Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch:
Talking to the Owner
There’s something really great when you can talk directly to the owner of a business. It’s a feeling you don’t get a lot in the virtual world I mostly deal in unfortunately. What’s got me thinking about this is that we’re building a patio around our pool (previously it was incomplete and just dirt!) and most of the companies I’ve gone with for the various components are small. The owner is on site at least part of the day here. It’s great to be able to talk directly to the guy making the decisions, the one who’s name is on the line.
Being able to talk to me is one of the main reasons for HelpSpot’s success in my opinion. Customers love having direct access to the decision maker. Of course, as a company grows the founder can’t answer the phone forever, but it’s an element I plan to always retain in some capacity as UserScape continues to grow.
Refreshing Post
Dennis Forbes with (as usual) a refreshing post. http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/Be_Bad_Or_The_Startup_Lottery_Ticket/. If you’re thinking of starting a business I can’t emphasize enough how important it is for you to read this post and take it to heart.
New Computer Setup
As usual I haven’t posted in a while. Since it’s Friday I’m not in the mood for anything too heavy so I thought I’d post about my new computer setup. So far it’s been amazingly productive for me.
First a little history.
The first setup I had when I started UserScape was a Apple G5 Tower with a couple gigs of ram (some may recall how a bad drive almost ended UserScape before it began). This setup had 2 Samsung 17” monitors.
That was OK for a while, but I got tired of being stuck in one location all day. So then I moved to a MacBook Pro, 3GB ram. I also purchased an Apple Cinema 23” display along the way for when I worked at the desk. That’s what I’ve been using up until last month, but the truth is I’m mostly at my desk these days. When I’m not at the desk I’m only doing coding, never really support or other business that requires the horsepower of the MB pro.
Given all this I decided to move to a high end desktop and a new laptop optimized for portability.
The new desktop setup is an Apple Mac Pro tower with 16GB ram (cheap from www.macsales.com), 3 hard drives (more in a moment on that), the same 23” Apple Cinema display as before. For portable computing I got a MacBook Air.
So far this setup is fantastic!!!
The desktop is great as I can easily run multiple VM setups for different Windows/Linux installations, Photoshop, BBEdit with 8 million documents open, multiple browsers with dozens of tabs and all without the system showing any signs at all of being loaded down. I’m also one of these people who never turns their computer off and so far the Mac Pro hasn’t broke a sweat.
The MacBook Air (MBA) is turning out to be the perfect compliment to this setup. It seems that I’m the ideal candidate for the MBA. It could never be a primary computer for a serious business person, but it’s a great second computer. It’s insanely light, powerful enough for coding PHP applications, and handles a single browser with many tabs no problem. I don’t bother with any VM’s or heavy apps like Photoshop on it since all that is on the Mac Pro. I couldn’t be happier with this little sucker. Battery life also seems very good so far and the screen is great.
As the link above indicates I’ve learned my backup lessons the hard way. So the Mac Pro is setup with 2 350 Gb drives in RAID 1 for mirroring. If one fails the other has all the data. I have a 3rd 750GB drive being used as a Time Machine backup drive for versioned backups of all the files on the raid disk. I also have an external hard drive which I use with Super Duper so that I always have a bootable version of the raid disk available.
I’m also using Jungle Disk to backup selected items to Amazon Web Services which is working out great. I haven’t cleared out my account from the backups of the MacBook Pro yet so up there I basically have duplicates of everything. With 50GB+ of data up there and lots of requests for the initial upload my bill was $30!!
Overall, if you have some money to spend on your computer setup I can’t imagine a better setup than this. My productivity has dramatically increased with the Mac Pro (and full time use of the big monitor).
HelpSpot 2.4.0 Beta
Development on HelpSpot 2.4.0 is finally starting to wrap up. This release contains more than I originally intended, but I think there’s a lot of important improvements especially as I plan on hunkering down to focus on version 3 development for the rest of the year.
This is one of those releases that won’t have a lot of flash on the surface, but adds or improves on many things which are day to day pains or potential issues for certain types of installations.
So if you’re interested in participating in the beta please post on our forums and I’ll get an email to you when we’re ready to get rolling.
Expression Engine 2.0 Preview
The guys at EllisLab have released a preview of EE 2.0. It’s fantastic, I love it. The UI is really nicely done. I especially like how it’s catered to their market so well. You can tell it’s going to be really easy for non-tech folks who have to maintain websites to get around and use the system.
http://expressionengine.com/forums/viewthread/74102/
Ebook on Generating Web Traffic
Stephane yesterday released an interesting book on generating traffic to your site. It’s remarkably in depth. I’ve only read some of it so far, but what I’m most impressed with is the breadth of the coverage. It pretty much hits on everything someone starting a commercial website needs to think about.
Competitive Advantage
Great post by Rick about competitive advantage among other things. I agree with this 100%. I’ve found that fast and great service are the easiest (in a certain sense) way to outperform your competitors. This is especially true of MicroISV’s and small ISV"s. It sounds counter intuitive, but it’s not really.
As you get bigger the service gets farther away from YOU and generally service gets worse. When you’re small it’s easier to provide great service and control the service environment. That’s something Rick has done a great job with as his company has grown and it relates directly to what he mentions about controlling growth.
My #1 advice to new ISV’s when they email in is to provide great (and fast) service.
Winter
It’s snowing like crazy here today.
Doesn’t this look like my wife and son are walking into a photo from the 1850’s
That’s an old rail bridge that runs next to our house. It’s pretty interesting. At one time it was the longest bridge in the world.
Sites that Sell!
Bob Walsh has released his eBook MicroISV Sites that Sell! - Creating and Marketing your Unique Selling Proposition. HelpSpot is one of the apps featured in it. For $19 it’s worth checking out if you’re planning to start a software business.
How to make Screencasts
This is probably the most useful thing I’ve read on a blog in the past year.
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/775-ask-37signals-how-do-you-make-screencast-videos
The most important part is one simple sentence. Make the audio first!!!! Doh!! No wonder I always sound like an idiot trying to do the audio while using the UI. Do the audio first and then create the video portion while listening to the audio and match them up. So much more intelligent.
Sunrise
My wife shook me up this morning to see the really vivid colors in the sunrise. By the time I grabbed the camera I had missed it a bit, but the picture is still very nice.
BarCampNYC3
BarCamp is just around the corner (March 15/16). I’ll be there! If you’ve never been I definitely suggest going, it’s a great time and you can’t beat the price.
I’ll be there both days. It’s in Brooklyn this year which is a fun change. I’ll probably stay at the Brooklyn Bridge Marriott which is right near the event and has a perfect view of downtown (I’m not a fan of sleeping on the floor).
UserScape also donated a few bucks and is offering up a 5 user HelpSpot license as a prize.
I hope to see you there!
Nice HelpSpot Review
The great guys over at Freshview did a nice write-up on HelpSpot. Thanks Guys!
They were actually one of our first customers and many of the best features HelpSpot has today are a direct result of their feedback and ideas.
HelpSpot End User Manual Soft Launch
I’m happy, proud, and relieved to announce the availability of the HelpSpot End Users Manual. The manual covers the features end users use on a daily basis (so everything except the Admin and Reports). While we’ve always had some documentation on the features, we’ve never had a complete guide to all the systems features (amazing isn’t it!). This manual fills that gap and covers the current 2.1.1 release.
What I really like about the manual is that it’s not so much click this click that click this, but focuses more on describing features, advice on how to use the most important features and general guidance. With Helpspot we don’t have much trouble getting people to understand the interface, the biggest challenge is getting them to understand how to apply the features to their help desk environment and see how they can improve their efficiency. I think this manual will go a long way in improving our customers experience with HelpSpot.
We hope to roll this out later this week or next week, but I thought I’d post it here first so it could get a little testing. So if you’re a HelpSpot customer or just an interested party I’d appreciate if you could download it and just make sure it opens for you, the fonts look right, etc. I know one person had a problem with the fonts, but we haven’t been able to replicate that yet so your help is appreciated!
I’m working on getting setup with an on demand printer so that we can offer full color printed versions as well. That should be ready in a week or two so if you’d like to order print copies that will be possible shortly.
I’d really like to thank Jamie who wrote the entire manual. Without her persistence this never would have gotten done. I’d also like to thank Mike Rohde who did the cover design and some of the interior design and Working with Words who did the proofreading.
Download the HelpSpot End Users Manual (pdf)
Blues Brothers on the Big Screen
Last week my sister scored tickets to Blues Brothers on the big screen. I never got to see it in a movie theater so it was a real treat.
Pictures taken with the bogus iPhone camera so they’re not great, but you get the idea. You have to be super humanly still to get a clear pic with this camera. Worst part of the iPhone.
Designers Take Note
Very interesting comments on the Washington Post redesign by Edward Tufte: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0002nk
A Few Interesting Posts
My father’s had a few interesting posts on his blog lately. Worth checking out for a little change of pace from my normal dribble.
Battle For The Streets - Wheelies Versus Walkies
KenRockwell.com
I linked to this site indirectly the other day, but it really deserves it’s own link. If you’re in the market for a digital camera and specifically a DSLR from Nikon or Canon then this site is simply a must read. I’ve literally been through every article. Ken’s writing style is great and the information is first rate. He’s making his living from the site so he must be doing something right. When I purchased a new camera last week I made sure to buy it through his affiliate link.
I wish even a fraction of the content I read online every day was anywhere near this good.
More Coverage of NewsGator
A few interesting articles:
http://www.rogueamoeba.com/utm/posts/Article/NNWFree-2008-01-09-19-00 (thanks to Mike for the link).
http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/blog/2008/01/scorched-earth.html (nice post from a competitor RSS reader)
How long until Brent and Nick move on you think? It makes no business sense to keep 2 of the premier developers out there working on free products. The products will do great (for a while) without them being free.
Anyone out there who creates software for a living should be pretty unnerved by this. Your livelihood just took another little hit.
Is there any chance they made them free because they weren’t doing well financially? I suppose it’s possible that sales were not up to snuff, though it seems unlikely.
Best Mac RSS Reader?
Since I’m done with NetNewsWire (you have no idea how sad it makes me to say that) I’m looking for the next best thing. Thoughts?