Ice Cream for Everyone!

Twitter is being being used mostly by early adopters right now but this idea’s time has come. I realized how powerful it was at SXSW, where @garyvee and a few friends decided to host a wine tasting party. They told people about it on Twitter, and minutes later 60 people were in the room tasting wine and having a great time. Instant party.

My friend @jimkukral was looking for PHP programmers. He asked for leads on Twitter and had 10 connections in as many minutes. Then there’s the guy who got out of an Egyptian jail with Twitter’s help.

So what is it? Twitter is something like a chatroom for the world, but where you only see messages from people you want to follow. It’s an ongoing dialog, where people post their thoughts, ideas, links, questions and others respond in kind.

Just like your telephone or email, Twitter is a platform, a blank slate. The only rule is you only get 140 characters for your message. Many posts are about the minutia of life, which can be interesting if it’s a close friend or it’s nearby geographically. Eg. “Thinking of trying the the new Greek deli on 4th street for lunch. Anyone been there?”

If you’ve connected Twitter to your cell phone you might receive that message by SMS and chime in with your opinion, or maybe find yourself eating Souvlaki 15 minutes later. Serendipity in 140 characters or less.

It’s useful too. Because it’s real-time and broadcast as opposed to 1:1,, you can ask your friends which movie to see while you’re standing in line.

Twitter is easy to misunderstand and dismiss, just as blogging was when it first appeared. Most people went through a phase of asking why anyone would publish (or read!) what happened at school or the office that day. The trick is not to mistake the average for the best. Just as with blogs, you only following/read what is interesting for you.

Getting Started:

1. Visit Twitter and choose a username that’s short and easy to remember. Personally I think a version of your real name is good since that’s easier for people to remember.

2. Connect with friends on Twitter by “following” them. You can also connect your phone to Twitter (beware text message charges) and get pinged when your close friends update.

3. Start playing around. After connecting with your friends on Twitter, you’ll discover new and interesting people through your friends’ conversations.

A few handy Twitter commands

d username blah blah  Send username a private message. Make sure you stay under 140 characters as the remainder may be posted publicly (a bug, whee)

on username  Start getting updates from this person.

off username  Stop getting updates from this person.

track foo  See when anyone says “foo” on Twitter. (Note that popular terms can be very high volume, and that tracked terms are only sent to your phone if you have one connected, they don’t appear in your normal feed.)

PS: Don’t be intimidated by a new medium. Have fun! I’m @dragushan if you want to say hello or have any questions.

We’ve been without a web counter for a few days, (showing how many people are arriving at our site and where they’re coming from) and I figure my productivity has gone up by 10% or more.

It’s not that I was spending 10% of my day gazing at it, but checking it was the starting point for a change in direction. I would visit sites that linked to us, perhaps leave a comment or email them, and end up spending 1/2 hour before getting back to “work”. One could say that’s a part of work these days, and while that’s true to a degree, my time could be better spent elsewhere.

My day is already full of internal and external interruptions. They’re par for the course and I don’t resent them, but they do make it hard to get into thinking work (writing, long-term planning, etc) which are important but fragile tasks. They’re hard to get into and easy to fall out of when someone taps you on the shoulder. (Programming is also in this category which is why it’s important for companies to protect programmers from needless interruptions.)

Without a counter I’m trading off easy-and-fun work for hard-but-important work. The kid in me wants that damn counter back, but the adult in me is pleased with how much more I’m getting done. It is important to have a counter so you’re not flying blind, but I’m wondering if someone else should watch it, and ping me when something truly urgent/important/interesting happens.

Anyone with similar experiences? Ideas?

Today was stressful.

The number of people online at Ask500 climbed from around 60 up to 130, the highest we’ve had so far. Registrations were speeding up and then we found that some of the new users were posting nasty questions and comments.

Argh!

Evidently there are groups of people out there who get together, target a site, register en masse and stomp all over it. We caught it pretty quickly and spent the next few hours cleaning it up. We closed registration, created ways to find and deal with abusers, opened registration back up and got in touch with people who’d had problems signing up.

I guess fighting abuse is just one of those things everyone has to handle. As traffic scales up it becomes more common. I had hoped we’d get more time to happily implement new features before having to deal with it.

In any case, we have a few more tools now to deal with the next wave, whenever that arrives.

After months of work we are finally off and running and boy does it feel good. The site is Ask500People.com - a tool for tapping into public opinion in real-time.

I hope you like it.

It’s 3:23AM by my laptop clock as I start writing this. I can’t sleep.

The East Coast is just coming online, and in a few hours we’ll have a much better idea if Ask500People is going to grow by word of mouth, and if so how fast.

Instead of an initial marketing blitz we’re doing a soft launch, telling a few friends about the site and hoping that word spreads. If it does take off, we’ll be happy we started off slowly because we’ll have more time to handle growth issues. There are technical challenges that we’ll encounter only once we start growing, and it’s easier to handle them when things are still moving slowly.

We told friends about the site to get things started, and initially we recognized everyone who came by to check it out. Ah there’s Jeremy. Oh, and Kim. Hey Kim.

After awhile we noticed a few people we didn’t recognize, which meant word was spreading a bit. “Hey, anyone know username X? No? Coooool.” On Tuesday we added a simple web counter so we could easily watch traffic and referrers:

Here’s visitors by hour. You can see where the counter was added to the page between 6-7PM PST yesterday.

Ok, I’m off to try to sleep again. (Yeah, right!)

We missed our self-imposed deadline of launching on September 20th.

Here’s what happened. In our application we want the community to be able to vote on which content is most interesting. It’s a core feature of the app, and while it sounds simple it’s tied into many other systems.

We could launch on time without it, but then we’d be trying to add it just when we want to be most responsive to initial feedback coming in. Just after launch we’ll want to be working on small features, which means we’ll have lots of good stopping places for the inevitable tweaks and adjustments.

Thanks for your patience!

Making web software is all about iteration.

First you put out an incredible, world-changing product. Next, people tell you why it’s no good, and then you keep refining it until they change their minds or you run out of money, time or willpower. Usually money.

Because we haven’t yet opened the front doors and let the world in, we don’t know the answer to the only question that really matters; “Will people actually use this?

It’s easy to rationalize the delay. The longer we keep polishing, the less likely we are to make a bad first impression.

On the other hand we could realize we’ve been adjusting the rear-view mirrors while the rear axle sits waiting to be installed.

Anyways, we’ll have something to show the world by September 20th. These rear-view mirrors are almost right…

I’ve always been proud of the fact that Wondermill has never taken outside investment.  We’ve had our ups and downs, but we have a solid business model and no debt.  We’re in good shape.

Bootstrapping for years has taught us to be careful with money and ensured we keep profitability in mind.  On the other hand we’ve had to pass up ideas with big growth potential but that might not fund themselves in the short term.

Now we’re at that fork in the road again with a new idea, and it’s time to choose the other path. 

Here’s what’s up.

We’re working on a new service, which we’re hoping to launch in the next month.  When we light the fuse, one of two things will happen.

A)  People love it.  Takeoff is explosive and we’re holding on tight as we go see what’s on the other side of the moon.

B)  The world shrugs, and we clamber out wondering what went wrong.  Then we either tinker with it and see if it’ll go, or go back to work on other projects.

I believe it’s going to be A. 

There are competitors already in the space, which is reassuring.  They’re proving a market exists, and they’re well-funded.  One has received $4M over two rounds and one started with $5M. 

We don’t need anything near that amount, but we do need more than we have now.  If the app is successful, we’d need three more people right away and more soon after that.  Ideally we’d be hiring for those positions now, as it usually takes six weeks to hire the right person.

Wondermill might be able to fund the new business at a survival level but there are other reasons to look for outside investment. 

I’ve got responsibilities now.

I’m married, and we’d like to buy a house someday.  I’ve got a kid who says “balababababrrble” but may someday say “hi dad, put me through college”, and I’d like to stop asking my wife if I can not pay myself again this month.

And so, for the first time in many years it’s time to make a business plan and see where this thing goes.

I’m a little nervous because it’s outside my comfort zone, but I’ll get over it.

Wish me luck!

“What is the most important thing I can be doing right now?” is a powerful question.  For me there’s a direct relationship between how often I ask myself that question and how good I feel about my work that day.

Checking in and realizing you need to change directions can be a great feeling.  You can tackle the right project with glee, knowing that in some parallel universe you’re still plodding down the wrong path.  (That’s another key to entrepreneurial success.  Always do business in the right universe.)

Two recent experiences:

1.  We’re moving from four servers to nine, so I called our host (ev1.net) to see if we can get a better deal than the posted price.  The sales guy offered to reduce our price by 5%, and though their prices are already quite reasonable it didn’t seem like much of a deal.

We talked for awhile, and eventually he said there was nothing else he could do.  I kept saying we had to find a way to reduce our costs, and so we kept talking.

Eventually he mentioned that on that older hardware they match any lower posted prices if you send the right people an email.  Lo and behold, we knocked off $200/month off our server costs.  It’s a great policy, but no-one had ever told us about it.

I spent about an hour on the phone and faxing contracts, and between the discount and the new hardware prices we’ll save $3,000/year. 

 
2.  The other night I spent two hours trying to install software that would save one measly click when trying to post something online.  In the end I couldn’t get it to work, and now I’ll never get that time back.

Also, some guy in a parallel universe is laughing at me.