Adam McFarland

I’m in the middle of working on a major revamp for SportsLizard.  As of a few months ago this wasn’t in our plans, but the major failures of new sites by industry incumbents Beckett and Tuff Stuff, combined with the urging of a few SportsLizard “fans”, inspired us to reconsider the opportunity at hand to leverage the existing SL community to expand our presence and really take on the big boys.  I can honestly say I’ve never been more excited about a business opportunity.  It should only take me a few weeks to complete the programming, the marketing will all be free viral stuff, and the site maintenance will continue to be almost nothing (a few hours a week).  Needless to say, the potential benefits are huge while the downside is almost non existent.

I decided to take a wholly fresh approach to the design and programming.  I wanted to take the extra time to learn and implement new CSS and design skills, and also to efficiently organize all of the code.  Aside from a relatively tiny site like Music Alerts, this will be the best overall job I’ve done with the entire site development process.

In doing so, I got to extensively look over a lot of the PHP code I wrote in April 2007 when the price guide portion of the site was launched.  It really is truly amazing what a year and a half will do to your skills.  Every file I open I think to myself “why did I do it this way?”.  While adding features, I’ve proceeded to write cleaner, more organized code.  Many pages have gone from 1,000 lines of code down to a few hundred while increasing functionality.   At some point in the last year or so, there was a shift in my development skills from simply being able to do almost anything, to being able to do almost anything in the most efficient way.  When I say most efficient, I mean less lines of code and more organization, while factoring in user interface, SEO, database design, and scalability issues.

If you constantly attack learning with a passion and are never satisfied with where you’re at, you’ll be stunned at your growth.  Just like we micro innovate as a company, you can improve your skills dramatically by getting a little bit better each and every day.  In our “want it now” society that’s not really a sexy proposition, but it works.

When SL rolls out in a few weeks it’ll be the first complete example of a site I developed at this level of programming.  And while this could bring in some great supplemental income for us, the true benefit of these skills will come in 2009 when Mike and I tear apart the shopping cart platform we built for Detailed Image and Tastefully Driven and rebuild it from scratch.  It’s good now, but we want better code, better organization, better UI (including useful AJAX), and a better back end.

The benefits of such a platform for our company will be huge.  It’s not just about increased sales or better shipping efficiency.  It sets the system up to be completely scalable.  The shipping system will be so easy to understand that any warehouse employee can fulfill orders successfully.  The inventory system will be so well organized that our first warehouse manager will be able to jump right in and manage our 30+ vendors.  The programming will be so well organized and documented, that any good programmer will be able to understand the structure immediately.  So by 2010 when we need two or three dedicated programmers, we can hand them this beautifully developed cart that they can dive right into and grow and expand.  If one programming issue impacts both sites, they will only need to change the code once to deploy it onto both sites.

All of this leads me to the (somewhat long-winded) point of this post:  if you really want to innovate on the web, if you really want to bootstrap an online company, you need to learn how to program.  Pick up an introductory PHP/MySQL book.  Learn HTML and CSS.  Get a solid understanding of Javascript, XML, and eventually AJAX.  Learn the basics of running a server.

This didn’t happen to me overnight.  Most of it - especially the server stuff - happened because of need and not because of desire.  But every single bit of it was worth it and I’m glad I learned it.  Because it gives me power.   Any website that I can dream up, I can create with $10 for the domain plus my time and the space on our server.  How cool is that?  I don’t need to search for a programmer.  I don’t need to try to convey my ideas to someone else and have things get lost in translation.  I can just do it and see the vision unfold.   Every idea I’ve had that I really wanted to do - SportsLizard, iPrioritize, Music-Alerts - I’ve done.  How many people can say that?

And even if you eventually end up passing on your programming to employees as we plan to do, it’s still a huge business advantage.  You can communicate better with your programmers and other managers because you truly know how things work, what can and cannot be programmed, and the difficulty involved in getting a feature programmed and deployed.  Understanding your technology inside and out helps you with your marketing efforts, and it helps you with your customer service.

When it comes to web business, programming skills really do equal power.  So young entrepreneur, instead of writing long winded business plans or reading more generic business books, I suggest forking over $100 on programming books and some web hosting.   Trust me, it will be one investment you won’t regret.

It seems to be a pretty popular assumption that running a business will tear your family apart.  The two compete for time with each other, your family always getting jealous of your commitment to your company, and you becoming bitter that your family doesn’t understand and support you.  We’ve all heard the argument before.  In many cases, with many business owners, this is very true.

But let me present a different possible perspective to you.  Contemplate the example of my partners and I for a second:

• We spend a lot of time together almost every single day
• We live off of the same income, finding a way to meet everyone’s needs even when times are tough and resources are low
• We routinely encounter difficult and stressful problems and need to solve them as a team
• We often disagree on important matters, but always find a conclusion that suits everyone
• When someone fails at something and is having a bad day/week, we pick each other up
• When someone does something great, we make sure to give them praise for their hard work
• Despite our stressful surroundings, we always make time (at least once a month) to get away as a group and celebrate our hard work and accomplishments, and the joy of getting to do it with great people

Doesn’t that sound a lot like a successful family to you?  It does to me.  In fact, it sounds a lot like an ideal family.

With the right mentality and effort from everyone involved, a business partnership can be an extremely gratifying experience that can teach you the tools necessary to further develop the other relationships in your life.  Sure, if you’re a dictator at the office you’ll probably be a dictator at home and my point is moot.  Or if you truly care about your business more than your family you probably won’t care to apply lessons learned from one to the other.  But if you constantly are other-centric and thinking of the ideas, needs, and perspective of those around you at work, I think it will most definitely translate positively to your life at home.

Obviously I can only speak to my own perspective, but I’ve found that over the last two years of our business partnership I’ve been able to have stronger relationships with my friends and family outside of work.  Part of that is probably due to normal maturation that people go through at this age, but I also feel strongly that a large part of it has come from an overall change in attitude because of the ups and downs I’ve been through with my business family.

Just some food for thought.

This Summer I’ve read five books that I have intended to review on this blog.  Other than writing the review for bounce! I’ve managed to neglect the rest.  Call it laziness…or better yet call it prioritizing, since book reviews do take some time and lately my time is better spent growing our business.  Regardless of the reason, the other four books have been sitting on my desk screaming “review me” for at least the past month.  I’ve come to the conclusion that if I haven’t done it already I’m probably not going to.  But I figured I owed it to the authors and publishers to do a quick mini-review of each.

I thought all four were very intriguing in their own right.  Each is a completely different flavor, but you can’t go wrong picking up and reading any of these books.  So if you need a good book to read this Fall, I suggest any of the four below.  You probably just don’t want to pick up and read all four at once

The Accidental Entrepreneur - by Susan Urquhart-Brown

What it is: written by a business owner and business coach, this book is a short, readable guide that covers the entire spectrum of knowledge needed to start a business.  Questions to ask yourself before you start a business, traits of successful entrepreneurs, how to structure your business, marketing, motivation, and more are all covered with very solid information.  The short chapters make it a very quick read relative to the amount of information in it.

Interesting thing I learned: The one page business plan, page 59.  I’ve long been a fan of ultra-short business plans (unless of course you’re raising money).  The author recommends five components:  vision, mission, objectives, strategies, and action plans.  I will definitely be using this model in the future.

Who should read it: anyone thinking about going into business, or anyone who has just started a business.  I think I may start recommending this book over the now slightly outdated big blue book as a go-to guide for everything for new business owners.

Who should skip it: anyone who has been running a business for a while.  If you’ve been at it a few years like I have, you’ve already tackled most of the important things covered in this book.

Finding the Sweet Spot - by Dave Pollard

What it is: a guide to finding meaningful work where “your gift, your passion, and your meaning” intersect.  The book takes you through a six step process:  identifying your gift, passion and purpose, finding the right partners, researching unmet needs, imagining and innovating solutions, continuously improving, and acting responsibly on principle.

Interesting thing I learned: I find the companies profiled in the book - dubbed “natural enterprises” by the author to be especially fascinating.  Mostly because we sort of fit the bill without realizing it.  These companies aren’t measured in terms of short term revenue growth and ROI (as almost any company with investors is), rather they create their own form of measurement.  It’s nice to see other companies out there like this.  Revenue is surely important to us, but so is creating a flexible work environment, providing stable jobs, giving back to the community, etc.

Who should read it: anyone struggling to figure out what they want to do as a career.

Who should skip it: anyone who loves what they do and isn’t looking to change.

Prepare for the Worst, Plan for the Best - by Donna Childs

What it is: a book about disaster planning for small businesses.  I have never seen a book (or really even read an article) on the topic, so this book piqued my interest as soon as I heard about it.  The book covers IT strategy, how to handle natural disasters, how to protect workers and their families, and the best way to ensure your insurance policies minimize damage.

Interesting thing I learned: the shear volume of information on IT data disaster planning, which is clearly the most potentially devastating to us and most likely to strike us at any moment.  I think we do a good job, but the book has over 30 pages about human error, equipment failure, third party failure, environmental hazards, fire and other disasters, terrorism and sabotage, and more, all with in depth advice on what to do and how to do it.  I now have it on my to-do list to revisit all of our data security and backup plans.

Who should read it: anyone who owns a business or is responsible for disaster planning.

Who should skip it: anyone who doesn’t own a business or isn’t responsible for disaster planning.

The Age Curve - by Kenneth Gronbach

What it is: “Why generation size matters to marketers”.  The book breaks down five age demographics and goes in depth on how businesses are impacted by the size and buying patterns of each.

Interesting thing I learned: Gen Xers have been unfairly branded as unresponsive consumers and “slackers” in relation to their parents, but in reality there are simply just fewer Gen Xers than Baby Boomers by 11%.  That difference is what accounts for the significant difference in spending.

Who should read it: anyone interested in business and the future of business, especially if you are developing a product or service targeted at a specific age demographic.

Who should skip it: business owners pressed for time who only want to read books that directly impact them.

I’ve had a subscription to Men’s Health Magazine dating back to 1999, my junior year in high school.  Throughout college and into my early professional years I found the magazine and books they produced to be an invaluable resource on health and fitness.  However, maybe it’s because I’ve had a subscription for so long, or maybe it’s because they repeat the same stuff over and over, or maybe it’s because they spend more time on introductory business “advice” and basic sex “tips” to attract awkward teenagers at the news stand, but I’ve become increasingly disinterested over the past year or two.  So much so that when an issue arrives I just flip through, clip a few recipies or interesting exercises out, and then trash it.

A few months back I got a renewal notice in the mail.  In my head I decided that I was not going to renew.  Their website now has everything anyway.  I might as well just subscribe to some feeds and newsletters and save myself the money.  When I opened the bill it said that I had set up auto-renewal last year (damn) and that my subscription had been renewed.  Oh well I thought.  I still get some interesting stuff out of it and it only costs like $2/month.

Then last week I got the following letter in the mail:

Here’s a tip Chris:  don’t chastise your customers.  “We’re puzzled”.  Let me help you out.  I never sent anything back, you auto-renewed for me (which I had signed up for), yet somehow messed up charging my card.  Unreal.  I couldn’t believe I read that from a seemingly professional magazine like MH.  Why don’t you do a section in next month’s issue about poor customer retention policies.  I give you permission to use the image above from your own letter as the primary example.

I also love that at the very bottom of their nastygram they write that half apology, almost as if to say sorry for their wise-ass tone.  P.S.  This bill reflects your account balance through 8/29/08.  If you’ve sent payment, thank you. Our letters must have crossed.  How about STARTING your letter with something along those lines.  Everyone who receives one of these letters knows that they’re getting it because they haven’t paid for one reason or another.  The sarcastic tone certainly doesn’t make people want to give you money.

I double checked and my card has not been charged.  So yesterday I cruised over to Men’s Fitness’ website and subscribed to all of their RSS feeds.  Problem solved.  Over the past few years they’ve arguably become a better magazine anyway.  Consider me no longer a customer Men’s Health.

Ever since I wrote the post a few weeks back about our internal micro blogging system (see Using WordPress to Make a Secure Twitter for Business) I’ve been bothered by the fact that it isn’t really as secure as it should be.  Following the steps I provided, there is still one unprotected RSS feed that - given the URL of your blog - almost anyone can find.  My suggestion when I wrote that post was simply not to give away your URL since it’s an internal system.  Obviously that’s not sufficient, and someone in the comments said as much.

Every few days I’ve tried a different fix that hasn’t worked.  Then today I went back and tried something super simple that I thought I had already tried - password protecting the entire blog directory on the server level - and it worked.  My order of operations must’ve been out of whack when I developed the thing, because clearly this is the most simple and secure solution.

While the majority of the info on the original post is still useful/valid, here are an abbreviated version of the new steps, with the changes in bold:

1. Install WordPress and turn off pinging
2. Install and customize a simple WordPress theme
3. Create user accounts for all potential users and modify WordPress to display who posted in the title
4. Password protect the entire WordPress directory at the server level.  This can be accomplished in your hosting control panel, usually under a setting called “password protected directories”.  For example if your micro blog URL is www.yoursite.com/micro-blog/ you should password protect the entire micro-blog folder.  This prevents anyone without the password from viewing the blog or the feed.
   
5. Use FreeMyFeed to create a secure feed that can be put in feed readers that do not support password protection.
6. Add the feed to the feed reader of your choice.  For us, we installed the CustomRSS Google Gadget on our Pure Adapt Personalized Start Page that we all use as our start page in our browsers.

Now, for all reasonable uses, this is a secure system that can only be accessed by the people you give permission to.

According to Tim Ferriss:

E-mail (and all of its Crackberry/digital leash/Twitter cousins) is the largest single interruption in modern life. In a digital world, creating time therefore hinges on minimizing e-mail.

How bad is it really? A Loughborough University study “found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email. So people who check their email every five minutes waste 8 1/2 hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.”

Wow.

Not only that, email is stressful. How many times have you been right in the middle of something important, just to get distracted by a negative email coming through? Maybe it’s a nasty reply from a customer, or an argumentative email from an employee or partner. Either way, once you’re distracted by that little Outlook pop-up and ding, you have to drop what you’re doing, reply, compose yourself, and try to get back to work. It sucks.

Over the past six months or so I’ve really honed my email strategy.  It works perfectly for me, in my current situation.  I never really thought about it much until I read Ferriss’ 4 Hour Work Week, but once I did I realized it was a major source of stress for me.  With that, I began formulating the following “email rules” that I now strictly adhere to:

1. Check email twice per day on weekdays, once per day on weekends. I check my email first thing in the morning around 7 AM and once again somewhere between 3 PM and 5 PM, usually when I’m wrapping up work for the day.  On weekends I generally check within a few hours of waking and that’s all.  This means that everyone gets a reply in less than 24 hours, most in less than 12. If you’re sending an email and expect a reply sooner, you probably shouldn’t be sending an email (i.e. pick up the phone or walk down the hall and talk to the person if you work in the same facility).
2. Avoid long email conversations. Every email conversation gets resolved within two emails per party. If not, I either stop replying (if it’s going nowhere) or suggest a conversation in person or over the phone. There’s no bigger time waste than 20 short emails going back and forth over the course of a day.
3. No mobile phones for email. I’m all for having an iPhone or web enabled phone. You can do a lot of cool stuff with them. I just won’t ever use it to check my business email. We don’t work in a life or death business (and you probably don’t either). If I’m not in front of my computer, business can wait. When I’m at a ball game or having a family dinner, I’m actually at the ball game or at the dinner.
4. Only receive emails that you need.  Yes, we set up positive reinforcement emails that are somewhat unnecessary - those are great for spirits - but I’m talking about those 50 newsletters that you’re subscribed to, or those emails that you always get CC’d on but never reply to or learn anything from.  Do everything within your power to reduce the number of emails you receive…including setting up FAQ systems like we did to minimize email contacts.

To anyone who is skeptical: I haven’t yet had a complaint from a customer, one of my partners, or any other business acquaintance.  The result has been a marked improvement in my efficiency and focus. I don’t “worry” about email because I have my set times where I check it and clear it out, and I really don’t think of it other than during those times.   Can’t beat that.

When I woke up today and combed through my morning email I was shocked to see that yesterday Google announced that they would be releasing a browser today.  Usually these things leak out sooner, but I hadn’t heard anything other than the same type of vague rumors that you hear about a gPhone or gOS.

Google Chrome, as it’s called, was released today at noon and can be downloaded for XP/Vista (Linux and Mac soon to follow).  After reading the comic and watching the video, I was excited to download it and take it for a spin. While all of the features sounded nice, I didn’t know what to expect.  Just because they say that they “started a browser from scratch” and that it’s designed for “today’s web applications and not the web pages of 1998″ doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s any better than IE7, Firefox 3, Safari, Opera, etc.

After playing with it for 10 minutes I feel confident in saying:  it is better than all of them.  Noticably better.  It is now my default browser.

Here are my thoughts:

• It is sooooooo much faster than other browsers that it isn’t funny.  Google spent a lot of time highlighting the new javascript rendering and crash control, and for good reason. Pages load a lot faster than in FF3 or IE7, and the “crash control” isolates each tab so if one crashes your entire browser session doesn’t.  They even have a task manager where you can see which tabs are using the most resources, very similar to the Windows task manager.  I tried apps like Gmail and Google Reader and they absolutely flew relative to the other browsers I had open.
• New tabs aren’t blank.  Instead they show thumbnails of your most visited sites, a list of your most recent bookmarks, a search box to search bookmarks, and a list of your most recent searches.
• Gone is the search box in the upper right.  Everything is in one bar - your history, your searching, and your web addresses.  The first drop down for anything you type is “search on Google”.  Subtle yet awesome.
• Less clutter - I’d say I have an extra 5% viewing space than I do in FF3.  Despite that, it’s still super simple to find everything.  Nothing I can think of that other browsers have is inherintly missing.  It just works.
• It appears to render exactly like Firefox, which is what I figured it would do (since portions are modeled on Mozilla’s engine).  This is good news for developers.
• Speaking of which, the developer tools are solid.  I still prefer Firebug in Firefox, but that might be just because it’s what I know and am familiar with.  The javascript debugging appears to be better than other tools I’ve used, although I don’t do a ton of JS debugging right now.
• Did I mention it’s REALLY FAST?

Download it and see for yourself.  It installs in seconds and imports everything from Firefox or IE so you can pick up right where you left off.

I have yet to really consider how much of a mainstream impact this could have and how it could change the future of the web.  For the time being I’m just enjoying a new browsing experience (I’m typing this post in it right now).  In the past I’ve been critical of all of the half-assed crap that Google releases and slaps “beta” on, but this is different.  It is very refined.  Microsoft should definitely be worried.  Google is creeping more and more into our everyday lives where Microsoft used to be.  Can’t wait to see how this unfolds.

P.S. The spacing on this post was messed up when I first hit submit. Guess it isn’t perfect yet.

P.S.S. I had some trouble in phpMyAdmin (which is how we access our MySQL databases).  Chrome wasn’t executing queries.  It’s no longer my default browser.  That lasted all of 30 minutes.  Oh well, I still stand by everything I said above.  For most browsing it is still fantastic.  I’m sure they’ll work out the minor kinks soon.