theAdmin.orgGrowing a simple software business

January has gone, marking my 7th month of running my freelance software business. It’s now time to take some time to review how I did with my goals and to set some new ones for February.

January Goals and Actions

After several months of “head-down” work, I took January off to scale up my marketing and get back into Ruby on Rails. I committed to 6 goals in January, but I didn’t reach all of them. Part of setting goals is failing and being happy with the growth you make.

1. Find an accountant - After procrastinating for months I got out and found a good accountant. She works from home and has a great sense of humor, just the type of person I need to help me run my business.

2. Complete 10 “Back to Ruby on Rails” tasks - I pressed hard but I just didn’t have enough time to complete 10 of the tasks on my list. I ended up finishing 9 of the 10, including reading two Ruby on Rails books (AWDWRv2 and Ajax on Rails). It’s amazing how much an active community can change in a few months and Rails is no exception.

3. 40 new RSS Subscribers - In January, I wanted to increase my readership by 40 subscribers and as of January 31st I had 46 new subscribers. I have to say that counting subscribers is really hard, it changes from day to day. I ranged from -4 subscribers all the way up to 57. Thank you to everyone who has subscribed, your support means a lot to me.

4. Meet 10 new people - In my best months I was meeting 10 people, so I figured it would be easy to meet 10 in January. Turns out I was right. Between my blog, my network, and Open Sourcing some new programs I was able to meet 16 new people in January.

5. Open Source 2 projects - I was able to release two plugins for Redmine. I think I might have some time to even put out a second update of them in February.

6. Write a guest blog post - Sadly, I didn’t have any time to complete this goal in January. I have a few offers I am going to follow up on, but I had a hard time do extra writing this past month.

February Goals

Now my favorite part of the reviews, deciding what I will reach for this upcoming month.

February is going to be an adventure for me. I have a few new exciting projects coming up but I want to keep my goals focused on marketing and bringing in new business.

1. Logo Designed - Part of my 2008 website redesign includes a new logo for my business. Adding a logo will help me create a business brand, instead of just some text.

2. 100 new RSS subscriptions - I reached January’s subscription goal easily so I am taking on a larger challenge. To get 100 new RSS subscribers I’ll have to really step up my online marketing, but it will bring me that much closer to my 2008 goal.

3. Meet 15 new people - As my network is expanding, I’m starting to meet more and more people. I’ve been able to consistently meet 10 new people a month but I have a few secrets I have planned where I can easily meet a lot of new people.

4. Release a large Redmine plugin - Open Sourcing my code has really helped me refine my process for delivering software. My Redmine plugins have also created a good amount of traffic to this blog, so I want to keep this up by releasing a larger Redmine plugin. I’ll have more details about it when it is ready but it will help to make Redmine the best project management tool for freelancers.

Some lessons I learned from this month:

• Don’t waste energy dreading work when you can just do it: I procrastinated finding an accountant for over 3 months because I was afraid of all the time it would take. Finally when I had no choice but to find one, it took less than 6 hours to finish. I spent more time dreading the work than actually doing it.

• Share your knowledge: I’ve gotten several projects just by offering my knowledge to someone. Something as small as a few emails helping someone understand an idea has materialized into a significant project.

I would like to close out this review with an open invitation. If you are running your own business or thinking about running your own business and want to be held accountable for you goals, send me an email. Joshua did it and now his February goals are public and I’ll make sure he is accountable for them.

Eric

I’ve been tagged by Shane, he’s looking for 7 of my personality quirks. Here’s what I could come up with, when my wife gets home she’ll get out her list. I think she just upgraded to a three ring binder.

1. I have to have something in my hands at all times

Doesn’t matter what I’m doing, I always have to have something in my hands to fidget with. When I’m on the phone it’s usually a pen or a set of Magnetix. If I’m out walking it’s usually my keys or my jacket pockets.

2. I hate having my food touch

I’m getting better with this but I cannot eat food that is touching. Up until about a year ago, when someone cooked spaghetti I would require them to separate the pasta from the sauce. This hit a wall when I discovered that I love Chinese food.

3. Swim? You mean like what the fishes do?

Like WAH(web)Mommy I cannot swim. Even being born in San Luis Obispo didn’t help. Of course, being 6 foot tall I can bounce my way around a pool, while entertaining onlookers.

4. I rock my chairs to death

Whenever I am sitting, I tend to rock back and forth. Because of this I’ve gone through about four office chairs in the past two years. My last chair actually broke the internal tension spring, you know the one that is half inch steel and weighs 3 pounds. Thankfully I get Staple’s one year no questions asked warranty.

5. I have three hands; right, left, and mouth

Whenever my hands are full (see #1) and I still have something I need it hold, it goes into my mouth. Pens, documents, books, iPods… nothing is safe.

6. I have the attention span of a butterfly

In the time it took me to write up this post I’ve:

• sorted some books
• checked my mail
• answered a phone call
• opened a window
• built a new desk toy
• weighed my water cup
• checked on my garden
• read a blog
• carried on an IM conversation
• checked my mail again

What was I writing about again? Oh yea, attention. Amazingly the only thing I can really focus on is coding, I just get into a flow and magically everything goes away.

7. I can’t waste electricity

Call me green or eco-friendly or whatever but I hate seeing electricity wasted. If a light or TV is left on, even for minute I shut it off. I unplug my cell phone charger when it’s not in use. I refuse to use non-rechargeable batteries

The ironic thing is I keep my computers on all the time. I guess I see them as an essential appliance, like a refrigerator. Refrigerator keeps food cold, computer keeps bits hot.

Whats the funniest personality quirk you have?

Eric

In a previous post, I setup custom data with Redmine to track specific criteria with my development projects. Since then I have written a plugin to make tracking scores easier. Like my other plugin, I’m releasing this under the GNU GPL v2.

Alpha Release

Unlike my other plugin, this one will be undergoing some major changes soon so it should not be used on a production system. I’m releasing it early to get some feedback for the next release, which should be production ready. If you could help send some code or suggestions, please visit my bug tracker.

Purpose

This plugin will let a user score a project on different criteria. I use it to score my consulting projects and pick the ones that are the best fix for my business.

Features

• Projects can be scored based on user defined values
• Score groups can be setup to rank a project in different areas (e.g. Profitability, Fun)
• Total score for a project is calculated

Install

1. Download the archive file and extract it to your vendor/plugins folder. You can also download directly from my Subversion server using Rails’s plungin script

    script/plugin install svn://dev.littlestreamsoftware.com/redmine_project_scores_plugin/tags/release-0.0.1
   

   Or the very latest copy:

    script/plugin install svn://dev.littlestreamsoftware.com/redmine_project_scores_plugin/trunk
   

2. Follow the Redmine plugin installation steps.

3. Setup the databases using the migrations.

    rake db:migrate_plugins
   

4. Login to your Redmine install as an Administrator

5. Enable the “Score Module” permissions for your Roles
6. Add the “Score module” to the enabled modules for your project
7. The link to the plugin should appear on that project’s navigation

The database setup includes some default data, feel free to change it or add your own using the Rails console.

Help

If you need help you can leave a comment here or enter an issue directly into my bug tracker.

For a couple of months now, I’ve been considering writing monthly goals for myself, but never quite seemed to get around to it. So when Eric offered me the opportunity to write a guest post for theAdmin.org and suggested starting my own progress reports I jumped at the chance.

So here it is, my first Monthly Progress Review. In the future, I plan to post a review on my own blog at the beginning of each month. Since I think that marketing is my weak point, that’s where I’ve chosen to focus my goals for now.

January Goals and Actions

1. Add 40 more RSS subscribers to my blog

Despite what it looks like, this wasn’t stolen from Eric. Towards the end of the month it looked like I wasn’t going to be able to meet this goal, since I’d been stuck at 25 new subscribers, but just in the last couple of days there has been a jump of 17 more subscribers.

Goal accomplished, plus some.

2. Write 4 guest posts

This month I wrote the following guest posts…

1. Avoid Freelance Horror - 6 Lessons from Stephen King on Freelance Folder
2. Focus and Flow for the Insanely Interested on Jarkko Laine’s blog Insanely Interested in Everything
3. 3 Ways to Become More Productive by Drawing on Your Inner Artist on Productivity in Context
4. And of course, this post itself.

Goal accomplished.

3. Create an AdWords campaign for one of my niches

I accomplished this goal fairly early on in the month. Haven’t had great results from it yet, but I’m looking to improve that.

February Goals

1. Add 60 more RSS subscribers to my blog

Since I met my goal for January, its time to up the ante a bit, and I think 60 new subscribers will be enough to be challenging without making me insane about it either. Want to help me out? Go ahead and subscribe!

2. Write 4 more guest posts

I have been very happy with the success of my guest posts so far, but I also want to maintain a high quality of posts on my own blog, and at this point, I think that 4 guest posts per month is a good balance.

3. Obtain at least 2 guest posts from other bloggers

Related to the goal above, I think it would be good to feature a couple of guest posts on my blog, both to get more of others’ perspectives, as well as to give me the opportunity to focus on some very high quality posts. If you’re interested in writing for my blog, contact me.

4. Optimize my AdWords campaign

While I think my keywords are good, I need to rewrite the ads and landing page to increase clickthrough and conversion rates.

5. Release a free WordPress theme

This will be my first attempt to create a theme for a broad audience, so I will also be asking for feedback on the theme before it is released.

6. Outline an ebook and write one chapter of it

I’ve had an idea in the back of my mind for a short (25 page) ebook for a while now. This month I intend to take the time to draw up a formal outline and write at least one chapter of the content.

Lesson learned

If you are posting quality content on your own blog and leaving quality comments on other people’s blogs, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll ask you for a guest post before you ask them.

Thanks to Eric for letting me guest-post!

Joshua Clanton is a freelance web designer who blogs about design, productivity, and creativity. If you liked this post, you might also like 18 Productivity Haikus - Get Things Done and Achieve Inner Peace through the Power of Poetry.

Was able to start to catch up on some developer links I had bookmarked this week:

• No True “mod_ruby” Is Damaging Ruby’s Viability On The Web - Peter Cooper wants to know why there isn’t there a good mod_ruby for Apache.
• Merb 0.5.0 is out - Hot on the tails of my last set of links, Merb has just released their latest version. It sounds like their next point release will be separated into the core and extras.
• loupe.js - Cool JavaScript library to “zoom” over parts of an image. It can also display part of another image under the magnifying glass (X-ray).
• Reinventing the Clipboard - Coding Horror talks about the limitation of the Windows clipboard to only hold one thing at a time. Linux and Emacs have had multiple clipboards for some time now, it’s amazing Microsoft hasn’t added this feature.
• 2007: The Ruby on Rails Year in Review - Very nice review of the progress Ruby on Rails made in 2007. Let’s make 2008 even better.