I write software 
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business
Remember those jokes about studying by osmosis back in undergrad? Put the textbook under your pillow and learn in your sleep! That was a funny joke, at least the first time, right? Right? It turns out the whole world runs on the same principle behind “learning by osmosis”. ”We have this problem, let’s do something totally arbitrary and [...]
Here’s the job of a CEO: to make money. To spend less than revenues. That’s it. It’s really that simple. Everything else is the how of doing that–how to cut costs, how to drive revenue, whether to worry about the short-term or the long-term, etc. The perception, though, is a lot different. Stereotypically, the CEO is [...]
There’s a commonly-held myth in software pricing. It goes like this. The more something costs, fewer people will want to buy it. Here’s the picture: This assumption, called elasticity of demand, is true in general but is wrong for software, or at least wrong from the point of view of a small ISV. First, demand [...]
Imagine if we lived in a world with an infinite amount of time. You could get all your projects done, and you could read all the things. What would you do with all that time? One thing you would do is talk to people. Having conversations is one of the most useful things you can [...]
As a software developer, you know the story: the “idea guy” approaches you and all he needs is someone to code his “idea”. You know, for equity. I get thousands of these per year, and you’ve gotten at least several dozen even if you’re not in a heavy “get-rich-quick” development sector. And while that’s all [...]
Just a week ago, I was talking about how great it would be to be able to filter and hypertarget AdWords, and I discussed in some detail a list of changes that I hoped would improve advertising performance. The results are in. For reasons that are a little complicated, it’s difficult to measure conversions directly [...]
Do you know what feature would change my life? A way to exclude certain hostnames from seeing our Google Ads. Doing hypertargeted AdWords campaigns both increases your conversion rate and decreases the advertising spend. If your sales cycle involves actually interacting with customers, it’s even more important to really target things as sort of a [...]
It takes a couple of bad clients to bulletproof your contracts. If you’re new at software contracting, you may know enough to know that you need a contract, but you don’t have the experience to know what to put in it. But rather than waiting for that bad client to test your contract, learn from our mistakes [...]
From Founders At Work: No, it was never clear that we were on to something huge. You never know anything. The hardest part in a startup is that you wake up one morning, and you feel great about the day, and you think, “We’re kicking ass.” And then you wake up the next morning, and [...]
This guy says you need $100k to make a game: Some of my clients are surprised when I tell them that the development of Angry Birds cost $140k, and probably at least double that since, because they physically cannot see where the money has gone. To the untrained eye, Angry Birds appears the same as Camelot Smashalot, and [...]
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