theAdmin.orgGrowing a simple software business

November Goals and Actions

I was wrong about setting so many goals for November. Being booked solid, my time was spread to thin between my goals and my client’s projects.

1. $7,000 in revenue

   Midway through the month, I found the only way I could hit this target was to either add another project to my workload or work 12 hour days. I decided to lower my target to $5,000, which I reached with a strong push at the end of the month.

2. Planning completed on a free web resource

   I completed the planning but discovered that the offer wasn’t that good so I scrapped the idea for now.

3. Finish all portfolio tasks

   Completed two more but couldn’t find the time to finish up the rest of them.

4. Meet 5 new people

   I was introduced and met 5 new people, hitting my goal by midmonth.

5. Get 5 new newsletter subscriptions

   My newsletter subscriptions have slacked off the past couple of months so I missed this goal by 3 people. I’m going evaluate the effectiveness of newsletters soon.

6. Speed read at 750 words per minute with 70% comprehension

   Sadly, I couldn’t find any time to commit to this goal.

December Goals

With a lot of holidays and time off in December, I am going to use this time to finish up my current commitments and start some planning for 2008. The goals I selected for December are:

1. $4,000 in revenue - Finishing up my current projects should generate close to this amount.
2. Complete planning on my redesign - I am planning a major redesign for my business website the beginning of 2008. Yes that is why I was asking for web designers earlier.
3. Meet 5 new people - I think meeting 5 people has been a good goal that I can accomplish each month.

Some lessons I learned from this month:

• Track your commitments: Committing to too many things at once will cause you to fail at all of them. It is better to move slowly than to burnout.
• Do what you love to do: If you are going to spend the rest of your life doing something, make sure you love it. Otherwise you are doing yourself and everyone around you a disservice.

Eric

If you spend a lot of your time looking up all the different methods and functions from your programming language or framework, try gotAPI. gotAPI consolidates a lot of the API documentation scattered across the web and provides a simple live search for it.

Best of all, I can use the same website to lookup Ruby on Rails, Prototype, CakePHP, PHP, and CSS.

Eric

I really enjoy using Mephisto but it is missing some of the features that other blogging applications have. One is the ability to send a trackback ping to another blog post. So I built my own library to handle it.

Download trackback.rb

require 'net/http'
require 'uri'

# Simple trackback class to send a trackback to another weblog
# This is used via the console
#
# Example:
# >> t = Trackback.new("theadmin.org", 227)
# >> t.send('http://trackback.example/url.php?1234')
#
class Trackback

  @data = { }

  def initialize(host, article_id)
    site = Site.find_by_host(host)
    article = site.articles.find(article_id)

    if article.nil?
      raise "Could not find article"
    end

    if article.published_at.nil?
      raise "Article not published"
    end

    @data =  {
      :title => article.title,
      :excerpt => article.body_html,
      :url => "http://" + get_full_url(site, article),
      :blog_name => site.title
    }
  end

  def send(trackback_url)
    u = URI.parse trackback_url
    res = Net::HTTP.start(u.host, u.port) do |http|
      http.post(u.request_uri, url_encode(@data), { 'Content-Type' => 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8' })
    end
    RAILS_DEFAULT_LOGGER.info "TRACKBACK: #{trackback_url} returned a response of #{res.code} (#{res.body})"
    return res
  end

  private

  def url_encode(data)
    return data.map {|k,v| "#{k}=#{v}"}.join('&')
  end

  def get_full_url(site, article)
    article_peramlink = article.hash_for_permalink
    url = site.host + '/' + site.permalink_style
    ['permalink', 'year', 'month', 'day'].each do |value|
      url.gsub!(/:#{value}/,article_peramlink[value.to_sym].to_s)
    end
    return url
  end

end

To install this just save the above code to a file in your Mephisto’s lib/ directory. Now you can send a trackback to a website using the Rails console:

$ script/console production
>> t = Trackback.new("theadmin.org", 227)
>> t.send("http://acheron/blog1/wp-trackback.php?p=1")
=> #<Net::HTTPOK 200 OK readbody=true>

I haven’t had a lot of time to work on it, so I hope I can get some help improving it. Some ideas I have to improve it:

• Turn into a Mephisto plugin
• Unit tests
• Scan all urls in the Article, looking for trackback urls.
• Support other types of trackbacks

Download trackback.rb

Eric

After reading Shane’s post about setting goals I decided I needed to sit down and plan out my next year. 2007 has been a great year for me both personally and professional. I see 2008 as a year of growing and refining what I started in 2007.

2007 Highlights

To see where I am going, I need to know where I’ve been. Some of the major highlights of 2007 have been:

1. Got married
2. Started my own business to do custom software development, Little Stream Software
3. Moved my family up to Oregon
4. Flew across an ocean (Kauai rocks)
5. Trained myself in JavaScript and PHP
6. Meet at least 84 new people

2008 Goals

1. Grow my business to make $100,000 in revenue in 2008
2. Finish my personal and business emergency savings
3. Get 3 paid Ruby on Rails projects
4. Grow my RSS and newsletter subscribers to 500 people
5. Redesign my core websites
6. Participate on 10 Open Source projects
7. Incorporate my business
8. Write a short ebook ( 30 to 100 pages)
9. Contribute a patch to Ruby on Rails

Scare yourself goal

My first goal of growing my business to make $100,000 in revenue is my “scare yourself” goal. Compared to what I have made, $100,000 is such a large number it terrifies me. Even if every month I made as much as best month, I would still come up short. I see three solutions to fill this gap:

1. Charge more
2. Work more
3. Get creative

Option #1 will not work. I am already charging were I should be at, upping my rate will start to price me out of my bread and butter projects.

Option #2 is also a no go. I started my business to have more time with my family, not to have less time.

So that leaves Option #3, get creative. I will be thinking though the details of this option but think of it now as using leverage to complete more work.

Eric

October brought my business some great events and some disappointments.

October Daily Actions

Marketing ideas are usually really simple but taking action on those ideas are extremely hard. Last month I said I was going to focus on closing the sales that I had pending. I closed some but I had a hard time working on the daily actions I set for myself. The three actions I was supposed to do were:

• Follow up with 1 proposal a day
• Get a “No” every day
• Have one new newsletter subscriber per week

By the end of the month, I found I never really did any of them. The excuse I have is that I was busy working on billable work. This is a really good excuse, but the lack of action will end up hurting me in coming months as my marketing has lulled next to nothing.

October Monthly Goal

On a better note, my October goal was to bring in $7,000 in revenue. This goal was to make me stretch and was basically double the amount of work I had confirmed.

Guess what? ….. I reached it

Near the end of the month about 66% of the goal was complete and I was pushing really hard to hit 100%. Then I had a project make some changes that resulted in a ton of work for me to do before the end of the month. This push let me finish my goal, in fact I even beat it by an extra 10%.

It is really surprising what you can do if you put your head to it.

November Goals and Actions

For November I decided to try something new with my goals and actions. Instead of having 10 marketing actions and one goal, I split my goals and actions into 3 sections, each with their own daily actions and rewards.

Business Section

I had a killer month last month, far exceeding my revenue goal. From the projects I currently have, I think I can have another killer month. I’ve also been wanting to add something to my website that I can give away to visitors, so I will be starting to work on that resource this month.

Goals

1. $7,000 in revenue
2. Planning completed on a free web resource
3. Finish all portfolio tasks

Marketing Section

Over the past few months, my marketing has slowed down a lot. My biggest problem is that I am not meeting enough new people. So my November Marketing goals are focusing on meeting new people.

Goals

1. Meet 5 new people
2. Get 5 new newsletter subscriptions

Personal Development Section

This section is a bit of an experiment. Since the business is part of my life, it should somehow improve the skills I have. Recently, due to long work hours and just an addiction to reading, I have stockpiled a huge amount of blog posts and books to read. I am already a fast reader, but if I could double my reading speed I would be able to start to catch up and pick up a lot of good information.

Goals

1. Speed read at 750 words per minute with 70% comprehension

Some lessons I learned from this month:

• Let your goals help push you to success: I was afraid to set such a high goal in October but I am now glad I did. If it was lower, I wouldn’t have driven myself as hard to reach it. Your goals should be far enough out of your grasp, that you need to strain to reach them.
• Track what you want to improve: The last two weeks of October, I started to track how much revenue I made every day. This let me see that I was making progress to my goal and helped motivate me to put in that extra hour of billable work each day.
• Reward yourself: As you accomplish major tasks, take the time to reward yourself. This can be as simple as an hour playing a game, or are large having a shopping spree at your favorite book store. Rewarding the little successes really make running your business fun.

Eric