How to Get Published?
In my last entry I wrote how I was interested in writing a book about marketing and sales for small businesses (all small businesses, not just software based small businesses). It was received with good enthusiasm based only on the summary. Several people commented that they would buy it. I also received a number of personal emails saying the same. Therefore I’ve decided to go ahead and write the book.
And like everything I do before I fully commit, I researched my options. I spent the last week analyzing what options there are to authors like myself, and its amazing to see how much the publishing market has changed. In the past you pretty much had to go with a major publication company to get your book out, and even doing that was a challenge. The odds of being selected for publication were really low, never mind actual success. You could also look for a small presses, which is almost the same as large publication company but without all the benefits. In any case, you needed a publishing company to get your book out in the world.
There was also another option, you could self publish. This however was, and still is, a very costly endeavor. You need to have a lot of seed money to truly self publish, you have to cover all the expenses. Let’s say you decide to print 100, 1000, or even 5000 books (for an initial print run), you personally have to cover that cost. That’s above the costs of writing the book, creating the artwork, getting the ISBN, hiring a copy editor, marketing etc. It can be a very profitable venue, its just that you need a substantial bankroll and expertise to go this route.
Today the market has changed for the better, there’s more options. Although most people still prefer going with a publication company there’s a couple of new ways to publish that are easier, quicker, and more affordable. The main ones are POD (Print on Demand) and ebooks.
Print on Demand is where you partner up with a company like iUniverse to print your book on demand, be it one at a time, 20, 100, and so on. You don’t need to make runs, your book can be printed one at a time if need be. However to take advantage of this with Print on Demand you do have to spend a bit of money to get your book ready and into the “system”. The fees aren’t astronomical but they aren’t cheap either. For example iUniverse has packages ranging from $299 to $1,199 (not counting editorial services, etc.). This is great when you consider you can be self published without have to do a full print run of your books.
How do you make money using this service? Like most publishing companies, it’s mainly through royalties. iUniverse gives you a 10-20% royalty depending on what options you want to use. Another benefit is that they’ll sell you copies (again even one at a time) of your book to you at a heavy discount.
The option I investigated with POD and traditional publishing is ebooks. Ebooks are basically books sold in digital format (generally PDF) that you can purchase and download online. I’ve purchased at least a couple dozen myself and I’ve even sold one in the past. Ebooks can be great because the costs are only your time to write and market the ebook. Each sale goes almost directly to your bottom line. The downside is that it’s generally less credible, harder to sell and market. People prefer traditional books over ebooks.
After looking at all the options, I’m strongly leaning towards Print on Demand (POD). You don’t get some of the benefits of a publishing company (big distribution, some marketing, etc.), but you make up for it in other respects. With POD, you’re guaranteed to have your book published, you’re publishing it! With POD you can also get your book to market much quicker. With traditional publication companies getting through the approval process can take months, never mind going through all the steps and negotiations. The difference is 2-3 months versus a year or so. Personally I just don’t have the patience for that anymore, I’d rather just go ahead and get it done. That’s what being an entrepreneur for so long does to you.
As a disadvantage you don’t get your book professional edited for you with POD. You need to do this or hire a professional editor. That’s ok with me because I don’t mind hiring someone for this. Also, you don’t get the full distribution of a publishing company. Your book will not appear in bookstores across the nation, at least not unless you’re a proven bestseller. That’s ok I can accept that. Another disadvantage is that you need to provide all the marketing for your book (books don’t sell themselves). That’s ok too, the topic of the book is about marketing and sales after all. If I can’t do that I shouldn’t be writting this book. Something to also remember is that publishing companies will only continue to market your book as long as it has a return on investment otherwise they’ll leave it entirely to you. Either way you’ll still need to do a lot of the marketing yourself.
Having looked at all the options, the benefits and disadavantages, I believe I’ll proceed on the Print On Demand route. I like the timelines. I like the control. I don’t mind doing all of the marketing, that’s something I know (its definitely a serious consideration for most people). I also don’t mind the loss distribution, my plan was to focus mainly on sales through Amazon anyways. I plan to emulate the success the authors of the book Call To Action had using their own techniques (great book by the way, I commented on it back in July 2005). I can’t find it anymore, but I remember reading somewhere that they didn’t want to sell the book directly on their own website, even if it was for a much higher margin! They wanted every sale to go through Amazon.com so that they could increase their Amazon ranking, giving it some serious momentum (there’s more to it than that, but that’s for another day).
Another factor that really helped make my decision was a book I recently picked up at my local bookstore called Get Published. It’s written by the CEO and editorial director of iUniverse so its very skewed towards iUniverse, it’s almost a sales pitch. But even with that it was a great read. I read most of it in one sitting. Again, there’s no doubt its a book to sell their service, they have testimonials of iUniverse sprinkled throughout, but it still clearly explains a lot about the publishing world. The fact that even with their sales pitch I’m still recommending the book should say something. They really do explain how things work in the publishing industry. They really do tell you the good and bad of the different types of publishing methods available to you (traditional, POD, etc.). They don’t try to oversell you on iUniverse, they tell you what they can’t and won’t do for you. They tell you exactly what the differences are and what you’ll need to do to be successful in both. For example, they tell you that you will need to do 100% of the marketing for your book with iUniverse, they won’t provide this for you. Again I strongly recommend Get Published if you’re looking for information on how to get a book published.
When will the actual book be available? My personal goal, which I’m publicly sharing right here and now, is to have it written before the end of summer. It’s an aggressive goal but I think I can do it. Add another 2-3 months to get printed by iUniverse (ISBN assigned, printing, edited, cover design, etc.) and I’m hoping to have it available for purchase on Amazon.com by late fall to early winter. Let’s see what happens!
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Marketing And Sales For Small Online Businesses
For some time now I’ve been considering writing a book about marketing and sales for small online businesses. Not just software businesses, but all small online businesses. During the summer I was even a spearker at such a seminar with Glenn Scott where I personally presented “Website Promotion and Traffic Generation” which got some really great reviews. As one attendee put it, “if the average course is like drinking from a cup [content], then this course is like drinking water from a fire hydrant“. Btw, congratulations Justin on starting CitySales.ca.
Marketing and sales is now a domain of business which I’m quite familiar with, one that I’ve been really striving at since I founded LandlordMax about four years ago. Since that time, LandlordMax has steadily grown in traffic and sales.
In addition to LandlordMax, I also personally started this blog (FollowSteph.com) almost two years ago now. Together, these two sites get approximately a combined total of a million unique visitors per year! It might not seem like much when compared to the major players (Google.com, Cnn.com, or even Digg.com), but the thing to remember is that both of these sites are focused to niche demographics, so these are phenomenal numbers! All in all this is a very big achievement which I’m very proud of.
Which leads me back to my initial concept of writing a book about everything I’ve learned since I initially started. It’s been quite a road, with lots of bumps and turns. And I can tell you, I’d have been a lot further ahead today (at least I’d have gotten there quicker) if there had been a book like this one explaining everything I needed to know about marketing and sales for an online business. There’s a lot of information out there, no doubt about it, but it’s all over the place. It took me a lot of time to consolidate it all into one. This doesn’t even bring forth all the trial and error experience I got along the way. I can tell you as part of this whole learning process I also purchased lots of books, lots of ebooks (ebooks are great for quickly changing information such as “Adwords Definitive Guide“), read tons of articles, read tons of blogs, and so on. All in all, it’s been a great big adventure of learning.
So now I’m considering putting it all together in nice little book that will contain lots of information, more meat than fluff. I’m personally not a big fan of fluff, I like to get a lot of information for my money, and especially time (it’s my scarcest resource bar none). My personal value of a book is if I can get at least ten times the what I paid for it (time and money), then it’s worth its price. I’m hoping this book will be worth more than that!
So without further ado, here’s the outline I’ve been looking at so far:
Introduction
- Some of my personal story, including some successes and failures.
Section 1 (General information)
- Why is marketing and sales important to you?
- How does traffic affect your revenue?
- Is all your traffic worth the same?
- Will your efforts need to change over time?
- How will people find out about you?
- What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
- What are the free types of website promotion?
- What are the paid types of website promotion?
Section 2 (SEO – Search engine Optimization)
- What exactly is SEO again?
- Why is SEO important to you?
- What can SEO do for you?
- Tips to improve your website for better search engine ranking?
- How does Google view your site overall?
- How can you improve your site’s ranking outside of your own site?
Section 3 (Free Website Promotional Campaigns – Blogging)
- What is blogging?
- Should you blog?
- How you can blog to increase awareness of your website
- How you can promote your website in your blog
- The real power of blogging
Section 4 (Free Website Promotional Campaigns – Part 2)
- How can your content help drive traffic?
- How can your content help your search ranking?
- What are loss leaders and how can they help you?
- What all this social networking about?
- Is linking still important?
- Do you really need an online presence?
- Are directories worth anything anymore?
- Are e-zines worth your time and effort?
- Potpourri of tips
Section 5 (Paid Website Promotional Campaigns – Adwords)
- How does Adwords really work?
- Is Adwords really that good for you?
- Does it really matter how much effort you put into Adwords?
- What’s CPC?
- What’s CTR?
- Why are they both so important to you?
- How you can do Multi-variate testing with Adwords
- How can you improve my Adwords Ads?
- What’s the best way to Manage your Adwords campaigns?
- Does it really matter what keywords you bid on?
- Are the other systems like Overture, FindWhat, etc. worth trying?
- Adwords Potpourri
Section 6 (Paid Website Promotional Campaigns – Part 2)
- What are presses releases and how do they work?
- Are press releases worth your time and money?
- Which services should you use for a press release?
- How do you determine what’s newsworthy?
- How do you write a press release?
Section 7 (Paid Website Promotional Campaigns – Part 3)
- What domains should you buy for your website?
- A great tip on how you can get an amazing ROI by buying domains
- How do you know which domains to buy?
Section 8 – Promotional Potpourri
- Why you should always sign your emails
- The power of giving testimonials
- Can you use RSS to your advantage?
- Misc Potpourri
Section 9 – Sales Conversion
- What is sales conversions?
- How can you increase your sales conversion?
- How can you monitor what’s going on?
- What to look for when you try to increase your sales conversion?
- Some quick tips on how to increase your sales conversions
Section 10 – Resources
- Links to great blogs and articles
- Recommend books and ebooks
Section 10 (Tentative)
- Small interviews and tips from industry leaders
Well that’s the outline I have so far. It might seem like a lot, but imagine if it’s not all consolidated in one place and rather spread out across multiple books, ebooks, websites, blogs, and so on. It took me a long time to get a real grasp of all this and how it can really affect a website’s presence.
I’m also a big believer of the multiplier effect, which is the concept that your business is a multiplier of many factors. And assuming that’s a fact, multiplying any one factor will significantly increase your overall effectiveness. For example, if you score a 2 on one thing, then 4 on another, and 10 on still another (all out of a max of 10), then you’re a total of 2 * 4 * 10 = 80. However if you increase just one item, since it’s multiplied, you get 3 * 4 * 10 = 120, where you’re whole business is running 50% more effectively! By being 10% more effective in just one area (going from a 2 to a 3 out of a max of 10), you increased your overall business effectiveness by 50%!
Therefore I think there’s a lot of value in marketing and sales, and coming from a more technical background, these are some of the tools I wish I had know more about beforehand. Things I wish I didn’t have to learn at the school of hard knocks. I can tell you that I spent a lot of money learning many of these priniciples. Adwords alone cost me quite a bundle before I finally started to really “get” it. On one ad alone I increased it’s effectiveness from 0.42% to 1.62% through about a dozen small iterations in just a few weeks time. This alone increased my ROI incredibly, much much more than four times! I won’t explain here why it’s much more than four times ROI (42 * 4 is approx equal to 1.62), I’ll leave that to the book. All I’ll quickly say is CPC * CTR is the key to your success (hint: another multiplier effect is in play here).
Anyways, please let me know what you think. Would you be interested in this book? Would you buy it? Would you buy it in ebook format or just as an ordinary book (from Amazon for example). How much would you pay for this book? $29.95? $49.95? Are there other topics you’d like to see included? Any topics you’d like to have skipped? Basically any feedback you may have would be greatly appreciated. At this point this is just my outline, but I will start writing it this weekend.
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Why There's Still Credit Card Fraud
Every wonder why there’s still so much credit card fraud? About 2-3 weeks ago I saw a really documentary on Dateline about online credit fraud, well mostly about identity theft, but still very relevant. It’s what triggered this article. In any case the commentator did a great presentation, and showed how many people get taken. He was even able to show how within a day or so they set up a fake online store to accept stolen credit cards orders on the internet. They did it in a day!
So why is this still happening? Why are stolen credit cards continually used to purchase products when we know how it’s done. Why aren’t credit card companies stopping it cold, or at least bringing it way down?
The answer lies with their motivation and incentives. A while ago I wrote a glowing recommendation on a book entitled “Freakonomics“, where one of the things the book really showed you is that you need to pay close attention to motivations and incentives. And once I started to ponder about the credit card companies motivations, things became a lot clearer. The incentives and motivations just aren’t there to completely remove credit card fraud. There are of course strong motivations to keep it low, but not to completely eliminate it.
Why?
Before going into detail, let’s take a look at an example of what happens to us at LandlordMax when someone uses a stolen credit card to purchase our property management software (although it very rarely happens, no one is completely immune to it). Firstly, the fraudster goes online and makes a purchase of LandlordMax. The credit card company authorizes the transaction saying the credit card is valid and has the sufficient funds. Once we get this ok, we then proceed to finalize the transaction and send the customer their product. Everything is looking good and all parties are happy. However within the next few days, more often weeks to months, we receive a notice from the credit company that the transaction they authorized was fraudulent (more often than not it’s because of a stolen credit card). However here’s where it gets interesting, it doesn’t end there, the credit card company then takes back the funds they authorized (remember they told us it was ok to proceed).
So let’s look at the motivations. Firstly they aren’t liable for lost funds. Yes they authorized it, but they aren’t liable, the merchant is. If the card is stolen, the credit card company doesn’t lose a penny, the merchant takes all the risks and losses. Not only does the merchants lose their funds, but you also have to remember that their out of product as well. So for example, if you sold a diamond ring for $2000, not only would you have to give back the $2000 but odds are the diamond ring is nowhere to be found.
Understanding this, it quickly becomes very clear why they aren’t motivated towards a zero tolerance on stolen credit cards. It basically becomes a cost to benefit equation, they have to cleverly balance how much theft they can let go by without people losing confidence in them. To put it in other words, it costs money to detect fraudulent transactions and to be on top of criminals, exponentially more expensive as you get closer to a zero tolerance. What they have to figure out is how much theft is acceptable so that people will still have confidence in their product (and continue to use credit cards) while not paying too much to prevent this fraud. It’s a very fine line to balance. As they get ever closer to zero tolerance their costs go up with diminishing returns.
Remember the key ingredient here is that they aren’t liable for losses they authorized, the merchant is. So their only real motivation is to instill confidence in their customers (credit card holders) that using their credit cards is safe (where they get a percentage of every transaction). They don’t really have a motivation to produce a 100% safe credit card system, at least not until they’re on the hook for the losses instead of the merchants.
Without pushing the point further, don’t get me started about chargebacks. Another one of my favorite pet peeves with credit card companies. If someone ever decides to do a chargeback, of which we’ve had a grand total of 2-3 over the last 4 years which is an incredibly low percentage, not only do the credit card companies take the money back but they also charge you a significant chargeback fee! If you look at their motivation, it’s definitely towards the credit card holders and not the merchants. They have no vested interest in helping you, they don’t lose a cent, they actually make money if chargebacks go through.
So if you take a good look at what motivates credit card companies in terms of protecting people against credit card fraud, its probably not what you expected. Yes they are motivated to keep credit card fraud down, but they are definitely not motivated to completely stop it. It just doesn’t make economic sense for them. Ethically it’s a different story, but unfortunately today the economics is the reality.
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How to Save on Bandwidth Costs
Reading many ISV (Internet Software Vendor), uISV (Micro ISV) blogs, etc. you often hear how bandwidth costs can sometimes quickly escalate with success. Jeff Atwood of CodingHorror.com posted an article (with a nice follow-up) on this very subject describing many things you can do to minimze your bandwidth costs. These are:
- Switch to an external image provider.
- Turn on HTTP compression.
- Outsource Your RSS feeds.
- Optimize the size of your JavaScript and CSS
All great options, no doubt about it. But another option that is very often overlooked by software companies is the size of their software installers. It’s very easy to forget, never mind completely miss, the size of the installer. For us here at LandlordMax it was always an issue because we also install a local JVM which is considerably large. With each new version the size of the installer steadily increased until it was about 36Mb. This might not seem so big compared to some of the other larger software applications in the market, but when you’re looking at thousands of downloads a month this quickly adds up to a lot of bandwidth.
Late last year we changed the software we used to create our installer to Install4j (you can read my review on this great installer here) and it was able to drastically reduce our installer size by about 50%! Yes, that’s a full 50%! What does that mean? Well if you consider that the majority of our bandwidth is used for downloading LandlordMax, then we were able to reduce our bandwidth by about 50%.
None of the suggestions above could have reduced our bandwidth nearly as much as this one change to the installer. On this blog (FollowSteph.com), the above four suggestions do indeed have a very significant impact, but on LandlordMax because of the nature of the website, the change in the installer completely overwhelmed any of the impact these changes would have had. This is not to say that I don’t strongly believe you should do them, but that in this particular instance another tactic to reduce bandwidth was much more crucial.
So the lesson of the day, other than to do the above great suggestions by Jeff (especially for blog type websites), is to look at your software installer and see if you can’t reduce its size (assuming you’re a software company). The impact may be more significant than you might realize.
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Interview
Ben from StartupSpark.com just posted up today an interview he did about me and my company LandlordMax. It’s a great interview, and I’d especially like to thank Ben for taking the time to interview me. As well he had some very complimentary comments about the interview:
“Stephane understands what it takes to be an entrepreneur. When I ask him about competition, he hits the nail on the head. When I ask him about what it takes to start a business he demonstrates incredible passion. You’ll have to read the interview to see what he says.”
Thank you Ben for those amazing comments!
Just an extra little note, for those of you who aren’t familiar with Ben’s blog StartupSpark.com, he’s been doing interviews with other small software vendors and getting their take on what it takes to make it. There’s some really good interviews there, I personally got some great nuggets of information from all of them. One interview that I particularly liked was with Ian about his company HelpSpot. So go check it out, there’s lots of good information.
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Manufactured CD's
Up until this week, we’ve normally had our CD’s created on an as needed basis. That is to say, either we created them ourselves through the special machine we purchased, or we sometimes had a local printing shop create them. Each CD is customized to the customer, which includes your personal license code, etc. saved on the CD itself.
On average only about 10% of our customers choose to have a physical CD shipped to them. Interestingly enough, for the first year or so we were open, we didn’t even offer the option of a shipped CD with your purchase. But enough people requested it that we had a CD professionally designed which we now optionally ship. Over the last year or so as our sales have increased, where we’re now at the point where it no longer makes sense to have them manufactured in-house or even by our local printing shop.
Therefore, we’ve just ordered our first test run of 100 manufactured CD’s as a test from a larger printer/manufacturer to see how they would turn out. Although I know that ordering in larger quantities does drop the price, I’d rather pay a bit more now per CD to see how they turned out. This way in case were not fully satisfied with the end result, or even just with the manufacturer, we’re not stuck with 1000’s of bad CDs. So far I have to say I’m very impressed with the manufacturer, the CD’s look great as you can see in the image above.
I’m really happy that this initial test run succeeded so well. And it’s great to see the company growing to a stage where we now need to do CD production runs rather than one-offs! I can’t wait until we do our first full run, this time for at least a full 1000 CDs at a time!
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School Versus the Real World
Many years ago when the movie Back To School originally came out I remember laughing quite hard when Rodney Dangerfield’s character Thornton got NASA to do his Astronomy homework for him. If memory serves me correct, he also got the a famous author write an essay about his own book for his English class as well. Of course this was funny, how could it not be.
Although funny, according to the academic world this is wrong. This is what’s called cheating! Having someone else do your work for you. It’s a simple black and white case, he didn’t do his own work, someone else did it for him, therefore he cheated on his assignments. This is looked down upon, and it’s easy to see why. If you don’t do the work you’ll never learn the material. Very simple.
Now in real life the opposite is true. You need to do some of the work, but those that get ahead generally have teams do many of their work for them. For example, if you buy real estate, you often get your real estate agent to process the paperwork for purchase of the property, you don’t do it yourself. You get a mortgage broker to prepare the financing for you. You might also get a lawyer to do some of the work. Maybe you also have a property manager to manage your property. In the academic world, this would be considered cheating because someone else is doing the work for you.
In business the same is true, otherwise you’re really a self employed person (or employee)! If you’re employed right now, what are you doing? Someone is paying you to do their work for them. Think about it! Every employee is doing work for someone else. In the academic circle, this would also technically be considered cheating.
The reality is that the academic world teaches us to do everything ourselves, to learn how to do everything ourselves. To balance our check books ourselves, to run our finances ourselves. In the real world, and especially in business world, the opposite is true. In business we’re often thought to get a team to help us. And I can attest that starting a business without an initial team in place is much more difficult. A team can make a big difference. Getting a good accountant, a good lawyer, and so on really does helps. But what’s more, you generally need members on your team that have specific skills that you might be lacking such as a graphics design, sales, marketing, software development, team management, accounting, etc.. Getting a software product like LandlordMax out the door requires more knowledge and skill than any one person can have.
The other week when the movie Back To School played as a rerun on TV, which by the way was the inspiration for this article, it really made me think about this. I realized that since I’ve starting my company LandlordMax over four years ago that my reality has changed. Yes the movie was still good, but what really caught me off guard is that I no longer found this joke as funny. Actually quite the opposite, I think it was a great move by Rodney’s Dangerfield’s character Thornton. It really showed his business acumen! He couldn’t be successful in business without assembling at least one good team, which is why he quickly went ahead and got NASA to do his Astronomy homework.
In some way, it really made me appreciate the difference in realities different people have. Why we don’t all think the same. Successful business people often look at assembling a good team first whereas the average person tries to do everything themselves because this is what they’ve always been thought. There’s nothing wrong with this, but without leveraging other people’s skills and time, you can’t get further ahead than the number of hours you have in the day. It’s a simple reality, a simple difference in the way we perceive our worlds, but it has a large implication in how we’ll go about living our lives.
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Two Great Books Every Software Shop Should Own
I was going to just recommend the latest book I picked up this week, but I figured if I mentioned it, I also really should mention another book I’ve been meaning to suggest for several months now but haven’t had the time to write about.
For those who are curious and can’t wait, the two books are The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman and Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister. Both are phenomenal books that every software shop should own and read.
Peopleware is all about how to run a software shop, about how to deal with people, how to create an environment that fosters to software development. It’s an excellent read that will really make you yearn for companies like those illustrated in his book. Probably the best description I’ve heard is how to be an anti-Dilbert company.
The Design of Every Things is about a completely different topic that not only applies to software, but to every single piece of technology, even things as simple as doors. The authors explains how people perceive and use the things you design, which really helps in identifying weak spots. But more than that, he really helps give you a better path on how you can design anything to give your users a better experience.
All in all two great books that should be on the shelves of every software shop. If you haven’t already read these books, I strongly recommend you do!
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A Large Monitor is Actually Cheaper Than a Small Monitor
No matter where I go, I always see it. Every company that I know of, with the exception of a few companies, are more focused on saving pennies by getting their employees the smallest monitors possible that they can get away with. Why? Because they don’t believe that a larger monitor is worth the investment. But then again I also see many of these same companies skimping out on hardware for the same reasons. The bad news for them, good for me, is that studies have shown that larger monitors do significantly increase productivity as shown here, here, and here.
The reality is that the extra costs to invest in a better monitor, or better hardware, will generally be returned to you in multiples. I personally work on the Dell 24 inch widescreen LCD monitor right now, and I can’t rave enough about it. The only complaint I have is that it’s not the new 30 inch LCD widescreen monitors that Dell now has available!
But really, the reality is that I’m so much more efficient on the larger monitor that the time saved makes incredible sense for me. Comparing the price of a 17 inch, or even 19 inch monitor, yes I’m paying substantially more. But you know what, I’m also a many more times more effective!
But the real question is just how much more effective? Well let’s break down the numbers, there’s no better way to determine the value than looking at the bottom line. At this time of writing, a 24 inch Dell wide screen costs $800. An equivalent quality 17 inch monitor can be had for as little as $150-200, so let’s use the smaller number of $150. Therefore the price difference is $650. All I need to do to justify the extra cost is find $650 of value over the lifetime of the monitor, which we’ll assume is at least 3 years (probably more). Breaking it down even more, all I need to do is increase my value by $650 / 3 years, or approximately $213/year. That shouldn’t be too difficult! In reality, I’ll get a LOT more value than $213/year, not counting the joy of using it!
Ok, so let’s look at the value. Below this paragraph you can find three screenshots of the Jakarta Struts project in Eclipse. The first at 1920×1200 resolution from my 24 inch widescreen monitor. The next one with the same screen settings showing the coding section truncated, and the last one how it would normally be displayed at 1024×768. As you can quickly see there’s a huge difference in screen real estate space! If I was just using Outlook, Word, or even an internet browser, it wouldn’t make that big of a difference, but for programming purposes it’s a very large difference.
For those of you would aren’t as familiar, let me walk you through the screenshots to give you a better idea of the real estate value. On the left we have our project structure (almost like Windows Explorer). When programming, you separate the code out into logical files to make your life a LOT easier. Therefore you’re always referencing this panel all the time. And sometimes it can get quite deep, with many nodes on the trees as you can see in the screenshots), so it can take some space (much like if you have many directories within directories on your computer).
After that you have your console on the bottom panel. This panel is also use a LOT! This is where information from your program is outputted. This can range from debugging (sending out diagnostic information to the panel while the program is running to give an idea of what’s going on), to bigger things like displaying program error message, etc. The more space you have here, the more diagnostic information you can display, otherwise you just end up scrolling the panel a lot.
Next we have the optional Outline display on the right. On smaller screens this is often omitted because there just isn’t enough space, even though it’s very handy and helpful. What it does is give you a succinct list of all the methods, properties, etc. of the class (or classes) within the file you’re currently editing. This might not seem like much, but imagine if you have several hundred lines of code (best of luck if it’s thousands) and you’re looking for a particular method? Instead of always having to scroll through the code or doing a search for the text, you can quickly see the list and just double-click on it to move your cursor there in a second.
Lastly, and by far most importantly, is the main panel in the center. This is your programming code! This is where you will spend most of your time and where you want to see as much as you can. Often an algorithm will be spread across a decent amount of lines, possibly over several pages (multiple methods, etc.). The bigger this space is the better! I can’t stress this enough. Think of it as a working piece of paper when drawing plans for a house. The more you can see at once, the better off you are!
As you can quickly see from the screenshots above, with a smaller screen you have to start sacrificing space right away to be able to see everything at once. And don’t think that you mainly use one panel at a time, you generally move around between the different panels very frequently as I’ve just described. It’s much like driving, you look out your windshield, then your rear view mirror, your speedometer, and so on. Always moving your eyes around as you need to get more information. The same is true when developing.
That being said, if you look at the amount of real estate space on the smaller monitor, you have to make a lot of sacrifices. Going back to the car analogy, you don’t have the dashboard space to see everything at once, so you have to cut into some of the information. So for example, you can only see half of your speedometer (showing only the most common speeds in that window). You can only 1/4 of your rear view mirror, so pick the most advantageous spot. You can only see out 1/4 of your windshield, so definitely pick the area directly in front of the driver’s side, near the center preferably.
So right away, you’re limited in information, you can’t drive or program at nearly the same speed. The good thing though is that you can resize any of these windows as need be, but each time it costs you time and you have to sacrifice another panel. So for example, if you want to see out of your complete windshield, you can’t see any of the other windows (rear mirrors, speedometer, etc.). You can also just partially increase the size of any one window but you must also relatively decrease the size of the other(s) to compensate. As well, each time you adjust the size of a window, it costs you time. For programming, this means you have to move your hand to the mouse, adjust the size, etc. It might only be 2-3 seconds, but do this hundreds to thousands of times a day and it quickly ads up; 400 seconds to 4000 seconds – 6 minutes to a full hour!
Each time you make an adjustment, you lose other information, so if you need to move back and forth a lot, you’ll probably lose a little bit of the context. If you spend 1/2 your time adjusting the sizes of the windows, it’s easy to quickly forget simple details such as the speed you’re driving at, which means another adjustment, lookup, etc. This ads up.
Assuming your programming pretty consistently (ignoring things like attending meetings, being tired on Monday, etc.), I’ll use the one hour metric for our calculations, and then I’ll follow up with the 6 minutes to show that even that’s worth the return on investment!
Ok, so getting back to our calculations, assuming about 200 workdays, and assuming 1 hour is lost each day, that represents 200 lost hours of labor. But before I go on, I’ll just take a minute to talk about the cost figure I’m going to use for a developer hour. In a previous article I used $1000/day per developer, which caused some people to comment that this was too high. The reality is that this isn’t too high from the businesses perspective, this is the cost of a developer. The developer won’t receive $1000 in salary, they’ll just receive a portion of that. What you have to remember is that the business also has to pay for the employees benefits, real estate (for example IBM saved $700 million in real estate costs by having workers work from home), hardware, software, etc. All these things quickly add up!
Anyways, assuming a $1000/day cost for a developer (or $125/hour) , giving that they lose 200 hours a year because of the size of their monitors, that’s a $25,000 difference in cost. So you just lost $25,000 in productivity to save $800! If you like those kind of deals give me a holler, I’m sure I can provide you with other similar great deal!
Now what if I grossely overestimated my numbers, which I didn’t but what if, then that’s 200 days * (6 minutes/day at $125/day) = $2,500. So even at 6 minutes a day, we spend $2,500 to save $800! Wow!
To add on top of this, in the above calculations we assumed our monitor would last just one year (200 working days). So multiply the above numbers by 2-3 times since most monitors will easily last longer than that! You can quickly see how valuable a larger monitor becomes!
To add to this, getting a larger monitor will also make programming much more pleasant to your developers, which means they’ll be more efficient. No you can’t really measure the benefits here directly, but rest assured that they do exist. If you go with high quality monitor, your employees will be less tired (it’s less hard on the eyes), and so on. With LCD’s I also found that it significantly reduced the number of headaches I personally got, so that’s another measurable benefit in terms of productivity.
All in all, as you can quickly see, a large monitor is actually much cheaper than a small monitor when you consider the total value of your purchase. If you only use it to surf the internet, send emails, etc. then you’re absolutely right, there’s no real benefit in terms of dollars. But if you program on it, the return on investment is incredible!
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Why It's Important to Test in Production
Every real software developer I know knows the importance of testing their software in a production environment because there’s always that slight chance that something may be different from your development environment. This is why in enterprise software you have a development environment, a staging environment, and a production environment. The development environment is as you might expect, is where things are tried out. However staging is where things get different, this is where your environment should replicate as closely as possible your production environment. Although it’s not always entirely possible to completely reproduce it, the closer the better. And production is your live environment.
Normally for LandlordMax, when we’re developing we run it directly from our IDE (Integrated Development Environment), which is our development environment. If everything works here, it should work in the production environment. You always want to test it in staging though, just in case, which we do. Also, to remove the chances of errors, what you also want to do is automate the process of taking your development application and “productizing it”. That is to say, you want to create something called a build script which will automatically create everything for you, removing any chances of human errors in creating the final product.
Once that’s done, at least for us here at LandlordMax, you have an installer created. You then try the installer. You then run the software to make sure everything is still working the same (hopefully someone else will do this to avoid any biases while testing). It’s a pretty simple process.
However with version 3.11 of LandlordMax we re-learned the valuable lesson of just important it is to test and re-test the software after it’s been productized. Yes we normally run it through it’s gamut of tests, but for some reason we missed one simple test case with version 3.11 that where we just a few minutes ago released version 3.11a tonight to correct. The bug, which worked in our development environment, didn’t work in staging, or production. Unfortunately it wasn’t caught until just recently by two of our customers, which I personally thank you for letting us know so quickly. The good news is that because they contacted us right away, within 1 day we have a new version with this fix available!
So what happened between the two environments, shouldn’t they be the same? Yes they should be the same, there should absolutely be no difference. However this was not the case with version 3.11. But before I get into the details, let me step back a minute and explain what happens in our automated script (which by the way was not at fault for those of you thinking ahead).
Our build script consists of several steps. First it gets the latest code from our version control, compiles it, and creates the appropriate objects. Once this is done, it grabs all the appropriate resources (for example images, etc.) and puts them into their appropriate objects. After that, it takes these objects and “Obfuscates” them (if you’re interested there is a famous contest held each year to see who can create the most obfuscated code called IOCCC). This is important for us as a company because it takes the compiled objects (intellectual property) and makes it extremely hard to reverse engineer. Nothing is impossible, but I can tell you from looking at the code after the obfuscater has run through it that I can barely understand it myself! Anyways, once this is done, it takes all the objects, and runs another script which then creates the installer (LLMaxSetup.exe) which you download and install. That’s our build script. Not too complicated, but not too easy either (I’m glossing over some of the details).
What happened with version 3.11 is that we updated the software that obfuscates LandlordMax. We’ve done this many times over the last 4 years, but this time for some reason it changed the way it reads the configuration file. Not significantly, but enough that it caused this issue. Without being too technical, in our code we overwrite a few libraries we use (for example we changed how the report printout calculates the report totals by adding a clause for “NSF” checks, and so on). Now when LandlordMax tries to call this library, our code is intercepted beforehand and is used rather than just going directly to the library’s code. Nothing major, this is called “overwriting” in programming. However, one key feature in overwriting code is that you need to use the exact same names!
Well to our dismay, the configuration in our obfuscater no longer accepted the wild card we used in the past. It overwrote the names of these classes, and therefore because the names weren’t the same, our code didn’t intercept the library’s code. And because of this, the software didn’t know how to handle “NSF” or other little tweaks we added! Hence all the totals were $0.00 on the printout.
So between our development environment and our staging environment something had changed. Something that wasn’t suppose to change, had never changed in the past, but suddenly now did. This is why it’s important to thoroughly test your final production product. We did, but we somehow still missed this issue and for this I apologize to all our customers. We have therefore just released a new version (version 3.11a) that you can download and install to resolve this issue right now.
PS: As an aside, I’d just like to say this was a fairly difficult bug to track down. This is a bug that worked in every development environment but not in our staging or production environment, regardless of the settings and configurations! It also illustrates even more the importance of properly testing in every environment!
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