Iarfhlaith Kelly – Code agus Craic

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.

Last Friday I was on a course entitled “Perfecting Your Pitch”. It was given by Catherine Moonan who coached the Dragon’s Den applicants for the current Irish series.

As part of the day’s course we were recorded on video whilst giving a 10 minute presentation about our business and then took questions from the audience. This was a great exercise and an opportunity to improve my public speaking and my pitch all at the same time. But it got me thinking about doing some video blogging, and the opportunity it affords. However, I’ve decided not to take it up for a number of reasons. Here are my top five picks on why I won’t be video blogging any time soon.

1. Videos Cannot Be Scanned Through by Visitors

When visitors are deciding whether to read a blog post or not, one of the things they often do first is scan their eye over the text to try and get a flavour of what the article is about. With video, this just isn’t possible. Instead, the visitor has to trust that the content of the video is worth watching, something that we cannot always rely on.

2. Watching Videos Is Time Consuming

When you watch a video that has not been edited it’s safe to say that it took you as long to read it as it did for the author to create it. There is no way to speed read the content or to read just the highlighted or bolded text (because there isn’t any).

Quite often I’ll spend no more then 5 seconds running my eye over a post to see if it’s something I might want to invest more time on. With video, there is no equivalent and I have to watch it in full before I know what’s in it.

3. Video Content Cannot be Searched (yet)

Search engines cannot read or understand video content. They cannot index it based on keywords in the audio and they cannot prioritise the importance of the text within it. At least not yet.

This is a major stumbling block for online video content and currently search engines rely on tagging and surrounding text in order to take it’s best guess at the content of the video. This can often mean that search engines index the video content incorrectly or maybe even skip it altogether.

4. Not Exactly Web Friendly

Watching video online requires special browser plugins. The most popular ones are Flash, Media Player and QuickTime. Not all devices have these plugins and depending on how you’re viewing the content you may or may not be able to view it. For example, many YouTube videos don’t embed themselves correctly in RSS feeds.

5. Possibly NSFW (Not Suitable For Work)

You take a small risk when you decide to watch a video in work. Because the truth is you don’t know what’s on the video before you watch it. It might be perfectly suitable or it could surprise you and have inappropriate content halfway through or the audio might include an ear piercing screech. You just don’t know.

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So, because of these reasons I’ll be keeping this blog free of video posts for the forseeable future. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be videos. There’s a difference between a music video or an interview and a video post. With the music video, I know what to expect. But with the video post, well, that’s anybody’s guess.

Locking in your customers doesn’t work. People use what they want to use. If they’re not happy with your service they’re going to leave whether you want them to or not. So opening up your service and giving your customers the choice helps your company look honest and encourages people to trust you.

Earlier today I had a run in with a company that clearly doesn’t get this concept.

Last week I needed to send a fax in a hurry. I didn’t have a fax machine in the office and the faxing service that’s offered in the main building hadn’t opened yet. I was running out of options. So I decided to look online for a faxing service that could send the fax for me. After a short search I found eFax which were offering a 30 day free trial. This sounded perfect because I only needed to send this one fax, after which I could close the account and avoid being charged.

A Decent Online Fax Service

First impressions were good. The sign up process was easy and once logged in, finding my way around the system was fairly intuitive. The eFax system works by assigning your account with a unique local phone number which you can use to send and receive electronic faxes as if they were normal paper faxes. It’s not a new idea, or a new company, but I hadn’t used anything like it before and was pretty impressed by it all. (Actually, any service that helps to break down the barriers between the offline and online worlds usually impresses me.)

Anyway, I sent my fax and I was happy. Crisis averted.

All I had to do now was cancel my eFax account. Unfortunately it wasn’t as easy as I had expected. In fact it was downright difficult. Here’s what happened:

There Was No Cancel Button

As part of the sign up I had to hand over my credit card details. eFax charge a minimum monthly fee of about €7 but with the free trial you get the first 30 days for free. I was keen to cancel my account before this subscription fee kicked in but was disappointed to find that you couldn’t cancel from within the service. There was no cancellation button to be found anywhere.

Online Help – Was Not So Helpful

I decided to try their FAQ section to see if there was any tips on removing or cancelling an account there. But just like in their logged in service, there was no mention of it.

Live Chat Was Like Talking To A Robot

Having given up on the FAQ section I decided to use their live chat facility to manually request that they remove my account. After a short wait, I was through to one of the operators. I quickly explained that I wanted to cancel my account but received a stream of unhelpful, pre-written replies that could just as easily have been delivered by a robot.

Eventually I discovered that I was using the wrong live chat service (sales only) and that eFax had a special dedicated chat line for people who want to cancel their account. It’s also hidden and unadvertised. So here’s the link: https://www.efax.com/en/efax/twa/page/chat

Clearly, they don’t advertise this link on their site to make it even more difficult to cancel an account.

Queue Position 8  – Not Good Enough

Once I managed to get the second live chat up and running (it doesn’t work in Firefox) I was greeted by the message that I was number eight in the queue and that I would have to wait approximately 20 minutes before someone could chat to me about cancelling my account.

The frustration was starting to get the better of me.

After 16 minutes of waiting and a fresh cup of tea I got talking to a support monkey who was eventually able to cancel my account. But that wasn’t before he tried to convince me to stay on until the end of the 30 day trial or before he asked me to fill out a questionnaire on why I wanted to cancel my account.

Lesson of the Day: Trust and Openness Matters Online

I left the chat with a sour taste in my mouth and a severe dislike for the underhanded way in which eFax have designed their ‘free trial’ service.

Let’s not forget, I was happy with the service up until the point where I decided to close my account. Yes, I was cancelling it but there was every chance that I might reopen it in the future and also recommend it to others. But now, after the way that eFax tried to lock me into their service I will never use them again and I won’t be referring them to anyone.

For as long as I can remember, businesses have deliberately attempted to confuse consumers by using over-complicated pricing plans that are hard to compare against the competition.

In today’s Ireland, this is especially true for mortgages, broadband and other telecoms services like mobile phone plans.

Have you ever tried to directly compare mortgage rates? It’s tough because many of them are measured in different ways (variable rate, fixed rate, tracker rate, LTV mortgages, etc.). Using different metrics makes it impossible to directly compare each product. The same goes for broadband. It’s hard to directly compare pricing plans.

But this isn’t going to last much longer.

The Game is Changing

There’s a shift in power that’s moving in favour of the consumer. It’s becoming easier for everyone to see through these deliberate attempts to confuse. Social tools have allowed us to become more organised, and more informed.

Comparison sites like Google’s Product Search, GoCompare (UK only) and PriceRunner (also UK only), are helping consumers make informed decisions that are no longer based on a glossy brochure or a smooth talking salesman. They’re based on the views of their piers and the community. They’re also based on cold hard facts.

It’s Already Happening

Recently, the major mobile service providers here in Ireland have had to launch simplified plans that are more flexible and are easier to compare to the competition. Pat Phelan has done a great job highlighting O2′s new Clear plans that have obviously been launched to counteract Threes new Relax plans.

The Best Value Will Win Out

The move to more transparent pricing models is great news for consumers. It will mean that we’ll always know who’s offering the best deal (on price or service) at any particular time.

This will force businesses to provide more competitive transparent prices instead of offering a set of confusing price plans designed to be hard to compare against the competition. In the end, the business providing the best value will win out.

And that’s great news for all of us.

This morning, Microsoft launched a preview of what they’re calling the Mesh Operating Environment (MOE). It’s an online platform geared at solving the device divergence, data convergence issue that I wrote about recently.

From the new www.mesh.com website, here’s the official description:

“Live Mesh puts you at the center of your digital world, seamlessly connecting you to the people, devices, programs, and information you care about— available wherever you happen to be.”

Sounds like the perfect solution, except it’ll only support windows devices (for now). See Scoble’s review for the full background to the launch.

Why Am I Interested?

This is Microsoft’s first real attempt at an online application. When it’s fully launched (probably in October this year), it’ll no doubt prove extremely popular, and as a developer I need to make sure that my own applications will be ready when this happens.

Microsft’s Mesh is going to provide a few interesting ways for developers to hook in their own applications. It’ll support ‘two-way RSS’ and have a RESTful API. Both of which combined enable other applications to fully interact with the MOE.

So why am I interested again? I’m interested because if this is where the community is going, my applications will need to provide tight integration options with it.

Critical Mass of Adoption

Once there are enough people using it, and I don’t think that’ll take too long (there are over 10,000 beta testers alone), Microsoft’s Mesh will likely become a one stop shop for online file management.

If it’s possible to integrate this online file system with existing web applications (my own included), which I think it will be, then people’s expectations of traditionally ‘stand-alone’ web applications will sky rocket.

Having fragmented data strewn across the Internet at various locations may not cut it anymore. People want their data in a central location (at least I do), so if I stumble across a web application that does what I need and also integrates with my existing online storage, I’ll be sold on the spot.

Now all I need is a beta preview account to help me prepare. Anyone feeling generous?