When Andrew asked me to share, I was honoured.  Andrew accesses very cool people in business and tech, and asks them the deeper questions we all wonder about. Luckily, I was only doing a “how-to” interview, haha.

I hope my contribution of information furthers what Andrew is working to put out there. I can’t recall picking a Mixergy interview to watch and being disappointed. It’s quality stuff.

One skillset that I’ve learnt and and continued to develop over the last 12 years is systemizing and automating things in businesses.  I hope you enjoy it and future posts on systemizing and automating in a business.

http://mixergy.com/jas-panesar-damaag-interview/

So much writing.  Documenting.  Trying it out.  Make sure it works.

It’s seems easier and faster just to do it yourself, right?

In your business, is it your job to do everyone else’s job?   Or is it your job to help figure out how to best do something?

Take a look at your actions.  We go off figuring out the latest item we need to get running smoothly for ourselves.  We want to make our own lives easier.  So you decide to document it, scribble down some notes, and know that in a few months you’ll have enough to go back on.  Bask in satisfaction of a job well done.  Kind of.

Are you really finished? Or did you just systemize a process into being more efficient for just yourself, and not for your business?  Don’t know what I mean?  Systemize yourself so you can pass your expertise into your business to become systemized, and run that one thing without you.

Every single item you systemize is a step towards having one of those dream businesses that runs without the owner. In those businesses, the owner is free to work on growing the business, instead of working in the business just to satisfy the day-to-day needs of that business.  Sound familiar?  It does for everyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re a bricks and mortar business, consulting, or an internet startup.

Think about it this way:  Isn’t doing something yourself, over, and over,  no matter how much you’ve made it easier for yourself, incredibly repetitive?  So boring?  Actually a waste of your time?  Don’t have time to work on the new things that excite you and you love?

By not systemizing, or only doing it enough for yourself, are you creating more boring and repetitive and dreadful tasks for yourself?  Isn’t that worse than systemizing beyond yourself?

Remember that what you find repetitive and boring today was likely a challenge and something new once.  You were figuring it out for the first time, with fresh eyes, not so long ago.  There’s one important step after, though.

When it keeps coming up to take your time, ask yourself, “Am I done with figuring this out?  Do I need to be doing this? Should I be moving onto the next thing to figure out?”

By the time you’re doing it over and over and not thinking about it, it means you’ve probably figured out enough to get someone else on it.  Good job.  Now be a friend to your future self and your future business.

It’s time to double your investment of figuring it out the first time.  Interested?

Empower someone else in your organization to do it.  Don’t have anyone?  Get a virtual assistant.  Seriously.

Take the accomplishment of figuring out how to do something efficiently and get someone else doing it exactly as you do it, with the understanding of why you do it that way.

What should you commit to today?  Make that list of things that you need to systemize. Things only you know how to do.  Things only someone else knows how to do.  It might be scary.  You won’t have the answers for all of them, that’s okay.  You just need to know what you’re looking at, so you can have something to work at.

Not sure of how your list will turn out?  It’s okay, I’ll share one in a future post and you can compare how well you actually will end up doing.

Start making a list!

That dream doesn’t always happen as we plan.  An undisciplined business can take over every non-business area of your life if it’s left to carve it’s own path.  A new business is a new born and it needs constant attention and feeding and direction.  I learnt that first hand in the early days of my freelancing/contracting career around 1999-2004 before I made myself see my work for what it needed to be: A business first.  My time since has been spent getting better at it every time something goes how I don’t want it to.

Let’s agree on one thing before exploring it from this perspective.

What is a business?  Something that creates value and can run without us.

We don’t own a business until it can run without us.  Until then we own a job we can’t quit because it cant run without us, and we’re too invested to easily quit or change.

Yeah, it kind of sucks to see it that black and white.  Look around.  Everything doesn’t move as it should, without you.  You can’t breathe.  You think about it morning, noon and night.  Everything stays in your head all the time and you just wish someone else could “get it” like you do.

There’s an idea out there I agree with.  Get your time on running the business, not working in the business.  This is kind of tough because normally we started off a business because we could “do it better”.  Quite often things do take off great by doing it better, but we can’t seem to make the jump beyond us.

Your time is a waste in your business if you’re not replacing yourself.  It’s a baby that will never grow up or live it’s dreams out for you.

There is a need to take a leap, from what we do regularly ourselves, and helping others around us do it in that same way.  It seems like it’s not possible, or a dream.  But it is possible.  It takes discipline and commitment, those two qualities we think we have buckets of, but not when it comes to systemizing, documenting and setting up our business to teach it ourselves.

We confuse activity with results. We see our discipline as commitment as “Look at how hard  I work”.  I now see discipline and commitment as “Look at how much I help make happen with others.”  No matter how good or talented I could be for a microsecond, once in life, I might hit a 10x or 20x productivity of an average person.

When you systemize correctly, 1 + 1 always equals 11. The best way to systemize is to take the items that are repetitive and tedious to you and get them documented.  Document them in a way that anyone can pick them up, and get faster at them after doing them a few times.  Explain the “why” of why you do it the way you do, before you explain what the steps are.  Recognize this will be a forever evolving document, capturing the history of how your business grew up and became better, every, single, day.

Systemizing does not limit you, it helps enable others to help free you to innovate. Sometimes we wonder how others are able to connect and get their teams working together in a way that they can do what’s needed, how it’s needed.  This comes from a clear, disciplined communication of how things are supposed to happen.

Systemizing frees you, it doesn’t lock you up. Entrepreneurs want to innovate and create with reckless abandon and creativity.  We all love it.  The reality of making payroll and paying the bills can seem dreadful in comparison.  Both are critical to master though, and systemization lets the most critical parts of your business (keeping the cash flow going) get systemized and run without you so you can find and do the next great thing to create value, get setup, and systemize eventually.

How can one start systemizing their business?

First, understand you’ll be learning forever. Your documentation and system may also evolve forever.  Realizing this will help you remember that it’s really about capturing how to get things done in your business in small piece-meals.  I have some strategies that have worked for me below.

Systemize what you know. Leave the unknowns blank until you get to them. Systemizing can seem like I have to know everything about my business before I write something.  The reality is this.  No entrepreneur ever started in a business knowing everything.  If you haven’t systemized yet, you still have to learn.  How could you have a complete document?

Systemize repeatedly. Once I accepted that systemizing was something I’d be working at forever, it made it easier.  Instead of a doomy, gloomy, how will I get all of this done kind of mindset, I decided I was just going to start with a point form outline of my business, and start filling it in how I knew.  It’s easy to be disciplined and committed in little steps than for big efforts.  When someone sends you an email, send back a long one, explaining why you do it the way you do it, and how.  Then, copy and paste it into your systemization docs as a first draft.  It’s better than nothing.

At first, systemize as conversation. You are not writing a scientific paper.  You’re writing a document for people to actually use, and read and improve.  The world will not see this.  It’s about doing great things with your team. Document the systems and processes of your business in conversational language that’s still professional, but doesn’t sound like you at all.   The easier it’s written and explained, the easier it is to read, understand, remember, and implement. I promise when you have enough there, it will become structured and polished on it’s own and you’ll actually want to keep improving it.  But in the beginning, just start.

Systemize with every explanation. We’re an email obsessed world.  We think answering emails gets work done.  But it doesn’t really.  We’re just being the path of least resistance for someone to get their answer.  We’re being the system, instead of building a system where people can get and store the answers they need.

Take a moment, every time someone asks you something more than once. Every conversation you have, whether it’s in person, by phone or email, take a moment. Instead of making systemizing a big effort, take a moment to capture what you know well, and draft up an email and send it to that person.  Ask them to do it and get feedback if it explained how best to do it.  It might not got well.  That partially reflects on your ability to capture the why, and the how.  Keep at it, you will improve.

But I don’t want to write and type! Yeah, I get it. For example, when you don’t have time to write, but have a minute to point at something on your screen to someone to show them how to do something… you can record it!  No need to write up long procedures the first time.  Jing it up!  Jing allows you to create simple, up to 5 minute videos for free. All you do is record and it uploads it to a secure space on the internet, and you can simply store the link to the video in your wiki, or reply to a multi-step explanation with an email.   I hope to show more examples of this in the future.

Store the why/how centrally, in a wiki. Learn what a wiki is. If you want to be in business in the 21st century, and like being hip with your Blackberry, learn what a wiki is.  It has the power to change your life.  A wiki is just a bunch of linked together word files, or web pages that you can hyper-quickly edit and maintain amongst a group of people.  They are easily searchable.  It will forever keep a history of all the changes you made to it so you know what you’ve changed in your ways, and why.

Operationally, A wiki is a centrally accessible document that you can quickly link together many processes and keep editing them in one place in the open.  There’s no binders to update, it’s electronic, alive, and current.  Update it directly with the email explanations.  Have your wiki always open so when you send an email explaining something, you can copy and paste the explanation into a categorized description.  I’ll document this further in future posts.

Most importantly, be a kind friend to your future self. I say all the time, I’m not perfect.  I don’t say it to knock myself down, but to remind myself that I have the opportunity to be better.. a lot.  In a lot of ways I have noticed my attitude towards systemizing my business and life has been my attitude towards my perfection and how I manage it.  If I was worried about covering it up and hiding the fact that I don’t know everything, I’d be terrified of systemizing.  Instead, I acknowledge that I have some talents in creating value for customers.

My real daily challenge that I never back away from no matter how crazy it might seem. I see a little more each day that my real job is to systemizing how I create value for customers, so others can do it too.  I’m past needing to feel special about my own abilities.  My business isn’t about just me. It’s about all the lives it touches from those I work with, to those I work for, to those they serve.

Become an agent of self-empowerment a little more every day. Even though I work in technology, I see myself working in the field of empowerment, because technology is in the age of empowerment for the masses.  Whoever can get the best at enabling technology for people to solve their problems, will have a lot more wins.  When you systemize, you empower yourself to let your life grow into new areas. You can setup a structure so things can happen without you, so you can continue to innovate.  When you systemize, you empower others to build and grow on what you’re doing, how you want it done.

The tool I use to run my entire business. I use FogBugz and it’s built-in wiki because it ties together the requests in my business (internal and external) with the wiki of how we address those issues.  Other systems probably work, but FogBugz found me, changed my life and for now I don’t have a need for more.

It was pointed out to me today that there’s not a lot out of actionable information out there about how entrepreneurs can systemize their business.  More of a problem, entrepreneurs don’t know why they should keep systemizing a high priority.

I have some information on how to systemize and automate any business. It’s pretty good, I think.  I’ve tested and learnt it in retail, manufacturing, shipping/logistics, eServices, online businesses, in the professional (legal, accounting) worlds and more.  While it’s not perfect, nor am I, I know that it’s possible. That’s a pretty crazy thing to say for some. But, I’ve been thrown down a lot of wells too and learnt a lot and keep learning more every day.

Hear me out, let me know what you think, and test what I’m saying.  It’ll help me clarify it even more.  I’m in a place where I understand and welcome that I’ll be improving the systemization and automation in my life forever.

I’m going to answer one question in this post:

Why must you systemize as much as you email, breath, sleep and bathe?

Here’s the thing.

Your business will never grow if you don’t systemize it correctly.

If you haven’t clearly systemized your startup/business, automating your business will miss the mark.

That’s it. But that’s not enough for us.  It sure wasn’t for Jas 10 years ago.

Let me try it differently:

1. If you don’t want a business that grows today, or tomorrow, don’t systemize.
2. If you don’t want a system that can grow beyond you, don’t systemize.
3. You will never have a business that makes your life great and the lives of your customers and employees great if you don’t systemize.
4. You will always feel under the gun without systemization.
5. You will feel less under the gun with systemization.
6. Quite often, you will be able to turn the gun around with systemization.

Businesses who don’t systemize don’t want to succeed. Who ever got into wanting to do a business and not be succesful at it?  Who actually knew everything about running a business before becoming an entrepreneur?  Anyone who agrees with the last 2 points might not be completely truthful with themselves.

We all had a dream when we started a business. A dream of a certain way of living. Working. Creating. Enabling ourselves and others.  Quite often, it doesn’t go this way.  Our business takes up more and more of our time, and we have less and less of ourselves to give to the other things that are important to us, including family and friends. Pretty soon we’re all work.  I ended up working 7 days a week for 4-5 years with no real vacation (more than a day or two off, and certainly no further than 2-3 hour flight away).

Somewhere our business dream becomes our worst nightmare.  Instead of running a business, the business is running us.  Worse, it’s running our lives, and the lives of everyone in our life, because it drives and decides everything.  We don’t own a business. We own a job we can’t quit. Too far invested.  Can’t switch or the loss might be too great. So we plod on, thinking if we work harder, we’ll find a way out.  Sadly, the harder *we* work, we only seem to dig a deeper hole.  There’s even more to do.

Proper systemization solves all of this. The question is, are you up to the task to remove the obstacles within you and all of us to let this happen?

Before we get into HOW to systemize, we have to understand a few things.

WHY > HOW. Why to systemize is more important than HOW. There are hundreds if not thousands of tactics you can use to systemize your business.  The most important thing is deeply connecting with why systemizing (and trying out everything you can constantly) is important.  The how becomes easier when we believe in why we should do it and remember it.  If you get the how you will run out of ideas.  If you always center your life on why you do things, it will forever fuel finding HOW to do systemize your business constantly.

Systemizing is not Automating. Systemizing is the act of getting a written, organized flowchart of your business with checklists and procedures for every position and task.  It’s a lot to undertake, but you start with the critical stuff first and work your way out.  Automating is making that system automatic.  Don’t prematurely automate, when you don’t have a clear process or system.  That will result in

Systemizing is improving your business 10-fold over.  Automating your systemization is a 100-fold improvement. If you don’t like those numbers, I guess you don’t care for your business to grow and run without you.

Systemization lets you get the work of many done. Don’t look for systematization or automation to replace staff.  Look for systematization to let you get 10 times as much done as your competitors with the same staff you have today.  Like?  I thought so.

Systemizing won’t let you replace people right away. People talk about replacing staff with automation.  That’s not a very light or easy thing to say.  If your business is really that poorly systemized that people are being the system instead of managing a system, that reflects very poorly on the business.  The experience customers can have will change greatly from one visit to the next.  You risk lifelong customers by rolling the dice.  You will always need people managing your system and business.  The more you can free them up to use their expertise to save and make you money by systemizing and automating further, the more of a friend you are being to yourself.

Systemizing is more important than anything you do in your business. It’s like a baby.  Feed it, it grows. Ignore it and it will suffer along with you eventually.  The more you avoid systemizing, the greater your growing pains will be if you grow your business first and worry about the rest later.  It’s possible to do both at the same time.

Systemizing is scaling. Even while you are figuring out how to do best things, there is zero reason it shouldn’t be documented somewhere it can be centrally found.  I use FogBugz for this, I find its a fantastic at letting me deal with things in general and specific details.

Systemizing is self-development. There is a way.  In the beginning it’s a little tough because it’s not hard, or tedious, but that it’s forcing you to spend your talents improving your own business instead of the business of your customers.

How is systemizing the solution?  Systemizing is the best discipline of your company. Wish everyone did it as well as you?  Well, learn it well enough to teach and explain it to someone else.  You can do it, because you’re so good at it.

Systemization is your dream apprentice, your best student, and will be the best teacher of your business. Systemization will record every lesson you’ve learnt and why.  It will always have forever ready “how we do this here”.  It will always be available for anyone to check 6 months after they forget and have to stumble through doing something again.

Systemization eliminates time wasting. You won’t waste time re-visiting what you learnt before.  Once you decide to do things a certain way, you write that down, and keep a history of WHY you chose that.  You will never re-hash old conversations and decisions unless there’s something new to discuss or consider.

Systemization is a discipline.  Creative discipline is the only way to success. The word discipline often leaves a feeling of “ew” in our minds and hearts.  Yet, I can’t help but say that the most successful people in my life, whether they are successful financially, professionally, academically, emotionally, mentally strong, physically in shape, emotionally mature and incredibly giving, or spiritually (or whatever leads them to be) so centered, is all because of a healthy discipline.

Systemization is the highest discipline resulting in the best result possible. Doing the right and best things every day, and improving how you do something all the time is the highest discipline.  Reading this post and doing nothing isn’t discipline.  Discipline is picking up a problem and solving it forever.  There’s a ton of problems to solve, but we have to agree, discipline, and success aren’t too far behind.

Systemizing serves you, not the other way around. In the beginning, it looks like systemizing is a lot of work.  But it’s not.  The purpose of systemizing your business is so that your business serves you, not the other way around.  The purpose of systemizing your business is so you can drive and steer your business to do great things for the world, not have your business steer your life where it needs.

Systemizing exists where success is. Seeing the successful people in our lives, we notice they have generally higher levels of discipline that allow their talent to increase.  So, sorry.  Discipline is king. And if we aren’t working on our discipline every, single, breath, we’re fooling ourselves.  Committment and discipline.  Learn to love those words.

Systemized businesses are for everyone. Not just McDonalds.  Every business, no matter how small, or not, can start reaping the rewards of systematization immediately. If we look at any successful business of any size, we’ll see the same thing. If you have a dream of a small business, it should be able to run with out you so you can tend to the rest of your life instead of leaving it to wither and suffer.

Systemized businesses last and grow. The ones that last, have a system of committment and discipline.  Some call it a procedures manual.  Some call it systemizing.  The important thing you need to understand is that systemizing your business, documenting it is sharing “this is how we do it here”.  And how we do it here is always improving and you better be okay with improving yourself all the time.

Systemizing is replicating yourself. We all wish wish we had 10 people just like us.  Well, that’s possible.  If you feel that only 20% of what you do is special/creative/talented, and the other 80% of your time is staying on top of details so they don’t get missed, that’s a sign for needing systemizing.

Systemizing replaces you. Instead of creating a system that other people can work with and improve, you are the system.  You are the business.  Micromanaging doesn’t work.  Every time we get mad at a team member for not “doing it right”, we should be mad that we didn’t document or train it ourselves.

Systemizing protects your business. People quit.  They leave, or they move up in your company.  Either way, they won’t do the same job for more than a couple of years.  You will forever have an issue of transferring “Why we do it this way” and “How we do it here”

If you don’t systemize your business, it will never grow. You can’t automate your business until you understand the system of your business and have a process running.  Systemization gives you one level of freedom from your business to work ON the business and grow it.  Automation is a second, exponential leap that helps a few peopel get the work of many done.

Know when to stop systemizing. When systemization gets tedious and you’re sick and tired of keeping up with the systemization, it works, but it’s inefficient.  It might be time to again take a sweep through automating what systems takes up the most time

Is this enough why?  Are you itching to say enough, I’m convinced, what can I actually do?

Are you willing to commit 5-10 minutes a day, or capture your existing ways so they can be systemized?

We know we should be documenting things. And systemizing.  We read about how good it is for us.  We bask in the sunshine of a sunny postcard.  But we don’t always do it.  So, we have a few choices.

1. Spend all our time trying to convince ourselves why we should do it, and after all that effort, hope that we remember it every days.
2. Realize that it’s important enough to hack into our habits.

I chose path 2.  I wrote enough of the above as a regular reminder but just started redirecting my ways, and life into emails.  For me that system was FogBugz, a central collection of everything in my life.  Whether it’s getting new business, doing the work for clients, or running/managing/improving the business, it collects everything. And I mean everything.

If it’s not in the system, it doesn’t exist.

Next, we’ll get into understanding how to start fitting systemization into your life.

So, you have a business.  Like any business, you need answers from every system in your business.  The funny part? Every business wants the same answer from their data.

Every system in every business constantly looks to answer one question.

WHERE IS EVERYTHING AT!?

That’s all anyone cares to know. On demand.  Get good at it and there’s a future for you.

When we systemize, we just want to get an answer. On Demand. Automatically.

Systemization hides the complexity of getting that answer under the covers, where a lot more goes on.

Automatically presenting this answer by systemizing is what I do as a Systems Integrator.  I first make it simple to use what you click and read.  Then under the covers, the complexity of what you do is busy working away for you 24/7.

If you’re looking for for meaty, applicable experience, here’s the first post in hopefully many.  If more software was built like this, or better, we wouldn’t have so much bad, time consuming, hard to use software.

MY LAW: WHY BEFORE HOW.

- If you don’t understand the data, you don’t understand the business. Find and learn the dots and how they connect.
- Be Datacentric. The data is actually the system. Software simply presents it.  No meaningful data, no meaningful system. Understand the data in each of it’s states and how it interacts, or find someone who can.
- People manage the system. The system manages the details. People should never be the tools or the system.  Use Virtual Assistants where software can’t do it until you find a way.
- Avoid premature systemization. If you don’t know your data and process inside out, you’ll rebuild and bypass incomplete systemization with manual processes anyways.

DISCUSS. DESIGN. DEVELOP. DELIVER. – How I systemize any business with a web-based tool:

- Listen before talking. Learn the customer’s business from their staff, and why they do things the way they do.
- Make checklists. All requests, responses. All the steps.  Have anyone do them.  Find the leaks and document.
- Map the checklists on a flowchart. Find what’s missing.
- Prioritize. Systemize most complex, time-consuming, profit eating checklists first.
- Timeline. Turn your prioritized list sideways and you have a timeline of what gets done first.  Apply dates.
- Build. Build the software to fit customer’s competitive advantage.  Don’t be an SAP dampener.
- Review, Improve, Repeat. See if it helped you get more done with less effort.  Build what you see based on new perspectives.

FOR ANYONE WHO THINKS SYSTEMIZING IS A WASTE - Why you must systemize:

- Get more done with less effort. Don’t push work onto someone else’s plate.  Systemization makes it easier for everyone.
- Monitor, notify and act. Get the computer to monitor, notify and take action as you find and define scenarios.  Bake it into the bread.
- People cost more than systems. The #1 cost in any business is time, of staff and customers. Let staff deal with people and solve problems, not computers.
- As your data increase, so do requests and needs of dataset. Manual can’t keep up.
- Maintain & Enhance your competitive advantage. Do it your way, not SAP’s (no offence). SAP just requires customization instead of doing it the SAP way.

Me: I’m a systems integrator. I systemized my customer’s businesses (SMB to enterprise) for 15 years before getting into products. Manufacturing, Legal, Shipping, Logistics, Retail, “eServices” and more.  Workflow management, Reporting, labelling, mobile, web, custom hardware, monitoring.

There’s a lot of great material out there on how to pick a startup idea that stands a chance of succeeding after you’ve found and made a list.  Do your best to not get lost in a sea of reading.  There will be no perfect decision, only a more informed one.  (A great habit I have picked up is never, ever read anything that doesn’t have something to do with the exact current thing you’re working on in your project.  Just bookmark it.)

A noble first goal is to validate that your idea is something customers are willing to pay for.  Seth Godin summed it up beautifully in a blog post the other day about the two step process to find and pick an idea.  Seth highlights how founders often don’t wander wide enough to examine a lot of ideas, and once they begin with an idea that might not be very good, become far too open and attached to it.

It’s better to pick an idea that has a chance of flying, validate it as such, and then get off to the races, instead of picking and praying it takes off (or delaying the launch forever).

I’m aware of validating an idea through two approaches:

1. Unknown problem with unknown/no market — Lean Startup “Customer Development” cycle. This process verifies that someone out there has a need and is willing to pay for it.  There may not be an existing demand for this product online, though, which might need to be built.  There is a lot of great information out there about this by Eric Ries, Ash Maurya, Steve Blank, etc.  This process is called “finding a business model” by Steve Blank and I think it’s a great way to put it.  This type of idea requires validating the demand and product fit.
2. A known problem that customers are searching for online. Imagine customers are searching for a solution to their problem.. but nothing really exists.  These types of niches often have search engine traffic tied to them which you can tap into and see if it can convert to paying customers.  This type of idea often has a demand validated, but not a market or product in specific.

Right now, I have two ideas, one that falls under each category.

Idea #1 falls under the “Unknown Market” side that I’ll be announcing soon. I didn’t think there was much of a market for this idea beyond scratching my own itch, mostly because I built it for myself.  The idea is a god-send for folks who live in apartments/condos.  It’s a utility that I built  for myself, received some “wow, that’s neat”, and has ended up with some seriously humbling offers of support and promotion from a startup friendly company in the US.  Can’t say no when I’m building it anyways.. it’ll be fun to document it here.

Knowing my habits I’ll probably develop both at the same time to compare the experience because I’ve never been known to do anything the straight way when it comes to myself and like learning a lot at once.

Finding a software startup idea seems to occupy many developers.  There’s a lot of valid things to look out for and understand the importance of.  For me, this is what I try to keep in front of me.  Being an idea guy, and a developer I’m often left with a lot of ideas and not enough time to build them all, so I have to pick.

First, we have to understand ideas. None are original. So few that that statement is true.  We’re just connecting everything to the web in a novel way, like libraries connected people to information in books.  Other variants include, attempting to internetize / computerize processes that currently aren’t.

Second, all ideas generally start with an opportunity. To sell. Either to someone you already have, or a way to reach them (adwords, etc).

Third, the idea has to be marketable in a way that you can market it. If you have connections in an industry, it’s not a bad place to start. I prefer to make the first few sales personally in-town to get the pitch and value presentation down before putting it online.  It might not be a sustainable or self-sufficient business model long term depending on what you’re after, but that’s a fit you have to find.

Fourth, any product is 80% marketing. 20% Product. Marketing is the single most important skill you need to get, not more coding or idea generation. Learning to sell my idea, approach and vision is the single biggest asset I have in my consulting business.  Customers invest in me as much as my idea.  The idea, sadly doesn’t have as big of an impact as it should.

Start learning marketing immediately. In general, in person, and online. Yes, it might not be exciting to learn marketing as a developer, but you wanted a business, not a coding job.  Consider yourself doing the world a great service of providing better software raising the quality of life, and putting in the yeoman like effort to learn and implement marketing to reach them.  Marketing in many ways is just clear, communication that focuses on benefits that a customer is looking for.  All developers have to do is learn to stop talking about features and learn to talk about benefits.  You have to reach customers who are looking for your product. Personally, directly, or automated online through adwords.

Using these two approaches to generate ideas (Personal/industry connections vs. online niche searching), I’ll share a few ways I discovered where good ideas exist:

1. Consult. Clients. Listen. Notice what isn’t out there. Usually low competition and long term customers because no one’s doing it.  Most customers have a competitive advantage of “this is how we do it”.  Learn it and see if some software could benefit from it.  Find the processes that take several hours a day or week and automate them.

2. Scratch your own itch. Solve a problem that you need solved. There could be something there. Try to pick something broadly appealing enough.

3. Find an online niche People are searching for things constantly. There are holes and weak/new niches where you can establish yourself.

4. Ignore creating new demand If you build something no one’s looking for, it will be harder to get people to find something they don’t know how to discover.

Out of these approaches to build an idea:

1. Find a small business tool you can bill $35-75/month. Even if the idea is a complete failure and only get 10 clients, it’s still $350-750 a month in passive income. In the beginning that’s nice to have while you try out the next thing.

2. Leave your charity to giving, not receiving. Do not do any ideas that are a few dollars a month unless you have very strong response to your beta email list in a low cost adwords niche.  It’s often better to have 5 customers giving you 20 dollars a month, than 40 giving you 2 dollars a month and build a slow growing business around it.

Once you have some ideas, you have to validate them. How to pick?

1. Don’t try to swing for the fences and build the next Facebook the first time. Chances are you’ll go through a few ideas.  You need to be able to pay your way in life while you do and try to be a little successful along the way.  Pick reasonable niche ideas that people are searching for. Test that niche via adwords to see what kind of response / interest you get to sign up for your beta mailing list while you build.

2. Build a simple proof-of-concept to see if you do it better, simpler, faster. See if that simple attempt makes your client happy.

3. Like 37 Signals says, release something embarrassing and charge for it. See if people pay.  Keep improving it.

4. Once you find something that pays, build yourself a modest money maker that makes a few hundred to a few thousand a month. Chain a few of these money making ideas together.

5. Now that you’ve had some experience exploring, validating, launching and automating ideas, you have enough passive income to sustain your lifestyle while you now go ahead and swing for the fences with a big idea.  Of course, it took a little longer than expected but you learnt a lot and are much more well rounded at developing online business ideas.

It’s interesting looking back at all I wrote in 2010 and with the perspectives I ended up with at the end of 2010.

Here’s where I ended up:  ColdFusion + Mura CMS + FW/1 Plugin Bundle = My web development nirvana.  I haven’t been this happy with developing in years.  It’s like discovering how easy ColdFusion made everything all over again, 12 years later.

How did this happen?

First, my discovery and adoption of Mura CMS to build web applications.  I know, that might sound a little strange on first read.  I’ve developed many web applications with several ColdFusion frameworks over the years.  Last year I got into built a few apps with it.  ColdBox was amazing.  The problem with me?  Most of the projects I worked on didn’t get to use or leverage the amazing features Luis has put into ColdBox.  It was like having the greatest swiss army knife ever, and not having enough uses for all the tools.  If there’s anything I like doing, it’s using features that make life easier. While I work on some very complex apps, any good framework for ColdFusion can handle it all pretty well. ColdBox was really becoming an issue of preference and wanting a new way to enjoy ColdFusion.  I hope to be able to use ColdBox one day.. but for now I think it’ll be on the shelf and I’m very happy to use it for existing projects.

As part of my framework search last year, I came across Mura CMS by Blue River Interactive and Framework One (FW/1) by Sean Corfield.  Individually, both were really impressive.  Mura CMS was what I dreamt Far Cry CMS was a few years ago.  Easy to install, easy to use, easy to extend and customize.  I could just kind of get things done.  It even had a Wordpress quality installer.  Great, I could use this for a few basic websites that came up and enjoy it.

There was one thing missing for me.  It’s always been missing in everything.  I’ve always had a desire to do as much of my web application development, be it for clients, or my own projects in one way, in one technology, framework, etc.  On one hand, I had ColdBox which let me build great apps, and on the other hand Mura CMS let me create great front ends for my clients to manage. Mura CMS has a wonderful plugin architecture, let me build a quick few plugins.. but it required more thought and learning if I wanted to build apps with it.

Oh, existential crisis.  I want both, in one place!

During this great time of pain from being, so close, I reached out to Blue River.  Not surprisingly, the guys heard me out and shared some great insights.  I was was introduced to Grant Shepert by the Mura team, and he ended up being a few blocks away from me and knew oodles about Mura CMS.  Grant has a great blog on Mura CMS, and while some of it is pretty detailed, it has to be some of the most enjoyable ColdFusion reading I’ve done in a while just from what he was uncovering and making possible in Mura.  I asked Grant if he would be so kind to answer a few questions of “how do I best do this”.. when there were a few ways to do a task in Mura and after that, I was sold.

I heard at the time that there was a Framework One “base application plugin” for Mura that you could use to create more complete applications, bundled as a Mura Plugin.  Yeah, I’ve heard that kind of empty hope before.  The key insight that Grant opened my eyes to was how he was building applications inside Mura.  Grant sat with me and my suspicions were confirmed.  Mura has CMS’ down right, and it’s FW/1 integration for plugins has a ton of power, but stays out of the way to let me build applications, thanks to how FW/1 is conveniently designed.  I highly recommend Grant’s base FW/1 plugin to build apps, it’s a bit tweaked from the one in the plugin store.

Since that time, I’ve delved deeper into Mura’s underpinnings and decided I’ll be centering a great deal of my time and life in Mura for my professional and personal projects.  Mura is a wonderful project in it’s own space, like ColdBox, FW/1 and many others.  Mura is open source, has a good team developing it, and a growing community.  The only thing I wish for is a bit more in the way of documented examples, but resources like the forum and Mura Show have been a great help to get direct help while those things develop.  I’m hoping to share my journey as well from the startup perspective of how it helped me bootstrap and launch quicker.

Today I’m standing in 2011 with another 3 new projects starting, all to be developed fully in Mura.  I feel for the first time in a long while that I’ve found the best balance of technology (ColdFusion) with a platform (Mura) and framework (FW/1) that I think I’ll be happily be able to build for a long, long time without needing much more.

This year you’ll see a few plugins put out pertaining to the small SaaS startups I’ll be launching.  Thats right, plural.  I think I can do more than one.  It’s time to show what ColdFusion can get done with a great cms like Mura can get rid with the boilerplate app logic that ends up consuming so much time after the proof of concept is completed of a SaaS startup idea.

Inward, onward, and upward!

We’ve all heard it: The ability to learn and apply how to communicate with skill is priceless, no matter what we do. At the top of most fields we will often find the best communicators.  The jury might be out on other things, but they do know how to share their message.

Being limited to 140 characters per message in Twitter, I’ve had to get very good at expressing my thoughts and ideas simply and clearly for maximum impact.  It doesn’t have to be bold, or brash, just clear. In this way, Twitter has become one pencil sharpener of expressing my thoughts and ideas.  How does it do that?

The long and short of it is this: When working on a project, product, business, or startups, we’re in the boat of having to communicate a lot, clearly and quickly.  Twitter helps us to develop the habit of communicating with less distracting noise, and more punchy signal.

Like the web, we all need to define what Twitter will do for us based on how we use it. For me, Twitter participates in introducing and sharing ideas that better help us define and navigate the world around us.

Twitter promotes quitting the brain dump to communicate. As a developer of projects and products, be it someone’s startup idea, or my own, I have to learn to cut through the tendency to take the easy way out and “write everything” to “cover it all”.  This is known as the brain dump.  Whether an email, on a website, or in your product, brain dumping as a way of communicating only increases complexity. It reduces focus. It makes people work to find the nuggets they are looking for.  (They won’t and they’l leave) Worse, brain dumps to communicate leave more questions than it answers, and a greater sense of confusion than it began with.

More signal, less noise. Less is definitely more. With all projects, products and startups, we often wear an extra hat of copywriters.  Write less, cut in half, and half again, right?  We often know the most about the product, how it works, and the market fit, and being able to find and speak to it with a lot of impact is a huge thing that the lean startup approach has emphasized.   Learning to find the essence and knowing what message to amplify is critically invaluable.

Training ourselves to speak about benefits instead of features. Since we’re focused on building features, we can have a tendency on communicating the features at length, and not always the benefit.  On Twitter, answering “How does this relate to me” is how information travels quickly.  “What it does” doesn’t seem as interesting.  Always developing our skill to communicate benefits is invaluable in all projects and products.

If we examine “How does this relate to me” about the relevancy of Twitter itself, we can notice some interesting things.

First there were opinions about what twitter was about.

“Twitter just IRC on the web.”
“Twitter is the wall chat of BBS (bulletin board systems) in the 1990’s”

There were the opinions where everyone wondered how is this useful to me.

“Twitter makes it hard to interact in so few characters.”
“Twitter seems like a popularity contest.”
“Who cares about typing everything you’re thinking or doing every second of the day.”

From this, a few things have become apparent about Twitter to me.

Twitter shares something with the web of the 1990’s.  It’s anything, and everything, to anyone and everyone. Tweeting about every moment, thought and whatever, is the equivalent of having flashing text on your website in the 90’s.  Cool to some at first, painful for everyone.  When we were new to Twitter, we were feeling things out.  What’s too much? what’s too little?  How do I participate in sharing?  How do I find what’s important to me?

We had Geocities in the 90’s.  Sites weren’t the greatest, but everyone was involved in consuming, expressing and sharing information with each other.  Blinking text lost out on the web, just like sharing your every thought at every second has (hopefully) on Twitter.  Search engines became a relevant way to link strangers with information that they wouldn’t know about.

Twitter has become a live, searchable stream of benefits to me. How we learned and evolved in expressing and sharing information has lead to a huge impact in the last 10 years.  Everything and everyone is becoming more, and more connected, and we’re having to deal with too much information.

Twitter helps us deal with massive information overload. Those who learn to share and communicate in 140 characters become more and more relevant as information overload and bombardment increases every year.  Conveniently, being able to write good copy for your projects or product is also very, very, powerful.

For now, the best signal to noise adjuster is people.  Computer’s can’t exactly put together the information stream we are trying to piece together ourselves as we go. We need to be able to tune things in, or out, as easily as changing an order at a restaurant. So, we pay attention to those who have a clear, consistent stream of knowledge so it can become a part of ours. Rinse, repeat with others to create our own meal from the buffet of information overload.

While it might be foolish to say there won’t be anything like it again, Twitter has, increasingly found it’s way into our lives as a communication format like email, fax, or phone. Consume it in many different ways.  Participate in just as many. Except, Twitter is a community like Facebook at the same time.  That’s unique.  And I’ll keep working to make the most of it.

So, if you made it this far, take the one benefit from the ideas above, or your own, and share how you’ll apply it.