There are several things that are hard to get used to in Argentina. First up is the fact that you can forget about finding somewhere to eat before 9 in the evening. Secondly it still kind of knocks my socks off when said meal out doesn’t require a mortgage extension. Finally – it is the language.
We’ve been batting away at it with a private tutor, podcasts, online training videos, books and video tutorials for a while and LangaugeBob was something I was keen to give a whirl. It is a great idea and I was kind of surprised to see that the company behind it is actually in Galway. Not that people in Galway don’t have great ideas of course.
LanguageBob is a plugin for your browser that splices Spanish/French/German etc words into the webpages you read. The idea is that it helps you to build your vocabulary while browsing the web. You can mostly figure out what the words are by context and in this way you can build up the range of words you know.
Great idea although you are out of luck if you want to use the Plugin on a Mac.
Damn. Rather than mosey on and do something more profitable I then took it upon myself to right this outragous descrimination against FireFox using Mac users and rolled my own Spanglish script for firefox. To install the script drag the Spanglish link to the top of your browser and hit it. You should see a little sea of yellow words pop up where a Spanish word has been interpolated into your browser. Fun.
This got me thinking. Stephen Downey recently pointed me towards the excellent Software by Ron blog. Ron proffers a four step process to finding a profitable niche.
Market
Marketing
Aesthetic Third
Functionality a Distant Fourth
I’m not so sure how far behind the others functionality comes. I was able to knock together something not a million miles away from their product in a few hours. A polished execution can create some barrier to this kind of competition. He does however emphasise a point that makes a lot of sense to me. First you gotta find the market – then design your marketing around them. Typically I spent about 8 hours putting together this Spanglish button but I hadn’t really thought about how you would market something like this. Then I realised what LanguageBob are doing right. They are already in a thriving marketplace – namely the FireFox plugin directory from where people can find their product and use it. Of course is a marketplace is too crowded then this doesn’t help you much.
So who would you sell this product to? Well – people like me is a good start – newly minted English speakers in foreign countries. Expat forums might be a good start. Perhaps directly to Schools? After that perhaps teaming up with other language product providers? All in all it is a toughie and perhaps demonstrates to myself how even though the cost of creating products like these (and mine) – the marketing costs seem to be pretty much the same as ever.
I really like the Bizcamp concept. I have met some great people through it and the grass roots feel makes the advice proffered that much more believable. On the other hand, I think the presentations can be even better. Specifically, and selfishly, I’d like to see less …
talk about funding / support ‘grants’: Most businesses are not suitable for funding. Biznik send me an email recently claiming than less that 1/1oth of a percent of their surveyed businesses had venture funding. The funding industry loves these type of events but it can be overdone. While funding is great for some it is a worrying distraction for most at a time when really it should be all about sales.
‘professionals’ pimping pro services: I’m all for selling but I’d actually rather get my accountancy advice from another entrepreneur (eugh – I hate that word) than someone who makes their way in the world be selling hours.
and more …
The nuts and bolts of business: Rather than a panel discussion on how to raise money – lets have a panel discussison of entrepeneurs on the nuts and bolts of business (sales, accountancy solutions, dealings with the reveneu etc). Already successful business people how have managed to crack some of the boring every day business or making a buck.
Guerilla tactics: Personally – I’m not so interested in what I should do to build a successful business. I’m more interested in what I can do. I want to hear case studies and examples of how people managed to get the most out of the system or pull off a sales coup by using a little inginuity. There should be a type of parliamentary privilege applied so that people don’t need to watch their P’s and Q’s too much.
Debates: Debates are great for pulling out little gems of advice. How about funding vs bootstrapping or building a business vs building a lifestyle.
Of course – I can’t be there for this years event but if I can’t spout supposed advice from a stage I can at least do it from here.
Messing around with my iPhone the other night I came across this youtube video.
I can recognise the gag. As a jobbing programmer I came up against this type of scenario all the time. Client expectation is hard to meet for development projects. They are difficult to estimate and by and large there is a huge skill in managing the process. At the same time, in a shrinking world, defending on price is also difficult. I don’t think its because I’m bad at what I do. Plently of other professionals run up against the same challenges.
So why isn’t development/accountancy/design etc easy money?
My answer if FEAR.
There is not much uncertainty when buying a DVD or a meal out. You have probably done it before hundreds of times. The same is not true for most consultancy services. You only move house every so often in your life and god help us – you hopefully don’t pay to develop too many software projects.
The other variable is price. Contracting a professional normally involves a fairly hefty fee. This also ads to the fear.
So our strategy for the last few years has been to reduce the fear in my clients by reducing the price. However, I’m starting to think I’ve missed a trick. Reducing the prices does help (400 people paying €25 a month instead of 2 paying €60,000 for the year). What really makes a difference is clearly defining an output. The client must exactly in advance what they are going to receive. This is very hard to do in plain old consultancy. Creating a tangible or well-known and predictable result reduces client anxiety and therefore makes the money you get for the service much easier.
The video does still irk me a little. If you are in the services industry – you have to expect these problems. Either that or get into a business where the deliverable is clearly defined in advance. You may even be able to charge up front for it like record stores do.
Pretty much any man and his dog can slap together a webapp these days. Putting together a user interface that doesn’t look like a dogs dinner however is another thing. No matter how many gradients or rounded corners I throw at an app it still looks awful. Maybe I’m not using enough of them. Anyway – there are a few resources that make putting an interface together a little easier. Here is my list of tools that I use to that end.
Yahoo’s user interface API is probably the easiest way I’ve found of putting together a well formatted standards compliant layout. They can’t help you with the graphics but the YUI Builder makes it a snap to get your general page layout in order.
Blueprint CSS is slightly more hardcore and harder to get your head around. There are WYSIWYG editors that eases the experience somewhat. They set default fonts which also look good and the forms look pretty good too.
This is a simple form layout that looks well and spaces nicely. Getting the forms to look right is always the bit I struggle with and I’ve used this as a template a couple of times.
Jamie Lawrence put me on to this resource. The templates are designed for use as a back-end for content management systems but look pretty slick and might work well as a webapp template. The templates are about $10 each.
Someone who’s design sense I’d never trust put me on to this. I haven’t used this builder but it looks like it has sensible defaults for a webapp layout. You configure what looks like a pretty standard webapp template via a javascript layout. Think YUI builder on steroids. Of course it makes a lot of design decisions for you – but if you are anything like me – tha
Maybe some of the excellent design sensibility down here in Buenes Aires will rub off on my soon and I’ll be able to mock up my own creations but in the mean time I’ll battle away with these guys.
While I’m not really in the habit of quoting management gurus, Tom Peters had it right. Measuring stuff works. By measuring you focus your attention on whatever it is and that extra attention naturally means you spend more time thinking about achieving the objective. “How much money did we make this week?”. “How many leads converted to sales?”. “What drove traffic to the site this week?”. It is the last question that I’ve been tinkering with in particular. We know that blogging helps our stats and get people into our sales pipeline. We track manually the number of blogs we write each week but I’m trying to get as much of our data into Google Analytics as possible.
I hunted around and couldn’t find what I was looking for so I put togther this wordpress plugin. Once installed you can enter your GA tracking code under the Settings menu. The script tracks every time you publish or edit a blog along with a couple of other events. These events show up under the ‘Events’ tab in the analytics interface. You can customise your dashboard report to include these metrics so you can easily see what when you blogged and what impact (if any) it had on traffic.
Ideally I’d like to add extra metrics such as ‘outbound phone calls’, ‘inbound phone calls’, ‘tweets’ and all the other stuff we track manually. I think there is a lot of scope for pimping out analytics with this type of extra information. While it is easy to know that you blogged last Wednesday – having a record there permenantly helps to identify trends over time.
Right. Enough of all this coding business. Time for some real work …
I admit it. I drank the cool-aid, read “The Seven Habits of Highley Effective People”, “Unlock the Giant Within” and even attended the live events. It was at one of these events that I met a guy who gave me the single most motivating advice I have ever received. The guy was from eastern Europe, had spikey blond hair, didn’t look over 30 and rented out a factory that was happily paying for his every whim. “How did you do it?” I asked. “I hate to work” was his reply. He hated work so much that he had read all the books, identified a way to avoid it (by purchasing property and renting it out) and just gone and done it. In a bizarre way, he had achieved what I was looking for – financial independence – by being more lazy than I was. If only I hated work that much.
So – this encounter now provides a major lynch pin of my attitude to getting to where I would like to go. By picking out my own weaknesses I can use them to my advantage. Personally I sometimes care too much about what other people think. To that end I try and position myself so that I’m embarrassed into achieving my aims. I tell people what I am trying to achieve (or narrow cast it via a blog, running networking events, twitter etc). The desire to do what I said I was going to do helps me to actually follow through. Just last week I told my father-in-law-to-be I was going to run a marathon with him. I guess I’m going to have to do it now.
Short.ie is a great service. It whittles down URL’s nicely but I’ve always found the interaction a little bit clunky. You copy your URL, carry it over to short.ie and paste it in. There you can press “Shorten” and finally copy your shortened text. Inspired by picomarks and skitch I knew there had to be a better way. With that in mind I’ve written a little button you can drag into your firefox/safari browser tab.
Grab the above link and drag it to the top of your browser just under the address bar and let go. It should snap in as a new button. It can take a few attempts to get right. I’m afraid this trick only works on Firefox and Safari for now. Now clicking on the button makes a little yellow box pop up with your short.ie URL ready to copy. You can copy the URL to your clipboard by clicking the copy button.
So has this anything to do with building online income? Well. No. Part of the reason for the move to the other side of the world was so that I could play around with stuff like this. Its nice to be nice and lets hope someone finds it useful.
Numbers are confusing things. Take probability for example. I never could understand why a coin wasn’t more likely to come up tails if it has just landed on heads. Numbers have a way of obfuscating reality. Humans as a rule are not great at visualising them. I’ve been reminded of this a number of times recently. The rule of 72 is a prime example (pardon the pun).
Despite this numbers are pretty damn important and for the last while I’ve been trying to get head around they effect our sales funnel. There are a number of percentages involved (% conversion rate, % margin) and the compounding effects of changing figures early on in the funnel (eg: adding more leads) makes it hard to understand which changes make the most impact to the bottom line.
To help me play with the figures and explain my thoughts I’ve knocked up this little javascript app below. You can change any of the figures underlined in gray.
Brad Sugars describes this basic model as the business chasis. I only have influence over certain factors in my business.
Number of leads: I can advertise, purchase, network, do press releases etc to generate more of these.
Conversion Rate: I can come up with special offers, deploy harder/softer sales tactics, ask for feedback etc to try and improve my hit rate.
Transactions / customer: I can email my existing customer base, offer upgrades, look for suitable products to pass on to my existing customer base.
Average dollar sale: Here I can offer 2-for-1’s upgrade my product offering etc.
There isn’t much else I can tweak really. It is just a question of deciding where I should spend my effort. Should I spend more time on adwords to generate more leads or would I be better off trying to improve my conversion rate or upping my average dollar sale? This tool is supposed to help me play around with the figures. It also helps me to think about new opportunities. Existing business models have reasonably well understood ‘industry norms’ for each of these figures.
For example, free webapps generally speaking have a just under 1% conversion rate to paid plans. Their average dollar sale / month is gonna be around the €20 – €50 mark. Using this conventions it makes it easy to slot in the figures and do the math on how many leads would be required to create a viable business. Of course it is very back of the envelope stuff but even doing these simple numbers has helped me avoid making false assumptions. Why spend $$$ trying to generate more leads when I can add a product to upsell for free and market directly to my existing customers?
It is not perfect as a tool by any means. I’d love to have some better way to visualise this model.
Moving country is not something that happens easily. It has taken us the guts of three months to get our act in order and I’m still yet to arrive. There is a lot to think about – especially as we will be carrying out most of our business in Ireland while living in Buenos Aires. Here are our thoughts on what is easy and what is not:
Bookkeeping: Tax in general will screw you up good time if you don’t sweat the small stuff. This is especially true where there are large numbers of small transactions and triply true if you are trying to do it from abroad. With all that in mind – getting a good bookkeeper is essential. What I’ve learnt about bookkeeping is that accountants, by and large, don’t like doing it. Accountants account and boookkeepers keep your books. They not only work at a better rate but generally do care about the small stuff and keep everything ticking along so you can focus on growing business. It has taken me a long time to learn this lesson and a lot of unnecessary pain. To that end I’ve been using C&W Bookkeeping. While the website might not look that slick – Sue and Liz have been excellent in helping us make the move. It is a BIG relief to have these guys on board. In particular we have:
Redirected bank statements
Had a copies of revenue documents sent to them
Given them access to our online invoicing system as well as our sales tracking sheets (which we maintain in Google Speadsheets).
Virtual Assistant: I’m not sure about the term virtual assistant, but for now lets pretend that is what we have. Back in Dublin a good friend is helping with things on the ground. Everything from sending out brochures to receiving and lodging the odd cheque all needs to be done. For a reasonable monthly fee we buy a block of time to cover off anything that requires a little manual effort. In our case this also includes on the ground marketing effort for Piehole. In our case we worked out a reasonable hourly rate and block booked 10 hours a month.
Power of Attorney: There are of course some things which won’t be possible without your own personal signature. Setting up bank accounts, accepting grants, signing death warrants etc. For this we have set up a power of attorney with someone we trust in Dublin.
Redirect Post: This is a pretty straightforward one. An Post will allow you to redirect your mail for €110 a year. In our case we redirect it to our VA.
Of course there are probably points 5 and 6 we wish we had set up before leaving but I’ll find out about them in time.
Ideally I’d like to add extra metrics such as ‘outbound phone calls’, ‘inbound phone calls’, ‘tweets’ and all the other stuff we track manually. I think there is a lot of scope for pimping out analytics with this type of extra information. While it is easy to know that you blogged last Wednesday – having a record there permenantly helps to identify trends over time.