scottish national economic forum

suit and tie photo

So a few weeks ago I attended the Scottish National Economic Forum in Edinburgh. The focus was on building Scotland as a digital nation – with the sub topic of cyber crime.

Now, I’ll hold my hand up and say that I wasn’t expecting much and with the 2.5 hour journey to get there expectations had dipped even lower!

The first thing that struck me was the sheer number of suits and ties! I understand that even making this observation sounds trite and, all in all, me a bit of a dick, but hey! The fact is that formality is not my thing, and indeed it does not chime with my experiences in the digital world. Maybe the atmosphere would have been more laid back, rather ungovernmental, without the formality. The fact is that most of the people attended were not in the tech sector or indeed under 40 years old. Maybe those points are related, maybe not.

Anyway the above is nitpicking so on to other matters.

Photo by Robert Scoble

One comment at the forum stood out on my radar. It was made by John Swinney who stated he thinks that they have the (early stage) startup scene and angel funding sorted in Scotland, he thinks the problem is now venture funding. Really! I don’t think this is true at all. There are nowhere near enough people starting companies. From what I can see people still have “the fear”, the completely-and-absolutely-no-risk-taking-I-must-have-a-mortgage-by-25-and-must-never-fail-or-be-seen-to-fail attitude. I attend or have attended quite a few startup/business meetups around Glasgow and quite frankly the scene is “quiet”. For me to feel this about Scotland’s largest city surely means it’s far from being “cracked”. It’s never going to be Silicon Valley so let’s not try to be. Onwards.

The workshop on digital marketing was good. Not exactly ground breaking but was nice to hear what some local marketers and government agencies were doing on the digital marketing front. What was quite poetic was the gentleman sitting next to me showing examples of new types of marketing material in the form of promotional gatefolds with embedded screens which is exactly what Neonburn (my business) can be used to create. Well I never!

network business photo

What followed was the ominous networking time. I say ominous as quite frankly I suck at it, I just find it completely unnatural, and it probably comes across that way as well! I do try though, fear not. Strange thing is I enjoy talking about my business, who would have guessed.

And finally. I was asked “are you looking to raise money” to which my reply was “no just making some sales would do rather nicely”. Is it just he automatic assumption now that to start a business you need to get money and without that you can do nothing? Surely it wasn’t always this way???

managing your enthusiasm

If there is one thing that is likely to unsteady the ship as a sole founder is lack of enthusiasm. No one there to push you on. No one to confide in. No one to help when things are just not working. All these things can lead you down the dark path.

Photo by CarbonNYC [in SF!]

I was reminded just how bad this can get over the last week or so when I got myself into a rut while trying to solve a problem with my code.

To be specific: I use fabric.js to draw shapes on an HTML5 canvas, however, I have pretty much wrote my own way to scale objects up and down as I found that if you have an image as a shape background then you get unacceptable pixelization – I tried the static and dynamic resize filters but they appear too slow. All was working fine but things were going wrong when you have a group shape as resizing wasn’t working correctly – amongst other things.

What I thought should have been an easy task turned into a nightmare. I was hacking away – essentially like a headless horseman – grasping at any straw to solve my problem without ever really thinking about the problem. The real problem was just that I wanted to solve the big problem without really knowing what all the little problems were. You see this so much these days with code, folk expect to find the solution to their problem on StackOverflow, and if they do, they copy-paste in the solution without ever understanding the problem. The day always comes where you can’t do this or it doesn’t really solve your problem and you only realise too late. That’s another story for another day though!

So the more days that went past the more I got frustrated by this problem. As each day ticked by my daily schedule (as I talked about before) was just a worthless piece of paper that I filled out each morning trying to pretend that I was in control. Each day my enthusiasm was dropping exponentially. This is where is really hit home having no one to talk over the problem with – talking it over with friends is likely not much use as no one is likely to understand what you are doing deeply enough to make any technical contribution. I was honestly at the point where I thought it was easier to just abandon Neonburn before I’d ever given it a chance. It’s amazing how the mind works, you’re happy to give up something you’ve given months and months of your life over to just because of one little problem.

Thankfully I started making small wins by edging little by little to a working solution, at which point the enthusiasm gradually startsed increasing. I started to understand the problem (I abstracted it mathematically rather than trying to write code to solve my problem). All of a sudden things were looking better and it’s amazing how good it feels getting these little wins. It’s important to accept that just because you can describe the problem succinctly it means that the said thing is easy to accomplish technically – think hoverboard!

So I’m not entirely sure of the moral of this story is. It’s probably along the lines of give yourself little wins all the time which of course means you need to set yourself smaller tasks. Walking away from something is actually the easy option, but then again so is battling away without really thinking about what you are fighting. However, I in no way believe that this won’t happen to me again. The only thing I remember thinking at the time that got me back on track was: this has happened before, and you always get it fixed even if it seems impossible at the time (this is assuming that you know it’s at least possible). I don’t want to trout out the whole “never give up” mantra as that sounds too much self-improvement-guy, it’s more a “never give up without having a proper logical converstation with yourself about it” – that’s not as snappy though!

accountability and digital signs

One of the main concerns that you have as a single founder is forcing yourself to meet goals on a week to week (or daily) basis. Obviously the easiest way to achieve your goals (assuming you have taken the right step and set some) is to have customers pushing and pressing you for action. On the other hand, as a customer I wouldn’t be too happy having to micro-manage a startup on a daily basis. With co-founders this tasks becomes easier, as peer pressure kicks in and accountability becomes easier to manage.

Photo by Swipespot

One way to mitigate this problem is by using your blog to force a level of accountability. Given this, it’s with great pleasure (or more importantly as I said I would do in my last blog post!) I’d like to introduce my very-soon-to-be-live product Neonburn.

So what is Neonburn? Well it’s an online web app that allows you to easily create and design an interactive digital sign for display on an Android tablet or mobile device. The main benefits of using Neonburn:

Easy to create and design without any specialist knowledge or design skills.
The signs are interactive so you can control what happens when someone taps certain objects on the screen.
Signs remotely update when changed via the online app – ideal if you have new promotions that you want to advertise and don’t want to have to manually change each individual tablet, or maybe you don’t even have physical access to the devices at all.
No other apps on the device can be accessed once the app is deployed, and the device always boots to your sign, i.e. customers can’t interact with the device in ways that you don’t want them to.

The application is going to be of interest to you if you manage a retail store or public house and want to make your customers aware of your current promotions, while multi-site organisations will find the ability to remotely change signs in multiple locations simultaneously (without the need for a physical presence) invaluable. The interactive aspect of the signs are ideal for improving customer engagement in situations such as trade shows, or to create interactive displays at museums and galleries. It could also be used by retail stores looking to give customers an interactive tour of their products – without the need to directly involve sales staff. Finally it just makes for a very cool looking signs in your workplace – especially if you have ~~propaganda~~ a set of values or metrics that you want to ensure everyone knows about.

If you would like to be one of the first to try this out (or you want this product right now!!) then please sign up for the pre-launch newsletter on the www.neonburn.com website.

By next week the plan is to have the web app open to those looking to create some great looking signs and then by the end of next week to have the app on the beta channel of the Google Play Store. Obviously, anyone who’s keen to be involved in the process at this early stage can count on getting a discount before we open to the big wide world! Go on.

being a solo founder

So it’s been a while now since my last post and also since I decided to go solo and start out on business for myself. I’m not 100% sure that the former is due to the latter but it most definitely has had an impact. Writing posts is actually a good healthy habit that I have somehow managed to remove from my diet, and to be honest, has probably been to the detriment of creating my own business overall. The fall-off was mainly to do with the fear of writing about stuff that either A) Seems obvious or B) that no one wants to read about. I’ve now got myself over this by simply thinking who cares!

Photo by Kevin Dinkel

Given the above it’s with great pleasure that I present “The fuckwits guide to starting your own business“. This will probably turn into a more what-not-to-do set of posts given my success rate but it’s a case of you’ll get what you get.

First up. Going solo. That is, being a solo founder.

If anyone has not read the stuff by Paul Graham and so the idea has not been force fed that this is kind-of seen as a bad idea then let me tell you it is. Never do it if you have the option of getting someone on board with you, and this is as close as I can bring myself to say don’t bother starting up unless you have a co-founder – yes it’s that important. Unless you have the complete and total discipline to avoid getting sucked down the tar pit of either A) working too hard on the product development or B) working too hard to customer development, then it’s important to have the perspective granted by having more than one founder. I’d imagine that most developers with suffer from (A) more so than (B), and I’ve known that I’m suffering from (A) for quite some time and yet I continue to sink in the tar pit – I’m almost hoping that vocalising it jolts me into action (it didn’t with my last blog post about the very same thing though).

It was hard for me to even suggest that starting a business without a co-founder just shouldn’t be done, as invariably it’s never that straightforward and, in my heart (not head), I think it’s better to start something than nothing. Before deciding to go solo I had been down the rabbit hole of attempting to start a business with others but it always failed to materialise. 99% of the time the reason it failed to even get out the starting blocks was that the other folk were often not willing to take the risk that was involved of possibly having no meaningful income (by which I mean closely matched to their current income) for an extended period of time – possibly more a British (Scottish?) problem.

OK negativity aside what can you do to make it work? Obviously I don’t know or I wouldn’t be failing so miserably at it. However, here are the steps that I’m about to take moving forward:

Be more accountable. I’m currently pretty disciplined on the number of hours I work – I use a timer to ensure that I do enough hours in a day. However a fellow startup founder Lee from icmobilelab.com suggested an accountability buddy! This struck me as a good idea but I felt I had to take it a step further and use this blog to make my accountability a bit more public rather than depending on a single person.
Segment time better. Be more specific about how I spend my time during the day. So something like 8am-10am software development, 10:15am-11:15am write blog post, 11:30-13:30 customer development, and so on. I’ve tried this in the past and if memory serves me correctly it works well – this blog post is sort of evidence of that! Obviously there are days where this becomes harder to organise but it should be the exception rather than the rule.
Get out and speak to people. Potential customers here are the obvious choice but it’s worth meeting other founders or investors even just to catch up. I want to prevent myself from going dark for extended periods of time as it’s never a good idea.
Blog. People like hearing about what other folk are doing so I should do it more – many Scottish people have a curious trait of enjoying seeing others failing, so there’s always an audience! Also developers love telling people how their way of doing stuff is WRONG, so again, even with technical articles, always an audience.

Anyway, shit, over my allocated segmented time for this. Don’t worry going to pencil in another hour for Monday! Maybe more details of what I’ve actually created. Over and out.

are you in it for the long run?

As developers we are often faced with the issue of time vs. quality. Let’s face it though, we could spend forever getting it all just right, from documentation right through to unit testing. However, there has got to be a point when you let it go and see how it flies.

This is particularly true when you are faced with a real-world optimization problem, e.g. scheduling, time tabling, process optimization. Often with this type of problem it is very difficult to obtain an optimal solution. However, I find the more time you spend on the problem the better you understand it, which normally leads to an improved model. In turn, the improved model leads to a better solution, or an equivalent solution found in a shorter time.

This begs the question when do you give up and say it’s finished?

To be honest, I’m not sure what the answer is to that. As a developer I want to keep on going, hoping to pull the rabbit out the bag, but as an employer, I just want the thing done good enough to have a competitive edge.

The same goes for unit testing – especially at a startup. In this setting you are NOTHING until you get your product out the door, and until you do, you are hoping and praying that no one beats you to the punch. Some people say that quality shines through, but how bright it shines I’m not sure. Take myspace as the perfect example. It has no redeeming features – it just got there before everyone else. Does anyone know a band not on myspace though?

However, Google proved that the best product can establish its market regardless of its starting position – I now find it difficult to believe that I thought Altavista was good. It’s important to remember though that for every Google there is a myspace (or the ipod, for that fact) where the first is not the best, but people have invested too much time in their choice to change (or in the case of the ipod, maybe it’s fashion outshining functionality).

So what IS the answer to when is the software ready to go? Maybe the simple answer is “whenever someone is willing to buy it”!

why would you choose .net?

I’ve been wondering for quite some time now why a new startup, on a greenfield project, or even a personal site, would choose to use .NET for web development?

Firstly, this is not a Microsoft bashing article – I’m simply trying to understand the thought behind such a choice. While researching this I noticed another recent article (titled: When Windows beat Linux: a cautionary tale) on something similar, so I will use some of the information from this article.

For those than can’t be bothered to read the article I linked to (as many people on a certain social network site decided to do before apparently casting their vote) I will summarise. The article looks at a case study by a German airline company who was restructuring the IT systems of a bankrupt airline which they had acquired. In this process they were moving from a Linux based “scripting” solution to a Windows based .NET stack.

To aid the discussion let’s say that I’m starting a new mISV (micro Independent Software Vendor – this seems to be the buzz word for startup). What will I be producing? I don’t know, let’s say an online bakery because I LOVE cakes so much. Now suppose that we choose to do this using Python and Django on a Linux dedicated server.

So let’s assume that we are going to be a rip roaring success and that every business close to us will be looking to buy our cakes to reward their industrious employees, i.e. the application should scale reasonably well.

A quick look at the case study seems to imply that for every Windows based server needed, we require 2.5 times the computing power for equivalent performance in the Linux based system:

4 Windows Server IIS 6.0-based computers replacing the 10 computers that had hosted the former Linux version

A quick check on Google reveals that a Windows dedicated server will cost around £120 (~$170) more per year than a Linux server. But I need 2.5 times as many Linux servers as I do Windows servers (assuming my application is going to be maxing out the Windows server). Therefore if a Linux server costs me £600 (~£840) a year, this means that I’m £780 better off with the Windows server as my choice. Hold on though, because, let’s face it, the conclusions drawn about the number of servers required for each solution in the case study are pure bullshit! Right? The case study thinks it’s fair to say that 4 brand new top of the range servers are equivalent to 4 Pentium P3s from heaven knows when. Common sense here states that I would get at least as much performance out of my Linux server as I would the Windows one. Hence I will be saving £120 a year, not gaining £780 as the case study would like you to believe. Now on to the software.

The case study states that:

The Web front-end to the e-commerce solution was rewritten using Microsoft C# technology, introducing object-oriented programming to what had formerly been a script-based solution and enabling the solution to be updated and expanded more easily in response to business requirements…The Web server portion of the solution took three months and $120,000 to develop; had SWISS used Java, Heintel estimates, the solution would have taken 50 percent more time and money.

How the hell did Heintel arrive at that estimate? Christ, every bank in the world would be scrambling to rewrite their enterprise Java apps at that rate. Let’s face it, their estimate was utter nonsense – my Mum could have came up with a better estimate and she still hasn’t figured out how to use that wee-thing-that-you-move-with-your-hand-to-make-the-wee-arrow-thing-on-the-screen-move! Moving on, I didn’t realise that you couldn’t write object-oriented programming on a Linux environment, news to me! I mean it’s not like you could write the exact same object-oriented based solution in a language of your choice, whether it be Python, Java, Ruby or PHP (or even C# using Mono). Therefore instead of saving me money on software it’s going to cost me. Why?

First, I’m going to have to purchase SQL Server, I can’t imagine it’s cheap, say around £800. Not only that, I’m going to have to pay for upgrades that I might need in the future, not to mention more SQL Server licences for any additional db servers should I need them. The Microsoft stack is certainly not saving me any money here.

Now on to the IDE. For the Linux based system I could use NetBeans or Eclipse, which are free. For the Windows based system I could use Visual Studio Express Edition. However, I can’t imagine the Express Editions are good for building large web applications, and I haven’t seen too many Microsoft shops using these editions – am I wrong? Presuming we can’t use the Express Editions, I need to pay for the full version of Visual Studio, which tots in at around £600 per developer. However, the Linux based approach is costing me NOTHING for each additional developer that I add.

Another facet of .NET development I have noticed is that you tend to have to pay for nice developer tools that are otherwise free on non-Microsoft based stacks – Reshaper being the example that springs to mind. Hence you have to factor in the cost of such 3rd party libraries.

All in all it appears that the Windows based system is going to cost me waaaaay more to get started than the Linux equivalent. Costs may not seem that high to some people, but when you have limited financies to start your own mISV, any costs, however small, are something you can do without, more so in the current economic climate.

One thing I have so far failed to take account of is the cost of learning new technology. If you are a veteran C# developer then taking the Linux route would mean learning to use new tools and new languages. However, any developer worth their weight in salt is keen to improve their knowledge and would quickly be able to cope. Most smart developers see it as FUN to learn something new.

What I would like to mention is Microsofts BizSpark. This came to my attention after listening to the Startup Success Podcast of which I have become an avid listener. If memory serves me correctly it drastically reduces the cost of Microsoft development tools for mISVs – sorry I can’t remember the exact price but it’s low (update: please see the comments below for some more info on this). This kind of incentive from Microsoft is a great idea, and something I may look at closely, alongside the Linux based options, in my own mISV ventures I will soon be embarking on.

To sum up: with the exception of the BizSpark incentive, if this truly delivers what it appears to, I just can’t see any reason to choose the .NET stack over a free Linux based solution. Can you?