Category Archives: Business

A secret to make money online

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I’ve found at 37signals’ blog the presentation by David Heinemeier Hanson called The secret to making money online. I know it sounds like cheap unrealistic marketing, but it’s actually quite simple:

  1. Great application
  2. Price
  3. Profit

The second and key point is price. It may sound obvious, but if you look around the second round of the tech bubble is coming strong about free, with advertising as the only revenue model. Some have even declared the web 2.0 to be dead.

Another key point is: instead of aiming to become a billion dollar company, settle for a million, maybe even less. Solve a real problem, do what you love and charge for it

We both know some people who own more than a billion (dollars) and they’re not any the happier

http://www.omnisio.com/bin/Embed.swf?embedID=d5_l9yexqr3B2LadbiFy2w&autoPlay=0

By the way, with this video I’ve discovered omnisio, which lets you upload videos and synchronize them with slides. The result is great as you might see.

Does your company have Happiness Engineers?

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The answer is probably no. We don’t have one at Warp. But the folks at automattic are looking for one. I case you don’t know who I’m talking about, these are the guys behind wordpress and akismet.

The details on this position are as following:

Happiness Engineer

Our software and services are far from perfect, and when things go wrong people aren’t shy about contacting us asking for help. We consider the support side of the user experience to be vitally important because it’s the person who interacts with our customers most and makes the biggest impression in their time of need. In fact everyone who joins Automattic, regardless of position, does support for 3 weeks. The customers range from the everyday blogger to VIPs like CNN, Flickr, and People Magazine. The job requires:

  • Patience and grace.
  • Excellent writing skills.
  • Working knowledge of WordPress, HTML, and CSS.

It’s hard to explain how thrilled I am about the existence of a position like that, but I’ll try: it has made me hesitate. I’m one of the owners of Warp, we have recently passed our third year, we are growing, we have 20 employees and we’re close to release version 1.0 of eBox platform. I’d call this a success. But, when I read job descriptions like these, I feel the need to apply or, at least, meet these people.

I’m aware I cannot be in all places at the same time, so I have to let that one go. The good experience I get from this is collecting those details that made me want to go there and trying to make Warp a better place for all of us

Being a geek is good for your business

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Or at least, that’s what a recent study shows. According to the CDW Business Rearview Mirror survey, 73% of those who described themselves as “total geeksâ€? reported double-digit average annual growth in their businesses over the past 5 years. Nearly half – 48% – of the tech savviest reported that their businesses reached the 100-employee milestone with in 5 years of launch, compared to just one-third of all survey respondents.

The details on Small Business Trends.

RedHat's SLA: simpler is better

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I know this is a bit old, but I’ve been trying to catch up with all the new stories after a conference, vacation, broken laptop and loads of work.

RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) was launched some months ago. I’ve never been a big fan of RedHat in terms of technology. I guess is quite good now, but RPMs scared me years ago and I’m not over it yet.

One of the things I liked is that RedHat proved that the KISS principle doesn’t only apply to software development, but to marketing and sales too. This is their new SLA (service level agreement). Can’t be simpler.

RedHat’s new SLA

That reminds me of MySQL and their all-you-can-eat support package (MySQL Enterprise Unlimited), easy to understand and with a catchy slogan:

For the price of a single CPU of Oracle Enterprise Edition ($40,000 per CPU), you can deploy an unlimited number of MySQL Enterprise Servers, with full 24×7 production support

It seems open source businesses are not only innovating on the technical side, but also disrupting the industry.

The beginnings of business decadence

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The pursuit of happiness

Business was originated to produce happiness, not to pile up millions. Too many so-called “successful” men are making business an end and aim in itself. They regard the multiplying of their millions and the extension of their works as the be-all and end-all of life. Such men are sometimes happy in a feverish, hustling sort of way, much as a fly placed in a tube of oxygen is furiously happy until its life burns out. But they have no time for the tranquil, finer, deeper joys of living. They are so obsessed with the material that they cannot enjoy the immaterial, the intangible, the ideal, the spiritual&emdash;quiet thought, self-communion, reflection, poise, inward happiness, domestic felicity. What profiteth it a man to gain uncounted riches if he thereby sacrifices his better self, his nobler qualities of manhood? Mere getting is not living.

Forbes Magazine, September 15, 1917

This was the first Forbes editorial, the first US business magazine.

Fair price

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Much has been said about music prices nowadays, I remember reading somewhere that usually the 10 most sold albums in Amazon every week were below $10. That’s not a bad price, but let’s call it sensible pricing.

Sensible pricing is sometimes not enough. Some albums are so good you’d feel confortable paying $20 for them, and some of those $9.99 albums have only one half-good song. I found this 37signals’ article today: Jane Siberry’s “you decide what feels right” pricing detailing how some small record labels are letting consumers (I don’t think that word applies anymore, but still) decide which is the fair price for a CD. At this time, 14% paid above suggested. See it on Sheeba Catalogue

The Canadian folk-pop singer Jane Siberry has a clever system: she has a “pay what you canâ€? policy with her downloadable songs, so fans can download them free — but her site also shows the average price her customers have paid for each track. This subtly creates a community standard, a generalized awareness of how much people think each track is really worth. The result? The average price is as much as $1.30 a track, more than her fans would pay at iTunes

This is not new, magnatune has been doing that for about 4 years. They let you listen the full disc, then download it paying what you consider a fair price

Magnatune pricing

And to help this cool ideas, if you like piano music, let me recommend you Rob Costlow (blog). It’s a great album to stop and relax enjoying the beautiful sound of a piano. And he could be called a piano hacker according to his biography:

By the time he was twelve Rob Costlow was annoying his piano instructor by adding unwritten endings to songs during rehearsals and recitals.

Boss/employee relationships

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Nacho writes about a nice article at Note from boss to employees. If you follow through the original article, you can find a comment reversing the meaning of the letter (from employee to boss).

I guess both are true. And I guess there are two conclusions to extract from the letter and the replay:

  1. We are all human. We all make mistakes
  2. Since we all fail, fluent communication is vital for the health of a company (or any other kind of organization)

So I think you can ask an employee some level of empathy if you aren’t offering the same, and viceversa. It’s not so difficult. Remember, just be nice. There’s always a story behind.

Update: via Lifehacker I found an article called A Manager’s Guide to Growing Happy Employees. The key points in this case are:

  1. Manage people first, do your own work second.
  2. Delegate your best work.
  3. Help people get recognized.
  4. Make projects relevant to people, not companies.
  5. Align yourself with your boss.
  6. Work reasonable hours.

And I think the last paragraphs summarize all the previous steps quite well

The best way to think about management is to treat everyone like an unpaid intern.

Each day, your employees ask themselves, “Am I getting enough out of this job to keep doing it?â€? And each day, you need to give them a reason to say, “Yes.â€?