Posts filed under 'Tools for Startups'
March 11th, 2010
I met Matt Perez in 2003 just as I was starting SKMurphy. It was the tail end of nuclear winter in Silicon Valley and folks were trying to figure out what was next. We kept running into one another at various networking events and as we got to know one another realized that we both had a passion for technology and innovation.
After I facilitated the Conversation Central roundtables on “Global Teams” at the 2009 Design Automation Conference I decided that a significant shift was underway where not only were teams in larger firms more often global but startups and small technology firms were going global much earlier in their life cycle than had been the case in the 1990’s. One of the enablers for this is a host of low cost collaboration tools. Some that are synchronous like Skype and real time dashboards, and others that are “quasi-synchronous” like wikis, distributed source code management and Yammer. These tools enable faster decision making because the team is able to maintain a “shared situational awareness.”
After a lunch with Matt in December where we had discussed this trend he agreed to share some of the ways that his firm, Nearsoft, was using Yammer and other collaboration tools to enable them to keep distributed teams providing development services and ongoing support in sync.
Q: Can talk you a little bit about what your firm does? I understand that your focused is on outsourced product development.
Nearsoft is a software product development firm with operations in Mexico. We work best as innovation partner to ISVs, SaaS companies and consumer-facing sites. These businesses understand that software is at the core of their business and they demand to work with people who are as dedicated and serious as they are about building great software.
We specifically avoid working with businesses that treat their software as a “backroom” operation or, worse, as a necessary evil.
Q: How do you work with clients?
We work in long-term relationships with our clients. We create teams around each client, with the right skills in the appropriate technologies. As the new team learns about the client’s business, they can contribute to all aspects of it, not just the raw coding.
Short-term, project-based engagements don’t work for us and I don’t believe they work for clients, either. It may work for doing something of the side, some throw-away code. But for the core product, you want to have a stable team of people that work well together.
We invest heavily in hiring the best and brightest and have created an environment that helps attract and retain that level of talent. A big part of that is because of the opportunity to work with leading-edge companies in the Valley as part of their core team. If we had people work on little projects here and there, we would not get the good ones; or, if we got them, they would not stick around for long.
Q: What collaboration tools do you use internally and with clients to support your methodology and your engagement model?
A: The first that comes to mind is Yammer, a Twitter-like system but for private use. Our folks are used to Twitter, so using Yammer was a natural. It works great for geographically distributed teams because it helps maintain a team presence.
In the situation where everybody in a team works out of the same office, team presence is a function of being physically in the office at the same time. Without consciously checking, you know when people are “there” and when they’re not. Yammer serves a similar function in that even if I am not reading each posting individually, I get a sense of people being “there” as the stream flows through.
It’s also a casual environment where people can jump in and out without much protocol. If I am looking for somebody, I can just ask “anybody seen Joe?” and one or more people will respond. Also, if people are joking around a particular event, you can also jump in and do the water cooler thing that’s part of social cohesion of effective groups.
Besides Yammer, we use Skype a lot. For example, a group of us keep a Skype “group chat” open all the time that we use a lot like Yammer. The reason we do it on Skype is that it’s easier to switch to voice conferencing when the text chats get too convoluted.
One of our client teams uses video all the time. They use both Skype and Adobe Connect.
Of course, we also use a number of tools to keep track of open issues, source code control, etc.
Q: What has been the impact of Yammer on your ability to deliver results?
Yammer and Skype and the rest of these real-time tools give us and our clients the benefit of being in touch constantly. Little problems and misunderstanding remain “little,” they don’t snowball into big, hairy messes. One person may say, “I am going to implement X using Y” and immediately another will jump in with “No, you shouldn’t use Y for reason Z.” They may go back and forth in the text stream, clarifying things. Then switch to voice or video. Misunderstanding is cleared before any major work is wasted building the wrong solution.
Without something as immediate as Yammer or IM tools, the question may sit in somebody’s email for a day before anybody looks at it. By then, the wrong solution may be finished only to be thrown away.
BTW, that is true for the folks working physically in the same office. In many ways, it is more convenient to casually ask a question or make a comment using one of the tools than in person. You can ask your question without “imposing” on the other people to drop what they’re doing to answer your question. The other people can choose when to respond. If they glance at it and see a “Google It” question, then they can just ignore it. If it looks important, then they can direct their attention to it at their convenience.
Q: What, if anything would you do differently?
When I started the company I tried several models before settling on the way we operate today. It would have been nice if somehow I could have gone through that part of it a bit more quickly.
We’ve had a couple of startup clients that didn’t make through the crisis in 2009. I thought they were dynamite businesses and wished they could have been able to stay in business. We helped all we could but in the end they didn’t make it.
Q: What else have you learned from working internally and with customers in this fashion?
The most salient thing for me is that cultural alignment is key. Effective communications include a ton of stuff that’s never said; it literally goes without saying. There’s a lot of “y’know what I mean?” in there and it would be too costly, emotionally and in time, to explain every little subtlety that goes on in a conversation. Likewise, it can very expensive when people miss out any of those subtleties. To deal with this you need to make sure that everybody in the team is aligned with the goals of the business and that they “know” what it takes to get there.
One example I can think of is when a developer is asked when he can get something “done.” If we both don’t have the same understanding of what “done” means, then we are going to end up in hot water.
Q: Thanks for your time
For some outstanding examples of how to blend humor into an explanation of a complex service I would encourage you to take a look at two of Nearsoft’s videos:
I really appreciate Matt’s willingness to talk about some of the practical challenges in working in a geographically distributed organization. If you would like to talk about lessons learned from your startup or innovative business practices that you would be willing to talk candidly about, please contact me and we can explore an interview that would be of interest to bootstrapping entrepreneurs.
February 6th, 2010
This is a start articulating a set of resources that are for the most part not yet part of entrepreneurial thinking but that have had a significant impact on my perspective. I welcome any suggestions or lists from readers for what has influenced you, and opened you to new perspectives on your entrepreneurial journey.
What follows are my two year old answers, in no particular order to a question on Hacker News: Articles, Ideas, Books and/or Concepts that have changed your life.
I developed the list thinking about my approach to business and entrepreneurship, which is narrower than “life” and accounts for a lack of spiritual, marital, self-mastery, and personal improvement books and ideas.
- Myers-Briggs Model for Personality
- “Four Steps to the Epiphany” by Steve Blank
- John Boyd’s OODA Loop as a model for competitive decision making
- Decision Analysis techniques: in particular decision trees, expected value of perfect information, and “good decision, bad outcome.”
- BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) concept for negotiation planning
- “Secrets of Consulting” by Gerald M. Weinberg
- “Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem” by Michael Rothschild
- SimCity computer game
- Analysis of Competing Hypotheses methodology
- wiki (social process) model for small team collaborative document development
- community of practice model for knowledge management
- “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” by Robert Heinlein (in particular TANSTAAFL)
- activation energy, catalyst, and phase change concepts from physics/chemistry
- Amplify Positive Deviance model from Jerry Sternin (Save the Children)
- “The Empowered Manager” by Peter Block, in particular his trust vs. agreement matrix
- “Crossing the Chasm” & “Inside the Tornado” by Geoffrey Moore
- “Maneuver Warfare Handbook” by William Lind
- “Change Your Brain, Change Your Life” by Daniel Amen
- “Micromotives and Macrobehavior” by Thomas Schelling
- Appreciative Inquiry Techniques
Here are a few more techniques or perspectives that I have added upon some further reflection.
- Russell Ackoff’s Decision Record Model
- Gary Klein’s Premortem Technique
- Saras Sarasvathy’s Effectual Reasoning Model from What Makes Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial
- Andrew Grove’s “High Output Management” in particular “always review drafts” and his model for one on one meetings.
- “Computers, Networks, and the Corporation” by Tom Malone and John F. Rockhart (1991 Scientific American Article)
- “The Computer and the Dynamo: The Modern Productivity Paradox in a Not Too Distant Mirror” Paul David (1989)
- “Gunfire at Sea” Elton Morison
- “Persistent Forecasting of Disruptive Technologies” by National Research Council (2010)
- “Technology Singularity” by Vernor Vinge, in particular the “Intelligence Amplification” section
January 8th, 2010
I have been using three tools on a regular basis that I think complement Google:
- WhosTalkin searches a variety of conversations including twitter and blog feeds. It’s handy, quick and claims “Our search and sorting algorithms combine data taken from over 60 of the Internet’s most popular social media gateways.”
- SearchCanyon is useful if you really want to drill down on a topic, you can click on intermediate results that were useful to refine your search. I find this approach to be more useful than Clusty.
- Keskese searches Google, Bing, and Yahoo in parallel, it’s lightning fast, and overlays a set of suggestion keywords to help you to continue to refine your search. I think it’s more useful for “mapping out” a search, where SearchCanyon allows you to drill in much more deeply once you know what you are looking for.
January 4th, 2010
SKMurphy was interviewed and selected as one of a dozen case studies on Document Management Solutions for Consulting Groups by Central Desktop. Read about our innovative approach at “Document Management Solution helps SKMurphy Consulting Group Increase Productivity.”
We make some strong claims in the case study:
- Increased productivity – approximately 5 to 10 times more productive
- Significantly sped up decision making time on projects
- Eliminated version control issues for faster review cycles
The baseline is E-Mailing documents and phone tag. We rely on the edit lock that Central Desktop show to prevent you from editing the same file at the same time as someone else (this happens more than you might think as you get close to a deadline) and find that setting update notification for two hours encourages other members of the team to contribute.
We use Central Desktop to work with all of our clients and have found that it allows us to respond with drafts much more quickly and to achieve a working consensus in a few hours to a day or two. We use it to rapidly prototype the content for key E-Mails, presentation outlines, datasheets, backgrounders, and other content or documents that are used in the sales or customer engagement process by our clients. Each of our clients has their own password protected workspace, as well as any attendee at a workshop who wants one. We also use them for projects with our partners.
We think this approach offers them the following benefits:
- The workspaces are searchable and both the wiki pages and attached files are under version control so they good visibility and control over our joint work product, whether it is in planning stages, in process, or had been delivered.
- Meetings and conference calls are more productive. We use the same wiki page can be used the agenda, notes in process during the meeting, and for minutes and action items afterward. There is one place to look for anything about a meeting and it can have hyperlinks to other content that was discussed. This is an order of magnitude more productive than reconciling a stream of E-Mails for agenda and minutes.
- The workspace is the first place to look and it’s more easily organized than anyone’s inbox. It’s not uncommon for us to run a Skype text chat session for conference calls and append that to the meeting page as well. This is a lightweight approach to making meetings more productive and because things get documented immediately you have more of a complete archive as you add folks to the team or want to look back in two or three months to see what was decided.
- We normally include the cost of Central Desktop in our engagement fees but have turned over the workspace to clients at the end of an assignment. One client we worked with in 2006 through 2008 had more than 550 pages and attached files in the workspace.
We have been working in wikis since we started in 2003. We chose Central Desktop in 2006 and phased other wiki platforms out except where a customer is already using one. We have more than a hundred distinct workspaces (some are archived) that have been used with clients, workshop attendees, partner projects, and internal projects.
We are happy to have a phone conversation if you are interested in trying to incorporate them into your business: Sean has given a number of talks on them as well if you would like a briefing or presentation for your group or event. We do not resell Central Desktop and we were not compensated by them for the case study: we agreed to talk about it because we have been satisfied customers for more than three years.
Related blog posts on wikis:
July 21st, 2009
We had a great Bootstrapper Breakfast® in Sunnyvale this morning. One of the comments from an entrepreneur who was doing his first venture and making good progress was that he hadn’t anticipated how much of an emotional roller coaster doing a startup was with “higher highs and lower lows” than his earlier jobs.
One technique you can use to maintain perspective is the “Morning Pages” approach concept from “The Artist’s Way at Work” Write three pages in longhand first thing in the morning every day. It can be stream of consciousness, a journal, a story, or even “I don’t know what to write” over and over. There are a number of good techniques in the book, but this is the best one to start with. If, like me, your handwriting skills have deteriorated to the point that writing out more than a 3×5 card is both painful and illegible you can use a typewriter or a computer, but do it in a way that it stands out from your regular work location. Write in a coffee shop or at the breakfast table or a place you can associate with this activity distinct from work. You can also do it in the afternoon or late in the day if that’s a “dead spot” but you have to do it in a way that it represents a clear break from work.
The breakfast also allow you to listen to other entrepreneurs describe your same issues, for some reason–at least for me–when I hear someone else describe a problem I am also having I am able to engage my analytic and creative problem solving skills in a way that they are not available during introspection.
Some posts related to the entrepreneurial roller coaster:
May 11th, 2009
Most entrepreneurs we talk to these days is asking “how can I bring more customers into my business?”
There are no quick or easy answers here. Just some encouragement to try a new technique or two. You will need to develop a multi-pronged approach for your business. Sometime it takes thinking of creative ways to expand your current techniques. There are many ways to generate new leads, none are right or wrong. It is very personal – which will work for you, and the people you are trying to reach.
Which one of these are you not doing that you should try next?
- Referrals (also see Discount for Referral and What Can I Do to Build Referrals)
- Website
- Brochures/ Flyers
- Direct Mail Letters or Cards
- Seminars
- Give A Talk
- Blog (also see Getting Started and Good Blogging is Good Linking)
- Strategic Partnerships
- Google Adwords
- Craigslist
- Newsletters
- Press Releases
- Articles and White Papers
- Keep In Touch With Past Clients and Nurture Prospects
- Phone Calls
- Invite To Lunch
- Letters
- E-Mail
- Invite Them To Attend An Event With You
- On-line Business Directories
- Networking Meetings
- Post Purchases Follow Up
- Joint Ventures
- Warm Call
- Trade Shows
Our 100 page “Getting More Customers” workbook covers each of these; please use the contact form to request a copy.
Update May 13: Please note that this is a physical book, spiral bound printed on paper. Please supply a phone number and a shipping address when you ask for a copy.
March 7th, 2009
Here’s a couple of sources for free public domain photo, clipart, cartoons and images. They are royalty free, not copy-righted and available for personal and commercial use. These stock photos are high resolution and high enough quality for print and websites.
However, keep in mind:
- You can not copyright the material yourself.
- If a person is recognizable in the image, for commercial purposes a model release must be obtained.
- Products and logo in the images may have their own copyright.
There are a number of sites that sell high-quality artwork at a low cost they may serve your needs just fine. These sites have a large volume of material available at low cost.
February 10th, 2009
I sent Kevin Garber an E-Mail yesterday afternoon “I love the product, I would like to pay for it.” I had spent about twenty hours in the last week cleaning up typo’s on www.skmurphy.com and www.bootstrappersbreakfast.com (first of all who knew that there were so many different ways to spell bootstrapper and entrepreneur, to name two of the more embarrassingly frequent offenders). A couple of reasons why spellr.us is an outstanding product and definitely worth paying for.
I have to say first off that they have not announced their pricing, and I am not privy to it, so I am assuming that they will offer some plans in the $10-$50/month range that are appropriate for a firm like ours.
- It’s clearly been in production use for a while. It performed very well and there were a number of features that were the result of serious use.
- It’s very good at detecting misspellings, it can show you what it suspects by highlighting it in the original page, or in the HTML view if that’s necessary (some misspellings can be triggered by splitting a word inserting an HTML tag in the middle, this can be caused, for example by bolding a word in two passes or not linking the entire word.)
- It allows you to build a custom dictionary that’s all your own. Because of the great number of personal names we mention on this blog, plus a fair amount of obscure but valid nomenclature, I ended up creating a 1200 word custom dictionary that can be re-used when I scan this blog.
- It’s fast, the scan takes 1-2 seconds per page. It’s designed to be useful immediately and to run on a schedule to detect new mistakes you have added.
If you have a website of any size, I would encourage you to give it a try. It’s proven so useful for me that I will be happy to pay for it just to be able to rely on it (and to prevent them from deleting my dictionary).
Update Feb-16: Pricing plans posted, free for 20 pages, $24 for 2,000 pages, $47 for 5,000 pages, $267 for 15,000 pages.
January 8th, 2009
I attended a workshop put on by CPSquare in 2003 on Communities of Practice that had a profound impact on my worldview. I met folks from around the US who helped to foster communities of practice in corporate, education, government, and non-profit settings and was surprised at how common the both the challenges and methodologies for overcoming them were.
I had a chance to spend a day with Doug Engelbart, we ended up sitting at the same table and did a number of small group activities together. His concept of bootstrapping as an improvement of an improvement activity was an inspiration for our Bootstrapper Breakfasts, an effort to harness the collective IQ of a group of entrepreneurs who are each trying to get better to assist one another in getting better faster. Doug also demonstrated a version of his Open Hyperdocument System that has given me a model to aim for as we continue to improve the infrastructure for the delivery of our services: individual consulting, workshops, partner coordination, and collaboration as a part of the startup team to reach a working consensus on both strategy and the supporting materials to execute them.
I decided to take part in CPSquare workshop that just started yesterday, and I would encourage anyone who is interested in learning more about wikis and other modes of on-line and face to face collaboration to consider joining. It’s going to run for the next few weeks, blending conference calls with on-line forum interaction and a number of very interesting case studies. I have been asked to present some cases on how we leverage a number of on-line tools, wikis in particular, but I am only one of many folks detailing their practice.
We had a very good conference call to kick things off yesterday and I thought I would blog and encourage entrepreneurs who want to get better at combining a number of different modes of collaboration, both on-line and face to face, to sign up. It’s that good. The calls are taped and you will have access to the on-line examples so you haven’t missed very much at all if you sign up now. You can register here: http://cpsquare.org/conferences/
The benefits: if you don’t learn how to be more effective in on-line collaboration, including techniques for global teams, and how to blend on-line and face to face collaboration to improve the quality of team meetings and decisions, then you are not paying attention. Our clients, while they are still primarily Silicon Valley firms, now include teams in Denmark, China, Australia, Sweden, India, and England. And watching how this international group has coordinated on this workshop has given me a number of new tools and techniques to improve how we work at a distance.
It’s not my workshop so I am not bragging about anything you will learn from me, but it’s a diverse and creative group of folks who are pushing the state of the art in collaboration. It includes Ward Cunningham who invented wikis and Etienne Wenger who helped to formalize the concept of a community of practice, a well as many other less famous but equally insightful folks.
SaaS, wikis, blogs are all more than a decade old: I think the next ten years may be as much about enhancing our understanding of how to leverage what’s already been invented as it is to invent new things. This will offer you an opportunity to start thinking hard about what that might entail in the way that you organize your work and your team.
December 27th, 2008
I am doing end of the year status for clients. I thought it would useful to share the best case numbers as well as the worst case numbers. We had a fun year working in the areas of banking & financial services, cloud computing, consulting, EDA, health care services, medical devices & services, search & text analytics, solar & renewable energy and team productivity tools.
|
Best Case |
Worst Case |
| Lead Generation |
|
|
| Mailing List Growth |
593% |
22% |
| Mails to List |
55 |
1 |
| Website Visits |
120% |
15% |
| Web Presence in Google |
182% |
27% |
| Inbound Links |
8100% |
40% |
| Website Grades |
17 to 63 |
74 to 76 |
| Press Releases |
5 |
1 |
| New Partners & Advisors |
3 |
0 |
| Joint Partner Announcements |
43 |
2 |
| Events |
6 |
0 |
| Marketing Material |
|
|
| Whitepapers, articles, blog post, website pages, success stories |
17 |
3 |
| Revenue |
$723K |
$0 – not a full year$8K |
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