I finally received the particular paycheck I was waiting for in order to be able to fund a Snip website redesign. I’m meeting with my designer next week to kick things off.
I’m very embarrassed by my current website from both a design and a content perspective. I find it comical how I just can’t seem to come up with anything other than garbage. WTF?
Gotta go.
I’d like to proudly announce that Snip trial-signer-uppers now get a welcome email when they sign up! That took forever.
I believe I implemented that feature on Monday. Since then I’ve added two more lifecycle emails: one to encourage you to add some appointments and another to encourage you to add some stylists.
A sufficient level of lifecycle emails was one of my two prerequisites for pointing an AdWords campaign at the site. My plan as of the last time I posted it was:
I now think it makes more sense to combine steps 1 and 3, so the plan is now this:
And now that I have a few lifecycle emails ready to go, I’m ready to call #1 good enough to start the campaign. So that would make the plan:
But before I can do the website redesign I have to wait to receive a certain large payment I’m waiting for. So I’ll work on the lifecycle emails until then.
I also got a message last night from one of my customers that some of her clients aren’t receiving their text reminders. I checked my logs and didn’t see anything unusual, so I’m a little frustrated that the customer sees a bug but I can’t see it. This isn’t the first time customers have complained about texts not being delivered. I don’t know if the issue is a real one or just a perceived one, but either way I think I probably need to create a text log the customers can see themselves for peace of mind. I’m frustrated that that is becoming a necessity because I don’t fucking want to work on the product right now! It’s already taking me long enough to get the website ready for an AdWords campaign. I guess maybe I can just get to a good stopping point with the lifecycle emails, then work on the text stuff while I’m waiting for the money for the website.
I’ve been thinking that in general it would probably be good to have a system for allocating for product work vs. marketing work. Both areas are in always in dire need of attention and I always feel guilty for not working on one when I’m working on the other. Maybe I do every other week or every other month or something like that.
I’m frankly getting really sick of trying to make Snip work for so long and having not much success. Is it possible I just wasn’t born with whatever it takes to be successful at this kind of thing?
I also haven’t gotten any Olark chats in forever, which is like what the fuck? I used to get about one a week and I’ve gotten like two in 2015 so far, period. What the fuck changed?? It’s not broken. I keep checking. My traffic hasn’t gone down. Nothing has fucking changed. Success is a mystery to me and I’m fucking pissed about it.
But anyway, I haven’t yet run out of things to try. I can’t give up before I have lifecycle emails in place, because it’s retarded not to. It’s also retarded to have a shitty website, so I can’t give up before I have a not-shitty website. I’ve always said that I won’t give up until I’ve run out of things to try, and I have plenty more to try. I expect to eventually be successful rather than to have to give up. But at this particular moment in time I’m pretty fucking frustrated.
I’ve done pretty well this week as far as making time for Snip goes. I fixed a bug with the forgot password feature and now I’m in the process of FINALLY adding a welcome email to the free trial. I can’t believe I’m just now doing this. Better late than never.
Adding this welcome email is the first step in adding a series of autoresponders all throughout the 30-day trial, which is again something I’ve had on my to-do list forever. My hope and expectation is of course that the autoresponders will get more people to “activate” after they sign up for a free trial. That’s a useful term I just learned: activate. My biggest problem with my free trials is that once people sign up, they fail to activate. They either never schedule a single appointment, or they just schedule a couple test appointments and then never come back.
A couple weeks ago I had reached out to my designer because I wanted to have snipsalonsoftware.com redesigned. Unfortunately she said she was busy with some long-term contracts, so I had to find somebody else. I recently connected with a friend of mine who I’ve known for a long time but didn’t think was available, so that’s nice. My plan is to pull the trigger on the redesign as soon as I have enough money. By the way, I’ve tried and tried to use some off-the-shelf design and make it work. I don’t know what it is but I just can’t fucking do it. I have to have it done custom by a real designer.
Once I have a good-looking site and have my autoresonders in place to a sufficient degree, I think it will no longer be premature to invest in sending paid traffic to the site.
Interesting week. On Monday I noticed my seven year-old MacBook was running exceptionally slow. After trying and failing to sufficiently reduce RAM usage I decided to just restart. It wouldn’t turn back on…and I had a pairing session in an hour!
I rushed home and used my wife’s computer for my pairing session, then I took my MacBook to the Apple store to see what the deal with it was. Bad hard drive. The machine also has a bad battery, so between paying to fix both the battery and hard drive (and at the end still owning a laptop from 2008) and just buying a new computer, I went with the latter. I bought a 13″ MacBook Air. It hurt to part ways with the money but it sure fucking feels good to have a brand new computer after living with that old one for so long. The old computer was also somewhat of an embarrassment in front of clients. If I apparently can’t afford a computer that’s not old as fuck with a broken “enter” key, how successful could I be (and therefore how good could I be)? Now that’s one little thing I don’t have to worry about.
While I was in Nigeria I set myself up at a “pairing station” where students could sign up to do pair programming sessions with me throughout the day. I found a sign on the door of my temporary office that said “The Code Clinic” and the students started calling me “Dr. Jason”. I found myself in very high demand (and exasperatingly short supply). When I got back to the states, I thought maybe I could replicate this situation at my new office. I won’t bestow the grandiose title of Dr. Jason upon myself but I will hold office hours at the grandiosely-named Ben Franklin Labs World Headquarters. I describe all this just to mention up the fact that I held my first office hours session last Friday and I remembered, about five minutes before my guests were due to arrive, that I have no wi-fi in the office. I believe both of my guests had MacBook Airs and so weren’t able to get online. Whoops. I realized eventually I would need a wireless router.
So now myself being in possession of a MacBook Air, the time had come when I absolutely needed a wireless router. So I drove straight from the Apple Store to Best Buy and bought a router. I then spent ALL afternoon fucking with the router to try to get it to work and no dice. Long story short, I didn’t get the router working until Wednesday (!). So all that stuff took a big bite out of my week’s productivity.
I wrote several more paragraphs after this but then WordPress lost it. I didn’t write anything terribly important. Talk to you next week.
Side note: when seeking out a mentor, don’t limit yourself. I’ve been surprised by some of the famous/wealthy/busy people who have agreed to mentor me.
The last week or so has been crazy for Snip. On Sunday I pushed out a fix for a bug I found in the reporting section, and on Monday I started calling my customers to tell them about it. I expected it to be horrible but nobody was pissed about it, which I found surprising.
Then yesterday one of my customers called me and complained of like 5 different problems, some real, some perceived. That was totally separate from the report issue but coincidentally around the same time. Then, also yesterday, another customer called me with a really good feature request that sucks to not have, but I don’t see how I’ll be able to afford to build it anytime soon, given that I have all those bugs to fix and maybe I’ll like to try to make some sales at some point too.
As of yesterday morning I was already working on moving the trial sign-up form to the home page of the marketing site, so I decided to keep going on that before I focused on bugs, since I had already partially done the form-moving job before but I had to throw the work out because I abandoned it and then it got too out of sync with the rest of the codebase.
Today I also received some money I’ve been waiting on for a long time, so I think I’m finally okay to pay to have the Snip site redesigned. I don’t see any reason why that can’t be done in parallel to the bug fix/missing feature addition work I need to do in the next little bit.
My schedule change has been great for Snip productivity. I’m back on the rails. I wish these product defects weren’t a thing, but whatever.
One of the things I’ve found to be true of all rich, successful people is that they know a lot of people.
How did they get that way?
And more importantly, how can little old me meet all these successful people I want to meet, people who don’t necessarily have any reason to give me the time of day?
These questions have interested me for a long time. I’m kind of a slow learner and so it took me a very very long time, but I’ve finally discovered a technique that works.
First I’ll quickly explain how I found the technique. I knew that the golden rule of networking is to give before you get, but not in all situations do I have something to give. For example, what could I give, say, Richard Branson that’s not already within his easy reach? What can I give to someone who’s “ahead” of me in every way? Nothing, right?
Then one day it dawned on me what I could give. Even if I have nothing else to give someone, I can still give sincere appreciation and a legitimate feeling of usefulness and importance the person. This can take the form of simply asking thoughtful questions, listening with genuine interest, and then repeating from the first step.
So when I wanted to improve my salon scheduling software business by making connections in the beauty industry, I decided to put this idea in action by performing interviews with beauty industry influencers with a strong focus on the other person. What I’ve found is that not only are my interviewees very happy to spend the time, but there’s also a strong sense of mutual goodwill built up by the end of the interview.
And in my case I’m also giving the other person the opportunity to promote his or her business, but I don’t know that that piece of it is super relevant. I’ve also done interviews when there was no economical component to it at all, and it still had the same connecting effect.
So there is my suggestion: if you want to meet successful, high-profile people, one good technique is to interview them.
And by the way, here’s a tactical note: the way I’ve done it in the past is to talk to the person over a Skype video chat and record the session using Ecamm Call Recorder which I then upload to Wistia. Then I have the interview transcribed by Casting Words and put it all up on a blog post.
If you want to raise your profile in any area, an effective way to do that is to assume a position of leadership. People will naturally assume you’re “somebody” in that area because you’re in a leadership position. I’ll describe two ways I know of to do this.
For a year, I served as President of Michigan’s oldest continuously-chartered Toastmasters club. People seem to be impressed by this credential when I share it with them, but it doesn’t represent a hard-won achievement. There was only one person running against me, and her “campaign speech” was “I don’t want to be President. Vote for Jason instead!”
I recently volunteered to serve on my local Chamber of Commerce’s Ambassador Committee. I’ve only been an active Committee member for about two weeks, but I’m already experiencing access to high-quality business connections I would not have had otherwise. Becoming an Ambassador wasn’t hard. All I did was ask.
In organizations run by volunteers, leadership positions are yours for the asking. Most people don’t want the responsibility. In my experience, just about any position can be yours if you just express interest.
I’ve been blogging about technical topics for years. When I find the solution to some tricky problem and I’m in the mood to write about it, maybe I’ll put up a blog post. Occasionally other people find certain posts helpful.
In 2014 I created AngularOnRails.com with the intention of becoming the internet’s best resource for issue at the intersection of Ruby on Rails and AngularJS. Whether or not I meet this objective, I can always say I’m the author of AngularOnRails.com, which without my having to say anything else indicates to people that I know my way around those two technologies.
By the way, here’s how I came up with the content for AngularOnRails.com: I solved problems as I encountered them, and then I blogged about how I did it. You don’t need years of experience in order to teach something genuinely useful!
The barrier to entry for teaching is pretty low. But even if you can’t think of something to teach yet, I’d say the barrier to entry for volunteering is even lower. So if you want to raise your profile, there’s a fairly clear and easy path for you to follow.
Back in the summer of 2014 (or sometime around then) I had set a schedule of working on Snip for the first hour of every day. The idea was to put the most important work first, and it worked out great because otherwise I would just never get around to working on Snip at all.
Then in November 2014 I landed a new gig teaching programming to students in Nigeria where I would spend 4 hours a day communicating with students, starting at 7am my time due to the 6-hour time difference. This pretty much killed my Snip schedule, and from early November to about now I’ve barely worked on Snip at all (ouch).
In January I actually went to Nigeria. My visit coincided with the opening of a new campus for the students which, long story short, also came with some scheduling changes for the students. I got back to Michigan Monday before last, and within about a week I realized that the schedule on which we were working before the campus change no longer made a ton of sense, especially on my end. I proposed a schedule that started at 8:30am my time. I believe that was Monday, so yesterday was my first day on that schedule.
Yesterday morning I spent about an hour and a half fixing a certain bug and today I finished except for deployment. So my plan from last post now looks like this:
The weekly Snip report hasn’t been weekly for a while, sorry. I was in Nigeria from January 15th to February 7th, so that’s a big part of the reason. I went to Nigeria for one of my clients to teach computer programming there.
Snip pretty much got put on hold the whole time I was in Nigeria. Actually, pretty much everything except the stuff I was doing in Nigeria got put on hold during that time.
Before I left, I had a rough plan for what I’d like to do on Snip when I got back:
While I was gone a customer reported a couple bugs in Snip’s reporting area. I almost remembered that I’m currently paying a ridiculous $250/mo to Rackspace for hosting my various WordPress sites (including the Snip site). The only way to change the pricing, according to Rackspace support, is to do a full server migration. (You used to be able to just move a slider. WTF? Oh well.)
So here’s my new plan:
I actually did the server migration today, now I’m on #2.
One thing I did recently was to remove the “view demo” opt-in form from the home page and replace it with a link to a “free interactive demo”, AKA the 30-day trial. This has resulted in an increased level of trial sign-ups and, in fact, January 2015 was Snip’s best month ever in terms of trial sign-ups. I had 13 in January, and the best month I could find previously is 8. That’s maybe not super impressive but it always feels good to reach new records and milestones. I have to imagine that if I move the trial form from where it is now to the home page, it would increase the conversion rate even more.
On the consulting side I finally feel good about where I am. I’m no longer “in pain” due to ill-fitting clients (e.g. clients that use Backbone.js when I’m trying to become an expert in Angular, or clients that impose problematic schedule constraints). I mainly have two consulting clients now: one where I get to work with someone who is (among other things) one of the world’s most well-known Rails experts, and another where I get to pick my own technology stack (Angular + Rails is my choice), charge a very healthy hourly rate, and be able to cite a “locally famous” business as one of my clients. I feel pretty good about that stuff. It always makes me sad to remember that I’ve been working on Snip for over 4 years and I’m still barely anywhere, but now I feel like I’m at least 1 for 2 instead of 0 for 2 in terms of successful businesses I own. It feels good to be successful at something. And even if I were to somehow lose one of my two clients, each of the two is so good on its own that I would still feel very successful even without the other. As time goes on I’m feeling harder and harder to knock down, and my level of financial comfort reflects that too.
I also moved Ben Franklin Labs into its own dedicated office in January, although I didn’t actually start working in it until 2 days ago due to being in Nigeria and waiting to get internet. After over a year of working in shared co-working spaces, it feels nice to be 100% in control of my environment. No shitty music, no feeling like I’m a guest in someone else’s space. If anyone comes here it will be because I invited them, and on my schedule.
Ben Franklin Labs is necessary because I need an income and I’m not willing to get a job. It’s a big distraction from Snip, but it’s a totally necessary distraction. I’ve always thought that an easy/lucrative/fun version of BFL would be less distracting than a hard/shitty/broke version. These days BFL is more easy/lucrative/fun than ever, and I think that serves Snip’s interests well. Looking forward to seeing what I can accomplish in the next few months in both areas.