Posts by Mike Taber
Goals for 2011
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…
Read MoreHow to Legally Steal From Your Customers
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…
Read MoreTroubleshoot Your Problems by Going Back to Basics
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…
Read MoreYou! Get out of my Industry!
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…
Read MoreWhat you are asking for is not the same thing as what you want
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…
Read MoreNobody is paying you for your code
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…
Read MoreFirefox is the new Internet Explorer
Here’s a date you probably won’t remember. November 9th, 2004. That’s the day that the Mozilla Foundation unleashed Firefox 1.0 to the world. Sure, there were more than two years of releases before that which were affectionally labeled as “beta releases”. Don’t blame Mozilla for that. Google’s the one that made it fashionable to do…
Read MoreY-Combinator backs a Single Founder (no, not me)
On a recent podcast, Rob Walling and I chatted about a new online magazine called Hacker Monthly. Today I dropped over and checked it out and found an article that really rang true with what I’ve been doing over the past several years. It was called “The Royal We: Single Founder Startups” by Ray Grieselhuber.…
Read MoreRecording of this week’s webinar
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!
Read MoreFree Webinar on Making the Leap to a Micropreneur
If you’re not familiar with the term “Micropreneur”, you’ll likely hear a bit more about it in the coming months. To give you a really short description, a Micropreneur is basically the owner/founder of a Micro-ISV. Ah yes, another acronym to explain. A Micro-ISV is a small, independent software vendor. That’s basically a term that…
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