Category: Business

If you have a driving motivation for building your next service, do it! I’ll always encourage the next entrepreneur to build their dream. But before you start, consider how unique the offering is. Has it been done before but in a friction-filled way, and you’ve reimagined it? That still sounds worth it. Does your idea take it a step further in a meaningful way? Still sounds worth it. Does someone need, not just want, the product? Keep going, I’m still listening.

Or is it just a wrapper? Something with a glossy website, but when you dig deeper, it’s really not a new idea. Something where the first few users say, “Wait – haven’t I seen this before?” Something that’s bound to disappoint: an empty fortune cookie, a concert without a band, a “Nothing Burger”.

Look hard at your idea and decide if it’s really just a wrapper. Look really hard. Maybe it sounded like a good idea, but it’s really just a wrapper.

Marketplaces are smarter than you think. If your great idea is really just a wrapper, put it on the shelf before you invest your time and money in something a marketplace won’t like once they see you’re just offering a layer on top of what they want.

I recently got a notice from a software vendor that they were raising their prices by over 3x, with 30 days notice. A quick search into the company showed a recent S-1 filing that roughly said, “We’re going to keep raising prices to extract more value out of users.”

While that is certainly a pricing strategy, it wasn’t what I wanted to hear as a customer. So I started making plans to leave, but couldn’t find the features in another vendor’s offerings.

So for now, I am staying with a vendor I’ve soured on. Soured not because of their product, or even because of their price. Because of how they treated a paying customer of almost 15 years. But I’ll be looking to switch because they have lost my trust.

Treat each customer like they’re your only customer. Pay attention to them. Listen to their needs and see if you can meet them. This is how you treated your first customer, so what happened to you along the way?

Many solutions we implement are additive: We want more customers, more revenue, more good Press.

Subtractive solutions are just as important, but work without offering anything more.

• Anti-spam solutions remove your junk email. They add no new emails.
• The fence around your garden keeps the rabbits out. It doesn’t make your lettuce grow faster.
• The Advil you take removes your headache. It doesn’t make your brain smarter.

But I think you’d agree, having no spam makes reading your email easier, keeping rabbits out of your garden gives you peace of mind, and having your headache go away makes you think better.

Sometimes a solution needs to subtract something before it can add something.

I used to use Calendly, and as a paid user, I was pretty happy with it. It worked, but one evening I thought I could create a system that would be easier to use, cheaper, and I could add features as fast as I could think of them.

And thus, findthetime.app was born.

At its core, it fixes a familiar problem. It allows anyone with your private calendar link to book an appointment with you. You can link it to your Google, Microsoft, or iCloud calendars, and it has features like creating buffers on either side of a meeting so you don’t have back-to-back meetings, and your day stays sane.

And it’s only $3/month. Even cheaper if you ask Support nicely for a coupon.

I didn’t create this to make money. I created it to help people, like me, handle scheduling issues.

So give it a try at https://findthetime.app and see if it works for you. If you’d like any features added or have general questions, email support@findthetime.app, and I’ll get back to you quickly.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could be in a section of an office, surrounded by intelligent people, working on projects that really mattered to you personally, and never having to interact with the rest of the company? I know a lot of people who would consider that a dream job. I would hate it.

Don’t get me wrong, as an engineer, the first few days would be delightful. Lots of interesting conversations over coffee. Working on engineering projects that are just purely interesting, regardless of how they fit into the company. That sounds fun – for a bit.

And there’s the rub. Within a few days, I’d start asking myself, “Why am I working on this?”. “What is it accomplishing, and where does it fit into the company’s goals?”. I shouldn’t live in a vacuum, nor should my engineering team.

How about we take a better approach? One that starts to ask those salespeople, “What does the customer want?”. One that starts to ask accounting if I have a budget and asks HR how hard it would be if I needed to staff up. And how about asking the CEO what goals they’re trying to accomplish? You can learn a lot if you just ask.

Somewhere along the line, we’ve forgotten that we need to accomplish the company’s goals – not ours. If you’re running your engineering team in a vacuum, it’s not good for the company, and it’s probably not good for your career.

I’ve run a few companies over the years, and one inevitably wants out of contact with you. Maybe they’re going out of business, or their business has changed and they no longer need your services. To make this decision, you need to weigh some data:

• What is the value of the contract they want out of compared to your entire customer revenue stream? A small percentage or a large one?
• What are the circumstances of their situation? Are they going out of business (inevitable) or just wanting a new vendor?
• Are you ready to ruin the relationship with the people at that company if you insist they pay?
• Will the outlay to collect the money (lawyers and collection agencies) be worth the value of their contract?

The idea here is to look at the bigger picture. Sure, collecting revenue from a customer on a signed contract seems like your legal right, but what is the bigger picture? If you insist on it, it will create friction and a rift. Are these people you’re dealing with going to go to other places and have a permanent memory of your inability to work with them on this issue? Or will you be a reasonable vendor – someone they’d like to do business with again at their new job?

Transactions create memories. The good ones can be memorable and often result in further business. The bad ones create memories that are hashed over and over, spreading the bad outcome. What kind of memory do you want to create?

I’ve started, run, and sold a few successful companies. Each one was different from the last one because I was constantly learning. But early on, I took on a management method that I used throughout my career – I ran each as a Benevolent Dictatorship. Now, before you go looking it up on Wikipedia, it’s a term I used with my own definition.

A Benevolent Dictatorship, in my terms, means I was very interested in other opinions on problems, as they often brought me to see new ideas. Others’ opinions added perspectives that fleshed out details I hadn’t previously seen, and, with rare exceptions, I relished each one. But regardless of how many I listened to, the proverbial buck stopped with me. I made the final decisions and was responsible for their outcome – good or, sometimes, unfortunately, bad.

If you’re going to run any organization, there’s a temptation to run it “By Committee”, pushing away decisions, so it makes it easier to wag a finger when they don’t produce great results. But it’s harder to take responsibility. It’s harder to run a Benevolent Dictatorship. It’s harder to shoulder the responsibility and be ready to take on the consequences. But if you don’t, who will?