Musings about Entrepreneurship, Technology and Software Development

Accidental Technologist

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Reading List →

Here is a great list of business book from Jonathan Stark. I’ve read many of these but found some I wasn’t aware of:

via Expensive Problem – Business Coaching for Dev Shops.

Sometimes Great Service and Transparency Have to Be Enough

Yesterday DNSimple, my DNS provider and domain registrar of choice, suffered from a Denial of Service (DoS) attack and as a result their service went down.  This affected my sites and the sites of many people I know.

DNSimple is a bit of a different provider of services for people on the Internet since they are an infrastructure provider.  This means they provide a fundamental service which I and others rely to deliver services to our customers.  This makes a company like DNSimple that much more responsible for being up moire than most. Their outage yesterday, and actually going back a some period of time before yesterday,

They could have handled the outage in several ways.  The way they chose to handle this outage is an example of how any provider of services on the Internet should handle sometimes uncontrolled events.  As a company, DNSimple has provided great service in the limited amount of support I needed from them.  You can distinguish a great company by how they react when faced with a crisis.

Great Service

Respond to your customers in a calm fashion, letting them know how important your issue is to them.  If support issues come in via email or Twitter, respond to them, even to let them know you received their email or tweet and will get back as soon as you have something to tell them.  It only takes a second and it keeps your customer calm.  How many times have you sent a support request and heard crickets for a day or two?  Me too, it’s annoying.

Treat your customers just the way you want to be treated.

Transparency

Probably the #1 failure of a company under pressure is their lack of transparency.  What is transparency?  Simply being open about what’s going on, the issues and how you are dealing with them.  Most customers are reasonable and probably have been in a crisis themselves and being open with them, communicating what you’re finding takes very little time and is a huge plus.

Be proactive, if you recognize a problem let your customers know before they find it themselves.  Be genuine, let people know you understand how important this to them.

DNSimple did a great job in their Twitter stream, responding to customers as well as general updates on what was going on and chronicling the ups and downs.

June 1st at 12:05am being proactive:

— DNSimple (@dnsimple) June 1, 2013From first thing in the morning:

— DNSimple (@dnsimple) June 3, 2013  

Setting expectations:

— DNSimple (@dnsimple) June 3, 2013  

Keeping your word:

— DNSimple (@dnsimple) June 3, 2013  

Thanking those who are most important:

— DNSimple (@dnsimple) June 3, 2013  

We are in the processing of fixing this issue for good:

— DNSimple (@dnsimple) June 3, 2013  

I feel good using these folks as a vendor.  The openness and the continued updates makes me feel like I can count on them to be there and doing all they can to fix this problem and any other problem that might arise in the future.

Offering details to an audience that would otherwise be in the dark cost them very little in the way of time but wins them big in the eyes of the people who rely on this service.

Running a business where you have customers who rely on the product or service you provide is a very rewarding experience, but it doesn’t always go smoothly.  Customers will remember how you reacted when things got tough.  What image do you want them to have of you?

UPDATE (6/4/2013 @ 5:00pm EST): Anthony Eden of DNSimple posted a great overview of the problem and the actions taken to resolve and prevent future attacks.  A really nice way for anyone not following the drama as it occurred.

2010 Year in Review and Looking Ahead

I don’t always do these types of posts and I almost didn’t this year but I figured it would help keep my thoughts together to reflect on later.

2010 was a really busy year and there was very little rest.

Expens’d

It has been just over a year since I acquired Expens’d from Atlantic Dominion Solutions.  The past year has really been about understanding the application, how people are using it and fixing some obvious bugs that plagued my users.  We added several new features requested by users but did not add the features I am dying to tell you about.  Unfortunately, I can’t say just yet what is being added but it will be great for our users.

Subscribers are continuing to increase, both paid and free accounts.  Advertising consisted of Bing, Google Ads and Facebook Ads.  I was surprised to find Bing brought in the most new users.  I don’t have exact numbers just yet.

Running a Software-as-a-service (SaaS) project is interesting and exciting, I have learned a lot in the past year and plan to share the details as we move forward.

Ruby on Rails

My complete move to Ruby on Rails and especially Rails 3 is almost complete.  I have one client remaining who I still provide consulting services to who is a .NET shop.  Once this project completes in 2011, my .NET career will come to a final end.

Rails 3 has really been a joy to work with, not in a single aspect but in the areas the team improved.  The areas which annoyed me in Rails 2.x are mostly rewritten and the pleasure continues.

I think Rails 3 is going to be a huge turning point for the Rails community.  This version could lead to better adoption in the enterprise and other organizations unsure of the platform.

An Epiphany

I would say about halfway through the year I came to realization that no matter how great it was to work with Ruby on Rails or any programming language and framework is, client work is not the joy it once was to me.

Since that time in the summer, I have been diligently working toward becoming 100% reliant on products.  These products include both web applications and mobile applications mainly targeting small businesses.  I continue to look for products to acquire which fit in with my plans.  If you know someone looking to sell, send them my way.

The transitions to 100% products is not as simple as flipping a switch, it takes time and planning.  My goal is transition complete by the end of the year.

All of my current products and projects are now Rails, future products will also Rails.  As consulting work winds down I will set some time aside to work on selected consulting projects that are particularly interesting.

Mobile Exploration

After purchasing a Motorola Droid X earlier this year and hearing how Android is gaining such market share I had to see what the hype was about.  I rejoined the Apple iPhone developer program and the Android Marketplace to make sure I had the latest information and tools.

Spending several weeks with both platforms to expose myself to iOS 4 and Android development I came back with an initial gut feel where my tolerance for risk versus the state of each platform and determined Android was not ready for prime time yet.  It is not as polished, tools are weak and making a reasonable living is a lot harder than with iOS.

This set my course from a mobile standpoint that I would focus on Objective-C on iOS and leave Android for another time, a more mature time.

The Year Ahead

I attended only one conference in 2010, which was RailsConf in the first half of the year.  I hope to change that in 2011.  I will be attending RailsConf again but want to take in some smaller, regional technical conferences as well as some business-related ones as well.  Maybe the Business of Software Conference this year.

2011 will be a year of transition from consulting to a products company.  I plan to blog more here about running a software company, some technical stuff but mainly about the factors behind technical decisions.  Some will be code, some will be me blathering on.

I have some ideas for other products to develop this year and some significant plans for Expens’d.  The journey will likely not be taken alone as one person cannot do it all, cannot know it all.

I am looking forward to this journey, things will certainly get exciting.