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!

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.

Every business needs cashflow (and profit) to survive like the body needs oxygen, food, and air.  Just because a business has cashflow, doesn’t mean it’s a success, much like we aren’t a success in life just because we sat around and survived.

If you have to mislead to make a dollar, it’s like tricking a girl into liking you.  You might make some money/trick her for a while, but it won’t last.

The better the mutual fit, the better the relationship.  As is often the case it’s best to see if you can work well together.  The client, or the vendor, alone, can’t make the relationship work.  Both have to be present.

As for finding the right work..

Know your product.  Know the value you deliver.  Know the clients it will benefit.  Only sell to them and you’ll have a lasting business.

Always generate more value than which you are paid. Otherwise your client turnover rate after they feel “had” will be much higher than it needs to be.

It’s easy to try and be someone else in business.  The problem is it always comes back full circle.  If you like honesty, and integrity, and when people eat their own cooking before giving it to you as advice, do it yourself.

Not every customer values it, but not every customer is for you.  There’s a big difference between a good dollar and a bad dollar.  It’s tough in the start but it’s worth it.

Be a defender of keeping goodness and kindness fashionable.    Your startup is your declaration of your moral and professional independence.

For one of the original software development bloggers, at the center of the startup, micro-isv movement to make a decision like this, it seems a little strange at first..

Joel mentions a number of reasons that I think are interesting of what a startup may face, once a startup has.. started up.

1. Part of the reason he’s no longer writing is that he has so many customers that his blog posts seem to deeply offend one of his clients in one way or another.Plausible? Sure. But isn’t differentiation what a product is built on?  I think this could be the topic of a blog post on it’s own by Joel to see what kind of things others in startups have to look forward to when you get large(r).
2. Growth means there’s revenue for traditional advertising. I would think, though, that tools for developers are ultimately best directly connected to them instead of magazine ads?

Joel might be big enough and he doesn’t need to, or can’t benefit from blogging as he did prior…  With Stack Overflow taking on the answer / thought market and opening things up beyond him, maybe there’s room for a lot more voices, that can be found easily.

Maybe Joel was developing the best bug tracking software in the world, and attracting the best developers in the world, so that when FogBugz reached it’s sweet spot, he can go onto building the best software company in the world?

Who knows.

I do know that writing, and sharing doesn’t leave you once you start, and know the value of being shared with, especially after many years.

Joel’s posts have helped so many that I don’t think many will lose their value or relevance.  Whether it was the pay-scale matrix, or why the command and conquer or econ 101 management won’t work with software developers, it’s rare to have reasonably concise, applicable, exploratory rants that were sane as it’s readers most of the time, and willing to have it’s share of mind-stretching ideas like anyone being stretched by growth.

If this is the last of Joel blogging, thanks for doing it.  The fact that Joel replies to emails and shared what he learnt so others could join the movement to make the world a better place with better software.

Will it be the last we hear from him in books, conferences, articles elsewhere..?  Doubt it.  His recent introduction to mercurial at www.hginit.com is a prime example.

I hope Joel continues to create and write, and if not, we see his writing has inspired others to write and share.

Joel I know you read more than you ever let on, so if your eyes reach here, which I’ll do my best to ensure, remember that with our talents we have a responsibility to share what has been shared and taught to us by life and others.  No guilt trip intended, the world owes us nothing.

Let’s step back from this and see the general picture.

Does this decision by Joel mean blogging is ultimately useless for startups? I don’t think so. At all.

Most companies, indeed, do use their blogs for boring news releases is relevant.

Blogs are all about relevancy. Blogs, like products that provide relevancy thrive.

Blogs will always have their place to share information, and for us, resources for startups looking to reach their market through the public seeking their content.  If you don’t have the marketing money, a blog is a key way to demonstrate and share expertise and knowledge.

I can say that the last year of writing this blog has showed me that I need to write more, and often.