BM: Blog Micro Transactions

Posted on February 23, 2012 by

After reviewing the original business model of the Entrecot restaurant I’d like to write today about a second original business model: blog micro transactions.

The idea is to write a blog post interesting enough so that people want to know more about the post topic. Then, as part of the post, you offer the reader to buy this “more” (a pdf with extended information, a more complete example, some technical details not explained in the post, etc) for a small price.

The best example of this is WildBunny that sells the source code that accompanies his technical articles (on how to make games). He explains his not-so-bad results with this strategy in this post. Definitely worth reading!

Most likely you won’t become rich with blog micro transactions but it’s a possible strategy to complement to your main revenue stream.

If you liked this post please consider following my thoughts on twitter and visit my other projects: the modeling languages portal, go wordpress migration services and my research rants.

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Worst thing can happen to you is to have “some” success

Posted on February 14, 2012 by

When you have no clients (and you’ve been pushing the product long enough) is easy to realize that you better drop the product and go back to the drawing board.

When you have many many clients, it’s a no brainer to go on (and become filthy rich :-) )

The problem is when you have some clients (e.g. imagine that you make, let’s say, 1500 USD per month with your product). Not enough to make a living (at least in many countries/cities, specially if you have to support your family) with the product but enough to be willing to stick to it.

Sure, you could try to take yourself out of the equation and automate as much as possible the product and all the tasks surrounding it (support, publicity,…) but still it will still occupy some of your time (or it will slowly die so you’ll lose the 1500 anyway).

You could also stick for a while and see if you can bring up considerably the revenue but how long should you try? When it’s better to just stop and try a different idea that could work better (or not, and then you’d lose the 1500 again!).

An alternative option would be to try to sell the product before moving on the next idea (not sure how much you can get for a product that makes 1500 USD per month, probably no more than 20-30.000 USD)

Tough decisions…

Posted in business model, customers, philosophy | 5 Comments

RR: The creators of no-longer-with-us products explain what went wrong

Posted on February 8, 2012 by

If you haven’t done it yet (this recommended reading was published at the end of 2010) I strongly suggest you to thoroughly read why the authors of several software products decided to pull the plug.

You can also read my, unfortunately, own experience on this topic

If you liked this post please consider following my thoughts on twitter and visit my other projects: the modeling languages portal, go wordpress migration services and my research rants.

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Sorry, but I’m not in twitter to follow your personal life

Posted on February 3, 2012 by

I use twitter as a work tool every day and I’m always looking for new people to follow (among the ones that follow me or thanks to the twilert search alerts that I’ve setup).

Unfortunately, I end up following few of the interesting people I find because there is too much noise in their accounts (noise defined as “a lot of personal tweets”).

Let’s be honest, I’m really glad that you enjoyed your bagel with cream cheese this morning or that you became the mayor of X but I don’t really care. So, if I don’t follow you back don’t get mad at me, it’s not personal, I just don’t have time/interest in your personal life.

So, if you created a twitter account as part of your marketing strategy for your mISV please make sure that each tweet is worth reading. Keep personal stuff for your personal twitter account but don’t mix things up. I (and for sure others) would appreciate it. Thanks!

If you liked this post please consider following my thoughts on twitter and visit my other projects: the modeling languages portal, go wordpress migration services and my research rants.

Posted in advertisement, marketing, social | 4 Comments

Why did I fail with my previous software business – Advise(II): Don’t sell to developers

Posted on January 26, 2012 by

This is the second in a series of posts trying to explain what I think went wrong with my previous business attempt, that I end up giving up for free due to the lack of clients (the blog part is still fully alive and I do get some revenue from ads, but that’s all).

In the previous post, I recommended to Choose a cool technology to sell.

My second advice is don’t try to sell to developers. Sure, I’m not the first one to say this, but I fell in this trap nonetheless.

Let’s start with the “why’s”:

If you knew it would be hard, why you chose to build a product for developers in the first place?. Well, first it’s in our human nature to think we can do better than others so we tend to believe their failure was due to other reasons and not the fact that the market was indeed difficult. The second reason, IMHO, why we tend to build products for developers is that, as developers ourselves, we know and like the domain so instead of investigating opportunities in other domains (as I did with my current business) we prefer to stay in our comfort zone.

And why selling to developers is so hard? My main reasons are:
- Developers are used to get things for free. You’ll most likely be competing with free and even open source alternatives of your product
- Developers have a better idea of how difficult is to create the product you’re trying to sell and may think they can build it themselves
- In a company, developers are not the ones with the money. So, your product must so great that they decide to talk management into buying it.

In my specific case, there was an aggravating factor. A common aspect mentioned by all vendors of MDE/code-generation tools I interviewed was that, at the beginning, to sell their tools they had to prove to each individual client the benefits of using the tool (usually this meant working together with the client in a first project almost for free to showcase all the tool possibilities). Being a micropreneur, this was impossible in my case. Again, if you choose a cool technology to sell you may not have last problem.

Any other reasons you want to share?

Usual Disclaimer: “Yes I know that you have a great product for developers and you’re becoming rich with it (congratulations!). You’re one of the few success stories but not the rule”

If you liked this post please consider following my thoughts on twitter and visit my other projects: the modeling languages portal, go wordpress migration services and my research rants.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

CSS Killswitch – (funny) strategy to deal with bad clients for web designers

Posted on January 18, 2012 by

CSS Killswitch lets you non- destructively black out a difficult client’s website with the click of a button since as they say “Because sometimes, no matter how diplomatic you are, people are… well… mean.”

I say this is a funny strategy because of course its practical effect is limited (there’s no magic so it can be annoying for a while but the client can end up figuring out how to avoid the black out).

However since it seems that it’s a legal move it may be enough to convince your client that paying is in the end a better option.

If you liked this post please consider following my thoughts on twitter and visit my other projects: the modeling languages portal, go wordpress migration services and my research rants.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

As a freelancer, how much do you bill per hour?

Posted on January 4, 2012 by

Interesting poll in hacker news: as a freelancer how much do you bill per hour?

To be honest I don’t know how value their time those that say that charge less than 50 USD per hour. I guess all depends on where you live but to me this is extremely low. Specially, because usually people don’t count the time of negotiating and clarifying the requirements with the customer (and at the end discussing with him/her details of the produced work, getting the final approval,….), which may account for several additional hours. And of course, you are also usually wrong when estimating the number of hours required to complete the work!. So, IMHO the real price per hour ends up being at least a 40% lower of what you expected (and this is just the gross income, then you need to subtract taxes and all other costs). So, to sum up, increase your billing rates!!!

If you liked this post please consider following my thoughts on twitter and visit my other projects: the modeling languages portal, go wordpress migration services and my research rants.

Posted in business model, customers, philosophy | 1 Comment