http://web.appstorm.net/roundups/design-roundups/10-marketing-resources-every-app-should-provide/
http://sendgrid.com - Great email application for email subscription lists. I think I’ll use postmark.com for my web API, but this site has a really cool UI.
This is my second year blogging. I started an anonymous blog when I became a teacher which I used for professional reflections. Each week, I would write an entry about something that happened in the week. I would write about what went well and what could be improved. This allowed me to grow as an educator and a writer. The blog was consistently updated on a weekly basis.
I conceived of this blog as a place to inform users of my software products and any updates. If Seth Godin was telling me that writing a blog would help my business, then by gosh, I was going to write a blog, the goal being to increase revenue for my software business. Unlike my last attempt, updating this blog has been a chore and not something I entirely looked forward to.
Writing for personal reasons is much more fun to me than writing for business reasons. I wasn’t seeing results from this blog. My last teaching blog got a modest amount of traffic, but for me, the fun was in the writing, not in the having been read. I didn’t have a results mindset for that blog like I did for this one.
I want to continue blogging but I’ve been thinking a lot about how to do it. My teaching blog was successful for me because it was personal, I didn’t care about results, it had a narrow focus (selecting topics to write about was never a problem), and I was disciplined about updating it regularly. I’ve decided to continue personal blogging, but not business blogging.
Most of my future blog posts will be at http://projecthatrick.blogspot.com. This is a blog I set up to document my development efforts on a software project I was working on last summer. When I was in high school, September would always come, and I’d wonder what the heck I did all summer long. So I decided to start writing it down. I kept a personal journal, with one short entry per day, each summer from high school through college. The blog at http://projecthatrick.blogspot.com is a continuation of that endeavor.
I’ll keep this Best Attendance blog alive, but it will be repurposed. It will contain less of the personal thoughts and opinions and will instead be used mainly for product announcements.
Interview on MicroISV on a Shoestring
One purpose of this blog is to serve as a scratchpad for myself where I can keep notes on business. This stuff might be useful to other entrepreneurs as well.
LimeLM – Hassle free anti-piracy and licensing
Visual Website Optimizer – A/B Testing
Ring Central – Toll free numbers and call forwarding
Postmark – Email delivery for web apps
Tenderly – Interesting site design for a microISV
Spreedly – SaaS Payment Gateway
Chargify – SaaS Payment Gateway
Joel Spolsky: Writes on the business of software, founder of Fog Creek Software, author of Joel On Software
Jeff Atwood: Writes on software engineering and human factors, author of codinghorror.com, founder of Stack Overflow.
Steve Pavlina: Writes on personal development for smart people and how to add productivity to your life and business
Jason Fried: Because he is better than you.
David Hannemeir Hanson: Because he is better than you and Jason Fried.
Richard Florida: Writes on the creative economy, author of Rise of the Creative Class and Who’s Your City
Thomas Friedman: Expert on world affairs and globalization, author of The World Is Flat
Barry Schwartz: Writes on behavioral economics, author of The Paradox of Choice
Dan Airely: Writes on behavioral economics, author of Predictably Irrational
Dan Gilbert: Expert on what makes us happy. Look up his TED Talk.
Paul Graham: Founder of Y Combinator, a startup incubator; writes essays on economics, business, and computer science.
Patrick McKenzie: Founder of Bingo Card Creator, a bootstrapped one-man software company he built working five hours a week and is now is sole source of income. Follow his personal story at MicroISV on a Shoestring.
Eric Sink: Because he started a high tech company in a cornfield.
Garrison Keillor: Because he is better than you, Jason Fried, and David Hannemeir Hanson.
Malcolm Gladwell: Writer for the New Yorker, author of Outliers and Blink.
Chris Anderson: Editor of Wired magazine, author of The Long Tail, writes on how to sell more of less.
Seth Godin: Trains business people how to tame their lizard brains.
I just got back from the Master Gardener’s Show in Central Minnesota. I built the new web site for Gaia Garden Designs, a growing greenhouse business in St. Cloud. They asked me to set up a slideshow for their booth at the trade show as well.
PowerPoint 2010 makes it very easy to create slideshows from a whole folder full of pictures. It only took me an hour to create an auto-running slideshow of 524 photos.
Just wanted to post here, letting you know I’m still doing stuff and haven’t fallen off the edge of the earth.
In an earlier post, I mentioned that:
the dream is to be the next Patrick McKenzie, Joel Spolsky, or Eric Sink, launching a bootstrapped software product and hitting it big.
I should clarify exactly what I meant. I meant that in the sense that the struggling literature student dreams of being the next Garrison Keillor, or the budding actor dreams of being the next Matt Damon.
Writers write because they enjoy it; actors act because they enjoy it; programmers code for the same reason. None of these people expect to make it big; in fact, that’s not the point at all.
Just like there are thousands of unpublished novelists and undiscovered actors, there are similarly thousands of people like me coding just for fun. In his early days, Garrison Keillor kept sending manuscripts to the New Yorker, not totally expecting to get published, but hey, you’ll never know if you don’t try. Some editor in New York decided to run one of his stories, and the rest, as they say, is history. Yes, Garrison Keillor wrote because he enjoyed writing, without many expectations, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t also be ambitious.
Most writers write for fun, not money, and that’s OK. Same goes for actors and independent software developers. It’s an avocation, something that transports you to another world, one which you understand fully.
Writers and actors and software developers don’t let their avocations consume their lives. We have jobs and hobbies and families and we like to get outside and smell the spring air after a cool rain as much as the next person.
I just downloaded the beta version of Office 2010, and I have to say it’s very impressive. I was running Office 2003 on my development machine and using the 2007 version in the classes I teach at school. I was expecting an extremely long download time. To my surprise, the entire 2MB download took about a minute, and all five programs: Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and OneNote opened instantly. Apparently, the first download just contains the bare minimum you need to get started, and Office will automatically download the additional features as you use them. Brilliant!
I’ve been using Notepad for my to-do lists, but I started playing around with the Task List feature in Outlook, and I might switch over to that. Outlook also includes an address book and calendar, which will be very useful, especially after I can figure out how to get the web component going so I can log in from anywhere. Apparently that’s possible with Office 2010.
Some interesting websites I came across this week:
Coding By The Sea – The story of how a team at Red Gate Software developed a product by locking themselves in a seaside barn for a week.
Is Your IDE Hot Or Not – So many things to waste time on as a developer!
Mad Libs Style Web Forms – Increase your conversion rates 20% - 40%
jQuery Sliding Doors – Fun jQuery magic for naivation buttons
I’ve just finished adding my first iteration of some lesson plans on copyright law to my website. This is just a rough first draft, and I plan to improve the lesson plan over time, but it still might be useful to business teachers.