Russian Ninja

I am continuing to setup my work environment on the Mac and I am evaluating an app called Things to manage all my tasks. It has a companion app for the iPhone which syncs with the desktop app via WiFi, so this makes it pretty convenient.

Today I was investigating the possibility of Things to sync with iCal and what good this can do to me. It appears there is not much to it. The ToDos from Things appear as ToDos in iCal in a sidebar, they of course don’t get added to the main calendar view since only Events can go there.

This got me thinking. What’s the difference between an Event and a ToDo? It appears that a difference for me is very small. I definitely want to see my Events in the list of my ToDos for today. If I need to go to a shopping center today, I want this to be in my main list of tasks that are due today. Although it’s an Event and I have set a specific time when it should happen, I still need to know that it exists at all when planning my day.

So, to recap, it appears that an Event is just a ToDo with a certain date and time attached to it. Things and iCal don’t do a good job to realize this concept. But I think I definitely nailed it down here at least as my personal most convenient way to work on tasks planning.

I’ll keep this in mind for my future experiements with project management software.

Thoughts Mac, Project Management, Things

Just finished playing a wonderful classic point-and-click adventure game called “A Vampyre Story” (done by people involved with The Curse of Monkey Island).

One of the best games I played in the last several years, definitely recommended, especially if you are a classic adventure fan.

My Macbook Pro has become my 3rd console (the other two are PS3 and Xbox360). When I am done working on it in the evening, I restart in Windows Vista and start playing Windows-only games. Great fun.

It’s a pity they don’t have A Vampyre Story on Steam, but it is still possible to purchase and download it online (for example, here), which I did.

Digital distribution rocks, especially when it is not limited geographically. The game is not available in the retail shops here, but I was able to buy it online and was playing in no time.

Nice!

Whatnot Games

Because “ls” is shorter then “dir”.

Whatnot Unix, Windows

First product released by Stuffed Guys (in what I call “Phase 2″ of the company’s life) was Stuffed Tracker 2.0.

I remember the fear that I had right after the release. There were no sales for maybe 20 first days, we had no evidence that anybody would purchase our software at all. This was very depressing time, especially since we’ve almost burned through all of our money by that time (Stuffed Tracker 2.0 development took about 9 months and we were developing our second product, Factory Nova, in parallel as well).

When one late evening, when I was already at home, I’ve finally got an email notification from ShareIt that somebody just made the first purchase of our product I’ve experienced one of the happiest moments in my life. And I was not the only one so excited, when I’ve sent a text message to Ivan’s mobile (Ivan is the Stuffed Tracker’s one and only programmer) that we’ve just got our first sale, he immediately called me back, although he was out of the city and it was really late at night!

After the first sale, people started purchasing Stuffed Tracker licenses regularly, but for many months, at the beginning of the month, when, for example, we were not getting any sales for the first five days, the fear that there would be no more purchases was returning to me again and again. It seemed that although we had purchases before already, it didn’t prove anything — maybe that was a coincidence, a fluctuation and nobody would buy anything anymore.

Only after five or six months I finally got a feeling that sales won’t stop, that it’s a trend and not a random fluctuation, that we’ve created something that people really want to buy and that the whole products business model works.

I hope this small story will help to build confidence in someone who is only preparing their first software product for a launch. Just create a great product (don’t forget to market it too!) and the sales will come. Guaranteed.

Whatnot Software Business, Stuffed Guys, Stuffed Tracker

Moral: upsell at point of sale, customers are handing over the money already, so why not give them more buying opportunities.

via The Business of Software – Upselling – Support Contracts.

That’s one of the missed opportunities for us in Stuffed Guys and a note for the future. We discussed this, it’s pretty easy to implement in any sales system, including ShareIt, which we’ve personally used. But we never got around to doing this, unfortunately.

The original post talks about upselling support contracts, we thought about upselling additinal sites licenses for Stuffed Tracker, or additional projects/users licenses for Factory Nova.

Thoughts, Whatnot Software Business, Stuffed Guys

I can’t stop thinking after reading a post like this on the 37signals blog that the guys in 37signals just constantly try to find an excuse for themselves. They do the same thing regularly with posts related to their Basecamp and the simple nature of their software.

A business plan. Right. My business plan for Stuffed Guys, for example, predicted the sales almost down to a dollar. Does it make my business planning skills exceptional, standing out of the crowd? I doubt it very much.

Of course you shouldn’t use numbers in your business plan made out of thin air, the numbers should be based on something (in my case — previous experience), but a business plan works, and it sets a clear direction for the company for years.

Whatnot 37signals, Software Business

I just decided to give another try to Google’s browser called Chrome. I’ve tried it when it was only launched initially and didn’t really get what’s so special about it.

The first thing I’ve noticed now that I am on Mac is that although Chrome is based on the same open-source Webkit engine that Safari uses, Chrome is currently only available for Windows. Unfortunate (and hopefully temporary), but not a big problem in this age when Macs can run Windows without problems.

Not sure if they had this great comics-style explanation of what Chrome is all about before, but this time I’ve checked it out and it make things very clear.

The most important feature (for me at least) is that each tab in Chrome is actually a separate process in the operating system, so theoretically you can easily identify tabs (or sites) that consume most of the resources, including memory. Chrome even has its own task manager, which shows what resources each tab consumes!

I am not sure if browsers such as Firefox work the same way processes/threads wise on every operating system, but certainly for Windows independently processed tabs is a cool and innovative feature. Google engineers definitely have something interesting going on in Chrome.

What struck me as important is the mention of the “Gears guys” in the comic who were saying that

One of the problems with the browsers is that they’re inherently single-threaded. For example, once you have Javascript executing, it’s going to keep going, and the browser can’t do anything else until Javascript returns control to the browsers.

In a response to this, Chrome engineers decided to go with this separate process tabs, but this is of course only a partial solution. And maybe even not a solution at all. Certainly you can isolate Javascript-heavy web apps in separate tabs, close the tabs if they become unresponsive and etc.

But it would be way cooler if Chrome actually made it possible to run Javascript in the page in separate threads like Gears guys were suggesting. That would tremendously help the developers of Javascript/Ajax-based web apps. You can do pretty complex things in the background with Javascript while the whole page remains as responsive and interactive as before.

I wonder if that’s technically possible at all, why Chrome engineeres decided not to go this way?

Thoughts, Whatnot Chrome, Google

I think Eric Sinc is right in this video — the best way to compete when you are introducing a new product is to pick up one feature from all the features that your competitors have and do it much much better.

From my experience with software products I can see that this should work. You build your product with the main focus of doing only one thing much better then your competitors, this immediately differentiate you from them. And, of course, you can always then extend your product to do all the same things your competitors do if your users would want that. But one key feature will help you tremendously to position your product correctly when it is only launching.

Thoughts Software Development

Information overload is a real problem in our age. I don’t remember how many years ago I stopped adding new blogs and other XML feeds to my feed aggregator because I couldn’t read all of the posts in the blogs to which I was already subscribed.

About a year ago I had this idea, that the same Bayesian statistical theory that is successfully used to fight with spam can also be applied to feeds aggregation. I actually started creating my own feeds aggregator based on this idea, but I didn’t have enough time for it, so it was frozen.

The main idea seems to be pretty simple and I don’t see why any of the existing aggregators don’t use it already. Basically, you allow the users to say if any particular blog post was interesting for them or not. It should be a binary yes or no thing. You then use Bayesian theory and look at the words in the post that was marked as interesting or not and this way you build a statistical profile for each user of what they like and what not.

After some initial training such system can start showing you only the posts you are really interested in and hide the ones you probably won’t like, thus reducing the information overload dramatically. What’s great here is that even if you’ve missed some of the posts that you’d like, there is good chance that due to blogs interlinking you will still see a link to that post in another blog post which would be statistically considered interesting for you.

There is so much that can be done with this — the system can suggest you blogs (or posts in the blogs) which you are not subscribed to, but there is a high probability you will like them based on your statistical profile.

This can even become a social network where you can find people with interests similar to yours based on their and your statistical profiles.

And this is just for starters.

Care to comment?

Ideas Bayesian, Information overload

This is the first post in what would probably be a series of posts about Stuffed Guys, a kind of post-mortem to the second phase of the company’s life, which ended on Nov 10th, 2008 with this farewell post on the company’s forums (and started on Jan 1st, 2005).

Stuffed Guys was created by programmers, we wanted to create our own software, make living out of selling it to individuals and companies and take extra pleasure from the fact that something we’ve created is being used and loved by people around the world.

Almost everything eventually worked out as I personally envisioned back in 2004. “Almost” — because user support over the years had become a major challenge.

The truth is, developers don’t like doing support. I think you need to have a certain mentality to be able to answer and resolve user queries on a permanent basis and find pleasure in doing this.

Two major problems for a developer:

1. In a small company like Stuffed Guys, with only a few developers, solving user problems everyday takes too much time out from actual programming. And we’ve chosen to be programmers because we.. well.. we wanted to program everyday. User queries, especially tricky cases, which could take a whole working day to resolve, take too much time, leaving too little for programming
2. Once in a while you encounter “mentally challenged” people, who don’t like you or your product for the reasons that only they know of. Such people won’t listen to the word of reason, they will tell you and sometimes your customers too (via the forums, for example) how they hate you, how bad your product is, and other such things. If you are doing user support and encounter such people, you can’t ignore them as you would probably do in the real life (or kick them in the face for that matter), you need to stay polite regardless of what they say. For a programmer this is a nightmare. When this first happens — it ruins a whole day, then a week, then a month and then you just can’t bare it anymore psychologically, your job becomes a nightmare.

It seems that in order to work in product support you need to have a special state of mind and support should better be your main responsibility in the company.  So, once I realized this, I started searching for a dedicated support person for Stuffed Guys. But it didn’t work out well.

Supporting users of such products as our Stuffed Tracker requires quite a lot of technical knowledge about the internet technologies and even some basic programming skills (to be able to debug problems on the spot with the client).

Turns out most of the people with that kind of knowledge are not searching for a technical support position, they want to be programmers. Probably a position in a support department can be looked at as a starting point in the company, but this doesn’t work in a Russian job market. Until late (maybe with the worldwide economic crisis this will change)  there was such a big demand for programmers, that people who knew how to program at least on the basic level had no desire to search for any job position other then programming (it also pays more).

When I will be preparing Stuffed Guys for the 3rd phase I would like to have a plan for support from the start, without this problem solved it doesn’t make sense to return to our own products at all as this kills all the fun.

I recently thought of one trick. We have support forums where our users can chat with us and with each other — this is a small community that gathered around our products. They actually already do user support for us in some way. They know how our products work, they use them already for some time. If only we could  come up with a way to outsource the support to our own users! Psychologically, these people should have little or no pressure, as they are not really a part of the company officially. So people who can be aggressive towards the company or the products should not be taken by the community supporters personally (as it happens when we do user support ourselves).

But the ideal solution would probably be for someone to create a company to provide outsourced technical support for small companies like Stuffed Guys. We can introduce support charges for our customers (which is a common practice anyway) and would redirect most of these payments to this outsourced support company. I think it is quite possible that this company can also provide their own support software to the companies they work with, so that both we and them can login in the same system and monitor user queries and things like this.  A ready-to-use support system would be an additional advantage of such support company.

That would be a perfect solution, for us at least. I wonder if such company already exists, or if someone would be interested in creating one (we would be the first customers!). The idea from the business perspective looks to be pretty interesting indeed.

PS. From Guy Kawasaki –

Hire the right kind of people. To put it mildly, customer service is not a job for everyone. The ideal customer-service person derives great satisfaction by helping people and solving problems. This cannot be said of every job candidate. It’s the company’s responsibility to hire the right kind of people for this job, because it is a bad experience for the employee and the customer when you hire folks without a service orientation.

Ideas, Thoughts Software Development, Stuffed Guys, Support