83% of US users of Pinterest are women and typical pinboard themes include:  fashion, funny images of cats, interior design, places to visit, food and wedding ideas. Check the Pinterest home page to see a sample of images currently being pinned. The interest in weddings is particularly relevant to me as I sell wedding seating planner software. So I started to create some wedding reception themed pinboards as an experiment. I quickly decided that scouring the web for pictures of pretty seating charts, place cards  and wedding cakes wasn’t a) a good use of my time b) the right thing for a 46 year old heterosexual man to be doing (GRRR!). So, using outsourcing site odesk.com, I found a nice lady in the Philippines to do it for me for a very reasonable hourly rate. She also (unsurprisingly) proved to have much better taste than me. I think she also really quite enjoyed herself! The resulting Pinterest pinboard is at http://pinterest.com/tableplan/.

Here is some data from my little experiment:

So that works out >$0.30 per click for not very targeted traffic (as shown by the bounce rate and avg time on site) and not a single sale. Not very encouraging. What’s worse, it only generated traffic while new pins were being added. As soon as new pins were no longer being added the clickthroughs fell off a cliff:

I may get some SEO benefit. But Pinterest isn’t looking a like a win for me. Also there are issues with Pinterest terms and general IP issues. Pinterest’s terms originally claimed that they could sell anything you pinned. They have since amended that to something more sensible. But pinning images you don’t own the copyright to is still problematic. I think most sites will be happy for people to pin their images, as long as they are correctly attributed – it is free advertising for them.  And it is obvious that most Pinterest users are happily pinning images without any thought about copyright. But it could conceivably get you into trouble for copyright infringement.

If you are a big name company with a big marketing budget, it may be worth putting some effort into Pinterest. Especially if you already have a big catalogue of images you own. But, based on my experiences, I think most small software companies can find better ways to spend their time.

• Your competitor has more staff than you? That means that they have got to make more sales to turn a profit and they spend a lot more time in meetings.
• Your competitor is better funded than you? That means they are spending more of their precious time and energy dealing with investors.
• Your competitor’s product has more features than yours? Their product is probably more complex to use than yours.
• Your competitor is using trendier technology than you? That probably also means they have a lot more third party bugs and issues to deal with.
• Your competitor is based in a trendy location with better access to talent? That probably means they have to pay higher salaries and office rental and are more likely to get their staff poached.

Strength and weakness can be just two sides of the same coin.

I keep a vague eye on competition to my own table planning software. Over time I have built up a list of over 100 other products whose functionality competes directly with mine or overlaps significantly. New competitors appear fairly regularly. I notice that their website might look a bit more “web 2.0″ than mine or their price is cheaper and my heart sinks a little. But, so far, it has never made a noticeable impact on my sales and I quickly forget about them. In fact my sales have gone up every year in the 7 years since I first released PerfectTablePlan. I just keep improving the product, marketing and support, day after day, year after year. While many of these competitors have since fallen by the wayside, with products and websites not updated for several years. Some of them are giving away their products free in the hope of making a few pennies from advertising. Some of them never even launched. Those that are still active are targeting rather different niches to my software.

Many companies respond to competition by trying to copy their competitors feature for feature. This is almost certainly a mistake. You will always be at least one step behind them. It is much better to listen to your customers and innovate. It is certainly a lot more interesting and rewarding. It is also much easier to market a product that is different[1].

There are cases where competitors can be a big problem, for example:

• markets where there is a strong network effect (I wouldn’t want to compete head on with Ebay or Facebook)
• markets where you might have to compete with the company that owns the platform (for example a Microsoft Office add-on isn’t likely to last long if Microsoft releases a new version of Office incorporating this feature)

So it is probably better to avoid these types of market, unless you are happy to accept that level of risk. But there are vast numbers of markets big enough to support multiple products. There are some 2 billion people with access to the Internet and they all have different requirements. Even a niche within a niche can provide a decent living for a small software business.

Competition can actually help you. The main competition for my table planning software is Excel and Post-It notes, not other table planning software. My competitors are helping to raise awareness of the fact that there is such a thing as software for table planning. Some of the people whose awareness they raise, are going to search for other software solutions and find and buy my software (thanks!).

So next time you find out about a new competitor, don’t panic. It is natural to focus on their strengths and your weaknesses, rather than your strengths and their weaknesses[2]. But they are probably doing the same, and they may be more afraid of you than you are of them.

In truth your biggest fear should be having no competition. If there is a no-one else doing what you are doing then either you are genius who has found an untapped market or the market doesn’t exist. Unfortunately, it is almost certainly the latter.

Further reading:

‘Choose your competition’ by Eric Sink

[1]This is why adverts for commodity products such as instant coffee and soap powders are so consistently awful.

[2] Microsoft should take note before they ruin a product with 90% of the highly lucrative desktop operating system market in their panic to compete with Apple in the tablet market.

Photo by Alistair Joseph.

Special offer

Quote “successful software” when you ask for an estimate and they will give you a 20% discount. This offer is valid for first-time customers, for the next 14 days only.

TestLab².com website

1. You checked the number of sales you made overnight before you had your breakfast this morning.
2. You measure the price of desirable objects (cars, houses, Xboxes) in terms of the number of licences you need to sell.
3. You’ve outsourced some work to someone with no idea what they look like and only a vague idea where they live.
4. When booking a hotel you are more interested in how good the Internet connection is than how good the restaurant is.
5. Your product has at least 20 five star awards from download sites.
6. You know what CTR, CPC and CPM mean.
7. You have begged all your friends and family to ‘like’ your product’s Facebook page.
8. You set up your computer or phone so it makes a special noise each time you get a sale.
9. Your software has been cracked at least once.
10. You have suggested to a particularly problematic customer that one of your competitors might have a more suitable product.
11. You’ve done technical support while wearing a dressing gown/bathrobe (or less).
12. You have Google alerts and Twitter searches set up for your product name.
13. You start to get anxious after not checking your email for more than half a day.
14. The last time you set an alarm clock it was because you were going on holiday and didn’t want to miss the flight.
15. Your relatives think you don’t have a ‘real job’.
16. You own at least 10 domain names.
17. You have had to fix problems with your software or website while on holiday.
18. You have had a least one chargeback.
19. Your software has been flagged as malware by at least one anti-virus package.
20. You use at least 3 different email addresses in the course of a day.
21. You have explained what you do to someone and they said “And you make a living from that???”.
22. You have used Google translate to answer a support email in a language you don’t understand.
23. You use “we” when talking about your company, even though its really only you.
24. Someone told you a half-baked idea they had in the shower that morning and said they would be willing to give you 50% of the profit if you did 100% of the work to  implement it.
25. The last time you wore a suit and tie was to a wedding or a funeral.

I scored 25/25, of course (it’s my test). How did you do? Are there any other questions I should have added? Let me know in the comments.

Thanks to fellow microISVs Steph, Oliver, Terrell, Clay and Ian for suggesting some of the above.

Go to the links page

Let’s imagine you have got an Excel spreadsheet with a month of (fictitious) sales transaction. It looks like this:

You want to find out:

1. The total value of sales of each product
2. The number of sales of each product
3. The total value of sales of each product by country
4. The total value of sales of each product by day of the week

How would you do it? You can crunch the numbers using a calculator, but that is very tedious and error prone. If you are a programmer you can export the data to a .csv file and write a small program in your favourite language to read it in, crunch the data and write the results out. You probably think you can do it in 10 minutes, but I bet it will take you at least an hour to get it working and debugged. I did all the above in 1 minute and 20 seconds using Excel pivot tables.

Here is how you can do it (screenshots from Excel 2007). You can download the spreadsheet if you want to try it yourself.

Select all the data, including the header (A1 to D222).

Click on Insert in the Excel Ribbon bar.

Click on PivotTable.

The Create Pivot Table window will appear. Click OK.

The PivotTable Field List will appear. We want to find the number of sales for each product. Drag the product field to Column labels and the value field to Values. This gives us the total value of sales by product.

To change this to the number of sales pull down the Sum of value drop-down list and select Value Field Settings….

Change Summarize value field by from Sum to Count and click OK.

The number of sales of each product are now shown.

Now drag the country field to Row labels. Then click on Count of value, select Value Field Settings…, change it back to Sum and click OK. The total value of sales of each product by country is now displayed.

We now need to add a day of the week column. Click on Sheet 1 and add a new column as shown.

Now select all the data from A1 to E222 and insert a new pivot table, as before.

Drag the fields as shown to get the total value of sales of each product by day of the week.

(We’ll quietly ignore the fact that the number of days aren’t divisible by 7 in the data.)

We can even display by product, day of the week and country with one more drag.

Excel also supports pivot charts if you prefer your results in graphical form.

Obviously this is a very simple example, but pivot tables can be used to quickly analyse much larger and more complex data sets. Next time you have got some data to analyse consider whether you would be better using pivot tables or pivot charts.

A couple of people asked me afterwards whether anything I tried had worked. Yes! I wouldn’t have survived long as a microISV otherwise. But I didn’t really want to dwell on what had worked for me because it might not be relevant for different products with different price points in different markets. Also that isn’t the sort of information I want to give to my competitors.

Things were running a bit late due to problems with the projector, so I didn’t have time for the audience participation at the end. Projector problems are really not what you need when you are just about to do a talk to a room full of people! Many thanks to Alwin and Sytske of Collectorz for doing the video and to Dave and Aaron of Software Promotions for helping to sort out the unruly projector.

• variables uninitialised in constructors
• classes passed by value, rather than as a const reference
• variables whose scopes could be reduced
• methods that could be made const

It only took me a few minutes from downloading to getting results. And the results are a lot less noisy than lint. I’m impressed. PerfectTablePlan is heavily tested and I don’t think any of the issues found are the cause of bugs in PerfectTablePlan, but it shows the potential of the tool.

The documentation is here. But, on Windows, you just need to start the Cppcheck GUI (in C:\Program files\Cppcheck, they appear to be too modest to add a shortcut to your desktop), select Check>Directory… and browse to the source directory you want to check. Any issues found will then be displayed.

You can also set an editor to integrate with, in Edit>Preferences>Applications. Double clicking on an issue will then display the appropriate line in your editor of choice.

Cppdepend is available with a GUI on Windows and as a command line tool on a range of platforms. There is also an Eclipse plugin. See the sourceforge page for details on platforms and IDEs supported. You can even write your own Cppcheck rules.

Cppcheck could be a very valuable additional layer in my defence in depth approach to QA. I have added it to my checklist of things to do before each new release.

There are also some other interesting looking talks. Chatting to other people in the business over coffee or beer is also invaluable. If you haven’t booked a ticket, it isn’t too late. Don’t worry if it is your first time – people are very friendly. Do come and say hello.

On the subject of conferences, the ASP is putting on ISVCon in Reno, Nevada, USA in July 2012. Being UK based it is probably further than I am prepared to fly for a conference. But I hope it is a huge success.

We all know how to lose weight: eat less and move more. So why do so few people succeed? You only have to spend a few minutes walking around any wealthy western country to see that obesity is a huge problem. The human body is truly an incredible thing, evolved over millions of years. It is so much more than just a mere transport and fuelling system for the brain. We only get one body, it is a tragedy to neglect it.

The past is always with us

Our evolutionary past is working against us. Agriculture is less than 10,000 years old. That is only about 400 generations. A blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. While our technology and culture may have changed beyond all recognition in that time, our bodies and brains are still very similar to those of our palaeolithic ancestors. Their innate drives to eat salty, fatty and carbohydrate rich food and minimize their energy consumption helped to keep them alive on the hostile African savannah. But these ancient drives do little to help urban humans with almost unlimited access to food and increasingly sedentary lifestyles. Hence the burgeoning waist lines we see all around us today.

Tightening trousers

Over the last few years I had put on a few kgs. I have been spending a lot of time in front of the computer; working on my software product, doing consulting and writing this blog. Having a young child also reduced the time available for exercise. The 32 inch waist trousers I have been wearing for the last 20+ years (not the same pair, I would like to point out) were starting to feel uncomfortably tight. I either had to lose weight or go clothes shopping. Surely anything is better than clothes shopping.

But how to lose the weight? Previous attempts to lose weight have never lasted:

• I went trekking in the Himalayas, spending 16 days walking up to the top of Mera Peak (6,476 metres). Weight loss wasn’t the goal, but the extreme exertion at high altitude meant I had the beginning of a ‘six pack’ when I got back. It didn’t last though.
• I wrote down everything I ate on a spreadsheet and worked out the calories by weighing the food and using the calorie information on the packet or the CalorieKing website. I tried to eat less than 1800 calories a day[1]. It worked for a while, but the bookkeeping was tedious and I got bored and hungry. I gave up after a few weeks.
• I tried the Zone Diet. Again it worked for a while, but I found the constraints (maintaining certain proportions of protein, fat and carbohydrates) tedious. I was also less than convinced by the science. I gave up after a month or two.

Success!

I decided to try a different approach. It is based on the same approach I take to my business – learn the concepts and measure the results. 8 months later I have dropped from 17.5% body fat to 13.0% body fat and lost over  6 kg (13 lb) in weight. I will spare you the before and after photos, but suffice to say that I can now easily fit into 30 inch waist trousers (damn – I still had to go clothes shopping!). And I never went hungry. I wasn’t even particularly disciplined, taking a week off here and there when I went on holiday. I won’t be appearing on the cover of a men’s fitness magazine or slimmer of the year. But I think it’s not bad for a 45 year old with a sedentary job, a distinct lack of ‘thin genes’ and a weakness for most fattening things.

I don’t claim to be an expert nutritionist or physiologist. Even if I was, the knowledge in this field seems to be constantly changing. But here is the approach that worked for me. It might work for you.

The slow carb diet

The cornerstone of my new approach was inspired by (but didn’t follow the letter of) Tim Ferriss’ slow carb diet. You should go and read his article, but the key elements are:

• diet 6 days per week – eat lots of lean protein, beans, pulses and veggies, no high energy carbs (e.g. sugar, bread, rice, pasta, potato, fruit, beer and sugary drinks)
• binge 1 day per week – pig out and eat whatever you like, all-you-can-eat buffet here I come!

There is more detail in his Four Hour Body book [2].

This approach makes sense in terms of our evolutionary heritage. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors wouldn’t have had access to refined carbohydrates, such as bread, and fruit would only have been available in season. They would also have regularly alternated between feast and famine.

A typical diet day’s intake for me is:

• 2 eggs for breakfast with chilli sauce (fried with a tiny amount of oil sprayed into a non-stick pan)
• a big salad for lunch
• cajun style fried white fish with lots of veggies for dinner
• several teas, coffees and glasses of water plus a glass of red wine

The binge day helps both physiologically (it presumably stops your metabolism slowing down in response to the reduced calories) and psychologically (you are never more than 6 days from eating what you want).

Pick an exercise regime you can stick with

I also increased the amount of exercise I do. The key to this was doing things I found enjoyable and a combination of routine (doing some exercises the same day every week) and variety (varying what I did on other days). I have found that a routine of capoeira, running and kickboxing pad work plus some swimming, weights and cycling for variety suits me. I average 3-4 30-60 minute exercise sessions per week.

I really enjoy capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian fusion of martial art, dance and music. It is very strenuous, but the fact that I am learning a skill (and trying to avoid getting kicked in the head) stops me thinking too much about the exertion. I also find running and weight training quite bearable when I am listening to an interesting podcast. I am lucky enough to live near a beautiful park with a lake. Running around the lake is even quite enjoyable on a sunny day. The fitter I get, the more enjoyable it becomes. Different things work for different people. People have even lost weight combining World of Warcraft with a treadmill or exercise bike. Don’t try to force yourself to do stuff you hate, you won’t stick with it.

Your body burns mostly glycogen stored in the muscles for the first 30 minutes of exercise. So you need to exercise for more than 30 minutes to start burning fat.

It takes a lot of exercise to burn off a small amount of food. About 15 minutes of running is required to burn the calories from a single slice of bread. I knew someone who was significantly overweight despite cycling 10 miles a day. It was only when he changed his diet as well that he started to lose weight.

Any form of exercise that builds muscle mass (e.g. weight training) is good, because extra muscle will increase your metabolic rate which will burn more calories.

Weigh yourself every day

If you weigh yourself every day, you will soon see a direct correlation between weight loss and how well you stick to your diet/exercise regime. I found this daily feedback very helpful for motivation. If you only weigh yourself once a week your progress may get lost in the noise, e.g. due to the varying content of your digestive tract. I weigh myself every morning, as soon as I get out of bed. Here is a graph of my daily weight over the last 8 months:

You can see the sawtooth pattern of the weekly binge day. It is easier to see overall progress using a 7 day moving average:

Each peak was a suspension of the diet and exercise regime for holidays, birthdays and conferences.

A bit of science

Different foodstuffs vary hugely by the amount of calories per gram. You could eat 10kgs (22lbs) of green vegetables per day and not exceed your daily calorie intake (you might get a divorce though). Look at the side of the packet when you buy food, you’ll be surprised. For example, 1 gram of:

• spinach = 0.2 cal
• onion = 0.4 cal
• kidney beans = 1 cal
• bread = 3 cal
• french fries = 3 cal
• sugar = 4 cal

Try to avoid food where you don’t know what goes into it. For example, a lot of home delivery pizza contains vast amount of hidden salt, fat and carbs.

All calories are not equal. One would think that eating fat makes you fat. But there is increasing evidence that carbohydrates, not fat, is enemy number one when it comes to losing weight. Particularly carbohydrates with a high GI (ones that are quickly absorbed into the blood stream). Carbohydrate intake affects insulin levels, which in turn affects fat deposition. I was moderately active before and I didn’t eat excessively, but I ate a fair amount of bread, rice and potatoes. Reducing the amount of carbs has been the biggest change for me and I believe the main cause of my weight loss. Note that many ‘low fat’ foods (e.g. low fat yoghurts) contain large amounts of added sugar.

Protein makes you feel full. Studies show that x calories of protein will make you feel less hungry than x calories of carbohydrates or x calories of fat. High GI carbohydrates can even make you feel hungry (as you will know if you have ever felt starving after drinking lots of carbohydrate rich beer).

Low carb doesn’t have to be boring. Pickles, chilli sauce and balsamic vinegar liven things up without adding calories. The amusingly named Ring of Fire (‘so hot it will burn you twice’) is my favourite chilli sauce. It’s not actually that hot.

It is easy to underestimate how much you are eating. Studies show that overweight people tend to be worse at estimating their calorie consumption. I watched a TV documentary in which they asked an overweight women to work out her daily calorie intake. She calculated 1000 calories per day. Precise measurements showed it was, in fact, 3000 calories per day. The large bowl of fruit she ate every morning was 1000 calories on its own.

Smaller plates=smaller portions. Studies have shown that simply reducing the size of your plate can reduce overall calorie intake.

Starving yourself doesn’t work. Not only does it require willpower that few of us possess, but also the body simply adapts to the lower calorie intake by reducing metabolic rate. This can then cause you to put on weight if you return to your old eating habits.

Studies show that most overweight people do not have low metabolic rates. In fact, they typically have higher than average metabolic rates due to their increased mass requiring more work to maintain. If you are fat, the chances are that you are eating too much and not doing enough exercise, rather than it being due to a slow metabolism.

Watch what you drink

Watch what you drink, as well as what you eat. Drinks can contain surprisingly high amounts of calories. A single small can of cola contains around 5% of your daily energy intake. Alcoholic drinks and milkshakes can also contain a lot of calories.

Drink more water. A lot of rubbish is talked about hydration. But water does make you feel more full. So it is a good idea to have a big glass of water between and/or during meals. I find it easier to drink water if it is chilled in the fridge with a squeeze of lemon. No need to waste money on bottled water. It works even better if the water is in the food. Soup is a good way to make yourself feel full without consuming too many calories.

Food supplements

Tim Ferriss also recommends PAGG (Policosanol, Alpha lipoic acid, Garlic extract and Green tea) food supplements for weight loss. But these are about £70/$100 per month and I haven’t been able to find any peer-reviewed, double-blind trials that shows that it actually works. I won’t be spending that sort of money without some proper scientific evidence. I am not aware of any other food supplements that are proven and without side effects.

Social factors

Get your partner or house mate to diet with you. It is much harder to stick to your diet if the fridge is full of things you can’t eat. Declaring your intention to lose weight publicly can also provide extra motivation. Feel free to post your current weight and target weight in the comments. ;0)

Be realistic

Have realistic expectations about how fast you will lose weight. I came nowhere near losing the ’20 lbs. of Fat in 30 Days’ that Tim Ferriss claims. I averaged around 0.3 kgs (0.7 lbs) lost per week over the initial 4 months, and less after that. If it has taken you years to put on the weight, you are unlikely to lose it in a month or two. Despite claims to the contrary by people with books to sell.

The long term

Losing weight and keeping it off requires a long term change of lifestyle. Only time will tell if I can improve on, or even maintain, my current weight loss. I expect I will put a bit of weight back on over the winter. But I think I have found a regime that works and that I can live with. Putting this article in the public domain gives me a bit of extra incentive!

A call to action

If you need to lose some weight, then today is as good a day to start as any. If you do, it would be interesting to get some additional data for a follow-up post in a few months. Email me (andy at oryxdigital dot com) if you are interested in taking part.  You can remain anonymous, if you wish.

[1] Note that I am following the (ridiculous) convention of referring to kilo calories (kcal) of food energy as ‘calories’.

[2] It is an interesting and entertaining book. But beware that:

• a lot of it is controversial, as you will see from the comments in Amazon
• I find many of his claims of results of weight loss and weight gain hard to believe, and I think they certainly aren’t representative of what most people will achieve
• experimentation is good, but self-experimentation is not as reliable as formally conducted, peer-reviewed, double-blind experimentation, especially when the author has a book to sell

Capoeira photo by HoveringDog.