Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

One of the things I love most about this business is that with nothing other than a computer, some imagination, and some time, you can create something wonderful. I think that’s what hooked me even as a kid, when I started writing software as a hobby. Good times. Here’s one of my “offices” now…

As an entrepreneur in the software business, I get to (have to) touch all things: product (of course), marketing, sales, finance, legal, operations and support. One of the parts I most enjoy is marketing. That probably wouldn’t sound strange at all, except that my background is techie all the way. I started out as a [...]

Before starting Devshop, I worked for 4 other small to mid-sized software companies. The last 3, as head of engineering. Each of these companies was around the 25 person mark (one of them ballooned to over 100 people during the dot-com boom but came quickly back down to earth shortly afterwards). In each of these [...]

I read a great post over here on The Long Tail about how “spare cycles” in a person’s day are a great untapped source of energy. Well said. I’ve seen so many companies try to “optimize” their business the way you try to crank every spare second of “production efficiency” out of an assembly line. [...]

I just saw this post over on 37signals’ blog. Apparently “The Essential Peter Drucker (part 1)” has a quote: marketing’s job is to make selling superfluous. I love this idea. Business folks always call product development a “cost center”, meaning it costs money to run but doesn’t bring any in. The Sales department is always [...]

I remember 5 or 6 years ago, at the beginning of the tech bubble when hosted software really hit the scene and the debates that ensued about which was better. It seemed people everywhere wanted to try decide which was right and which was wrong so they could move everything into the right camp. I [...]

Another great post by Kathy Sierra called “How We Treat Customers – Before and After they Buy our Product” includes this picture which sums it up: I really like her idea of having Marketing do the support materials, like they’re still trying to sell the product, which of course, you are. Constantly. The good experience [...]

I just saw this article on PM Boulevard: Title: Communicating Effectively for a Successful Project Sub-title (or category): Human Capital Here’s what I think: Step 1 – stop calling people human capital. It leads to all sorts of awkward sentences like, “My human capital is angry.” and “Can I have some more human capital please?” [...]

Like I need to tell you who Joel is. Anyway, here’s a snippet from a recent post he made: Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf. “It’s ok! I have great advisors standing on the shore telling me what to do!” they [...]