity, but it takes a lot longer when you’re only squeezing 5 hours of coding each week into a product. But extrapolating that back to July, that means that I likely did around 110 hours of coding. That would be 5.5 months * 5 hours/week =110 hours. There were two weeks I think where I spent about 40 hours because I took time off from consulting, so it was closer to 190-200 hours total. Had I been working on it full time, then I would have met my goals rather handily.

But I wasn’t. And I knew I wasn’t working on it full time. Perhaps I felt I would get more time into it, but with all of the other things I’ve been doing, such as the Micropreneur Academy, working on MicroConf 2012, my podcast, other products I’ve been putting maintenance time into, various work and family obligations it just wasn’t going to happen. Again, I should have known better, but I was trying to push the envelope of time and that was just unrealistic… or dumb, depending on your point of view. I’ve discussed this to a large extent on my podcast, Startups for the Rest of Us and have provided some sporadic updates via Twitter so it’s not a big secret or anything. I haven’t blogged about it because blogging takes time. It’s a lot more time consuming to write a blog article than it is to just talk about it on a podcast for 45 minutes. There’s one problem with this.

However you look at it, the result is the same. Developer Fail.

But there is a bright side of things.

As of last week, I finally reached my goal. AuditShark is far enough along that it has reached an Alpha stage, or MVP (Minimum Viable Product) as I referenced via my Twitter feed. In fact, I’ve got it running in my lab environment full time and piping data back out into the cloud so that I can do reporting. I also have a volunteer who has offered to put it in his lab environment as just as soon as he gets back from vacation, which I expect to be January 2, 2012.

No income yet, nor do I intend to try charging people until after I get through some sort of alpha testing. In fact, I will be relying on manual billing for the time being until I get enough customers where automating it is necessary. The current problem I’m wrestling with is that I haven’t reached a solid conclusion about what I consider to be the success criteria for a successful Alpha testing phase. Probably just that nothing really major breaks. I need to get some feedback from my Alpha tester to establish what they view as necessary for them to make full use of the product. But I think this is a problem that every software entrepreneur must address.

The question becomes: when should you convert from alpha to beta, and from beta to paying customers?

I have some ideas in my head, but if you have any thoughts, please leave them in the comments.

About three months ago, Rob Walling and I announced that MicroConf was coming to the Riviera in Las Vegas. Two weeks ago, it happened. And more than 100 people descended on the hotel for a conference we put together from beginning to end in a mere three months. If I saw you there, then I want to say “Hello, and thanks again for coming”. If you weren’t able to make it, I think you missed a great conference.

Rob and I kicked around the idea of having a conference for nearly a year before we decided to do it. Several people asked us to put it on but it never seemed like a good time. But I suppose it’s like having a child. There’s never a good time and if it’s something you want to do, you have to just do it.

But why have this conference in the first place? What made it so important? Justin Vincent from the TechZing podcast asked me if we were going to make a lot of money on it and I explained that the economics were such that we would most likely break even, but it would be close. On his podcast with Jason the next day, he called it a “labor of love”, which is a pretty accurate assessment.

But that doesn’t quite answer the question. Why bother putting on the conference if we weren’t going to make money? What made this conference so important to us?

After seeing how everything went down, this was exactly the type of conference that I would have wanted to attend more than five years ago when I was first starting out with my business. More than 100 people came to the conference with exactly the same goal in mind: to learn about how to build a software business from other people who were doing it and how to go about it without external funding. Virtually everyone there had a product they were building or a product idea that they wanted to launch but most needed a bit of help in figuring out how to do it.

Ideas flowed like free drinks at the casino. It wasn’t the type of atmosphere where people were afraid to talk about their ideas for fear that someone might steal them. Everyone was too busy working on their own products to take an interest in someone else’s, so everyone talked quite openly about their problems, their fears and more importantly, were willing and able to help each other solve those problems.

During the evenings, speakers mixed freely and at great length with the attendees. We got a lot of compliments on that. I got the distinct impression that many of the other conferences people have attended, speakers show up for their speech, give their talk and are out the door shortly thereafter. That didn’t happen at MicroConf and it was, in a word, awesome. Every speaker hung around to listen to all of the other speakers. Some of the speakers asked some of the harder questions during the Q&A sessions. There was genuine interest in what everyone else was saying and in learning from the experiences of others.

Lunch on both days was a highly intimate affair with about a dozen entrepreneurs sitting at every table and we made sure that the tables were packed together in a really tiny room. Everyone just sat there talking about whatever came to mind with people commenting left and right on a variety of topics and sharing their experiences. Speakers were mixed among those tables, handing out advice and even cannibalizing their upcoming talks to help people. I felt like I spoke with nearly everyone there, although I know I likely missed a few people. Minutes before I had to catch my flight, I ran into the three guys from Ninja Otter and thanked them for coming. I’m sure they weren’t the only ones I didn’t quite catch up with.

Sunday night at the pub I was told: “This conference has already paid for itself and it hasn’t even started yet.”

One attendee came up to me between sessions and said “I think Patrick McKenzie just saved me $5,000 on AdWords.”

And yet another introduced himself to me and said: “You probably don’t remember, but I’m here because of the very long explanation you sent to me about why I should come to this conference. I wanted to say thanks. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for that email and I’m really glad I came.”

For days afterwards, blog posts about the conference appeared. On Sunday, I listened to the Techzing podcast discussing the conference, and read through hundreds of tweets about the conference. We set up an online group for conference attendees and more than 30 people joined it within 72 hours. Another couple days and the membership was over 50. Between the times my speech started and ended, my Twitter following increased by more than 60 people. By the end of the conference it was up by more than 80 and today is more than 100. I imagine other speakers got the same treatment.

It feels good to get that kind of a response and I can’t begin to express my thanks to the speakers for giving up their time, the attendees for taking a chance on the conference, and to all of the people who helped out with all the random things that came up, like Dave Rodenbaugh taking photos and Ruben Gamez recording video.

Not to mention the sponsors. Whew! We had Microsoft, Red Gate, Balsamiq, bvsoftware, Bidsketch, UserVoice, Pluralsight and Appsumo. Rob and I also contributed on our own with sponsorships from our podcast Startups For the Rest of Us and our online startup school called the Micropreneur Academy. There were loads of giveaways and it was hard to squeeze them all in, but we managed it. Special congratulations go out to the Xbox with Kinect winner. I bet he’s a happy camper!

But there was one question that burned in my mind the entire conference and I took every opportunity to ask people the same question: “Would you pay to come back next year.” I asked that question not because I was looking to make more money next year, but to make sure that we delivered value to people and they were able to justify attending it again. If they said they wouldn’t come back, then we didn’t get it right. But you know what?

Not one person said they wouldn’t come back. And I realize that most people are going to be nicer in person than they would be in an anonymous survey, but the responses I heard were over the top and overwhelmingly positive. I would expect that there were a couple of people for whom the conference probably wasn’t a good fit, but the networking opportunities abounded.

In short, the overwhelming answer was always “Yes”. Several people said we didn’t charge enough and most said they couldn’t wait for the next MicroConf. One attendee even commented that he’d pay any amount of money to come back next year.

If that’s not a testament to what we were able to put together, then I don’t know what is.

I’m looking forward to reading the surveys that are going out this week. Thanks again to everyone who attended, helped out, or sponsored the event. We really appreciate your support.

And one more thing. If you’re interested in coming to MicroConf next year, be sure to sign up for Early Notification.

One of the pieces of advice that I’ve heard doled out. Over the years is this. “Don’t build a product that goes head to head against a company like X.”, where X is usually Microsoft, Oracle, Google or some other large, public company with billions of dollars sitting on pallets in a dark bunker somewhere. Increasingly, the names mentioned are companies who are much smaller, but tend to have extremely large networks of users, such as Facebook or Twitter.

The reason these upstart companies have become so “dangerous” to startups is that with their substantial networks of users, they can institute changes such that your user base can be sucked away virtually overnight by little more than a press release and a beta version.

Regardless of the opposing company or the type of power it may wield, the situation is very similar and can generally be described as follow:. Your startup is “David” and their company is “Goliath”. In some circles, this is referred to as a death sentence. When your startup stands in the way of a powerhouse who has resources that it can bring to bear on defeating you, there is often little you can do.

Something to keep in mind is that “often” does not mean “always”. There are a few very important strategies that you can use to compete effectively against a larger competitor. Many of these strategies will remain valid whether you are each going after the same market, or if you have decided that you are going to go on the offensive because the product “Y” from company “X” is so abysmal, that its users can’t possibly withstand the pain much longer.

Strategy 1: Fly under their radar

This is a short term strategy that you can use to survive for a while. It’s not perfect, and it does have some flaws. For example, it won’t work very effectively if your opponent sees this market as critical to their success. Trying to tackle Google and build a better search engine is almost doomed to failure. Just ask the Bing team at Microsoft. They have billions of dollars at their disposal and to date, have still come up short.

It’s also not going to work well if you are both new to the market with your product, because you can bet your favorite de-motivational poster that they’re already on the lookout for competitors. When they find you, they will actively seek to copy the features of your product and beat you in the market.

If your competitor knows who you are and you know that they know, look for another strategy because it’s too late.

However, if you’re the upstart in the industry and it’s a relatively mature industry with several enterprise level vendors selling into it, this will probably work quite well. In Enterprise sales, mature products are handed off to teams of people to sell who consistently don’t get any real work done. This is not to say that they don’t make sales, because they do. Their problem is that they become so entrenched in the status quo, that eventually they lose all respect for their existing competitors and don’t realize that an upstart like you might have a shot in the market, especially if you address their shortcomings.

It’s not until you start taking multiple sales per quarter from the same regional sales reps that someone is going to notice anything is wrong. It could be months before this happens, or even years, depending on the regional sales rep churn rate at your competitor. The time that this can buy you is crucial. An enterprise company will put out a new release, on average, once or twice per year. Occasionally they will do a quarterly release, but as a startup, you can beat them at the release game. You are more readily able to churn out a new release for each customer, as new demands come to the table and it takes more code to land each customer.

Strategy 2: Be where they aren’t

If you’ve never heard of the technology marketing pyramid, don’t worry about it for two reasons. First, I’m about to explain it to you, and second, I’m remembering it from a conversation I had with the VP of Sales from a company I worked for a long time ago. There’s probably an official name for this, and if you know it, please drop me a line to fill me in. Otherwise, bear with me for a few minutes.

Any market for a high technology product can be divided into a few different segments within a pyramid. At the very top of the pyramid, you have the people who want or need the bleeding edge stuff, for whatever reason. The definition of what is considered to be bleeding edge is going to change based on the type of product. However it may make it easier to understand if we use a more concrete example.

Let’s look at the database software market for a few minutes. When it comes to bleeding edge performance, whose name leaps to mind first: Microsoft or Oracle? Most people will think of Oracle first. Remember that we are discussing impressions of performance, not actual performance, nor are we discussing usability or pricing.

Oracle created their database software with the intent to run it on as many different platforms as they possibly could and wanted to do so with rock solid performance. Most people would agree that Oracle licenses are way overpriced and the way they sell their software is little better than the tactics employed by a used car salesman.

Customer: “How much for 4 Oracle licenses?”

Oracle: “Well, there are a lot of things that factor into it, including number of processors, types of processors, modules, software maintenance, how close I am to my quarterly bonus, etc. What’s your budget for this project?”

It’s probably little consolation that every single Enterprise vendor operates this way. But Microsoft did something smart here. Microsoft looked at how Oracle had positioned itself in the market as the elite database engine with the best performance you could possibly buy and on as many platforms as you could ever imagine. So what did Microsoft do? They shipped Microsoft Access. Many would argue it’s not a true database, but then again, neither is Excel and people use it extensively as if it were. Hell, Microsoft even shipped an ODBC driver interface to get at the data inside of Excel.

But the point is that Microsoft chose to go where Oracle wasn’t. Oracle was well known at the high end, but they were also known for being expensive. You get what you pay for, right?

Microsoft decided that if there was a small segment of the market at the top of the pyramid that were willing to pay Oracle for bleeding edge performance, then Oracle could have them. And Microsoft was going to take everything else. And so Microsoft did.

Microsoft Access went on to become one of the most prevalent desktop databases, a market position that it still dominates. Indirectly, they leveraged that success to assist with the establishment of SQL Server in the small to mid-level enterprise. But they still have issues pushing their database into markets where extreme performance or scalability is required. It’s not that SQL Server doesn’t work in these environments. There’s simply the conception that it doesn’t work well and is going to be a hassle to implement or somewhat unstable.

Over time, this strategy can also fall apart. As you can see in today’s market for databases, there’s a lot of ambiguity. Oracle has nowhere to go but down market, so they’ve offered free versions of Oracle to help attract developers and get into deals they otherwise wouldn’t. MySQL started at the bottom of the pyramid and is working its way up, pushing into Microsoft along the way.

Microsoft rests in the middle. It is attempting to push higher by releasing high end versions of SQL Server to compete with Oracle while at the same time trying to fend off MySQL with free offerings on the low end.

It may be a long way of saying it, but the point is that regardless of facts, you can choose how to position your product in the market and you must differentiate yourself from your competitor, even if the differences are minimal.

This means that if they are pitching performance, you pitch reliability, or scalability, or something else. You can’t also pitch performance after they have started that marketing effort. It just doesn’t work and customers will be skeptical of your claims. Market positioning has little to do with facts and more to do with perception. Use that to establish where you want to be, rather than to emphasize where you are.

Strategy 3: Exploit their weaknesses

Are you going to compete with a desktop application? Build a web app. Are you competing with a web app? Build a desktop app. Do you hear their customers complaining about something relatively major? Pick that as one of your marketing points and start taking away their customers.

The idea here is to find chinks in their armor and begin exploiting them for your own gains. Large companies often don’t realize that things are going terribly wrong until it’s too late. Then they simply buy out their competitor to regain the lead. Sounds great, doesn’t it? See? I knew you were in this for the money.

Strategy 4: Find the users who are pissed off

This strategy plays with fire a little bit. It’s usually pretty easy to find where people hang out who hate the product of your competitor. Just add “sucks” to the end of their company or product name and do a search. You’re almost certain to find a forum that tells you exactly why they suck. Or a URL redirection back to the company website because they were smart enough to buy it first.

Finding these communities does a few things for you. First of all, it serves as valuable market research. These people are more than happy to share why that product or company sucks and how things “should” be done. Take the good, and leave the bad because let’s face it. Customers don’t always know what they’re talking about.

Second, it gives you a place to market your ideas. If these people really hate the other product or company so much, chances are good they would be willing to defect and use yours instead, especially if it addresses their issues.

And finally, people who a pissed off tend to vent online… A lot. And they’re more than happy to tell all their buddies about this great new product from a competitor of their old vendor that is ten times better and here are all the reasons why. Basically you have a built in evangelist network you can tap into.

But there is also fire to contend with. As I already mentioned, these vocal customers have a tendency to believe they know how a product should be built and what it should do. Sometimes, they are in the distinct minority. Worse still, sometimes they don’t even know it. So before you go pitching your product to these people, make sure you can meet their demands and that they are at least reasonably justified in their requirements.

Just be cautions. The fact of the matter is that they are going to be a fickle bunch. They’ll give you a lot of slack in the beginning. As your product matures, they will expect your product to match all of their needs. When it doesn’t, you will have to leave them behind and accept that they may very well be on another forum denouncing your product. Chances are it won’t be nearly as loud or nearly as vocal because they tend to feel like large companies deserve their full wrath and they should save that wrath for them… As if they can’t simply create more.

Strategy 5: Integrate with third party software or develop a plug-in API

Enterprise companies don’t tend to play well with others, especially when it doesn’t suit them to do so. However, building integration points with other products can be the bread and butter of your business strategy. When an Enterprise company starts losing deals because they don’t have a good story to tell around a type of product such as help desk software, they’ll do the only thing they know how to do: go out and buy a company that sells help desk software.

They won’t build their own. When is the last time you saw an Enterprise company release a new product? I know there are a few examples, but they are the exception rather than the rule. The reason for this is that is time consuming and expensive to build a new product from scratch. Even worse, from the standpoint of the Enterprise Company, building a new product is exceptionally risky.

What if they build something that customers don’t actually want because they misread the market? What if they find it too difficult to establish solid market penetration because of the entrenched players? What if they launch a minimally functional product and they tarnish their reputation as producing bad software? Anything involving a tarnished reputation takes a long time to overcome. More often that tarnished reputation hangs like an albatross around their necks which is difficult, if not impossible to shed.

So instead, they trade money for the time it would take to get a foothold into the market. In doing so, they get the code, the market penetration, complete rights, all the future benefits of the product, and a new source of potential customers to peddle their existing product line to. You obviously don’t have that option.

Instead, by providing integration points between your software and the products of other, preferably larger vendors, you can gain a steady stream of customers from those other products who are looking for integration points with products that they already use today. As this third party product grows, the potential for your revenue to increase grows as well. Building integration points into multiple products can compound this growth.

The disadvantage to this is that there must be a valid reason that users of this third party product would use it in conjunction with yours. Not all third party products will be a good fit. In addition, you have little to no control over those products. If they decide to go in a different direction, change their API, or eliminate it altogether, there is little you can do about it.

Finally, you must provide solid value to the customers via the integration points you provide because the customers must now pay for multiple products. Depending on the price point, this could be a difficult pill for customers to swallow.

Final Thoughts

Finding companies who have successfully employed one or more of these strategies isn’t terribly difficult. Certain open source products such as Linux and MySQL have certainly carved out rather large portions of the market. On the commercial side, you don’t have to look any further than companies like Mint.com, Skype (which took on traditional phone providers), and Netflix. For smaller, self-funded companies you can look to Red Gate, 37signals, Source Gear, and Atlassian.

To people like us, these companies are financially doing quite well today. But they all had to start at the bottom and cut their way through the competition before they got to where they are today. That takes time, effort, and a lot of hard work. Any questions? Leave them in the comments below.

This is part 2 of a 3 part series. To read part 1, click here.

So far as the post-op procedures went, I had three different sets of eye drops to use. The first was an antibiotic that I was to use four times per day. I started it the day before the surgery. The next was an anti-inflammatory/steroid to be used every 2 hours for the first four days, and then 4x/day after that. Finally, I was to use preservative free, single use saline drops every hour for the first week and as-needed after that.

I set up something of a schedule so that there was virtually no overlap between them. The problem with overlap is that one set of drops can push out the benefits of another set of drops, so you are supposed to wait a minimum of 5 minutes between each set of drops.

The first set of drops I used at 8am, noon, 4pm and 8pm. The next set I used every odd hour of the day on the hour. And the saline drops I used at the half hour mark of every hour. I was also to do a full round of each set just before going to bed, which prolonged my bedtime rituals by about 20 minutes each night.

Here’s an unpleasant little tidbit about the drops. Your tear ducts are somehow connected to your throat, for drainage purposes. So these drops end up in your throat. As a byproduct, sometimes they hit your taste buds. These drops are the nastiest things in the world. A “good” friend of mine once convinced me to try this stuff called Echinacea drops. The story was that it’s supposed to have some weird medical benefits and that I needed to try it. This is the same guy who got me to try Goldschlagger years earlier.

Anyway, the drops reminded me of Echinacea drops. The taste of the drops isn’t nearly as strong as the Echinacea, but if you’re ever interested in finding out what it tastes like, I invite you to give it a whirl. You won’t thank me, I’m sure of it.

In addition to the drops, I was to wear my Spiderman eyes every night for the first two weeks. I thought they would be really uncomfortable, but it wasn’t really that bad. They sit right against your face, so you don’t really notice after a few minutes, so long as your eyes are closed. Looking through them really distorts your vision because they aren’t glasses and your eyes aren’t healed yet. The down side of those was that in the morning, I had to peel them off because they were held on with tape. Avoid taping them to your eyebrows. Trust me on that one. And there were some slight indentations in your face for a few hours every morning from where the plastic was held against your face.

So the doctor gives my wife instructions to have me lie down in the car on the way home, close my eyes and try to get to sleep. She was ordered to get me a Snickers bar or some other similar candy bar with some substance to it for the ride home. When I get home, I was to put some drops in and then go straight to bed for at least 3 hours.

We got home around 5pm and I went to bed, as instructed. A short time later, my wife brought me some pizza for dinner, which I ate in bed with my eyes closed. If you ever want to know what it’s like to be blind, try eating dinner with your eyes closed. It’s another freaky experience.

I actually fell asleep for a little bit and got up around 8:30pm. A few more rounds of eye drops and after chatting with my wife for about an hour and a half, it was back to bed. Surprisingly, it wasn’t difficult to get back to sleep. I set my alarm clock for 5:45am so I could be out the door at 6am to be at the doctors’ office by 7am.

I know what you’re thinking. Gross. He didn’t even shower. Those were the doctors’ orders, I swear. He said not to shower or take the Spiderman eye shields off until after I came back and he looked at my eyes.

Amazingly enough, when I woke up the next morning, I could see. My vision wasn’t perfect, but I could see almost as well as when I had glasses. I got to my post-op appointment just before 7am and then waited around until after 8am to be seen. Notice a pattern here? There were easily more than 20 people in the waiting room for their post-op and I was one of the last people there. He had done the surgery for every one of them the day before.

Several of us got to chatting about our experience, the exact procedure we had done, the fact that the light would move on us, etc. Two people there had eye surgery in the past. One had his back in 2003 and had the RK surgery. He had a lot of scarring and had to wait until it healed before they could do it again.

The second guy had his surgery about a year ago. His vision had started deteriorating and although he was still happy with it, the doctors said they could do better. Since it was free with the insurance, he said to go for it.

A few others chatted about the PRK surgery they had and discussed in detail to the point that I was really glad I didn’t get it. The reason they had a different procedure because they didn’t have thick enough eye tissue to cut flaps that they could peel back and use the laser. Instead “they took this thing that looked like a toothbrush and scratched the front of the eyeball off”. Their words, not mine. Their stories made me glad that I declined that as an option if the surgeon decided he couldn’t do the LASIK.

The surgeon looked at my eyes for a couple of minutes and said they seemed to be healing pretty well. He put me through a couple of eye tests to check my vision and that’s when a complication I encountered was revealed.

My Lasik Complication

Apparently when he was cutting the flaps of my eye for the laser, there was some serration that occurred. In layman’s terms, that means that instead of a straight cut through the eye tissue, the edges between the flap and the eyeball are a bit wavy. If you looked at it from the side, it might appear like a sine-wave or something close to it.

What that does is causes some slight deterioration in the vision that otherwise wouldn’t be there. He said it’s relatively common, but it generally goes away completely as the eye heals. The result of that serration is that my vision isn’t quite as good as it will be just yet and I should expect that my vision will be better on some days and worse on others until it does heal.

Oh goody.

I didn’t think to ask exactly why this happened. Maybe his hand slipped a bit, maybe the blade twisted, perhaps my eye twitched as he shoved the hatchet into it, or more likely I didn’t hold still as he screamed “Hold still you little bastard!” Ok, maybe I’m being a little over dramatic. Regardless, it happened but in the end this complication wasn’t really a big deal.

So the Spidey shields were removed for good. I was told I could go home and would need to come back in two weeks for another follow up. I wasn’t to watch television, read, get on the computer, or do much of anything that involved looking at stuff for another 24 hours. I would still need to wear the Spidey shields for another two weeks at night to keep myself from accidentally rubbing my eyes in the middle of the night.

A word of advice: When you go to the post-op, bring a pair of sunglasses. Your eyes will be a lot more sensitive to light and if you don’t bring sunglasses, it might be a little difficult to see. In fact, definitely bring sunglasses to the evaluation as well. The eye drops they give you during the pre-op really open up your pupils and it can be really blinding to the point of being dangerous to drive.

So I know what you’re thinking. How soon before you were able to go about your normal activities? I was back to normal almost immediately.

In fact, after having the surgery Saturday afternoon, on Sunday evening I got on a plane and flew out to see one of my customers the next morning. Monday and Tuesday, I avoided sitting at my computer as much as I could, but my eyes were basically fine. They tended to be a little dry, but the constant regime of eye drops helped keep that feeling at bay.

I did get a little scare on Sunday, which was the day right after my surgery. I was fooling around with my younger son and he twisted quickly as I tickled him, which resulted in his shoulder going into my right eye socket. He definitely hit my eyeball a little bit because my eye hurt, but it didn’t dislodge the flap that had been cut the previous day. I think my face caught most of the blow, but that ended me fooling around with the kids for the day.

A mere nine days after the surgery, the only symptoms left to speak of were continued blood spots (see photos) in my eyes around the iris and some continued dryness. I was still using the saline drops quite a bit, but it was getting to be longer and longer time periods between doses. By the 11th day I’d forgotten the saline drops more times than I could count.

This concludes Part 2 of this series. Tomorrow, I’ll post Part 3 and you can hear about the final results from almost 3 weeks after surgery and my conclusions about the ordeal.

On Saturday March 5th, I finally took the plunge and had LASIK surgery on my eyes. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for close to ten years now, but given my profession, I’ve always been very hesitant about it.

I feel stupid saying that to be honest because I’m sure everyone says something similar. After all, how do you do home repair if you can’t see the nails to hit them with a hammer? What about hair dressers, administrative assistants, or virtually any other profession. The idea that I think that my vision matters more than theirs is actually a bit absurd. But nonetheless, I’m entitled to feel that my vision is important.

Based on the success statistics, it seems fairly safe, but as we all know, numbers and statistics can be manipulated and placed into marketing material to say just about anything you want.

Since making it generally known that I was considering it, people I know have come out of the woodwork to share their experiences with the process. I knew about a dozen people who had it done prior to announcing my intent. Then I found perhaps another dozen people I knew had it done. A few people have asked me to share my experience and blog about it. So that’s what I have decided to do.

To begin with, I had planned on getting surgery in April or May of this year in preparation for my trip to the Bahamas in June. I simply wanted to be able to wear sunglasses instead of my regular glasses and some weird contraption to help shield my eyes from the Caribbean sun. When I went to Aruba for my honeymoon back in 2003, snorkeling was fun, but I couldn’t really see most of the fish very well.

I knew I had three months before my trip, but I wasn’t sure how long the waiting list would be or when they would have openings available. I happened to be home for a week after being grounded with pneumonia so I decided to make an appointment for an evaluation.

One place I called couldn’t get me in for an evaluation for another 2 weeks and told me up front that the cost would be $2,300 – $2,500 per eye. I had actually expected it to be a little lower because I had been evaluated back in 2005 and was told it would be $2,500 per eye back then. I was hoping the price would have dropped over time as the procedure became more widespread, but I live in the Boston area so things tend to be more expensive. For a bit of context, I knew my brother-in-law and his sister had theirs done in Canada nearly 10 years ago. It cost them about $1,500 for both of them and that included both eyes.

In any case, I knew I wanted to “shop around” a bit. The last thing you really want to be paying Wal-Mart prices for is eye surgery. Let’s face it. Joe’s Discount Lasik isn’t a risk you want to take. But I didn’t want to pay top dollar and not actually get any additional benefit other than the knowledge that I paid a lot more for it. As with just about anything, there exists a quality bar for eye surgery and once you’ve passed it, you’re overpaying. The extra money is not really granting you a lot of extra benefit. Whether I paid $3k or $5k, chances are pretty good that my vision would be about the same afterwards.

I was disappointed about the wait time for a simple evaluation and realized that although they did eye surgery, they also did a lot of cosmetic surgery, which made me wonder about their qualifications. Did they rent their equipment? If so, how often was it used? Was it moved a lot, did it need to be calibrated, etc.

I called another place which seemed to do a lot of surgeries. To my surprise, they could evaluate me in 2 days so I made an appointment. After the evaluation, they concluded that I was a good candidate for the procedure. I had somewhat expected this, given the results of my evaluation from 5 years ago. I had two different options available to me: standard LASIK and what they were calling Custom LASIK.

My understanding (which to be sure, is as fuzzy as my vision was) is that standard LASIK pricing was based on how bad my eyes were. Mine aren’t too bad, but it was still $899/eye. That didn’t include the cost of insurance in case my eyes deteriorated over time, which was going to add another $200/eye. I’m not a big fan of insurance in general, but this was expensive enough that for a lifetime guarantee, it seemed rather foolish to not do it.

The custom LASIK was a flat price of about $2,000/eye and that included the lifetime insurance. I was told that the custom LASIK uses some kind of 3D mapping of the eye to guide the laser, which makes it 25 times mired precise than traditional LASIK. Twenty-five times more precise? I didn’t look into all of the details of this particular procedure, but I’d heard of it before. Honestly, this decision was a no brainer to me, since I already budgeted in my head up to $5,000 for the procedure.

During the post-evaluation meeting, which was on a Thursday morning, they said they had an opening for the procedure on either that Saturday (a mere two days away) or in another two weeks on Friday. In addition, if I had the procedure done in March, it would be 25% off, dropping the price from $4,000 to $3,000. That was in the ballpark of what I considered to be reasonable. Not too much, and not too little. Like Goldilocks, it was just right.

I gave it some thought on the drive home, talked with my wife about it and decided to register for the procedure on Saturday. A simple deposit of $100 paid over the phone via credit card reserved my slot and I was ready to get sliced and diced.

Well, the next two days were awful. I didn’t sleep well at all. I don’t know whether I was nervous or stressed out from the work things I had on my plate, or what. But I didn’t get a decent night of sleep for two nights before the surgery.

We convinced my wife’s mother to watch the kids while my wife took me in for surgery on Saturday morning. Her mother completely freaked out when she heard I was getting surgery for my eyes, instantly worrying about how safe it was, had I done any research at all, etc. For those of you who are unmarried, having a mother-in-law is like having a second mother. That’s something nobody ever tells you, so make sure you take the time to meet your future second mother before you pop the question. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

And just for fun, I posted an obscure Facebook update indicating that I was headed in for surgery and to “wish me luck”. My mother calls around 10am Saturday morning to find out what’s going on. She’s not terribly thrilled that one of my hobbies is messing with people just to see what their response is, but I digress. I still think her rationale for having more children was that “the next one can’t possibly be any worse than this one”, not that she’d ever admit it.

Back to the story at hand, my appointment was at 11:45am, but I sat around for another 45 minutes. The surgeon requested that the ophthalmologist take another look at one of my eyes, take a few more measurements to double check some numbers and prep me for surgery.

It’s apparently standard procedure that they insert some plugs into your tear ducts prior to surgery in order to help prevent the various eye drops from being siphoned away too quickly. The ones they used on me were collagen and designed to dissolve after about 48 hours. The ophthalmologist explained what she was doing before she put them in and assured me that it wouldn’t hurt at all and I wouldn’t even feel them or know they were there.

Liar. Well, I suppose she half lied. It didn’t hurt, but even with the topical anesthetic, I could definitely feel the plugs. It was a very slight pressure that I would feel in my eyelids for the next 24 hours or so.

The surgeon looked at my eyes personally for a few minutes and said everything looked good, asking if I had any final questions.

Me: “Ummm… I was sort of expecting to get some sort of sedative to help me relax and they haven’t given it to me yet. Do you do that?”

Surgeon: “No, no, no. I don’t generally do that because it’s hard to predict how it’s going to affect a patient and if they’re too out of it, they can’t follow directions which can create complications. So I just don’t do that anymore unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

I considered pleading with him that it would be absolutely necessary, but given his demeanor and the fact that he’d done more than 40,000 eye surgeries over the past 10-15 years(a fact I learned later), I didn’t think it would help. I knew the procedure would only be about 15 minutes in total so I figured I could suck it up. Looking back on it, I wish I had pleaded my case a bit more but again, I don’t think it would have helped.

We got started a couple minutes after that and the best way for me to describe the process in a single word is that it was disconcerting. I had watched a video on YouTube several years ago to see how LASIK was done. I had also known enough about it to know what they generally did. Sometimes it’s better to not know the details, to be perfectly honest. If you’re squeamish at all or unsure of whether you want it done, don’t watch the video or read the next paragraph.

The video I watched showed them placing some sort of metal plate over the eyeball. It was curved sort of in the shape of the eye, but had a hole in the middle and had a flat piece near the top. This was intended to keep the blade level as the surgeon took the top layers of the eye off so the laser could do its’ work. I think they put the same sort of thing on my eye, but it’s hard to see exactly what they’re doing when it’s being done to you.

Everyone I’ve ever talked to about having the surgery done has always been terrified of blinking and not being able to keep their eyes open. For me, they used surgical tape to tape one eye open and they taped the other eye shut during the procedure. I found that a bit odd, but I assume it was to help keep my face from twitching too much. It seemed to help.

As I said earlier, the procedure itself was disconcerting and not knowing exactly what is going on is a really big part of it. I was awake without a sedative and after the YouTube video, I had a good idea of what was being done, but not exactly. At one point, they put this device over my eye and said I was going to feel some pressure.

Lies, lies lies.

I felt like my eyeball was being sucked out of my head! It hurt a bit inside my eye socket. Basically behind the eye itself but the front of my eye didn’t feel any pain. It was a really strange sensation and very difficult to describe.

And of course he says “Look straight at the light” while this is going on. What he didn’t tell me was that everything would go dark, making me completely blind. I panicked and said something to the effect of “I can’t see anything!” to which he replies in a matter of fact tone that it’s normal. Thanks for the heads up buddy. Fortunately, when it happened on the other eye, I was expecting it so my heart didn’t thump itself out of my chest and onto the floor the next time.

When we got to the part where they were ready to use the laser, I was instructed to look at the orange light. Now let me talk about that for a little bit because if you intend to get eye surgery, there’s something you need to know. Through the entire process, there’s this orange light that is intended to help give you something to focus on. This presumably helps keep your eye looking in the same direction at all times. Let me clue you in on a little secret. It doesn’t. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

The problem is that this light isn’t a pinpoint of light. It’s really close to your eye and thus, really fuzzy, out of focus, and it looks flipping huge. It seemed like the size of a golf ball at about arms length so it’s not exactly a “pinpoint”. Also, as you try to focus on it, it seems to move. I know my head wasn’t moving, so maybe my eye was twitching. Regardless, judging where the center of it is located so you can stare at it is pretty difficult. Staring at the edges definitely causes it to move.

All of this leads the surgeon to say “Don’t move” repeatedly and at an increasingly urgent tone as the nurses count down from a number that is based on how long the laser needs to fire into your eye. Others I spoke with in the post-op meeting said theirs was as high as 30. Mine was like ten trillion. Ok, it was 13 but it seemed like forever to hold really, really still or you’ll go blind.

And him saying “Don’t move” repeatedly freaks you out even more because you can smell the laser burning your eye tissue. I’m serious about that. You really can smell the laser burning your tissues. Deep in your brain, you know that if you move too much, it will probably screw up your eyesight.

Disconcerting? Oh yea. Where’s a sedative when you need it?

In the end, the whole process for both eyes only lasted about 15 minutes. Immediately afterwards, everything was fuzzy which I was told is normal. They taped these clear plastic, Spiderman eye shaped shields over my eyes and I sat in the waiting room with my eyes closed for the next two hours. It probably should only have been 30-45 minutes, but they were really busy and never got back to me. No joke there.

Part of the reason I chose this place was that this was basically their entire business. The other place I called seemed like they threw LASIK onto the menu just to get a few more customers. That’s like going to the farmers market to pick up some eggs, milk and a flat screen TV. It’s just not right. Instead, I felt more like we were cattle and that is sort of what I had been looking for. They knew what they were doing and ran a fairly lean ship because they did this all day long. Apparently, I ran into one of the drawbacks to this volume based model.

After two hours that should have only been 30 minutes, I got aggravated and sick of waiting. I asked my wife to flag someone down and ask WTF. They checked my eyes very shortly after that, scheduled me for a 7am post-op the next day and sent me home.

Arrival Time: 11:45am
Surgery Started: 1:15pm
Surgery Ended: 1:30pm
Discharge time: 4pm

Below are a couple of photos I took the day after surgery. Notice the really dark red splotches in my eyes around the outer edges. This wasn’t something I expected to happen, nor was it something they warned me would happen. But I wasn’t worried about it, since it’s hard to cut into any part of your body without it bleeding a little bit.

Tomorrow, I’ll post more about what happened right after the procedure and some complications I ran into.

In early October, I had the pleasure of meeting Harry and Ted from Moraware Software at the Business of Software Conference in Boston. They’re apparently big fans of the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast that Rob Walling and I run. We had more than a couple of discussions at various points in the conference, but this one sticks out the most.

I’ll credit Ted for this particular blog post, since he brought up the topic. Over the past year or so, Moraware Software has transformed its pricing model from that of selling software outright to Software as a Service(SaaS). Their rationale? Mostly it had to do with interesting quirks associated with how accounting is done.

You see Moraware, like the vast majority of software companies on the planet, was stealing from its customers. And before you go off the deep end, let me state plainly that this is a common and widely accepted practice which is completely legal. The details are in the accounting.

Let me explain how it works so that you can steal from your customers too. Trust me. They’ll love you for it.

The Dirty Secret to Downloadable Software

Selling downloadable software certainly has its pros and cons. More specifically, for downloadable applications the price points tend to be higher in the short term and the cash injection is more than welcome for most companies just starting out.

But here’s the dirty little secret that nobody ever talks about. The vast majority of software applications offer support for some period of time after the purchase. Many offer a money back guarantee as well, because lets face it. There’s very little to lose by doing so if you’re offering a genuinely good product.

But guess what? Until that support period and money back guarantee have expired, that money isn’t yours. It’s what’s called “deferred income”. Straight from Wikipedia, the source of all truth in the universe:

Deferred income (also known as deferred revenue, unearned revenue, or unearned income) is, in accrual accounting, money received for goods or services which have not yet been delivered. According to the revenue recognition principle, it is recorded as a liability until delivery is made, at which time it is converted into revenue.

Thanks Mike. What the hell does that mean?

The basic concept is simple. Assume your support period is 1 year. Every time you make a sale, only 1/12 of that income should be applied to your revenues on any given month throughout that year. What you should technically do is set that money aside until the month in question, at which point you can access it and spend it. Otherwise, you’re spending money you’ve received from the customer before you’ve delivered what you promised.

An Example

Suppose that you’re selling two different products:

1. “Spin, Spin, Spin”(SSS) is a downloadable software application built for people who are into the indoor cycling sport known as “spinning”. It tracks your physical statistics and compares them to stats from your training buddies. It costs $120 up front and comes with 12 months of support.
2. “Shake Your Moneymaker”(SYM) is an iPhone app built to measure how well the phone (and most likely other parts of you) move in your pocket while you’re dancing. It’s a social phenomenon sweeping across the island nation of Elbonia and for a mere $10/month, you can compare your “moneymaking skillz” against those of your friends and enemies.

Scenario 1:

Assume that you sell SSS to Customer A in January. Chances are pretty good that you’ll get that $120 and spend most of it before the month is out. You’ll plow that hard earned cash back into the company to do additional software development, provide additional enhancements or simply pay for additional business expenses.

Guess what? If you spend more than $10 of that money in January, you’ve just stolen money from your customer. They’re probably not going to care or even notice unless they ask for their money back, but it still happened. And the reason is because you didn’t set that money aside and account for it properly.

Scenario 2:

Assume that you sell SYM to Customer B in January. This customer is paying you $10/month for each month of service. You provide the service for a month, and then the customer pays you for another month of service. No harm, no foul.

In Scenario 2, we’re spending money as we provide a service. In Scenario 1, we’re spending money prior to delivering a service, which in a way is theft.

What the hell are you talking about? That’s not stealing!

You’re right, it’s not. But you still spent money that isn’t yours. At least not yet it isn’t. So you borrowed without permission, which in most cases is stealing. But this is a socially and legally accepted way of doing business, so from now on, I’ll call it borrowing from you customers. At the end of the day, what’s wrong with doing this?

The fundamental problem with spending money you’ve received before you provide the service isn’t so much that you’re stealing. The underlying problem is that you’re operating your company on credit that has been extended to you unknowingly by your customer. Your customers have credited you with that revenue, but you’re still on the hook to deliver services for the next 12 months.

This means that when you look at the monthly bank statement, it says you have loads of money. But when you look at your accounting statements, they’re going to show that even double digit growth doesn’t make you significantly better off than you were before the sale because you are carrying a liability that is equal to the sale price, minus 1/12 for each month that passes.

Is this really a problem?

Yes. The problem with downloadable software is that it’s much more difficult to identify sales trends. When you are selling downloadable software, you basically start from $0 every month.  So every month becomes a new sales cycle. An off-month can easily derail many of your sales projections and make it difficult to determine definitively whether you simply had an off-month, or if your business is in the middle of a mild (or severe) downturn. It can take months for you to find out the answer and those months can make or break your company.

With SaaS, you have a base of customers and each month it’s extremely easy to tell if you are doing better than you were in the past by looking at your customer base. If you have more customers at the end of the month than at the beginning of the month, then your business is growing. If you lost more customers than you acquired, then your business is shrinking.

When you sell downloadable software, the picture isn’t nearly as clear.

When is Selling Downloadable Software a Good Idea?

I’m glad you asked. One-time fees for software are a great idea when you’re just getting started with your product. This assumes that the cost of your product is in a reasonable range that most of your customers are going to be able to buy without too much trouble. Generally that means less than $2,500 or so per purchase. Beyond that, the sales cycle tends to be a bit longer and therefore becomes more difficult to close the sale.

But in the beginning of your fledgling company, the cash injections you get from those initial sales will do something for your company that a SaaS offering won’t do.

These early sales will provide you with the capital needed to help develop your product.

And that right there is generally reason enough to license your software per sale rather than as a subscription based service. Just keep in mind that when you do this, you’re building your business on a line of credit offered by your customers.

Whenever I do consulting work for a customer who is having serious problems, I tend to look at the basics first. And I mean the extreme basics. Things like computer names, network routes, DNS resolution, Active Directory membership, etc. I’m going to stereotype a bit here and say that the people I work with who’ve been around a while tend to accept it and let me do my thing. The younger ones don’t seem to understand why I need to double check the things they’ve already done and get irritated.

To some extent, I can understand this. After all, at some level I’m saying that I don’t trust anything they’ve done or any information that they’ve provided to me. The truth is that I don’t. I’m not saying outright that they’re liars, or that they don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s just that sometimes, the implications of certain configurations can have side effects that they may not be aware of. Let me give you an example.

One of the products I work with is called the Altiris Client Management Suite. I had a customer who swore up and down that the software didn’t work and they were going to throw it out. I came in for a week and sat down to review their processes because lets be honest, software like this never just “doesn’t work”. There’s always a reason and usually, that reason is because the customer isn’t following all of the rules and recommendations. That’s a bit nicer than saying they don’t know what they’re doing, but humor me here, I’m trying to be polite.

Before I get started, let me get a tiny bit technical to make sure you understand the issue that I suspected was present. When the Altiris software is installed, it generates a GUID that uniquely identifies it to the main server that acts as a central console for all of the computers being managed. When this GUID is duplicated on multiple computers, the central console can get confused regarding who it is managing. It doesn’t use the machine name, the serial number, or anything else. Every computer contains its own GUID and uses that GUID to check in for policy updates.

When the GUID is duplicated, the environment ends up with multiple computers which are each identifying themselves as a single computer. At best, this means that inaccurate inventory information is being reported back to the main console. At worst, the environment becomes almost unmanageable and virtually nothing works.

Back to my example, I started with my standard line of questions, regarding how they were imaging computers, when they were installing the client agents, etc. Remember when I said that some customers get irritated at these questions? For three days, I followed various leads trying to determine the problem and each day, new computers appeared on the network with duplicate ID’s. Standard practice at many companies is to create what is called a standard image of the client computers and deploy that same image to every new computer as it is deployed.

If the Altiris agent is installed into that image, the GUID will be duplicated on the network. If it is installed afterward, it will create a new GUID and there’s not a problem. There’s also a mechanism to reset the GUID during the imaging process, but I knew this wasn’t the case because the customer insisted that the agent was not installed into the image and if it was, then this additional step would not have been taken.

Repeatedly I asked for proof that the agent was not installed into the base image. Finally at the end of the third day, I think someone got irritated enough that in order to shut me up, they checked the image. It was at this time that they learned the Altiris agent was installed into it,which was causing their problems.

Joel Spolsky alludes to a resolution to this problem in his article called “Seven steps to remarkable customer service” with step number two, “Suggest blowing out the dust”. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work so well when you’ve already asked the customer a yes or no question, they’ve given you an answer, and there isn’t a way for them to back down gracefully.

That’s a pretty long winded way of getting to this, but what I’m trying to say is that when you run into technical problems, you need to be assured that the fundamental building blocks that your assumptions are based on are valid. This is harder than it sounds, especially when you’re working with other people and you need them to double check everything that they’ve said and done.

However, I’m not immune to needing a dose of my own medicine. A few months ago, I ran into some pretty serious network routing issues and couldn’t figure them out. If you’ve ever dealt with setting up network routes, you know how difficult it can be to debug them. In my lab I have a VMWare ESX server that has a private domain that is segmented from the rest of my network. I use it primarily for testing purposes, but I route traffic out of it through the domain controller in that network. I also pass all incoming traffic through this domain controller. For some reason, the network routes stopped working.

I spent nearly two hours trying to figure out why these machines couldn’t reach Google because I could do it without a problem from my desktop. Finally I got so frustrated that I decided to reboot my router. In the process of pulling the power cable, I watched dumbfounded as the cable from my ESX server swung back and forth next to the router, quite obviously not plugged in. I plugged it in and everything worked just fine.

Demons of stupidity be gone!

Maybe it’s not stupidity to assume that network cables don’t unplug themselves, but stranger things have happened. The next time things go haywire and stuff just isn’t working, go back to the basics. If the fundamental assumptions are wrong, any correct conclusion that you arrive at is little more than a lucky guess.

I think that there comes a time in every halfway decent developers’ life when he realizes that he’s halfway decent and the world is full of people who couldn’t program their way out of a wet paper bag. I’m not referring to the noobs who troll forums asking for help and are truly trying to learn what they’re doing. Those guys are ok in my book. After all, everyone had to start somewhere, and we were all like them at one point. Although I don’t think forums actually existed when I started programming. Back then it was called Usenet. But I’m old, so I digress and get distracted easily.

What I’m referring to is that the software industry is going through another purging process of the below average developers in the same way it did back when the dot com bubble burst. Back then, it was difficult to find a job if you didn’t really know what you were doing because times were tough and the competition was fierce. This is exactly the opposite of how things were just a few short years before the bust in 1997-1999. At that time, if you had the letter “C” on your resume, they didn’t really care whether it was in reference to your grade in a programming class, a nickname you had, or an actual programming language. “Oh. You’ve worked with ‘C’ before? Here’s an offer letter. Welcome aboard.”

I think that we’re back to a point when times are tough and people are leaving the technology industry, although not by choice. You know what?

Good riddance.

Yes, I know. I’m going to catch hell for that, but I mean “Good riddance” in the best possible way. This isn’t me having a holier/better than thou attitude about programming. This is about raising the bar for everyone who works in the technology field.

That was a bit blunt, so let me rephrase it with an example. This is one of my favorite quotes that I never thought I’d be able to work into a blog article. It’s from the television show Cheers where Cliff describes the effect of beer on the brain.

“Well, you see, Norm, it’s like this, a herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members.

In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Now, as we know, excessive intake of alcohol kills brain cells. But naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine. And that, Norm, is why you always feel smarter after a few beers.”

Well said Cliff. Well said.

Jack Welch, the now semi-famous former CEO of GE heavily advocated a practice that is somewhat common today. At some companies, about 10% of the employees are let go every year, citing poor performance. It is a topic of great debate as to whether this practice is or isn’t beneficial to the company, but the reason the practice is controversial is that it is based on the idea that the rating systems they use are in fact valid. Here’s a hint. They’re probably not for reasons that are best left for another blog post.

What I’m advocating is that the people who are in the technology industry who really aren’t any good AND don’t have an interest in bettering themselves should find something that makes them happy. It’s a subtle, yet very important difference.

Now I certainly don’t consider myself one of the greatest developers of all time, but I do consider myself to be reasonably competent. I’ve had some pretty good successes and done enough dumb things to keep me humble. It’s not enough to be interested in what you are doing for your profession. You have to actually be competent at it, or at least willing to learn how to be competent.

I think this became most apparent to me when I was interviewing people to work at Pedestal Software and ran across someone who claimed to be a SQL Guru. I wrote about this encounter a few years ago, but the basic gist of it was he claimed to be an expert SQL developer (his words, not mine) but had never even heard of cascade deletes or cascade updates within SQL Server. He accomplished this functionality using triggers and apparently very poorly. This certainly wasn’t the only example I came across. Others claimed to have COM expertise, but couldn’t explain the basics of what COM was.

I’ll be honest and say I don’t know anything about COM either, but if you claim to know it really well and can’t explain it to another techie, then something is seriously wrong. Half of the people I interviewed had trouble writing the most basic of code snippets. I’m not talking about building the next PageRank algorithm for Google. I’m talking about simple stuff like sorting, and knowing what ASCII characters are. I mean really basic stuff.

Just last week, I spoke with a long time friend who relayed to me the story of an acquaintance who had been working in the same job in the IT field for the last 5 years. I don’t know his real name, so we’ll call him John. Now, John is not a developer, but this example will serve to illustrate my point. In addition to not receiving a raise for the last 5 years, John had gone out on disability for about a year through no fault of his own. When John came back, his position had been filled so they offered him a different position at a slightly lower level than where he was, resulting in a net pay decrease over five years. John couldn’t understand why he was essentially demoted and is incredibly frustrated at his position.

I turns out that there is good reason for the position he is in. John is hellbent on making sure that he works his 8 hours a day because that is what he’s obligated to provide as an obligation to receive his salary. John is neither interested in, nor willing to work a minute past 5pm. So when something breaks at 4:50pm, he’ll work on it for 10 minutes and then leave it for the next day, regardless of who might need it fixed and when they need it fixed by. He doesn’t take any work home, nor does he research anything on his own time or have any interest in doing so because it would eat into his free time.

An argument can certainly be made in his favor to say that his salary is intended to pay him for the house of 8-5pm and that’s it. Thus, by working past 5pm or doing any sort of off-hours training, he’s giving away his own time for nothing. What he fails to realize is that working 8-5pm isn’t even about working from 8-5 or any set hours for that matter. It’s about doing your job and doing it well. When you walk out the door on a problem because “it’s 5pm”, then you’re telling people that you don’t care about your job or the company you work for. So, when the pink slips start to fly, why should they keep you around?

If John were an hourly employee, I could certainly see the rationale, but he’s on salary. Being a salaried employee affords you additional benefits, such as a slightly more flexible schedule and less overall hassle about exactly what hours you are keeping. And more to my real point is this:

If you don’t actually enjoy what you are doing, leave the industry and go get a different job.

John, I know that sounds harsh and I know that it’s mean, but it has to be said. Get out of our industry and go find another job.

After my friend relayed this story to me, he asked me about the programmatically challenged developers I’d interviewed over the years. We discussed what it means to be smart, talented, and excited about technology and whether that translates into being a more productive worker. It didn’t take more than a few minutes before I convinced him that it did, although to be fair I think he was just trying to make sure my arguments were solid. He labeled it as creativity, while I said that it was simply a general interest in technology. He asked me: “Well, if someone likes to play Frisbee after work instead of staying late or reading books about software in their spare time, does that mean they’re not a good programmer in your mind. Is taking work home a prerequisite to being hired by you?”

Absolutely not. In fact, I’d prefer if you didn’t. I’m not a huge fan of taking work home unless you have to although admittedly, I do it far more often than I should. The underlying issue is not about whether you like things other than technology, rather it’s about whether you are passionate about technology in addition to those other things. The people who excel in the technology field do so because they are passionate about it and have a genuine desire to understand it. It fascinates them and if they had the time and money to leisurely learn about it, they would do so. The same can be said for business problems that are technology related. They’re challenging and if the challenge is big enough or the deadline great enough, of course I’m going to take it home.

But for those of you who are complaining about why you didn’t get a raise for the fourth time, or wondering why you were passed over for yet another promotion, stop looking around. The answer might be no further than the nearest mirror. Do yourself and everyone around you a favor… find a new industry. It probably won’t pay as much, but maybe you’ll enjoy it a bit more and find a career where you can actually get ahead. Ever see what Peter Gibbons ends up doing at the end of Office Space? He seemed quite pleased with himself at that point.

Life isn’t about how much money you make. It’s whether you’re happy. Do what makes you happy or take the time to find it. If you can’t do that, then what’s the point?

A colleague referred to me as Mariano Rivera this week. If you’re not a baseball buff, Mariano Rivera is the closer for the New York Yankees. Like most closers in baseball, Rivera usually comes into the game when it’s almost over and the Yankees are winning by only a couple of runs. It’s his job to make sure the other team doesn’t score so the team holds on and wins the game. If he does it, he gets a “Save” in his statistics. If he doesn’t, he usually ends up with a loss. He’s widely regarded as one of the best closers in baseball.

As I thought about this comparison, I realized that while flattering, it wasn’t remotely true. The people I work with don’t send me in to close a deal. I’m not there to “seal the deal” because I’m not that kind of person.

I’m the guy they call when all hell has broken loose. I’m the guy they call when someone screwed up, someone else got pissed, and tens of thousands of dollars of products, services, and future productivity are on the line. I’m the firefighter.

This week, I felt the urge to change my business card to Winston Wolfe or at least put a quote from him on there. If you remember the movie Pulp Fiction, he’s the guy who shows up to clean up the body after John Travolta’s character accidentally shoots “Marvin” in the face. When he arrives he says:

“I’m Winston Wolfe. I solve problems.”

In a nutshell, that’s generally what I do. I solve problems. And when I’m sent in to rescue a dying project, I look like an All-Star for a couple of reasons.
1) I know how to manage a project and set expectations
2) I have a deep and diverse set of skills
3) The customer expectations are based on the guy who went in before me.

How many of these projects fail?
A study by Gartner suggested that as many as 75% of IT projects fail and an informal poll by CNet in 2008 suggested that 62% of IT projects fail. Neither specifically calls out consulting projects, but personal experience from cleaning up some of these messes seems to indicate that it’s at least 20%. In the past 30 days, I’ve saved two different projects from completely falling apart after the customer lost confidence in both the consultant and in the vendor.

There are varying degrees of failure, but when the customer asks for a consultant to be replaced before the project is over, that’s a pretty good sign that they failed. I came in after one consultant who claimed to know how to use a software package that he had merely installed and used once or twice. When he started working on the project, the customer asked a bunch of questions he didn’t know the answers to, so the consultant went to the product documentation. After four days of reading the documentation, he’d found the answers. But by that time, the customer lost all faith in his ability to deliver and threw the company out. I delivered on the next several weeks of services and heard the story mid-way through the project. I’d be pretty irritated too if I paid $12,000 for a consultant to read documentation for a week. I knew what the customer was thinking and he didn’t hesitate to offer it up. “Hell, I could have read the documentation myself.”

Yes, you read that right. The customer paid $12,000 for a week of consulting services. Some consulting companies charge exorbitant rates is because they guarantee their work. If a project fails, they’ll throw another consultant on it for no charge. Usually they come out a little ahead or a lot ahead.

The problem for the customer is that they waste valuable employee time with the consultant doing things that end up being thrown out anyway. Failed projects cost them even more money. So how do you go about making sure that a project succeeds?

The obvious answer is to use great consultants in the first place. But finding a great consultant is a lot like hiring great employees. The difference is that you have less data and interaction with the consultant to make a decision. More interaction isn’t necessarily going to help because a consultant is generally taken at his word that he knows what he’s doing. It’s simply not cost effective to give a battery of proficiency tests to a consultant who is only going to be there to do a short term project.

When you hire a consulting company to come in and do work for you, you’re relying on the professional services manager to provide you with someone who knows what he is doing. You can stress how important that is, but at the end of the day, the company you hire is going to give you whomever happens to be free at the time unless there’s a very specific skill set needed for the job that nobody else has.

Basically that means it’s a total crap shoot. You can easily get stuck with a consultant who just doesn’t know what he’s doing. Guess what though?

It’s almost never his fault!

I generally feel bad for these guys, because if you hire a company to come in and deliver consulting services and end up with a consultant who really shouldn’t be there, it’s not his fault. It’s his boss’ fault for putting him there. Consultants don’t get to choose what projects they work on. They go where they’re told. And if that means they are put on a project they have no business working on, then so be it. But he didn’t choose to be there. Someone else did. His choice was “Give it a try, or find a new job.” If it works out, then great. He’s got some new skills they can peddle to the next customer. If not, there’s usually enough profit margin built in for the vendor to replace him with someone else who is more qualified and still at least break even. In either case, it reflects poorly on the consultant, even though it’s not his fault.

What’s the formula for being a great consultant?
If you think that a great consultant is someone who knows their products cold, then you’d be wrong. A great consultant is many things, but mostly is someone who is a good teacher. Customers don’t want to have to hire you every time they need something. They want you to come in and teach them to be self sufficient. If you can’t do that, then you’ve failed to do your job. I worked with a guy about 10 years ago who was a brilliant programmer. He could write C code in his sleep and was very good at it. But his abilities, much like the dark side of the Force, made him arrogant. As if he could do no wrong. His code was poorly documented and difficult to read. The few bugs that were in his code were notoriously difficult to find because of his programming style. Eventually, management fired him because he wasn’t willing to be a team player.

A great consultant has to straddle the line between being that kind of Lone Wolf who can accomplish a set of tasks without any supervision, but at the same time, fit well into a team. As a consultant you’re working with the customers employees and need to teach them the things they need to know to be successful. At the same time, you have to be something of a good project manager. If you’ve only got a week to finish a project, then wasting 3 days chasing down a “nice to have” isn’t going to help you finish the project on time, let alone give you time to do any sort of knowledge transfer with the customer employees.

Finally, dial up your Humility Meter a bit. So you’re a consultant. You’ve worked on multi-million dollar software deals. You’ve installed software on tens of thousands of computers in a globally distributed environment. Your customers are all over the Fortune 100 list. Big fat hairy deal.

Customers might be a little impressed by that, but at the end of the day they just don’t care. They want to know that you’re going to do the job in a professional and competent manner. If you do a competent job, they’ll want your company to come back. If you do an outstanding job, they’ll want you back and won’t take anyone else. Which is great for you as a consultant, but bad for the consulting company you work for. This puts their consultant in high demand, rather than the company’s services. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great for repeat business, but if a consultant is good at what he does, most of his customers don’t want to take a chance on another consultant who might have a different style or a lower level set of skills.

How do I become a great consultant?
Like being successful, there’s no one secret to success. A great consultant is a combination of a lot of different things. Usually, you have to branch out a bit to be more successful. I’ve seen both ends of the spectrum and there’s a world of difference between a great consultant and a mediocre one, let alone a bad one. If you want to go from mediocre to great, here’s what you need to do.

1) Learn to be a great presenter
This isn’t just about public speaking, although that’s definitely a big part of it. I’ll give a follow-up blog post in the next couple of weeks to address this specifically because it’s a pretty big topic. Suffice to say that building a good presentation is key, as is being a good public speaker. If you have an opportunity to take a course on how to be an effective instructor, then do it. It will help you. Courses that teach how to be an effective instructor are generally technology or product agnostic. They teach you how to hone your delivery.

2) Become well versed in a lot of different technologies
It’s fine to be a Windows or Unix guru. It’s great if you can build PL/SQL queries in your sleep. But if you can’t relate your skills to problems across multiple technologies and business processes, this is going to hold you back. The ability to at least be aware of the pros and cons of various technologies allows you to relate those technologies to one another to solve larger business problems. It also gives you an effective position from which to offer suggestions on how to approach problems differently. It also helps to provide insight into how things work (or how they should work) when you run into technical difficulties. I’ve been able to pinpoint bugs in a product by knowing how the technology itself is supposed to work, without ever having looked at the code.

This is why developers who turn into IT consultants are so good. They tend to have an innate sense of how things would have been put together that they can troubleshoot things that they think are wrong. It’s like a sixth… or even a seventh sense. A good consultant doesn’t always know why he does the things he does.

3) Be professional
This sounds easier than it is and there are more things that you shouldn’t do than anything else. Don’t badmouth your product, your competitor, your competitors’ product, your boss, your ex-girlfriend, your employer, your ex-employer, the guy who was there before, etc. Airing your personal dirty laundry is simply not appropriate when you’re at a customer. It’s ok to tell stories of when someone did X, which was really stupid. But make sure that you do two things. First, don’t say names. The customer doesn’t need to know who the idiot was. Second, make sure the story serves a purpose.

For example, one of the best practices that I tell people when using a specific product is to always drag the computer onto the job, rather than the job onto the computer. It technically works both ways, but in the list of computers is a node called “All Computers”. If the mouse skips, or there’s a UI glitch in a remote desktop session, it would be very easy to accidentally install a new OS on every computer in the company. The story I tell is of someone who actually did that. It illustrates a point which is the potential consequences of doing it against best practices even though it works. And it illustrates that point without being demeaning.

Don’t brag either. Nobody likes the guy who brags about all of his past successes or the massively complex things he’s done in the past. On the other hand, you have to bring up some things you’ve done in the past to help make the customer comfortable that you’ve done this before. Using past experiences is a great example and an effective way to do this. You get to stroke your own ego a bit by telling a short story of a successful project you’ve done in the past, and at the same time answer their question.

“Mike, how do other companies do this.” “Well, there was another health care company I worked with that had a similar problem. Here’s what we did and it took us this long to do it. I know you’re a much smaller company than them, but it still takes about that much time to get it done. The issue isn’t the number of machines. It’s the setup time for all of the potential configurations. And the thing to keep in mind is that you’re using this technology instead of that one. So it’s a bit different, but the basic process is still the same. Here’s what I think you should do…” As you can see, part of this goes back to #2.

Finally, don’t look like a scumbag. Iron your shirt and pants. If your pants are worn out and threads are coming loose, throw them away and buy new ones. Customers are paying for a professional. The least you could do is look the part. Coming into work wearing jeans and sneakers isn’t going to endear you to the customer, although you can get away with it if there are extenuating circumstances.

I had a customer in Indianapolis who wanted me to deliver training to a class of 12 people for 3 days. I flew out on Sunday night, arriving there shortly before midnight. Unfortunately, the airline lost my luggage with all of my dress clothes. All I had to wear to the training facility the next day was the jeans and t-shirt I’d worn the previous day. The class started at 8:30am and since most stores weren’t open until 9am, it wasn’t as if I could go buy new ones. So I showed up in jeans and a blue t-shirt. I’d spent some time thinking about how to explain it, as I’d never met some of these people before.

I got a lot of funny looks as they walked in the door, but I started the class promptly at 8:30am with no nonsense. I told them that I was wearing blue because I was still upset that my Patriots had lost to the Indianapolis Colts several weeks before and that the reason I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt had absolutely nothing to do with the airline losing my luggage. They laughed at the terrible joke because all of them could relate to the situation. My professional, instructor-like demeanor carried me through noon when I was able to get back to the hotel where my luggage had thankfully arrived. Feedback at the end of the sessions included comments about how some of them were initially skeptical based on how I was dressed, but that I had handled the situation very professionally and they were very pleased with the course.

The way you look and present yourself in business as a first impression is very important and it can go a long way. But if you act like a douche-bag or don’t know what you’re talking about, your value as a qualified professional decreases dramatically and in very short order.

4) Shut up and listen
Customers and people in general like to talk. They want to tell you what’s going on and if you let them, they’re not going to be shy about telling you more than they probably should. You need to let them talk. I’ve been told of goings on which are considered illegal by simply keeping quiet. If you have ideas of how to solve their problems, ask if they’ve considered them. Don’t tell them what they should do before you find out if it’s something they considered. Otherwise, they will tell you why they already tried or considered that option and knew that wouldn’t work in their environment. Eventually they stop listening because you haven’t actually contributed anything.

The point of the first day at any customer is not to solve their problem. It’s to get the lay of the land and figure out what needs to be done. If the first thing you do is jump right into the middle of things without taking the time to find out the background story and what’s really important to the customer, you’re simply setting yourself up for failure.

Listen first. Ask questions. And don’t offer suggestions unless directly asked what to do. Even if that happens, talk about a few different options and then ask more questions. Trust me, you’ll seem smarter and sounds like you know exactly what you’re doing, even if you don’t. Making decisions without all of the information simply leads to poor decisions. Let the customer tell you everything. In fact, ask them to. Then filter out what isn’t important. Don’t let the customer tell you what’s important and what isn’t. You need to make that decision. By all means they should decide what is important to them in terms of goals and accomplishments because that will help guide how your solution is implemented. But you need to decide what information is relevant to the success of the project. That’s part of why you’re there.

5) Manage the project and your time well
Arrive on time, especially the first day. Most customers tend to be a bit lax about the exact hours when they’re paying for X weeks of assistance. So long as you get the job done, they don’t care about the hours you spend unless they are far lower than the amount they paid for. Unless you make some major mistakes, there should not be an expectation placed on you to work late unless that was a commitment made as part of the project. I’ve had customers start at 7am every day. Others have said that 10am is fine. The customer generally dictates the hours. It’s up to you to make sure that the project gets done during that time frame.

As the project progresses, your role should change from that of an information gatherer to that of a project lead. You need to drive the engagement, as opposed to letting the customer tell you what should be done. The presumption is that you’ve been a consultant for a while and have done a job like this before. You know the process and what should be done next. The customer doesn’t. Show them why they hired you. Unless you’re truly at a standstill and there’s nothing else you could be doing, then you should be working and moving towards your goal.

I’m not a consultant. Why should I care about how to be a great consultant?
The skills that make a great consultant translate very well into being a great employee. These skills translate into being a solid and well rounded business owner.  If that’s not something you’re interested in, then there’s somewhere else they come in handy. These are the same skills you need to be a great manager and I’m sure we can all agree that the world needs better managers.

These skills really aren’t for making a great consultant. They will help turn you into a trained and polished professional. Being a polished technical professional will translate very well into any career path you choose. I’ve never heard of anyone who was called “too professional” for a job in the technology industry.