June 2006 Archives

I just made it up to SF an hour ago, and am looking forward to
This will be my third to go to. I am curious how this one will differ from the other two that I have attended. I’ll let you know.

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Peter, Chris and Charles are sponsoring a meetup in San Diego prior to the Simple Business Workshop.

The meetup will take place on Sunday, July 23rd at 8:00 p.m. at the Aero Club Bar, located at 3365 India Street.

We’ve arranged for Happy Hour prices all night and the first 25 drinks will be on us.

Jeff Clavier points us to Kleiner Perkins investment criterias for software startups. It is interesting, as Jeff points out, that their criteria essential follow the traditional methods used to sell consumer products, even though the target market is often the Enterprise.

Why? Because small businesses (and agile teams inside large companies) don’t buy like a business; they buy like consumers! Small teams work on a limited budget and short deadlines, just like most of us do in our own personal lives. When a new need emerges, they don’t want to spend a lot of time talking to sales people, they just want to find something that works and get on to the next task.

What a difference that makes; when the enterprise-software model (big sales team, major commissions) actually works against you.

PS This realization is what got me interested in starting SproutIt (hosted business software for small businesses and agile teams) in the first place. I’ve always felt that business products were more full-filling because they solve high-pain problems. Consumer marketing, on the other hand, is way more interesting and fun. The chance to play at the intersection of these two was too good to pass up.

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I’ve been busy talking with bloggers and journalists in the San Diego area about the upcoming Simple Business Workshop in San Diego.

If you’re a blogger or journalist who’d like to write about the Workshop, drop me a line and I’ll give you any information you need and even set up interviews with the perpetrators if you’d like.

San Diego is a bit of a homecoming for Charles, Chris and Peter who met in that city’s Point Loma Nazarene University MBA program. Their connection to the city, their experiences living and creating a business abroad and their involvement both with independent business and with online software development are all elements that make an interesting story.

Indigo Moon Systems mentions us along with some other easy business tools. I like his description of Sproutit Mailroom:

I just came across this one-it’s not free, but it’s interesting and I have at least one current client I’m going to recommend it to. It’s an online automated e-mail management system, using basic artificial intelligence to receive and sort mail coming in to common addresses (like “sales” or “support”) and automatically produce recommended replies, reducing the time to manage each individual piece of mail. This has long been a function available in helpdesk software, but that’s either very expensive or very complicated to implement-this is entirely web-based, easy to get started with, easy to quit if it doesn’t work well.

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A phone interview with Jason Evans, a phototgrapher who is in the middle of living his dream.

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Not a time out, but a little office fun…It’s Game Time! USA vs. Czech Republic

But, the question is, “Who is Sproutit rooting for?”

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I am heading down to the Buddah Lounge near the Galleria for the first ever, BarCampHouston

I will post a bit more today at the event. If you are in the Houston….or Texas area, I’ll see you there.

We now have a staging server for Mailroom setup, which has already helped us catch at least 4 bugs before they ever saw the light of day.

They were relatively minor and somewhat obscure, but… having that server setup allowed the entire SproutIt team to hammer on development code and iron out most of the remaining wrinkles.

If you run a web business and don’t have a staging server yet, after recent experiences I would have to highly recommend acquiring one.

A hosted VDS (or VPS), which is basically like a segmented time-share arrangement on a much larger dedicated server, allows you to have root and full control over your OS.

These can be had for anywhere from $69 / mo. down to $29 / mo., depending on how much CPU, memory, etc. that you’ll need.

I generally wouldn’t recommend them for production usage for a large-scale application, but they work well for a staging server or place to run your personal blog.

You generally only run into problems with them, I’ve found, when someone else on your box is really hogging the CPU. (or, you’re the one hogging the CPU and they kick you off!)

The Joel Test for Web Apps

If you are a fan of Joel Spolsky’s writings on coding and the business of software development, you are no doubt familiar with his Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code.

Some of the commandments like ‘Daily Builds’ are not as applicable to webapps.

IMHO, having a staging server, where you have a daily or even hourly process that automagically updates the server with the latest development code, and is accessible by your team to be tested and hammered on from anywhere, is the closest thing to a daily build you’ll get for a webapp.

Hosting solutions plug: We’ve had great luck with OCS Solutions and AVLUX. They are especially well-suited for shops running Rails / Subversion / Lighttpd.

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BusinessWeek has a great article today on Web 2.0 for Corporate America. One of their best points:

Corporations also are balking at installing big, multimillion dollar software programs that can take years to roll out—and then aren’t flexible enough to adapt to new business needs. “They’re clunky and awkward and don’t encourage participation,” grumbles Dion Hinchcliffe, chief technology officer of Washington, D.C. tech consultant Sphere of Influence.

Read the full article here.

Just announced today, Shopify has hit the streets!

Congratulations to the guys at Jaded Pixel. Great job guys!

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Being back in Houston has a few great advantages. I get to see my family, an Astros’ game, old high school friends at my reunion and Tex-Mex food. But something that I am very excited about is getting to attend another BarCamp. BarCamp Houston is happening on June 10 at the Buddah Lounge. If it anything like the BarCamp Austin experience, it should be great fun. So go to the BarCamp Houston site and sign up! I’ll see you there.

I was able to nail down Houston’s venue for the Simple Business Houston Workshop. The Hilton University of Houston. It is confirmed for Tuesday, August 15th from 9 am to 5 pm. So, get the word out and I’ll see you there!

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A few weeks ago we experienced what would turn out to be the first in a series of scaling issues with Mailroom when our search engine crashed. Since we launched Mailroom a few months ago, we have handled just shy of 250,000 emails for customers. This number grows at a rate of several thousand per day.

It turns out there are not very many search engines that can handle even this kind of growth, let alone when we get to the million of email mark we expect to reach in the next few months. We had to do something.

After several weeks of testing, we’ve rolled out our new search engine. This engine is faster and better able to scale with Mailroom as we grow. Many thanks for Shanti for his hard work in putting together this new engine.

Read the full details here. If you don’t have a Mailroom account yet, you can create a free account.

This new search engine is the first in a series of performance enhancements we are working on right now. We’ll be announcing our other improvements soon, so stay tuned.