The Blog of Codora

Time Freedom

Posted by Duff OMelia Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:03:00 GMT

I met a dad in the pediatric intensive care unit whose child had been in the neonatal area of the hospital for 3 months. I asked him how things went with work and how he and his wife were able to spend so much time at the hospital. He replied that he’s a business owner and that his work wasn’t too affected by the long hospital stay.

Creating assets that provide value to people is important. Producing more than we consume is important. Figuring out how to live in a way such that your income is not solely based on the time you spend working is important.

Posted in Entrepreneurship | no comments

Ready for real customers?

Posted by Duff OMelia Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

You’re creating a website that you’d like to release to the general public. One of the questions that needs answering is, which features do you need to make it to that first release?

I’ve been enjoying creating sites that I personally use like Spreedly and No Kahuna. When I’m an actual user of the site I’m making, it makes the decision about what to implement a bit easier.

The goal is to get to market and have the site being used by real customers as quickly as possible. For No Kahuna, that happened in 2 days. Spreedly took many weeks of effort before a real customer started using it. To release to a real customer, we’re only trying to make something that’s slightly better than what’s out there. We’re only trying to provide some value to the customer, not all of the value we’re ever going to provide. Does the site in its current state improve the lives of our customers?

When you’re your own customer, this becomes fun because you’re only working on the features that you’re quite sure would improve your life. If you’re at all unsure whether a feature provides value, defer it. Only do the stuff you’re confident about. This is fine because you’ll be released soon, and then customers will start giving you real feedback which is much more valuable than your guesses about what’s important.

Once you’re released, then you need to be judicious about which features to implement and be willing to say no to many requests from customers. In Getting Real, the 37 Signals guys said this:

And one more thing: it’s not just about the sheer number of requests (we don’t recommend adding something just because X# of people requested it), it’s about customers planting a seed in your mind. If they keep reminding you of something, it forces you to think about it. Maybe it is a good idea. Maybe it isn’t. But at least it’s important enough to consider if so many people keep asking for it.

Posted in Entrepreneurship | no comments

No Kahuna

Posted by Duff OMelia Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:34:00 GMT

My friend Alex and I spent 2 full days last week creating No Kahuna. It was an intense and quite enjoyable 48 hour burst of design and development. We can’t wait to see what the world thinks of it.

Of course, we used Spreedly to handle our subscriptions and payments. Without Spreedly or something like it, going live with a subscription-based web site would be pretty difficult if not impossible.

I hope you can give it a try.

Posted in Entrepreneurship | no comments

Nathaniel Talbott's first Spreedly interview

Posted by Duff OMelia Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:22:00 GMT

Some exciting things have been happening in Spreedly land. More invites have been sent and Nathaniel’s been interviewed.

Posted in Press | no comments

The Art of Innovation

Posted by Duff OMelia Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:31:00 GMT

I found this excellent talk by Guy Kawasaki to be quite motivational:

Posted in Entrepreneurship | 1 comment

Spreedly

Posted by Duff OMelia Sat, 26 Jan 2008 11:52:00 GMT

I’ve spent the last few months working on Spreedly with 3 friends. It’s been a wonderful experience working together to create a business.

Posted in Entrepreneurship | 1 comment

Less time, more done?

Posted by Duff OMelia Fri, 07 Sep 2007 15:05:00 GMT

For the past year and a half or so, I decided to spend less time consulting and more time creating businesses. For a long time I knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I wasn’t really spending any time doing it. It took me a few years actually to make the realization that if you want something to happen, you need to spend some time working toward the goal in a disciplined way.

So I had decided to spend about 30 hours consulting per week rather than the typical 40. I would spend the other 10 hours creating businesses. Now that I’ve been doing this for awhile, I’ve come to some conclusions.

It’s amazing what can be accomplished in about 10 hours per week. I’ve been quite surprised about it. Here’s what I mean. Let’s say I have a project that I think will take about a month to complete if I were working on it full time. At the normal 40 hours per week that would work out to be about 160 hours for this project. If I only worked on it for 10 hours per week, I would have thought that it would take me 16 weeks to complete the project.

It turns that it’s been taking me much less time than I anticipated. I would have thought that because I was working 1/4 of the time, I would only accomplish 1/4 of the work. Instead, it seems as though I’m accomplishing much more than 1/4 of the work in that time. How is that possible? Why is it that I feel so productive for those 10 hours?

I think it’s because there’s a whole bunch of time during the week that I’m not working the project. By the time I’m ready to do some actual work on it, I’ve spent a ton of time mulling over things and making determinations about what the next steps should be. These determinations are often not even conscious thoughts. But by the time I’m ready to pick up that project again, I feel like I’m ready to code like the wind.

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Personal Development | no comments

Soapadone

Posted by Duff OMelia Fri, 08 Jun 2007 17:07:00 GMT

One of the businesses I’ve spent a good amount of time on is Soapadoo. A few days ago, the server that Soapadoo was hosted on had some issues in that suddenly some directories were missing. In working with the hosting provider, we weren’t able to determine the cause. It’s strange because the site had been running for about a year and nothing like this issue had ever happened before.

It would probably take me about a day to recover from the server issue and institute an improved backup system taking into account the lessons learned in the incident. As I started on that work, I started to think about whether the work was worth it.

I’ve decided not to bring Soapadoo back. Some of the reasons include:

Soapadoo was making about $10-$30 per month in advertising revenue. This revenue doesn’t cover the hosting cost of the site.
The site is clearly not viral or remarkable since the traffic wasn’t steadily increasing.
I don’t have any ideas as to how to make Soapadoo more remarkable.
I’ve learned a ton of lessons about running an advertising based business. I think I’ve learned all the lessons I’m going to learn about it for now.
I’ve spent very little time on Soapadoo over the past few months because I’ve been working on other businesses.

It’s always a tough question about whether to persevere or change gears to work on something different. At this point, the other business opportunities I’m pursuing seem to have much more potential than Soapadoo.

For those Soapadoo users who would like a copy of their reviews, just send me an email about it and I can get you a copy in a number of different formats.

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The Geek Blog of Codora

Posted by Duff OMelia Fri, 11 May 2007 15:32:00 GMT

I thought I’d mention that I recently created a technical blog called The Geek Blog of Codora. It’s a place for me to share any geeky/technical lessons learned.

Posted in Other Stuff | no comments