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Cost of startup

I’ve been talking with a co-worker who is trying to start his own Internet based business.  His business will be typetribe.com when it grows up, but right now it is still in the idea/development stage.  This got me to thinking about the cost of starting up a business like this.

I am a software engineer for a very large company that makes airplanes.  I also do a lot of side work with web applications using Ruby on Rails and other technologies.  I must say I am good at what I do and am very proficient.

If I were to startup a business like typetribe.com I could easily do almost all of the work without any external costs.  I can do the development, design, engineering, scheduling, testing, security, and so on all myself.  If I decide that I no longer want to continue, I can simply stop without any loss of investment except for my own time.  If it succeeds and starts making income, the income is immediately profit.  Any costs are negligible and can take advantage of cheap hosting like slicehost.com or scalable service such as Amazon Web Services.

However, for Jamey, he has no software engineering training and must rely on external people to get his business idea off the ground.  To get started, he has to find investors (or put up his own capital), raise funds, find developers and designers, pay everyone, and if he’s lucky he may have found the right combination of people and have a working web business.  Cash flow immediately goes to repay investors and employees.  Changes to the web site and ongoing maintenance will continue to drain profit.

Does he have a chance?  Sure.  But he does have a definite disadvantage.  His idea is great and I wish I had the time to work with him on the project.  But it is interesting to see how much energy and momentum has to be built up to get an idea like this off the ground.

Echo, echo, echo, echo, echo

I used to use a service called iwantsandy.  With this service I could send e-mail to a particular e-mail address and it would remind me about things.  I could send an e-mail saying “remind 3 days change cat litter” and in 3 days I would get an e-mail  reminding me to change the cat litter.

This was very useful for things that do not have specific calendar event times.  I wouldn’t use it for a meeting reminder, I’d use the calendar for that.  But if I needed to be reminded to do something sometime in the evening I would use iwantsandy.

Often I would get e-mail from people that I need to take care of later in the day or even days from now.  I could leave the e-mail unread to mark it as something I need to do, but this gets annoying because I keep seeing unread messages and have to keep track of when and what has to be done.  My solution was to forward e-mails to iwantsandy with a command “remind this evening” and the e-mail is out of my inbox and will be re-delivered when I actually need to handle it.  Worked great.

But iwantsandy went away.  I was very sad.  I started to write my own replacement, but got side-tracked.  I eventually found this service called Echo that did almost what I wanted.  The e-mail address is echo@3mindme.com and if you simply send an e-mail message to that address it’ll reply with a help message telling you how it works.  Try it out.  It’s a great way to re-queue your things to do that will be delivered when you actually need to do them.

Peanut shelling machine

What does the machine look like that shells peanuts? It takes me a baseball game to go through a small bag of peanuts. I hope their processing rate is better.

Getting stuff down

Getting my ideas out of my head and down in some external form is my latest productive improvement.  This goes beyond the “getting things done” ideas where not just the things you need to do get written, but most every idea or concept get’s written or typed.  This blog is just one of the forms.

I used to keep everything in my head.  I didn’t carry a notebook at work.  In meetings I never wrote stuff down.  When doing work, I never kept notes.  In class I would often simply absorb what was said.

I recently started carrying a spiral notebook at work where I take notes on what I’m doing.  It’s amazing how often I refer back to that notebook.  Simple things like IP address can be looked up in the configuration files, but if I write them in the notebook with context I can find the answers much more quickly.  Ideas or things I should do get written down too.  Perhaps it’s my old (cough, cough) age, but this really helps out.

I think what I like is, like the “getting things done” condept, it lets my brain let go of needing to remember that bit of information and allows it to focus on other things.

This blog is another.  I thing of things I’d like to tell people and I often don’t blog about it.  My ideas roll around over and over in my mind as I’m forming my thoughts.  Here, I can put my thoughts down in a form that hopefully is useful to someone else.

I also have a new information database system I’m calling buckets.  The idea of this database system is to have a flexible and permenant storage of structured data.  Rather than being relational, records have a fixed structure and are associated with other records to create contextual relationships.  These relations are informal, providing links between records that make sense in their context.  Records can be put into “buckets” to group things together and everything can be tagged and searched.

Buckets will be my new information repository once it is created.  I am hoping to work on this on my vacation, but we’ll see how that happens.  I’ve created one version of this already and it worked quite well, but I have a new strategy this time.  One that has been churning through my brain for quite some time and in the “getting stuff down” strategy, I need to get this written so my brain can think about other things.

iPhone usage tip

I discovered this by accident when the iPhone 3.0 OS came out.

I put all the applications I use on the first page of the home screen.  I have a LOT of applications installed, most of which I never use.  All the applications I use on daily basis are on the home screen.

For some reason, it created a blank home page after the primary home page screen.  In there it put the new applications.  As new applications that use 3.0 features like push notification came out, they got installed right after the main page.  This was incredibly useful because I didn’t have to hunt through pages of applications or lose a possibly useful application in the mess.  I knew all the new applications were going to be on the sparsely populated 2nd page.

So my suggestion is to make a blank page after your home page to put newly installed applications that need to prove themselves before either being promoted to home page status or banished to the later pages.

Shampoo bottle

In PragPub (The Pragmatic Bookshelf) I found a quote saying…

“If the shampoo bottle in the shower is turned around half the time, why isn’t the logo on both sides? — @KentBeck”

This makes sense, but there is another analysis to consider.

Most people run their mornings on auto-pilot and in a specific order.  The shampoo typically has a flip top.  The bottle will be gripped by one hand and the flip top opened with either the thumb or the forefinger of the other.  Now, most people will have a consistant way they open the bottle (left hand hold, right thumb flip, etc.).  This means that when the bottle is placed back on the shelf, it will generally face the same way every single time.

So the argument by @KentBeck still holds, however, the analysis might be flawed.  For some people, the bottle will always face front and for others the bottle will always face back.  So for the people where the bottle faces back, they never see the logo while the others always see the logo.

If anything, this analysis makes the “logo on both sides” comment more accurate.  It’s not that your users will see the logo half the time, it is half of your users will never see the logo.  That’s really bad.

Technology is cool

So I’m on a road trip and taking advantage of technology.  Mainly GPS and my iPhone.  Here are some of the things I’ve done.

On the way out, we needed lunch in the middle of nowhere Ohio.  Using the trusty GPS it found restaurants at the next exit that were not on the highway information signs.  We found a town just a mile down the road with a lovely DQ so the kids had a great meal and dessert all in one.

On the way, I used the iPhone with BeeJive to keep the people we are traveling to abreast of our progress.  I would periodically copy and paste Google Maps locations of where we were using the in-phone GPS into an AIM chat using the BeeJive program.  BeeJive uses Push Notifications so I could get replies when my phone was “off” too.

Just today was the greatest use of the tech.  I was out getting stuff at the store and stopped by Office Depot.  They had a clearance camera for $89.  I used Amazon lookup on my iPhone to find the specs and prices.  The price was right, but the specs showed it used the Sony Memory Stick technology which I wasn’t excited about because of the cost.  So I was able to make the decision to not buy the camera because of that.

We then went to Best Buy.  I used the same lookup to check another camera selling for $79.  Specs looked good.  It used SD memory so that’s great.  I checked cnet and the review showed no horrible problems.  Same with Amazon.  But Google said the price that Best Buy Online was selling it for was $66.  So I showed that price to the sales person and they said they could match the price in the store.  So I was able to walk out the door with a good quality pink camera for my daughter’s 8th birthday that has the right specs for $13 cheaper than the in-store price.

Way to go technology!