You might have heard about my little podcast called Startups for the Rest of Us. You might have also heard about MicroConf, which is the conference that Rob Walling and myself put on for self-funded startups and single founder companies.

If you haven’t been listening, don’t worry about it. We’re hosting this little conference again this year. This week, we’re finalizing all of the contracts and will probably start selling tickets by the end of the month. Yes, that’s within the next two weeks. Based on feedback we got last year from people who attended, we learned that they really liked the fact that it was a small, intimate conference where everyone really got to chat with everyone else. So we have decided to limit the number of tickets this year to make sure we keep it small. With the overwhelmingly positive response from last year and the number of people who said they’d come back, I don’t think I’d be entirely surprised if we sold this year.

Don’t worry though. If you want to have the first crack at tickets before that happens, go to the website and sign up for the launch notification. You can also see all of last years’ speakers and download a free E-Book. It’s a great event to meet fellow entrepreneurs where you’ll get good and energized for your next entrepreneurial push forward.

I’m doing a bit of an informal survey here, but I’m curious to know whether any of my readers use WordPress. If you do and have a few minutes to take a simple 6 question survey, I’d appreciate it. It shouldn’t take you more than 3-5 minutes to finish.

Take the Survey

Well, I decided to change things up a bit on my Blog and the new look that you see today is a result of that effort. It took me a couple of hours of tweaking last night to get it to where it’s at right now. I’m sure there’s a few odds and ends that I might have missed, but I’m not too worried about it. I would imagine that people are going to point out the things that aren’t working via the spiffy new “Contact Me” form that I added. Now that the new theme and the Contact Me forms are out of the way, I’m going to start blogging a bit more.

The delays have been due in part to MicroConf, AuditShark, goings-on with the Micropreneur Academy, not to mention a bit of self-induced guilt due to not having dedicated the time to actually get back to blogging. But suffice it to say that I think that’s all behind me now and I’ll be making a concerted effort through the rest of the year to start blogging more… a LOT more in fact if I’m ever going to meet my year-end blogging goal.

It was just two short months ago that I announced on my blog that I’m co-hosting a conference called MicroConf. Well, we’ve gone through the pre-sales process, and gone through the regular sales process. Now it’s time for the final push. If you’re interested in going to MicroConf, you still have time to get there. Go to http://www.microconf.com and register.

So far, the conference has really started to come together. We’ve got a great lineup of a dozen speakers who are generally well regarded in the startup community. We’ve got a solid set of sponsors who I can’t possibly thank enough for their generous support. They are, in the order listed on the website:

• Microsoft
• AppSumo
• EditMe
• Bidsketch
• The Micropreneur Academy
• Red Gate Software
• Balsamiq
• bvSoftware

Most of these sponsors are giving away stuff, and in some cases that stuff reaches into the thousands of dollars of stuff. The conference is relatively small (as conferences go) so you stand a reasonably decent chance at winning something. Don’t expect a TV or anything like that though. We’re giving away stuff that’s going to help your business to either launch a product, or to become better situated to find more customers or serve the existing ones better. Some of them are giving away developer tools *woot*

So register today and we can have a few drinks at the Queen Victoria Pub in the Riviera.

Wait, you don’t want to pay for it? Hmmm, well I do have a couple of tickets that I can give away. So I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. Send me an email to mike at micropreneur dot com and tell me your story. Tell me who you are, what you do, and why you should get a free ticket to come to MicroConf . I’ll read all of the submissions and award the tickets I have based on those submissions. I’m not looking for sob stories. What I’m looking for is genuine interest in either launching a product or furthering your business, why you need to attend this conference, what you expect to get out of it, and whether you’ve already registered or not.

In a nutshell, that’s it. And for those of you who want to go but are afraid to register in the hopes that you might win, go ahead and register. If you win and are already registered, I’ll refund your money. I haven’t decided yet, but I may look more favorably on people who have already registered, since I’ll know that you’re serious about going.

That’s about it. Good luck everyone!

Over the past several months, I’ve been diligently working on my new product called AuditShark. If you are new or haven’t been following my blog lately, the basic concept goes something like this. There are dozens of industry regulations which dictate specific settings that should be configured on computer in specific ways. They include things like network share access defaults, permissions on certain files, whether specific services are allowed or disallowed, etc. All of these system settings fall under an umbrella that is designed to help make computers more secure.

Implementing an auditing product is often extremely challenging for a small company because of a lack of funds and more importantly, a lack of technical expertise. AuditShark solves both of those problems by offering a cost effective solution that’s not only easy to use, but helps you measure exactly how you stand in ways that I’ll discuss in more detail in another blog article.

Building this product is not much different than any other product I’ve ever worked on, but recently I’ve come to a revelation. When faced with a choice of two methodologies for implementing a feature or fixing a bug, I’ve often struggled to make a decision. Often, it’s because the two have different trade-offs associated with them, but the scope and severity of those trade-offs tends to be similar. At the heart of this, I find myself spending a lot of time trying to make the best choice when the reality is that it’s an arbitrary choice. Thus I spend more time trying to make a decision than it would have taken to simply flip a coin and then do the work.

When you’re trying to make decisions, keep in mind that instead of making the optimal choice, you should simply aim to make a decent choice. If all of the options before you are what you would consider “decent”, then it’s an arbitrary choice and no amount of analysis or discussion is going to change that. This little tidbit is key to maintaining forward momentum and maintaining progress on whatever product you are trying to build.

If you’re not maintaining forward progress, then you’re either spinning your wheels or moving in the wrong direction. Either way, you’re not getting any closer to launch. So make a decision and go with it. You can always fix the code. You can’t get back that lost time.

Last week, I listed a number of goals for the year, and the fourth one was to speak at more conferences. Rather than waiting to be invited to speak, I thought I’d be a bit more bold and simply host my own. Well, it’s not just my conference. I’ll be hosting it with Rob Walling, whom you may know from his blog SoftwareByRob.com. So without further ado:

MicroConf 2011: The Conference for Self-Funded Startups and Single Founders

When?:  June 6 & 7
Where?: Las Vegas, NV

Speakers include

• Hiten Shah (KISSmetrics and CrazyEgg)
• Patrick McKenzie (Bingo Card Creator)
• Rob Walling, author of Start Small, Stay Small
• Mike Taber (That’s me!)
• and many others…

A limited number of discounted pre-release tickets will be available soon.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?

Anyone launching a startup with no outside funding who wants to learn from, and hang out with, 225 of today’s leading founders and entrepreneurs.

Cool! WHAT SHOULD I DO NEXT?

If you’re fired up about this conference, here are the next three things you’ll want to do:

1. Sign up to be notified when discounted pre-release tickets go on sale at www.microconf.com
2. Upvote the conference on Hacker News
3. Tweet it!
4. Tell your friends who might be interested.

More info will be coming and I hope to see you there in June!

I’ve said in the past that setting goals for each year is a good practice. And while I try to do that every year, those goals don’t always make it to the blog in a timely fashion for some good old fashioned public accountability. Sadly I’ve skipped the public accountability aspect of my goal setting for the past 3 years. In an effort to prevent this from becoming another one of those years, I hereby announce my goals for 2011.

1) Blog more often, at least one full blown article per week on average.

Yea, this “New Years Resolution” went out the window already. But all isn’t lost. I’m technically several posts behind for the year but not so far behind that I can’t catch up. The problem is more about me not making the time to blog than it is about having ideas for articles. I have a list of more than 100 article ideas. I just need to start knocking them out. Of course, if you have an idea for an article you would like to hear my thoughts on, feel free to drop me a line.

2) Launch AuditShark before the end of June of this year

I’ve been largely quiet about the progress of this little product, but it’s not exactly little by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve been working on it for a long time and feel like I’ve come farther in the past few months than in quite some time. Check out the AuditShark website and if you’d like to hear more about the product, sign up for the mailing list. The next 6 months or so are going to be really interesting. I will likely see about pulling some beta testers from the people who sign up, so if you want a preview, that’s a good way to get it. I’ll also accept monetary bribes from customers.

3) Reach out to fellow developers more often.

Unlike my other goals, this one is a lot more difficult to quantify. There’s no real metrics behind it other than simply chatting with developers about what they are trying to do and seeing if there is advice I can offer or ways I can connect them with other people who can help them along. So far this year, I’ve had several hours worth of conference calls with indie developers who have greatly appreciated the advice. I went out to meet with an aspiring entrepreneur/developer in the DC area several weeks ago and will likely have another in the Boston area later this year.

Additionally, I’ve been named as an official Friend of Red Gate which is, in two words, simply awesome. I can’t wait to spread the word a bit more about the great things they’re doing for the software world, not to mention talk about some of their tools a bit more to people who can use good software and database development tools.

4) Speak at a conference

I’m actually quite a competent public speaker. It would be nice to start speaking more at conferences, but I guess it takes time and effort before you start getting invited to things. I’ve been on several podcasts and fielded a ton of questions from people on private conference calls but it’s been a while since I’ve been asked to give a presentation at a conference. Who knows. Maybe I’ll host my own.

5) Finish my book

In my younger years, I dreamed of being a full time writer. I wrote in my spare time and people who read my work felt that my writing was quite good for my age. I went to college for Computer Engineering and never looked back. I certainly don’t regret my decision to become a hardware enthusiast/software developer, but I’ve always enjoyed writing. I’ve started writing the outline of my book and have even completed some of the writing. It has quite a ways to go, but it’s an exciting process to know that eventually, it will be out there in the wild for people to read, buy, and then use at a book burning convention. My goal is to finish it later this year, but I don’t expect to be done before the end of summer. I have to focus a lot on goal #3 until summer.

So, there you have it. My high level goals for the year. I have a bunch of other goals for the year, but many of them are simply stepping stones to the goals above or ways of measuring the goals above. I think that all of these goals are completely attainable, and those are the best kind to have.

Care to share yours? Do it in the comments below.

Recently, I had a conversation with a customer over a bit of functionality they wanted in the software they purchased. Specifically, this customer wanted to monitor their server for changes. I was told it was for “Change management”.

Me: “What kind of changes do you want to monitor for?”

Customer: “All changes. We just want to know what was changed and who changed it.”

Me: “Why?”

I should note at this point of the conversation, that I’m not a complete idiot. I’ve been asked a variation of this question numerous times. There are a lot of reasons people ask this kind of question and what they want can be wildly different from one person to another. Here’s a short summary of some of the reasons people want to know.

• Security management
• Integrity checking
• Change control
• Incident Prevention
• etc.

Some people want to know for security reasons. Others because they are having problems with employees making changes outside of the normal change control process. Sometimes the monitoring is required as part of industry regulations. And occasionally, a company is trying to be proactive about detecting what might be causing problems that their customers are seeing.

Whatever the reason, what people are asking for is not always the same thing as what they want. Have you ever had a manager who told you to do something, only to find out later that what should have been done wasn’t remotely related to what he really wanted? It’s irritating, to say the least.

When I do any sort of work for someone, I ask what they want, not what they need me to do. The fact is that I’m being hired to solve a problem, not to do a job. There’s a very subtle distinction, but it’s a difference nonetheless. And it is this distinction that allows developers to sell software and separates a good consultant from a mediocre one.

You see, your customer will never actually tell you what you need to know. They will try to tell you what you should do and it’s up to you to figure out what they actually need. Because most of the time, what people are asking for is not actually what they want. For example, take the question posed earlier of monitoring a system for changes.

Most people don’t realize that on your average Windows server, there are thousands of changes every minute. Don’t believe me? Download the latest version of Process Monitor, fire it up, and watch the number of writes to just your registry. You can also monitor for file system changes with this particular tool. Yet this is exactly what this customer was asking for.

Fortunately, I have a demeanor that indicates to people that I really do know what I’m doing and I’m not just an idiot off the streets. Most people will humor my questions, even though sometimes they border on the edge of insanity. This customer was no different and after a short conversation, it turned out that they simply wanted to make sure that unapproved software wasn’t being installed on the servers in question.

It’s a bit different than knowing each and every single change that happens on a machine, wouldn’t you agree?

The next time someone asks you to do something and you’re not sure if they understand what they’re asking for, make sure you ask what they’re trying to do. Worst case, you’ve wasted a few minutes of someone’s time. Best case, you saved them a lot of trouble trying to implement something that they didn’t really want.

I think that one of the more interesting facets of a software company is that what people are buying and what they are paying for aren’t remotely the same thing. If you run a software company, or at least work for one, then you’re peripherally aware of the fact that your company writes code, builds executables from that code, and then sells them to other people in an effort to make money.

That money pays your salary, hopefully gives you some sort of health and dental benefits, and keeps the lights on at the company. But the code you are producing isn’t what people are paying for. Not in the least.

People are paying you to solve a problem for them. Something that’s painful. Whether that pain is a business problem: ie: we need an email server, or a consumer problem: ie: I’m bored and I want to play the game your company wrote.

I think that a lot of companies tend to forget this. And when they do, that’s when feature creep happens. Companies start putting features into a product because they don’t have any value left to add. And they chance the UI here to make it look like they did something important, when in reality all they did was change the UI to make it look better so they could charge you for your yearly software maintenance fees and get away with it.

It still astounds me that these companies get away with it. Or rather we let them get away with it. Because we continue to pay them money to do little more than sit on an existing product and let it languish rather than dedicating their resources to making the product better.

When a product stops getting better, we as customers need to stop paying for software maintenance releases that simply don’t happen.

This does beg the question of how to address SaaS applications. When a product has matured enough, the company owners don’t really need to do anything with the software and largely, they can get away with it. I’m sure that under the covers, some tweaks here and there happen, but on a broader scale, a mature SaaS product doesn’t change much. It solves the problem it needs to in a relatively bug free manner.

What you’re paying for with a SaaS is the fact that you don’t need to support the infrastructure behind the application. That’s a very compelling reason that SaaS applications have taken off the way that they have. Another good reason is the pricing model. Let’s say that you want to buy 1,000 licenses of a $300 application. That’s a $300,000 investment. But let’s say that they charge a tenth of that per month. Paying $30k/month isn’t nearly as bad as paying $300k all at once for something that might not even solve your problem.

But again, customers aren’t paying you for your code. At least not directly. They’re paying you to solve a problem. When you’re building a business, remember that. If you can solve a problem, you can make money. Sometimes the trick is to find a problem that needs solving or that can be solved in a unique way.

When you’ve done that, you’ve found something that people will pay you for.

If you missed the webinar on Monday, you can listen to it here: http://bit.ly/c7FlM8

A special thanks to Matthew of EditMe for having me on to talk about starting a business.

Cheers!