Wille Faler’s Buzzword Bingo

Wicket RAD is going in somewhat of a start-stop mode at the moment (I’m not getting paid to develop it, but I use it for a lot of work that gets me paid), as any open source project.

But I’ve decided to start working a little on the Wiki. So if you are using Wicket RAD and feel comfortable either mentioning the company that you have used it with, or even better, would like to point to an app using it and giving a short one or two line description of how you use it, please send me a comment or mail! I’d like to add a little “Powered by Wicket RAD” section to the home page of the wiki.

SVNsite, a subversion hosting service, now has a private hosted issue tracking on all plans (made available to existing customers already of course).
The issue tracker of choice in this case fell on JTrac, a lightweight yet flexible and powerful issue tracker that should be suitable for most needs, and quite good for managing roadmaps as well.

The choice of JTrac was made for several reasons – it is lightweight, very easy to install and deploy (hence provision for new customers automatically), and it is written in Java.
Furthermore, it is written in Wicket, which is a plus for several reasons – first of all it keeps the number of technologies used for SVNsite down (the main app is built in Wicket too), which makes maintenance that much easier when skillsets can be leveraged across functionality.
Finally it promotes quality Wicket applications, which is not a bad thing as an added bonus.

..seems about right for most places..

This is a short story of how my life aspirations have changed over the last 7 years, and more importantly, why.

Back in 2002 I was poor, actually, I think the technical term would be destitute.
I had just crashed and burned with a startup I was trying to get off the ground, in debt, no job, and I had a messy and protracted break up with the woman I loved after going through an abortion with her.
I had a roof over my head (barely), but I could barely afford food and to be able to keep clean and tend to my toilette “needs”, I stole soap and toilette paper from public toilettes. I was probably as skinny as I’ve ever been due to lack of food and the beginnings of malnutrition.
Despite all this, stubborn pride kept me from going to the government and ask for a handout I surely would have received.

At my most desperate hour, an opportunity arose to leave Sweden behind for work, and I did it with a bag over my shoulder and a one way ticket I had paid for with the last of my (borrowed) money, never to look back (I still remember the day: Sunday the 6th of October of 2002 was the last time I ever called Sweden “home”).
A friend and former colleague I worked with at the job I went to had an “aha” moment when he heard the background story for the first time just a week ago. He and another colleague I befriended at the time thought I seemed a tad greedy and obsessed with money at the time.
Let’s put it this way: if you don’t have any, and barely even live hand-to-mouth, money all of a sudden becomes pretty darn important to you. It might not buy you happiness, but at least it can buy you some piece of mind and pay away a lot of your troubles.

If there ever was a character building period of my life, that would be it. I probably wasn’t in a “comfortable” position where I was clearly on my feet until sometime in 2005, it took me a good three years of barely scraping by to get out of the abyss, both financially and emotionally.
That being said, I really was obsessed with money, I thought it was the be-all, end-all goal in life.
Suffice to say, as my level of comfort and affluence has risen out of the depths of desperation, my priorities have changed. I sure as hell never want to be back in the vulnerable position I was back then, but at the same time money beyond having a little for security, basic needs and a certain level of lifestyle, traveling and spending is no longer that important to me.

What is important to me these days is independence and freedom, I want enough wealth and money in my pocket so I can say “f*** off!” to people if I think they deserve it, I don’t want to depend on anyone. I love what I do, but I want the freedom to at least have the time to myself to work on my own things from time to time, even if it is only to scratch some curiosity. I want to be able to take a little longer off from time to time, to travel, lay on a beach and soak up the sun, take “mini retirements” in the middle of life if you will.
Why wait until your 65 to do the things you always wanted to do? You might be too old, too weak, too sickly, or even dead by then. Take the opportunity.
In the lack of a rich inheritance, I obviously have to do some work, but what I strive for above all is freedom, independence and a balance between what I need to do and what I want and love to do.

Money is important to a certain extent, but life is there to be lived.
I want to learn, explore, enjoy, create and work in a balance that will leave me with no regrets. If I make a few bucks along the way, that’s fine with me, but it’s never the endgame.

There is one thing that scares the bejesus out of me: the complete lack of any sort of basic understanding of economics that afflicts politicians and policy makers these days.

It seems that spending, spending, spending will save the day according to the politicians..
Lets put this into an example: if spending money makes the economy go round and makes us wealthy, why don’t we all just line up on the streets and hand £20 bills back and forth between us, and we shall all become fabulously wealthy?
The simple truth is, shifting money around does not make anyone wealthier or better off. There is only one thing that makes us wealthier and better off: that is producing goods and services that improve peoples life quality and enables them in turn to produce more wealth.

Me handing over a £20 bill to you, and you handing it back to me is a zero sum game.
But if I instead create a product or service that costs me £10 to produce, I sell it on to you for £15, but that same product enables you to either save or make £20 in time or money, the net result is that we are both £5 better off than we where before. That is what wealth creation is about. But lets be clear here: the creation of wealth was in me creating a product you wanted, and certainly NOT in the act of you handing over £15.

The above example is the thing that gets lost in the chatter by pundits and politicians. Hiring lots of people to shovel papers in government programmes will only achieve one thing: wealth destruction. Yet it is what politicians plan to do when they speak of “stimulus” and “investment”.
People should call their bluff when all they do is impoverish us by spending our current and future wealth for the sake of political expedience and winning the next election by pandering to their special interest groups.

An important lesson to remember in these tough days of blame-storming and activist government.

When I was younger and had ideas for businesses I used to be paranoid about people stealing my ideas.
No more, an idea is nothing but a figment of your imagination unless you take active steps to make it reality. Ideas are a dime a dozen.

I have realized that I am no longer afraid of people stealing my ideas, but I am afraid of people stealing my knowledge and ability to execute.

My edge is not my ideas, it’s my capacity to effectively make them happen.

I have previously been a fan of the so called “Freemium” business model – giving away something for free in the hope that a premium service will entice some of the users to pay you. I have dabbled with this business model a few times myself, and I have also given it a lot of thought in the context of other businesses that have gained traction and hype.
I believe that Freemium has a few fundamental flaws unless you are in the media business and/or your business can go viral (which is far fewer businesses than claim to be “viral”).

The first problem I see with Freemium is that the conversion rate from free to premium will normally be miniscule, we are talking a few percent of users having to pay for the use of all the users. Furthermore there is a problem of finding something that is actually valuable enough compared to the free offering that people will pay for.

The second obvious problem is that “free” attracts the wrong people – the passers by, the cheapskates and the freeloaders.
I tend to like the comparison between Windows and Mac to a certain extent: Piracy is rampant among Windows computers, whereas it is a negligible problem on the Mac problem, personally I think this is due to a combination of buying a Mac is a conscious effort, people who buy Macs pay more, but are prepared to do so for a different sort of computing experience.
Windows on the other hand comes with most computers, so everyone gets it. When everyone gets it, there are bound to be a few people with either more loose moral boundaries, different values, or just simply not the financial motivation and means to pay because other things are more important to them (like food).
Note! I’m not painting all windows users with the same brush here!
I’m merely pointing out that Apple has some “disqualifiers” in how they “choose” their own customers, making Mac users as a group more likely to be willing and able to pay for things they perceive as valuable.

A final example of “free” attracting the wrong people is a very simple one: do you honestly believe that you will one day convert people to pay you money, if they are not even willing to part with $5 to get your product or service?!
If people are not willing to part with even a minuscule sum it means one of two things – either they are cheap and will never give you their money anyway, OR your service/product is simply so useless and pointless that it’s not even worth $5.

Thirdly, giving away something for free delays the crucial feedback on whether or not people will want to part with their money for your product or service, hence it delays your knowledge on whether you actually have a viable business or not! Without the feedback, it could mean that you don’t have a business and that you are simply throwing money down a hole.

Fourth, if you are giving something away for free that is actually costing you something, there is the risk that it will eventually kill you, or force you to pull the free offering to great dissatisfaction of your community and user base. Among the competition to SVNsite, there have been several competitors that in the past have given away free service, but they have all gone the same way eventually – they have either pulled the free offering and forced users to leave or pay up, or they have scaled down the free offering to a level where it is close to useless.
If your customers are paying you and carrying their own cost, it will and should actually give them and you some piece of mind – because they pay for a service, they have some level of guarantee that the service will remain as is, baring a collapse of the company behind the service.

Fifth and final: if you don’t charge it will have two effects on the users of your service, they will perceive it as not worth a lot and secondly they don’t have much of an active investment in the service and hence not much of a reason to come back.
A couple of years ago I built an online project management application I was very proud of, that was free to use. Compared to my SVNsite there are some baffling differences: the project management application had less signups than SVNsite in 12 months, than SVNsite has had in three weeks, and people tended to only use it for a couple of months before leaving. With SVNsite, I have asked for money upfront, yet people keep signing up, and they keep coming back (I think)!

This being said, it is not a 100% indictment of Freemium, just a critique of the hype around it: Freemium might work if your business is content- or “social media/networking” in its nature AND can go viral, but it it doesn’t fulfill any of those criteria my firm belief is that it is of limited use.

Apple has sometimes been ridiculed with the implication that it sometimes seems that they start with the ads and then create a product to fit the ad and image they want to convey.

Personally, I’m starting to question whether or not that isn’t actually a pretty smart way to go about it. Don’t get me wrong, most of us don’t have Apples marketing clout, brain or above all resources, we can’t do things the same way Apple does, but somewhere there is a nugget of wisdom in their approach, their image and success isn’t down to pot luck.

Let me elaborate: in today’s world the barriers to overcome technological barriers, to create brilliant and technologically sophisticated products are very small. For the most part a sufficiently smart guy sitting in his bedroom will be able create products that are at least as good as anything created by an army of minions at one of industry’s clay footed giants.
Innovation is accelerating and new technology will keep coming through, but making the technological achievements is no longer the greatest challenge because we are all standing on the shoulders of giants, accelerating our progress exponentially.

The biggest challenge today is rising above the noise, not being drowned out in a cacophony of voices trying to be heard, trying to tell prospective customers why they should choose their product or service.
In such an environment, starting from the end might not be such a bad idea.

If you don’t know exactly who your customers are, and exactly how you are going to reach them, your business is screwed. This is why I have made a 180 degree shift in my thinking about business and entrepreneurship in the last year or two – when attention is scarce and the noise is loud you need to know who your customer is, where you’ll find him/her and exactly how you are going to get through to them. And oh, you’ve got about 5 seconds to get through to them before they browse past you.

In an environment with these characteristics, ideas and technological sophistication are secondary, they are merely enablers. Simplicity and a plan for communicating with your customers is at the forefront, and if that is the case, starting from the perspective of how to engage them rather than starting with the product might not be such a bad idea..