I thought about calling this entry "Don't Spend Two Hours to Save $20", but it lost out on the internal blog title poll. Both phrases are about how it's easy to end up spending hours & hours to avoid paying a nominal amount.

People who know me know that I like to talk about productivity a lot. Granted, I see the irony of me talking about productivity while I sit around writing blog posts, but anyhow.

Have you ever...

One of the things I've learned over the years is to not be afraid to spend a little money to save a lot of time. Assuming your time has value, it makes a lot of sense. So have you ever:

• Spent hours creating a program to do something, instead of buying a $25 piece of software that does all that you need and more?
• Used poorly-written, cumbersome free software to do your daily work, instead of paying $30 for a program that works really well?
  
• Saved $20 on a new tech gadget by trolling FatWallet and TechBargains for a week, sending in multiple rebates, asking store managers to price match, and/or driving back to the store to do a return/rebuy or price guarantee?
• Avoiding paying a $25 shipping fee on furniture or other large items by driving down to the store yourself, strapping the items to the top of your car, heading back home, unloading it, and carrying it into the room?
  
• Bought a cheap piece of crap to do something (a rake, a wrench, a garden hose reel, a heatsink) that required extra time or money to get it working correctly, and/or broke after a short while and required replacement?

...and so on. It's easy to get sucked into saving a little money, but unless you enjoy the time spent saving that cash, you should make sure to be aware of how you spend your time and ensure that it's really getting you somewhere. As programmers, we love writing software, and it's really easy to say "hey I can quickly write or build my own X for free!" I've done that a lot (and heard similar sentiments from other developers), and while it's fun writing little utilities and tools, they have a habit of taking longer than expected.

A Full Price Lesson

I had a friend back in Chicago who asked me to come with him to buy some stuff for his computer. I mentioned that he could save a lot by checking out various deals, and that different stores had different prices, so that he could buy his keyboard at one vendor, his antivirus software somewhere else, a mouse on Amazon, and then send in some rebates to save even more. I mentioned that he should keep an eye on bargain-shopper sites and only buy when items go on sale, do some online research to compare price-for-performance between different items, and other price-shaving tips.

After a long spiel on techie thriftiness, he promptly ignored me and dragged us into Office Depot, where he asked my advice on what a good keyboard, mouse, and antivirus vendor were. I told him, and he grabbed the items, paid at the counter, and strolled out.

Initially I was shocked at his cavalier attitude at paying full price, but then I realized that he was done in 15 minutes. Done! I'd still be driving around, cutting out UPC symbols, etc. a week later.

I still remember that experience whenever I start thinking about how I can save $10 on a hard drive by comparing 4 different drives at 5 different sites over the course of 2 weeks.

If you're not working, you aren't getting paid

I'm not saying you shouldn't try to save money, nor should you throw money away. Nor should you buy things you don't need if something free will work just fine. Nor should you avoiding writing your own tools.

I'm just saying that if your time is valuable, think about how your time is spent, and just be conscious of where your hours are going vs where they'd go if you spent an extra $20-$100. Over the past two years at DevelopmentNow, that really hit home. We do 100% project work here, so if we're not working on a client's site, we don't get paid. With that in mind, I felt more comfortable paying a little to gain a lot (of time). Especially in IT, there are opportunities to spend an extra $20 to save hours.

Examples from the field

For example, I set up an Unfuddle account for the company. Unfuddle is sort of like BaseCamp+Subversion+Ticket system, but it was ready to go instead of me spending hours (days?) setting up SVN, Trac, and other stuff for free. I'm also probably going to buy phpEd or some other commerical PHP editor. Why? Because I get a lot for that $100 or so, and I buy it & I'm done. I take a lot of screenshots, too, and need more features than Cropper + Ifranview currently provide, so I'll probably buy SnagIt for $40. Plus I order most things (including furniture) online & have it delivered right to my door -- not only does it save me time, but it's better for the environment than driving my car around.

Wrapping up

So...that's how not to spend two hours to save $20. If you get paid hourly, saving $20 via two hours of unpaid work carries a real opportunity cost, which is how you go about losing 20 (or more) dollars an hour.

Ice Cream for Everyone wrote about their experiences in hiring a designer, listing out where they placed ads and what kind of candidates they found. Me the Geek also has a list of specialty job boards for finding programmers, and has a great quote (from Michael Arrington) on why companies often choose to post ads on smaller, niche boards:

The idea is that the best candidates read these blogs, and by definition are up to speed on cutting edge tech issues. By advertising there, you get the benefit of access to those candidates, without the hundreds of unqualified resumes that come flying in from a Craigslist or Monster.com listing.

I like playing devil's advocate, so I'll say that while it's true that sharp people keep up with technology, there are also a lot of bright programmers who don't read TechCrunch. There are also ones who read TechCrunch, but not the TechCrunch job boards.

A friend of mine runs a consulting company and had his best success on Monster.com, of all places. He mentioned that while he had to wade through a lot of bad candidates, the mere fact that Monster.com cast such a wide net helped ensure he'd find someone. He also felt that if people were looking for a job, they'd be sure to check Monster.com -- he didn't think there would be many viable candidates who ignored Monster and only focused on niche boards.

Anecdotally, I posted ads on ThinkVitamin and Authentic Jobs, and I did get a number of resumes from really sharp-seeming developers. However, they were on average outside the range that I could afford. When I posted on CraigsList, I actually didn't get as many responses as I thought I would -- largely because posting ads was free (until recently), and so your CraigsList job ad would get buried within a day or two by tons of staffing company ads.

So...maybe I don't get it. Or maybe if you're on a tighter budget, niche boards aren't the right place to look. But now that CraigsList charges $25 per ad in Portland, I might get better visibility.

 

I spoke with one of my social networking clients today about how to get their user participation up. My client mentioned that they saw people registering, but they just weren't doing anything. I was thinking about the conversation on the way home from work today and wanted to blog out some thoughts.

What's In It For Your Users?

The first question I asked was "From your perspective, what does your site offer users? Why should they sign up, and why should they participate?" It's a good question to ask yourself about your site -- what's in it for your users? Do you have a good value proposition? Who is your target audience? Who is your competition and why are you better? Would you use your site? Do you use your own site, and how often? Are your needs unique? What do your friends and associates think? Do they use the site too?

It's easy enough to stick a survey from Zoomerang or PollDaddy on your site to collect some feedback, too. You need to understand the needs of your users and the value you provide -- you can't just build a site and wait for the content to roll in.

A Combination of Factors for User Participation

Getting user participation is a combination of a few things:

1. There should be things drawing your users into the site
2. There should be as few barriers as possible preventing them from participating
3. To grow, you need more and more users
4. Some percentage of users will do nothing
   

Draw Users Into Your Site

#1 begins with two standard fares: content and activities. Having lots of interesting content is great, but content isn't all you need -- this is an interactive site, not a book you just flip through and read. So give users a chance to do something, too. Let them put their two cents in, compete against other users, show off their skills/photos/etc, win a prize, gain notoriety, ask a question. And give users instant feedback if possible. Let them see the results of their participation.

Important point: Users need to know that if they do something, they will get a (positive) result. That's important to realize. That's why no one participates in forums with no posts -- why bother posting to an empty bulletin board, since no one will probably read and/or reply to what you said? There's a reason why forum moderators seed content and prune empty threads.

Another thing talked about is stickiness. Stickiness means getting users to come back. Maybe there's an activity that keeps them logging back in to check on stuff (e.g. checking your score or approving a friend request), or maybe your site emails them to tell them that "XYZ just happened on the site, click here to visit the site and check it out!" Make logging into the site worthwhile. If the content (text, photos, etc) is interesting, that could be reason enough to come back.

Think about the sites that you visit regularly -- why do you visit them? Now think about the sites you participate in regularly -- why do you participate, and are the reasons different from the sites you merely browse?

Lastly, make sure users know what your site has to offer. Laura G from Ning talks about Welcome Centers -- does your site have a prominent area, preferably on the home page, welcoming new users, telling them what the site is about, and encouraging them to join in the fun?

Eliminate Barriers to Participation

Top of the list -- make registering as easy as possible, or eliminate it. Allow people to post comments, rate, & review things without registering at all. Then, allow registered users something extra as incentive (maybe they can gain reputation, or access special features, or not have to use the CAPTCHA all the time). Make registration quick & simple -- require as little as possible before they can participate. Don't make them wait 5-10 minutes for a confirmation email (*unless that kind of security is really necessary). Don't redirect them to the home page after registering so they have to remember what page they were on. Don't make them log in again, after they just told you what their username and password should be. People will register because they want to do something, and the more hoops they have to jump through before they're able to do what they wanted to, the more their enthusiasm will wane.

A cumbersome registration process is part of a larger theme -- usability. A site needs to be easy to use, be responsive, be intuitive, work on all browsers, not require rebooting your computer to load a plugin, etc. If a site is simple and easy, then people enjoy using it, and they'll use it more often.

Granted, barriers can be higher if the reward to your users is higher. Lonely bachelors are more willing to put up with an involved registration process if it means they can browse pictures of pretty girls and find true love. But in general, don't make the barriers any higher than they need to be. If you start getting too much content, you can apply the brakes later.

Another good tip is to visit a non-technical friend (who's not a member), ask them to participate in your site, and watch them use your site. And I mean physically sit behind them and observe. Watch what they do, see where they get caught up, and understand what might be frustrating your users.

Get More Users

I won't talk much about this, but obviously, you need to get as much of your target userbase to your site as you can. Note I said target userbase, not just any random set of users. That's because your site has some sort of theme, niche, or focus, and you want to reinforce that. Social sites' value and appeal increases with more users (and more user generated content), so make sure your site is something your users will share. Include standard "viral" elements in your site -- invite a friend, email this XYZ to a friend, import your Yahoo/Gmail/etc contacts. Give people a direct reason to include more people. Give them points, give them a "friend count", something. Make a facebook/OpenSocial app. Get some buzz. Get blogs to write about you. Do some SEO. Buy keywords. Acquire an existing social network.

Some Users Will Always Be Lame

After all your hard work, some users will always do nothing. Some might start participating after a while (especially if you email them from time to time to let them know about new and interesting features), but there will always be a percentage of users who register on your site but don't post anything, don't upload any photos, and never come back. First off -- that's normal, and that's totally ok. If your site is healthy, those inactive users will fall by the wayside as your active users fill in your content. Secondly, if it still bothers you, ask yourself "why did these users register in the first place, and why didn't they do anything else?" Make sure that your site's registration process is easy and leads people towards contributing. If it's a cumbersome process, you may find that after completing registration, users are too tired to do anything else.

Yes I've been busy lately. In fact that's what I wanted to blog about.

A while back, I was going through my finances to see how much I spent on different things. I wanted to know what my budget should be. When I'd go through the credit card statements, I'd see utilities, food, and other fixed costs. Restaurants, entertainment, etc. But there would always be one or two oddball one-off purchases (e.g. plane tickets one month, a new refrigerator another month, a new PC some other month, etc.) that I didn't want to include in the budget. "That fridge was a one-time thing, I shouldn't include that $500 in my budget," I'd say. But each month there's be some other random purchase that wasn't accounted for in the budget I drew up. And so these one-time purchases kept blowing my carefully detailed budget.

I eventually realized that I needed some sort of $500 "Random" or "Miscellaneous" category in my monthly budget because it dawned on me that there was always some important -- but new and unaccounted for -- item being purchased. So after I restructured my budget to assume that I'd "buy a fridge each month" so to speak, things worked out better.

Since starting DevelopmentNow almost two years ago, I've come to a similar realization about what takes up some of my time -- I can't assume I'll be able to spend 100% of my time coding, because there's always something that comes up as part of running a business. Interviewing job candidates, talking with clients, purchasing things for the office, working with my accountant to incorporate the business, writing contracts, updating proposals, upgrading my site hosting -- the list goes on. All that stuff needs to be done, and probably takes up at least a few hours a week, but it's hard for me to know exactly what those 8-12 hours a month will be spent doing ahead of time. I can guess, but I won't know for sure. And it's different each month.

But I now know that I need to permanently budget for that time so that I don't overcommit myself. So if you find yourself repeatedly crunched by unexpected timesinks, you may want to add a good ol' 10-hour "Random Stuff" block to your monthly budget, too.

How to minimize the amount of random stuff, however, is a topic for another day.

Been a while since mylast post. Anyhow, recently we needed to change the minimum word length for MySQL Full Text Searches and then rebuild all our full text indexes, which requires doing a quick repair on any relevant tables.

I knew it was a lot of tables, so I came up with a quick query to list all the tables with full text indexes:

select DISTINCT TABLE_SCHEMA, TABLE_NAME
from information_schema.STATISTICS
where INDEX_TYPE = 'FULLTEXT';

You could also change the query to list out the relevant REPAIR commands.

select DISTINCT
CONCAT('repair table ',
TABLE_SCHEMA, '.', TABLE_NAME,
' quick;')
from information_schema.STATISTICS
where INDEX_TYPE = 'FULLTEXT';

Read/WriteWeb had a favorable article recently about a new social network for foodies: iFood.tv. It features the standard social network elements, but also allows users to create, share, rate, and comment on recipies.

I also noticed that iFood.tv is built using Drupal, an open source CMS/building-blocks system with many pre-existing SNS modules. Drupal is a popular and powerful choice if you want to build something custom, but you don't want to build everything from scratch.

TechCrunch wrote an article today about ModelsHotel, a social network for models only. You have to be a professional model to join. The writeup was prompted by an article about ModelsHotel in the WSJ, which mentioned that the site just got a $10,000 banner ad deal, and is looking to raise $1.5 million in capital.

Normally this would be a pretty ordinary story about a vertical social network in a decent niche.

However, I noticed that ModelsHotel is running AlstraSoft E-Friends, a $300/year social networking package (good ol "view source"). In fact, other than removing the standard header & footer, ModelsHotel doesn't look that tweaked.  

ModelsHotel Profile.

Standard eFriends Profile.

Granted, I'm not a model, so perhaps there's more custom functionality that just isn't visible from the outside.

So what's my point? Well, I have one point and one concern:

Point: (Initial) success in the web can come from innovative technology, business prowess. Having both is great but not required.

In the case of ModelsHotel, it's not the technology. ModelsHotel isn't getting $10,000 advertising deals, Wall Street Journal articles, & the hope of $1.5 million because they spent paid $300 for some software and spent a week installing it and tweaking the template. They're getting this action because of the niche they chose, the company focus, the effort they've put into the business (outside of the actual software effort), and the business skill and connections of the owners, management, and staff. 

Their technology isn't winning them anything -- their business side is. The technology merely enables their business focus to succeed (at least for now). You cannot pay $300 for off-the-shelf SNS software, do nothing else, & wait for the money to roll in.

Concern: ModelsHotel will need to do something with the site to prevent competition

From what I can tell, the software they're running seems very similar to the default eFriends install. If I'm right, that means that someone could create a same-or-"better" ModelsHotel clone in a weekend. And since ModelsHotel has a very restrictive entry policy (apparently it only has 1000 members), a competitor might be able to quickly get the same number of members.

I'm not saying that ModelsHotel can't successfully fend off competition purely through non-technical means (marketing, partnerships, contracts, significant market/mindshare, covert model hacker squads sent to destroy competitors' servers, etc). Because again, you can be successful through non-technical means.

But still, especially given the fact that it's a web company ... it's going to be much harder to stave off competing networks if they stick with the default install. My $0.02.

 

White label SNS providers...

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/02/12/list-of-white-label-social-networking-platforms/

With so many providers out there, how does one choose? I'm wondering if it would be valuable to post a screencast of how to set up & configure a few different SNS tools (e.g. Ning, phpFox, etc.)...

You may have seen Web 2.0 Creatr, but if you have a copy of Photoshop, you can create your own logo. The many following links show you how:

Logos

link
link
link
link
link
link
link
link
link
link

Web 2.0 Page Header

link
link

Web 2.0 Buttons

link
link

I apologize for the bare-bones link list. :)

Duncan Riley of TechCrunch blogged today about Damsels in Success, a new business-oriented social site for professional women. The name is of course a play on "Damsels in Distress."

Duncan felt that because he was male, he was "totally unqualified to pass judgement" on the site. I think Duncan's judgement would have been ok, but I admire his sentiment. I'm male, too, but I'll try to give it an honest review. I will agree that, like Duncan, I'm not part of the site's target community, and so I can't promise to know whether it'll meet the particular needs of women or not. So I'll try to keep my review focused on how it does as a social network in general, based on my opinion (of course).

Features

Nice looking site. I definitely see the LinkedIn angle, w/ the Jobs section being so prominent. Then again, the site is about women & business. When you register, there are a number of required fields (e.g. age) that could be a turnoff.

The "stories" feature is neat, since they're not just random blog posts, but instead posted as answers to specific questions, giving the site owners a chance to encourage users to contribute, steer the content, & keep it aligned w/ the theme.

The forums are run by up to 50 "damsels," and only they can start threads, although anyone can comment on an existing thread. There's also an advice/ask the expert area, where the expert blogs about community-submitted questions and people can comment.

Issues

Three main downsides that I see:

The name

Overall, more (female) TechCrunch commenters seemed to feel the name was a lame, cutesy pun off a sexist statement, rather than sharp and clever. I think the name is fine, but it may hurt their acceptance and turn off a percentage of the very people they want to attract. Then again, there may be people who love the name(?).

Profile section

The actual profile section feels a bit watered down, but I suspect that's because the site is still pretty new. I'm sure they'll flesh it out as the community grows. And maybe I've been looking at too many "fancy" social networks these days. There are a number of required profile fields (e.g. age) that I'm not sure why they're required, and could be a turnoff.

Restricted User Generated Content

Maybe I missed it, but it doesn't seem like ordinary members can initiate a new topic or line of thought anywhere (other than by thread hijacking, or by sending in a question to the Advice area & hoping it gets blogged about). You can only respond or comment on existing questions, posts, and topics created by either the site owners or the up-to-50 official "damsels."

If I wanted to ask the community a new question (e.g. "What other social networks would you recommend for women in business?"), I wouldn't be able to.

I can see how "steering" content can help encourage participation, strengthen a theme, and reduce off-topic threads, but I still think community members should be allowed to start threads to ask something new, otherwise they may go elsewhere if they don't see their particular question. Even a "General Discussion" type forum would help.

I assume this was a deliberate design decision by the site, and I'd be interested in learning more about the rationale. And again, I may be missing something.

Technology

From a technology angle, it's written in ASP.NET -- something you don't see very often for startups. I'm glad to see .NET being used, as Rails & PHP (or at least Rails) often get all the love.

Monetization

Since jobs are featured so prominently, my guess that the site will eventually offer some sort of fee-based "enhanced" job posting. I've seen loads of blogs & communities allowing me to post a 30-day job ad for $75-$300, so perhaps there's some money to be made in the niche job site market. Most social networks' revenue models seem to be restricted to "ads", "get acquired", and/or "huh?", so perhaps it's nice to see a change of pace.

Revenue could also be gained from advertising, but that's pretty much a given.

Conclusion

Yet another social network, but I haven't seen many in that particular niche, and I think the business/jobs focus and atypical revenue possibilities might help it rise above the tide. I really think they need to loosen the controls on the content, though, otherwise the community might go to a less restricted site. I'm also a bit concerned about the name, but maybe it just means that there's room in the niche for more than one site?