Working Backwards
Lately I keep running into instances where different worlds coincide with a common theme. The theme I’m running into lately is flipping the funnel. Sometimes when you hit a stumbling block, it helps to flip the funnel and work the problem backwards.
For example, consider these three topics:
1. Improving e-commerce sales.
2. Reducing manufacturing cost and […]

Following MacWorld, Reg Developer started a rumor [1] that VBA would be going away from future versions of Microsoft Office for Windows. The speculation was based on Office 2008 for Mac dropping VBA (a big blunder by Microsoft, IMHO) and on Microsoft dropping their licensing program for 3rd parties to incorporate VBA into their applications.
Sometimes […]

[This is a story about Bob. Bob is not his real name, but he is a real person. The events here were gleaned from intermittent conversations and pieced together as accurately as I could.]
I’d never heard the term “lifestyle business” until I met Bob. It was a few years ago, not long after he started […]

I’m always looking for new avenues to get the word out about FlowBreeze, so recently I ran an experiment using StumbleUpon’s advertising program. If you’re not familiar with StumbleUpon, basically it’s just a random site re-director. StumbleUpon users are served up random pages based on their preferences and demographics. If they like a page, they […]

Fog Creek released a new version of FogBugz this week with something called Evidence Based Scheduling. It feeds project tasks and developer characteristics, along with historical data, into a Monte Carlo simulation then builds a probability distribution for project completion.
By coincidence, I was reading about statistical methods for project estimation several months ago. (All I […]

Update: The method described below will cause IE7 to drop the extension. A modified version is pending.
Until recently, I had no idea that IE6 cached downloads. I knew page and image caching were issues, but I didn’t know if affected exe’s and zip’s as well.
FlowBreeze 2.0 was released 11 days ago, putting some of the […]

Until this past week, I’ve never been able to tell whether AdWords was paying for itself or not. Somewhere between my ads and the payment processors, my tracking lost its way. It all hinged on a) the tracking working through the payment processors or b) the customer clicking the link to return to the BreezeTree […]

Fireclick has published some interesting numbers on software conversion rates on their site:
http://index.fireclick.com/fireindex.php?segment=9
Fireclick is a web analytics company owned by Digital River, which owns a huge chunk of the payment processing market for software vendors. The data is compiled (anonymously) from all of Fireclick’s clients across different sectors. The software sector includes benchmarks for overall […]

Someone on the Business of Software forum asked how others motivate themselves to get working. This is a timely question. The jump from FlowBreeze 1.x to FlowBreeze 2.0 has been a long struggle. The code base has grown 3X and of course that doesn’t include the re-writes and thrown away code. Facing burn out in […]

The Business of Software blog posted Part II of their microISV survey. (Part I van be found here.) I have to admit that I was surprised by some of the low revenue numbers. But I’m one of those obstinate people who refuses to believe something when it doesn’t fit his world view. At least for […]

Due to the recent incompatibilities between Vista and the crappy 3rd party licensing tool I use for FlowBreeze, I have been re-examining how I look at anti-piracy protection. I’ve decided it all boils down to a simple formula:
PL = F(SLS + SE + LS - DT)
Where, PL = Piracy Loss (i.e. the revenues lost due […]

There’s a basic concept in Six Sigma called Voice of the Customer. When you’re defining a project, you need to identify the critical-to-quality (CTQ) elements in your process that matter to the customer. Too often though, the voice of the customer isn’t heard until _after_ they become a customer. What about potential customers?
Taking a step […]

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
- W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming
As I battled the demons towards the planned launch of FlowBreeze 2.0, I stumbled upon Clarke Ching’s Rolling Rocks Downhill, a business novel about Agile Development in the tradition of Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal. It’s a […]

Everyone likes to write about web sites and blogs catering to small businesses. That’s fine. Many people like Escape from Cubicle Nation, Wall Street Journal’s Startup Journal, OnStartups, Creating Passionate Users, among others. They’re good sites and are worth a read. Even if you read them just for inspiration or entertainment, you can usually pick […]

Thanks to Matt Inglot for writing my belated New Year’s resolution for me. (Yeah, I’m running a little behind on that one.) The recent tax season has convinced me his 5 Tips for Staying on Top of Your Books for Small Business Owners is just the sort of advice that I should be implementing. Especially […]

Overwhelmed by all the advice you read about running an AdWords campaign? Here’s a simple and concise list I’ve gathered from several reliable sources:

Break your campaign in groups of 10-20 highly related keywords.
Use exact matching or phrase matching, but avoid broad matching.
Use negative keywords (e.g., -free) to improve CTR & lower cost.
Put keywords in […]

One of the more frustrating things about selling online is dealing with AVS mismatches. Sometimes you get an email from a customer complaining that your payment processor won’t accept their credit card. Most of the time, though, the sale is lost without notice - unless you’re scanning your transaction logs daily.
So What is an AVS […]

I wanted to say Thanks! to all the BreezeTree customers who have made this a great first year.
The first six months were a little slow, but after the release of FlowBreeze 1.2, sales really started to pick up. FlowBreeze (a Flowchart Generator for Excel) has benefited from a lot of word of mouth marketing. Plus, […]

When I read The E-Myth Revisited, I have to admit my first impression was “What a load of crap!” After all, it takes 200 pages to say what could be said in less than 10. I’m busy. I don’t have time for that.
Through analogies to the world of McDonald’s franchises and small bakeries alike, […]

Do you love a bargain? Of course you do. Everybody loves a bargain. If you love software bargains in particular, then you owe it to yourself to check out Bits du Jour because they offer a new software bargain everyday. If you’re on the consumer side of the equation, then you can keep tabs on […]

Why flowchart with FlowBreeze? Ask yourself these questions…

Do you need to standardize your business processes?
Do you want to run your business the E-Myth way, like a franchise?
Would you like a tool that is intuitive and easy to learn?
Would you like a tool that lets you add analysis to your process flow diagramming?
Would you like to […]

I installed a piece of software recently that sealed my fate in the tongue-wagging war over Web 2.0. This is one of those topics I steer away from. It’s too much like politics. Just as I prefer issues over politics, I prefer solving problems to debating the tools used to solve problems.
One part of the […]

If, like me, you’re a big fan of the Axialis Object Packs, then one blog you should definitely know about is My maaads!. Kudesnick, the blog owner, did the Vista Icon Pack available on the Axialis web site. He now has 1165 icons in his Vista Icons Pack 3. Check it out.

You should always be honest with your customers because transparency is the foundation upon which good customer relations are built. So when several people have asked about my newsletter sign-ups, I have been honest about it. The bottom line is, I’m trying to convert clicks into sales. Clicks don’t always convert into sales immediately, so […]

I started using Google Sitemaps several months ago to ensure that my site was getting fully indexed by the Googlebot. Aside from the obvious indexing advantages, Google Sitemaps also offer a few other insights to your web site. One of the more interesting ones is the Page Analysis feature.
Page Analysis has a Common Words section […]

Inspired by a new Excel add-in developer, I’ve decided to create a list of Excel developer resources. It’s sparse now, but I will upate it periodically.
Books
I’ve only found 2 that are even worth mentioning.

Professional Excel Development by Bullen, Bovey, and Green is the best book on the market for .xla and COM add-ins.
Microsoft .NET […]

Here are 3 easy to do PAD file improvements you should make because they will increase your download site traffic, bump up your sales, and give you a nice little SEO boost.
—
#1 -Add Keywords to Your Product Name
This is so simple and obvious that if keywords aren’t already in your Product_Name field, you should […]