Money isn’t the same everywhere

By on December 12, 2011 in Business Philosophy

I get recruiter calls every so often. I always listen, because you never know where that sort of thing is going to go.

I listen. I answer the questions. I might even go through another level of phone interviews from time to time.

In the best-case scenario, I hear a salary range. And they always sound nice when you’re on the phone. One was a 50% pay raise if you just go by the numbers.

But if you’re in a similar situation to me, you can’t just go by the numbers.

That 50% pay bump was for a job in Washington, DC … which means it really wasn’t a pay bump at all. If it were a job in the Bay Area? It would have been a pay cut.

So, here’s my pro tip: Before you accept any job that requires you to relocate, run the numbers through a cost of living calculator.

The results will almost always surprise you.

And for god’s sakes: Don’t think for a second that a $125,000 job in Silicon Valley is somehow worth more than a $75,000 job in Indianapolis.

Bonus pro tip: If you run a company in Silicon Valley, stop wasting your investor money (even if that’s what it’s there for) and hire remote employees. Much more bang for your buck.

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Of course I miss the first day

By on December 11, 2011 in Uncategorized

20111211-005058.jpg

I say I’ll update every day and immediately miss the next day.

But I had a very good reason.

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Getting back into the swing

By on December 9, 2011 in Uncategorized

I have a very long and checkered past with blogging. I remember blogging before the word even existed (we called them journals back back in the late 90′s or early Aught’s).

And back then, what I wrote was a) highly personal and b) written every single day.

Now, I’m not a college kid anymore, so I’m not likely to get highly personal again. I’ll talk about personal stuff every so often (especially when it comes to talking about my son’s Autism and advocating for more early treatment and screening), but my days of pouring my deepest feelings into a public-facing website are probably over.

I still have some of those old blog entries floating around on floppies and zip drives around the house, and I might get around to backfilling some best-of content at some point, though.

Mostly, though, I want to try getting back into the habit of posting daily, even if it’s a small entry like this one.

There’s little better for building your voice and getting comfortable with writing again than to force yourself to put words to a page every day, even when you don’t have anything particularly pressing to say.

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Links

By Any Other Name

By on December 8, 2011 in Business Philosophy

Sign that you’re wasting your time and money: Spending $20k on a goddamn domain name.

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The World’s Most Expensive Job Application

By on December 7, 2011 in Business Philosophy

I had an experience lately that crystalized how I think about business these days. Rather than talk about the experience (maybe some day), let’s talk about how I view running a business.

  1. Why the hell do you need funding?

    I see apps get VC funding and can’t help but wonder: Where the hell is that money going?

    Maybe my experience is skewed, but this stuff just doesn’t cost that much.The whole bill for Montabe is less than $200/month before revenue.

    Admittedly, I’m not paying myself yet. But that’s the point: I can do this myself for now in my spare moments and very early mornings. You can, too. If you’re more the marketing-type with an idea, rather than bothering devs to do work for equity, learn to code yourself and just build the damn thing already. Chances are you’ll have it done before you get somebody to sign on.

    And chasing VC funding is a waste of time, even if you get it.

    Every second this thing isn’t live and up is a second further from finding out if your idea will work. It’s a second further from getting feedback and ideas from actual users.

    It’s a second wasted. And you don’t have time to waste.

  2. If You’re Thinking of an Exit Strategy, You’re Wasting Your Time

    It boggles my mind that people actually go into a project with timeframes for when they’ll get acquired. One place I’ve talked to wanted to get acquired so they could go to work for the buyer.

    Dude, there are waaaay less expensive ways to apply for a job. You’re not building a business; you’re building the world’s most expensive job application.

    More importantly, the brain cycles you’re spending on that would be better spent thinking of the only two things that matter: keeping your existing customers and getting new ones.

    Hell, anything other than those two things is a waste of your time and effort. Because those two things are incredibly difficult and should demand your undivided attention.

  3. If You Sold, You Failed.

    You’re going to pour yourself into this business just to turn around and sell it so you can be employee No. 343,245 at Facebook? Dude, that’s gotta suck.

    There are exceptions here, but acquisitions that leave the purchased company or products intact and healthy are few and far between. After all, if what you’re doing was a priority for the company that’s buying you, they’d be doing it already.

    At some point, you’ll get reassigned and your minnow of a company will enviably end up digested.

    And you have to ask yourself: Is the money I’m getting worth killing this thing I’ve worked so hard to build?

  4. This Ain’t No Lifestyle Business

    I’m not building a fucking lifestyle business. And when you call it that, I have to resist the urge to break things.

    I’m building a business, period.

    A sustainable business.

    A business I’d want to work for.

    And I can’t imagine working on anything else.

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Introducing Montabe

By on September 16, 2010 in Business Philosophy

[Not to bury the lede: Montabe is a new photo and gallery management web application I'm building. You can sign up for a beta invite.]

“I’d work on this for free,” I said more than once during my time at The Indianapolis Star while working on AutoFocus, the photo and gallery system that still powers the photos and galleries across the bulk of Star Media sites (it’s made it through two site redesigns and counting).

From my very first day working in media, back at the relatively tiny News & Sentinel in Parkersburg, W.Va., I’ve had a fascination with how we manage photographs. The first day, sitting at the photo wire terminal and watching Associated Press photos fly in from around the world hooked me.

I spent almost all my time in online media building and designing web applications to handle photos and collections of photos. I built systems in PHP and later Ruby. It’s something I love to do and something I like to think I’ve gotten pretty good at. I know a lot of the pitfalls and I know the workflow inside and out.

Now divorced from the media world, I’ve felt that itch to do something with photos again. And I started noticing a definite pain point associated with them in my own family’s life.

We run a website filled with photos of our son, Benjamin. My wife does a fantastic job a) shooting the bulk of the photos (I keep telling her she should investigate doing it semiprofessionally) and b) managing the website. But the open source software that runs it is kinda clunky, kinda slow and not ideal. More importantly: My wife and I aren’t the only ones that take pictures of Benjamin.

My family, her family plus various friends and acquaintances have photos of Ben sitting around on hard drives and camera cards. Getting those photos on the site usually involves getting them to email them to us, then uploading them to the site. The process sucks.

It’s a fairly common pain point anytime you deal with photo projects that involve multiple photographers. We went to a friend’s wedding in the past where they asked attendees to take photos and send them to them. I built a quick website to allow them to upload them, but few people did because it required a manual upload.

I also thought about, given my journalism background, breaking news events that require a call for photos. The ability to quickly deploy and populate a gallery of camera phone input would be really killer. Less journalism-like, what about a silly gallery that just has random camera phone shots of a city’s nightlife?

There are ways to do some of this now. But most of them suck for me, and certainly for the general public. I can deploy an open source software package; they won’t. Flickr pools require all the contributors to be members of Flickr and you can’t skin them in a design of your choosing (without a lot of API hacking).

My vision for the photo and gallery management application I’m building on nights and weekends, montabe, is to ease these sorts of pain points. I want to be able to move Ben’s website to it and then upload photos to it directly from iPhone via MMS or email … and let my family know they can send their photos there as well, without having to require them to sign up for an account. I want to see budget weddings that eschew a traditional photographer be able to easily update a gallery of contributions from the wedding’s attendees (and have the gallery look good, too).

So, long-term, that’s what I’m building montabe to be: A dead simple way to update a photo gallery from multiple sources and input methods (direct upload, MMS, email, maybe twitter hashtag down the road) that’s flexible and theme-able.

It’s not going to have all of this at launch, but I will eventually.

Because this feels like what my professional life has been building toward … and it’s time to start working on it.

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The Wild West of Remnant Advertising

By on February 24, 2010 in Uncategorized

First a little context: The Minneapolis Star-Tribune website earlier this week had an advertisement that included a bit of a social engineering hack related to viruses (according to a Twin Cities blog).

Said post also includes an offhand mention of other newspaper websites owned by Gannett having a similar ad.

As soon as I saw the headline come across my feedreader, I thought, “Goddamn remnant ads.”

I can nearly guarantee no one at The Star Tribune approved, scheduled or even saw the ad before users started complaining. And you might be wondering how that sort of thing could happen.

Web advertising at large newspaper and media websites (at least the ones I’ve worked at), works something like this:

The newspaper website has a lot more ad inventory than its salespeople can sell. Especially in non-local areas such as Nation/World.

Each ad position on a page calls the main ad server (in Gannett’s case, gannett.gcion.com) through javascript and says, “Give me an ad.” Said ad server checks to see if it has any local- or network-scheduled ad. If it does, that ad, which generally has been seen, approved and checked, is sent down to the user.

Failing that, it will pass the request for an ad on to another server to fill the spot, sight-unseen.

And these third-party, or “remnant” (because they get the leftover) ad providers are unscrupulous customers.

You’ve seen these ads. The dancing mortgage people. The teeth-whiteners.

The sketchiest of the sketchy.

And the dirtiest of the dirtiest.

In my time at The Indianapolis Star, we saw remnant ads include large files intended to do nothing but sniff your browser history.

Eighty-percent of the time, when users or staff would complain about page speed, we knew without looking there was a third-party ad to blame.

They’re either bloated with logic to sniff out users’ information or coded so poorly that it just takes forever to load.

As an example, a lot of remnant ad designers think of their little ad box as a separate little webpage: including their own javascript libraries, regardless of whether or not the site they appear on already has those libraries installed. Worse yet, they sometimes will include them in a such a way that they conflict with the libraries on the parent page and wreck the whole thing.

These ads are bad, and they don’t make publishers much money, bringing in a significantly lower CPM than local- or network-sold advertising.

So why do newspaper websites (and large media websites in general) continue to use them and continue to increase ad inventory with no hope of ever selling ads in those spaces?

Because it’s free money.

It’s not much money, granted, but you have zero overhead. Slap an ad position on a page and you get back fractions of a penny every time that ad gets viewed.

No local salesperson is needed or involved. The third-party ad network takes care of sales, scheduling and delivery.

When you lose that local overhead, though, you also loose something more important: control over the ads your users see.

When you have a bad ad, how do you turn it off? You have to call somebody, wait on hold, explain the ad, get them to understand the problem and then turn it off. You can’t turn the ad off, the third-party advertiser has to do that work.

Meanwhile, the whole time you’re on hold and haggling, that damn ad will still be on your site, ruining your good name and permanently driving away readers.

Or you do what The StarTrib did: you turn off all your ads and bleed money by the second and pageview until you get everything resolved with the ad providers.

I will argue (and have argued), that what newspaper and other media websites need, financially, is fewer ad positions, not more. It reduces the reliance on untrustworthy and damaging third-party ads and can help drive up the CPM-per-ad on those locally sold.

Better yet, put pressure on your ad departments: You only get ad positions you have sold. If you don’t have an ad for this spot, it goes away.

Fill the spots, for whatever price you can get, because we aren’t going to let somebody else do it for you anymore.

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FollowIndy: An iTunes for News

By on February 18, 2010 in Uncategorized

I’m still waiting to hear back on FollowIndy‘s status in Round Two of the Knight News Challenge for this year, but I wanted to take a moment to give a clearer picture of where I plan to take it, regardless of Knight funding.

For several years now, I’ve found software inspiration in an odd place: iTunes, the ubiquitous music-management software behind all those iPods and iPhones Apple has sold. Most newspaper intelligentsia focus on the iTunes Store, looking for a way out of the media’s revenue woes.

Meanwhile, I looked at the iTunes application itself and at the way it made a formerly tedious task — finding and organizing your music — fun, useful and good for hours of time-wasting knob-tweaking.

It also has the added benefit of making it easy to unearth favorite music, both old and new, a variety of different ways.

I’ve already built a photo and gallery management system that drew some inspiration from iTunes. With FollowIndy, I ultimately want to take that inspiration to another level and apply it to news in general.

It starts with making sure there’s a good base of content. FollowIndy currently has that, but I want to add more. There are a lot of smaller publications in the Indianapolis metro area that I’m not yet including and even more newsworthy blogs.

If I know about it, I want FollowIndy to have it.

But I will never know everything. And sometimes, Indy-relevant news happens outside of Indy-area news organizations. The recent machinations involving Evan Bayh and earlier Tim Durham bear witness to that.

What I intend to build is any easy way to add content ala carte to FollowIndy. A way that adds the content as a first-class citizen with all the metadata of everything else.

Once we have all that data, the fun can begin.

I want FollowIndy to have playlists of news: user-defined user-sorted playlists, smart playlists and even genius playlists of news that allow users to find, organize and disseminate the news they care about, regardless of source.

And I want to make that fun, useful and good for hours of time-wasting knob-tweaking.

As I mentioned at the start, I want FollowIndy to do this regardless of how the Knight funding turns out. And it will do this regardless of how the Knight funding turns out.

What winning a Knight grant gets me is the ability to choose fast and good from the matrix of good, fast and cheap. Right now, I’m forced to go the route of good and cheap.

And the work begins anew tonight.

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Privacy is your responsiblity

By on February 12, 2010 in Uncategorized

The most-shared link related to Google Buzz today seems to be “Fuck you, Google” in which a blogger tears into Google for … well … I’m really not sure for what.

The auto-follow thing is a tricky calculation on Google’s part and just like its integration with Gmail, is likely to piss some folks off. I’ve helped run a social network in the past, and one of the most perplexing issues users have always had is not wanting other people to see who’s following them, or being able to stop someone from following them in the service.

It never made sense to me.

It’s the internet. It’s inherently not private. If you post something in public, people can look at it. Following just means they can do it slightly more easily.

That said, I kind of get that. Auto-following can seem a bit creepy, but was a calculated gamble to auto-populate a social graph for a new service that Google seems intent on rapidly iterating.

But to blame Google for exposing your Google Reader shared items?

On that, you have no one to blame but yourself. Those shared items have been public all along. For instance, here’s mine. I’ve even written a post about how to find someone’s shared items feed.

Google has always treated shared items in Reader as public by default.

Anybody could have read them all along. And if anyone cared to, they probably did.

You have to make the effort to make it private.

And Buzz didn’t change this.

And Buzz wouldn’t have included them if they were private to begin with.

If you really care about your privacy, at least to the degree that you feel you have this sort of rant in you, it’s ultimately your responsibility to groom and maintain your privacy.

Turn off anything public. If you can’t turn it private (and you can definitely turn off almost all the Buzz privacy concerns at this point), don’t use it.

To be frank, if you care that deeply about your privacy, you shouldn’t be using webmail in the first place. Sending and receiving email through Google webservers is inherently not private … never was and never will be.

To take it further, if you care about your privacy that much, you probably shouldn’t be posting anything on the internet.

Privacy is important, but it’s also important to realize that your privacy is ultimately your responsibility. How much you share with the public on the internet is your choice and under your control.

And you either choose to exert that control or you don’t.

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Baby Gear: BumGenius

By on February 12, 2010 in Daddy Blog

I’ve been a father for nearly 14 months now and wanted to start passing along some tips, tricks and gear that have made life easier for the wife and I when bringing up our son.

A cloth diaper from BumGenius

First on the docket: BumGenius cloth pocket diapers (pictured at right).

Before we had Ben, we talked a lot about doing lots of rather granola-y things: cloth diapers, making our own baby food, etc. Thanks to these diapers, cloth diapers are the one of those thoughts that stuck.

See, we didn’t want cloth diapers to be a hassle involving safety pins, rubber pants and cleaning services. What we wanted was the convenience of disposable, with the cost-savings of cloth.

And boy, are there some cost savings.

We have an initial outlay of around $500 for more than 24 diapers.

Since then, we’ve bought maybe $100 worth of disposables for trips and excursions (since one thing that cloth isn’t good for is lugging dirty ones back home).

On disposables, we would have passed that $600 around Ben’s eighth month (even at Amazon bulk prices).

And the cost savings increase with each kid we have. As long as we take good care of these diapers — wash them correctly, make sure we have the velcro tabs tucked in — the next kid or two can use these same diapers. We might have to replace a few, or want to get a few pink ones for a little girl, but we’re not talking a huge outlay.

In exchange for all of those cost savings, you have to do more laundry: about an extra load every other day. You have to user special detergent (we use Mountain Green) free of dies, perfumes and enzymes, which is much harder to find than you’d think.

Until starting solid foods, you just remove the diaper, remove the liner from the pocket and toss the whole thing in a mesh bag that gets taken down to the laundry room later. After solid foods, you might have to make a stop by the bathroom first to remove any solids he might have left.

The other good things about using cloth:

We’ve had very few diaper rashes, and the ones we have had have been caused by missing a poopie for too long and have been short-lived.

We’ve had zero blowouts and very, very few leaks, unlike they few times we’ve used disposables.

In all, choosing cloth, and specifically BumGenius, turned into one of the best decisions we made as new parents.

I can’t recommend them highly enough.

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