Iarfhlaith Kelly – Code agus Craic

I’ve had my HP Compaq nx7300 for over 6 years now. It owes me nothing. Over the years, I’ve practically rebuilt it entirely. It’s on it’s second motherboard, 3rd hard drive, second battery, and will more than likely need a new screen in the next few months. It’s also on it’s second power adaptor, which for the last month has been threatenting to fail. And this morning, that’s exactly what happened. Bye bye power adaptor. At least for now.

I’ve ordered a new adaptor from the good folk at laptopchargers.ie, based in Cork.  But in the mean time, and with nothing to lose, I thought I’d have a go at repairing my own one.

The Right Tools for the Job

To do the job, I used only the tools that most people have in their toolbox. If you want to try this yourself you’ll need a wire-strippers, scissors, masking tape, a long nosed pliers, wire cutters, a blade, a mini hacksaw, and something to pry open the case. I used a tool for wedging up hammered nails, but a chisel or sharp flathead screwdriver will work just as well.

Opening the Plastic Casing

The hardest part of the repair job is getting the black plastic casing open. For this, I started with the blade and worked into the seam around the entire adaptor. Once the grove was large enough, I used the hacksaw to open it further until I could see that I’d broken through the plastic.

There are four little clips inside the adaptor at each corner which you’ll have to break in order for it to come apart. This is where you’ll need the screwdriver or chisel. Pry open each corner until you hear a little snap. After you’ve done each corner you should be able to lift off the top and bottom of the plastic casing.

Finding the Problem

Once the casing was off I could see more clearly where the cable enters the adaptor and how it’s wires were organised. In your case it will help to have an idea of where abouts your wire is damaged. For me, I knew it was very close to the inside of the casing as there was no visible damage to the adaptor and it could only be damaged at the point where the cable meets the board.

As it happens my hunch was right, as the majority of the secondary shielding had snapped.

Removing the Insulation

Next, I cut the power cord about one inch from the hard plastic surround at the base of the cable. I wanted to leave myself enough wire to work with at that end.

There were three parts to the power cord, an outer shielding, and inner shielding, and a central wire to carry the current. Once cut, I stripped off the outer insulation and twisted them off to keep them neat.

I then did the same thing with the end of the cable, discarding the broken section.

Here you’ll see I stripped back the cable, exposing the three different layers. I was careful to stagger the stripped insulation so as not to cause a short circuit later on. The photo above only shows two layers stripped back but remember to strip back the third blue inner wire as well.

Adding Insulation

Now that each side was stripped and all the damaged cable had been removed it was ready to be re-connected. I carefully twisted each cable together and then covered each connection with masking tape.

Next, I added another layer of masking tape over the individual cables, bringing them together and stabilising them.

In the above photo, you can see I’ve added the extra layer of masking tape. And in the background of the photo lies the hard outer protection designed to stop the cable becoming damaged by rough use. I had to slit this down the side to remove it, but having done that, it meant it was quite easy to wrap it back around the cables, giving them even more support.

Adding Back the Casing

Once the wires were fuly protected and insulated, I added back the plastic casing, wrapping masking tape at each end to hold it in place.

And that was it!

The whole process took about an hour, and costed just a few pieces of masking tape. Can’t get much better then that. The adaptor is working fine again now, for the moment anyway. I’ll update this post if I have any issues with the repaired adaptor over the next few weeks.

Here’s one more close up photo of the fixed outer casing.

Footprint was my first real web app with Webstrong, but for a multitude of reasons I never launched it. I have no regrets with that decision, it was definitely the right thing to do at the time. But lately I’ve been looking back on what I’ve achieved so far and I’ve decided that despite Footprint never reaching it’s potential as a business, it can still provide some value as an open source project.

The Original Idea

Started in 2007, I came up with the idea whilst on a flight to China, having just finished 37 Signals’ Getting Real. Feeling totally inspired and with absolutely no market research whatsoever I went about wireframing up a web app, that I would use myself, to help me work more effectively with the web design clients I had at the time in Webstrong.

During the flight, I filled a large notebook with ideas, features, names, technologies, wireframes, and even the infrastructure of the software. The ideas were pouring out of me. I wrote hundreds of pages. Filling the notebook on that flight was and still is the most productive work I’ve ever done.

Two weeks later, on the return flight to Dublin, after having fleshed out the plans for the app over the holiday, I began coding. As luck would have it, we were upgraded to business class, which gave me plenty of room to work on my laptop and personal access to power. I began coding. Whilst others slept on the flight I was writing code. I coded non stop for 14 hours, another session of extreme productivity, and by the time we touched down in Dublin Airport I had the outline of a working prototype.

Getting Support

Over the next week, I put together an application for the Hothouse incubation programme after having heard about it from a friend. As luck would have it, they were just closing their next round of the programme and I managed to get an interview straight away. And so, with no business plan, a working prototype, a hastily filled out form, and a 2 hour interview I managed to land a place on Hothouse.

Over the next month, I continued to work on the app, adding new features, multi-tenancy, and even built out the start of the promo site. During the same time, I prepared my CORD grant application, a business grant from Enterprise Ireland, aimed at technology startups with international potential. It gave you half your salary from the previous year, tax free, up to a maximum of €38,000. Entrprise Ireland took no equity in the business and the money didn’t have to be paid back or even matched. It was, and still is, the cheapest way to fund your startup in Ireland.

Whatever I said in the CORD interview, I must have impressed the judges, because a few weeks later, I was approved for the grant. And sure enough, the next month I began to receive the first of 12 monthly payments into my personal bank account. Plenty of cash to support me whilst I worked on and launched Footprint.

Polishing and Polishing

I was on a roll. I was 25, and running an Enterprise Ireland funded technology startup. Over the next few months, nothing could stop me. I added features, installed a blog, a forum, integrated Amazon’s new S3 storage, OpenID, RSS, and even made a start on an RESTful API. I did some real market research, wrote a proper business plan, went to networking events, told people about what I was doing, got feedback – some good, some bad. I did all of this, all without launching the actual app.

This was my mistake. In hindsight, I now know that my ego was too fragile to launch an app that I wasn’t completely happy with. I had a minimum viable product, but I kept on polishing it. I postponed launching it, constantly giving myself reasons not to launch. Despite what everyone was telling me, I felt I knew best, and that launching now was a mistake. However, nothing was further from the truth.

Failure to Launch

The truth was, launching it immediately was the only way it could have worked at all. These days, once you have an MVP (minimum viable product) it’s time to launch. Period.

And as time went on, I got distracted. People started asking me to help them on their own projects, I got busier, and worked less often on Footprint. And all the time in the back of my mind was this doubt, that it simply wasn’t good enough.

In reality, I should have let the public decide whether it was good enough.

Over time, development on Footprint slowed, and eventually stopped. Consulting took over, and the seduction of a large paycheck won out. I guess I just wasn’t ready for what could have been.

Finding My Passion

That was in 2008. Almost 4 years ago. What I learned through that process has helped shape my career ever since and gave me my mission for the rest of my life. Despite the failure, I had found my passion  – I wanted to run a web app business. Bleeding edge technology, community, leverage, global reach, passive recurring income. It had everything. It was looking likely now that it wasn’t going to be Footprint. But the lessons  I learned from that journey gave me skills and experience that ironically I may not have gotten had it succeeded.

Having learned so much, and gotten so much out of it, I wanted to share it with you – especially if you’re thinking of getting into the business of web apps. It’s the greatest industry in the world. And whilst the rest of the world is in a deep recession, web apps are booming.

Going Open Source

Now it’s 2012, and rather then have Footprint continue to gather cobwebs on an old server, I’ve decided to give others the chance to learn what I’ve learned. And so, as of today I’m opening up Footprint completely and releasing it open source.

The Footprint web app has been fully launched now at footprintapp.com, despite it not being completely polished.

I’ve released the source code on GitHub under the Open Software License v3.0. Included is a full installation guide and database generation scripts. If you want to host a copy of it yourself, you can. If you want to improve the currently hosted version, just make your changes and send a pull request. If you want to strip it down and take out the pieces you need for your own project, that’s fine too.

To help understand how Footprint works, here’s an overview of it’s system architecture. I wrote about it in more detail previously.

Footprint was built in PHP 4.2 on an Apache web server, and uses PEAR and the Smarty Template Engine extensively. You will need a MySQL database and an Amazon AWS account to get everything up and running. Follow the instructions in the installation guide for step by step instructions.

What Next

Nothing would make me happier, then for someone to take a copy of this code and do something interesting with it. In fact, if all they did was write some improvements and use it themselves, then that would be just perfect. Footprint is now open source – that’s the whole idea! It’s over to you now to decide what you’d like to do with it.

Writing this I’m on the train heading north from Wexford to Dublin after having spent a couple of very relaxing days with my cousin Eoin, his wife Beth and their new baby boy.

Aside from having a great break to help slow down after a hectic Christmas schedule we also decided to redesign Beth’s business website Kavanagh Ensemble. A tall order given we had only a single day to do it!

Beth is a classically trained violin and viola player with experience playing in some of the top classical orchestras including the London Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Now based in Wexford, she has launched an ensemble service for hire, perfect for weddings, corporate functions and recording sessions.

The only thing letting her down was her website. Officially I don’t do website development anymore, I’m concentrating on thedebs.ie and consulting for tech startups, but every now and again I’ll help someone out and set them up with a freebie. So, armed with a cup of tea and the last remaining tin of Christmas biscuits I went about building a new website for Beth and her exciting new business.

Time was limited so I decided to keep things simple. No point reinventing the wheel. I installed the latest copy of WordPress onto Beth’s hosting account and then together we went about choosing an existing theme that suited her needs.

After many searches on Google for things like “WordPress themes for musicians” we found a great theme called SimplePress by Elegant Themes.

Access to the theme cost $39. A small cost considering we received a fully ready to go WordPress theme in the exact style that Beth wanted, saving me days of coding. It also included a collection of shortcodes which act like widgets that can help structure the layout of each page.

Now that the theme was purchased and installed, we went about configuring it and adding content. Beth had had a number of photoshoots done in the past and already had plenty of content, so adding it all in was simply a cut and paste job.

Beth also had a large number of sample tracks in mp3 format which she wanted to make available so site visitors could listen to previous performances. Instead of spending time building an audio player I setup a free SoundCloud account. From there we uploaded all of the tracks. Once up on SoundCloud we were able to embed the tracks easily into the site using the WordPress SoundCloud plugin (although you don’t actually need this to embed the tracks – it just makes it easier).

And finally Beth wanted to display her full repertoire on the site. This is a long list of all the compositions that the Kavanagh Ensemble can play. Everything from pop to classical. Duos, trios and quartets. To list the repertoire easily I took advantage of another great WordPress plugin called WP-Table Reloaded. Here we were able to import the lists directly from Excel saving hours of time. The table plugin allowed the data to be sorted anyway the visitor wanted, searched, and automatically paginated the data.

And that was about it. Total time worked on the site was about 12 hours. Broken down as follows:

• WordPress install: 1 hour
• Theme search: 2 hours
• Theme install and configuration: 2 hours
• Photo prep and page creation: 3 hours
• Soundcloud Setup: 2 hours
• WP Table import and setup: 1 hour
• Final few checks incl. G. analytics: 1 hour

And here’s the end result: http://kavanagh-ensemble.com.

Just goes to show you can create a really great looking site in a single day using existing tools without having to write any code at all.

A well funded business doesn’t have to focus on profits, or in some cases even revenue. I believe this is a risk, which can damage the potential of a business and prevent it from learning important lessons early on that could cost it huge amounts of money down the line.

Many startups are rightly encouraged to launch early and then iterate like crazy, constantly listening to their customer feedback, honing their product into something ready for sale. This makes sense for bootstrapped businesses, and often it’s the only way they can operate since they’ve no choice but to chase revenue in order to keep the business going.

You’d think that a well funded business would follow the same approach. Sure, they don’t need the revenue quite as early, but the value they’d get from the customer feedback could save them millions of dollars later on.

Case Study: Segway Inc.

Take the case of the Segway PT, the innovative ‘personal transporter’. This is a great example of how a well funded startup can get it wrong by not testing their product in the wild first. The company was founded in 1999 by an inventor named Dean Kamen. Born in New York, Dean’s history is an interesting one. He’s a great example of the modern day inventor and the more I read about him the more impressed I am with what he’s achieved. But all his great inventive abilities and personal success couldn’t help his new plucky startup get the basics right.

The first Segway was unveiled in December 2001 to much fanfare, and was announced as a revolution in personal transportation. The company had announced an annual sales target of 40,000 units in it’s first year and expected to clear 100,000 in the subsequent 13 months. But things did not go according to plan. In fact, things went so bad that between 2001-2007 there was less than 30,000 units sold in total – not exactly a revolution.

Nowadays Segway are extremely coy about their financials and many believe that they are still not profitable. To date, Segway have received €151M in funding so it’ll take a while for them to pay that back at the rate they’re growing now.

The problem with the Segway, as most people know, is that you look like an idiot when you’re on one. There is a zero coolness factor for having one and you can probably expect to be slagged by your friends if they see you using one. As a result, hardly anyone buys them.

This could have been easily avoided, but with their well funded manufacturing plant in New Hampshire, Segway steamed on ahead producing thousands of units without getting proper feedback from their customers first. It’s my view that if Segway was a bootstrapped company and not a well funded one, they would have been forced to start selling earlier, and getting feedback from their customers. They would have realised that yes, the Segway was not cool, and making a vehicle that people actually looked good while they used it was as important as all the other benefits.

But this didn’t happen. They had their heads buried in the sand, or in this case, in the lab. Their funding was the catalyst for their mistakes. Without it, they would have been forced to launch earlier, and they would have realised their design flaws well before they’d spent millions in production.

Segway are still operating today, but they’ve moved into different markets and mostly focus on corporate sales. They might get it right in the end, but not before the’ve wasted millions of dollars on poor decisions that could have been prevented by getting early feedback and iterating like crazy.

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I witnessed the benefits of this approach first hand on thedebs.ie this month. We’re a bootstrapped startup that’s now well and truly trading. We’re learning new things from our customers everyday and we’re constantly changing our plans, our strategy, our revenue streams and our business models as a result.

A bootstrapped startup is a crazy roller coaster ride, but because we have no other choice then for it to be profitable from day one, we’re open to making those changes as soon as they need to happen. That’s an important lesson for me, and I’m sure for everyone else out there trying to do something new.

If you’ve got a great story about launching early and iterating quickly, why not drop a comment below? The more people that learn this lesson the better.

UPDATE: It seems that in 2009, Paul Graham of Y Combinator fame wrote a very similar post to this one.

They say that when everyone is panning for gold that you should sell pans.

It’s a clever statement and fits well with the spirit of an entrepreneur. I’ve heard it used time and again in the web industry as an argument for building software designed for other software developers. Over the last few years as I’ve become more experienced in the business of web apps I have formed a view on this which I’d like to share.

The argument for selling to other software developers

Positioning your business to sell to other software developers can be very attractive. There are a lot of reasons why you or I would see that as an easy market to target. Here’s a quick list of some of the benefits of designing software for other developers like myself:

• we’re online all the time, so it’s easy to market and advertise to us;
• there’s a strong community of developers, it’s easy to find us;
• we value good software and are willing to pay for it if it makes our life easier in some way;
• we understand the business model. We ‘get’ why you’re charging us;
• we’re not scared to buy online, it’s second nature to us;
• we also tend to be noisy. If we find something we like, we share it with other people;
• and we’re not afraid to try new things.

All things considered, it’s pretty easy to see why more and more developers are choosing to build tools for other developers. Here are some great examples of software especially targetted to other web developers:

1. Basecamp
2. Freshbooks
3. Campaign Monitor
4. Postmark
5. Intercom
6. Stripe
7. Twilio
8. Wufoo
9. Beanstalk
10. Springloops

There are new ones popping up everyday. Just keep and eye on Read Write Web or Smashing Magazine and you’ll see what I mean.

It’s hard to argue against what companies like this are doing. There are some really really good reasons why an entrepreneur would go after web developers as a target market. But I’m going to give it a shot anyway, and tell you why I believe we, the web developers and entrepreneurs, should be looking beyond our own community to build a web business.

The argument against selling to other web developers

If all web developers only sold to other web developers then that micro economy would be a zero sum game.

Just for a moment, let’s use our imagination and try to think of the web community as a country, it’s population made up entirely of web developers and the trading that goes on between those web developers are that country’s local economy. Are you with me so far? Okay good. Now try to think of everyone else (i.e. the non-developer folk) as the populations that make up the other countries in the world.

Okay, now let’s try and think of this argument in terms of a local and an international economy. By trading amongst each other we are simply pushing money around between us. Web developers selling to other web developers.  We’re not helping to bring new money into the local economy.

Let’s keep the analogy going for a little longer and focus now on the international economy. Web developers that sell to to the non technical folk, the people that make up the other countries, are helping to bring in new money. They’re expanding into new markets and growing beyond their local community. They’re figuring out how to bring new wealth into the economy.

The web developers who simply sell to other web developers are really just passing on the responsibility to someone else to figure out how to bring in new money to the web app economy.

Selling outside of the web development community has a number of very real benefits:

• it’s a huge market. Millions of different niches, billions of potential customers;
• there’s less competition. When everyone’s selling to developers, you could be selling to everyone else;
• there are tons real of problems that need solving;
• opportunities for new business ideas are everywhere.
• there’s less of a risk you’ll be providing a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist;

All that being said, there are some developers and companies who have decided to step outside the community and are selling into new industries. Here are some great examples of software targetted to people who are not web developers:

1. Diary Monitor – built for Dentists & Doctors
2. Decisions for Heroes – built for Search and Rescue Teams
3. Salon Monster – built for Beauty Salons
4. Snapizzi – built for Professional Photographers
5. Fishpond – built for the Film Industry

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Just in case you think I’m against writing apps for other developers, I’m not, I’m simply saying there are massive opportunities outside of our own community. In fact I believe that as an industry we’ve spent the last 10 years honing our skills, learning how to build great software and laying the groundwork for us to go out beyond our comfort zones and to start solving bigger problems. With the foundations laid, and our understanding of web apps and online software a little more mature, I think we should start to look beyond our backyard, to start ‘trading internationally’ and start solving problems for other industries, and not just our own.

Photo credit: Killiney Bay at dusk. November 6th 16:20. Taken with an iPhone 4.