Category Archives: news

Oryx Digital sponsored team wins gold at International Rocketry Challenge

The Ridgeway Rocket Club team of Ben Wigley, Sanjay Bala and (my son) John Brice, won the International Youth Rocketry Challenge at the Paris Airshow last week. After beating 180 other UK teams at UKROC to qualify, they then beat the best teams from the USA, France and Japan. I sponsored and mentored the team this year and the year before. The team placed 9th overall in the UK at their first attempt, last year. Airbus was the main sponsor for UKROC and their trip to Paris.

The rocket was designed and built from scratch by the team, with various 3d printer and laser cut components. The top tube is a Pringles can (strong, cheap and full of yummy pringles)! We used a Cesseroni F Classic solid fuel motor for the launch.

The results were scored on a combination of flight (60%) and technical presentation (40%).

The flight mission was for the rocket to reach 850 feet, split into 2 sections and land the nose section in 42 to 45 seconds with an intact raw egg. The UK team managed 872 feet height and ~38 seconds duration with an intact egg. A French policewoman accidentally elbowed the rocket on the way to the launch, so it was a good job they made the fins super strong!

The UK team got an impressive 58 out of a possible 60 points on the presentation.

I’m very proud of what the boys achieved and it was such an amazing experience. VIP everything and the team got to meet and shake hands with the French Primer Minister, various French cabinet members and 5 astronauts, including NASA astronauts Charley Duke (who walked on the moon and commanded the lunar module on Apollo 16) and Mike Bloomfield.

They managed to get Mike Bloomfield to sign a rocket fin before the launch. They also got to meet a load of other interesting people from rocketry, aerospace, the US armed forces and from the other teams. Another highlight was a personal tour of an Apache gunship helicopter by the US Army (I’m so glad we are on the same side!).

Our launch:

Our onboard video from the launch:

Yesterday we got to go into the house of commons to show off the rocket and the team met various people including: space scientist Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, our member of parliament and the Minister of State for Education. There can’t be many people who have taken a rocket into the house of commons!

Next month they have a VIP tour of the Airbus factory at Stevenage. The team has also been interviewed by the local BBC radio station.

Before getting involved in UKROC my son wanted to do something technical, but he wasn’t sure what. Now he has decided he wants to do Aerospace engineering at University. Ben is also considering an aerospace career. Sanjay wants to be a corporate lawyer, maybe for an aerospace company. I’m sure it has also got a lot of other people interested in aerospace careers. So a definite result for the sponsors. A big thank you to everyone who makes the UKROC and International Rocketry Challenge competitions happen, including: ADS Group, Airbus, Lockheed Martin, NAR, AIA and all the volunteers.

If you are in the UK, USA, France or Japan, why not enter a team in 2024? It is a fantastic way to get kids involved in a challenging STEM project. And if you are looking to employ a rocket engineer a few years from now, drop me a line!

Software Startup Founders Academy

My friend Stuart Prestedge is launching his Software Startup Founders Academy next week. He is giving away a limited number of free 1:1 advisory sessions for software startup founders (and prospective founders) .

Stuart has been creating software startups for over 30 years, including 2 successful exits. He is now making his knowledge and experience available to any founders or prospective founders who join him in the academy. This means you can get help and guidance with whatever your issues, hurdles, blockers, worries and concerns are, right now. You’ll be part of a community that helps each other to succeed, answering questions, solving problems and making decisions big and small. You’ll also have access to resources (videos and documents) to accelerate your progress. And you can join the regular group coaching calls to discuss the topics that members are asking about. The combination of community, content & coaching will help you to grow and succeed.

To request your free session go to:

https://softwarestartupfounders.academy/academy-launch-request-1-1

Verifone seems to be having issues processing UK payments

An ‘unfinished’ transaction is when an order ‘has incomplete/delayed/invalid payment details’. For example a payment not completed after being flagged (correctly or incorrectly) as fradulent will be marked ‘unfinished’. Recently I have been getting a lot more ‘unfinished’ transactions than usual through my main payment processor, Verifone[1]. This seemed to be particularly for people ordering from the UK.

I dug down into my table planning software sales data using my own data munging software. Here is what I found looking through data since 2017:

(April results are for half the month. There were fewer transaction during 2020 and 2021 as not much table planning was happening during the pandemic!)

The brown bars show the ‘unfinished’ transaction rate for all countries. The blue bars show the ‘unfinished’ transaction rate for the UK. So my suspicions were correct – there has been a huge jump in ‘unfinished’ UK transactions. In March and April the number of unfinished transaction is about 10x what I would expect historically.

Some of these lost sales I am able to recover by emailing them and sending a Stripe payment link. But it isn’t ideal, as it is a hassle for me, and the customer and Stripe doesn’t handle the tax. But many of these sales are just lost for good.

I emailed some of the prospective customers with unfinished transactions. Here are a couple of responses I got:

“Hi my bank tell me that you are not set up with the new security banking system. That is why my payment is not going through.”

“I was told to ring my bank to ask why the payment was denied. I spent ages waiting for [my bank] to answer the phone and had to answer goodness knows how many security questions before they were able to tell me that the payment company had not updated their software to be on Visa’s list of acceptable people to pay. Something to do with preventing fraud.”

What is going on Verifone? Why has my ‘unfinished’ rate for UK customers sky rocketed? Is it going to be fixed soon? This is costing me time and money. Quite a lot of money. Is anyone else seeing the same thing?

I emailed Verifone on the 11th of March to ask what is going on. I am still awaiting a substantive reponse from Verifone, over a month later. It isn’t the first time I’ve had to send several follow-up emails and wait weeks for a response. Verifone support response times are glacial. Unfortunately great little payment processing companies frequently get bought and become not-so great large payment processing companies. Back when they were Avangate, you would often get a reponse on the same day. I miss those days.

** Update 10-Jun-2022 **

Things got even worse in May, with some 30% of UK customer transactions failings. I kept on at Verifone and I finally got an email on 23-May-2022:

“Thank you for the patience you have shown us during the investigation. Our development team has resolved the described issue and released the fix into the production environment. We have tested it and confirm that the fix is working as intended.”

The rejection rate then went very quickly back to normal. When I asked what the problem had been I was told:

“There was a setup issue with the GBP payment terminal. Our engineers identified and fixed it.”

So I am glad it is fixed. But it took from 11-Mar, when I first reported it, to 23-May, when it was reported fixed. It cost me a lot of time and and money. It must have cost Verifone a *lot* more, Possibly millions in commission for an operation of their scale. You would think they would have spotted and fixed something like this very quickly. But apparently not.

[1] I was originally with Avangate, who merged with 2Checkout and then were bought by Verifone.

Chrome SSL certificate issue

The issue

Google have decided to “deprecate Chrome’s trust in the Symantec certificate authority (including Symantec-owned brands like Thawte, VeriSign, Equifax, GeoTrust, and RapidSSL)“. This comes after “Symantec had entrusted several organizations with the ability to issue certificates without the appropriate or necessary oversight”.

What does that mean for me?

If you are affected by this then your website SSL certificate won’t work for Chrome version 70 or later and visitors are going to see an ugly warning like the one below.

ssl error

Not good! The first beta of Chrome 70 is expected in September.

How do I know if I am affected?

  • Start Chrome.
  • Navigate to the https version of your website.
  • Go to Developer tools (View>Developer>Developer tools from the menu bar) and look at the Console.
  • If you see something like the below, then you are affected.

ssl cert

My https://www.perfecttableplan.com website was affected (it uses a Geotrust SSL certificate provided by my ISP, 1&1). But my https://www.hyperplan.com website was not affected (which uses a Godaddy SSL certificate).

On my Windows development machine Eset anti-virus seems to override the SSL certificate used by Chrome, so the console message did not appear. But it did appear in Chrome on my Mac. So you probably want to check from more than one computer.

What can I do about it?

Get your certificate re-issued. This was fairly straightforward with my hosting provider 1&1.

Final thoughts

As an owner of a small software business I spend too much time dealing with annoying crap like this. Symantec, I have always hated your bloated software. But now you officially suck.

Also, is it any wonder digital certificates are such a rip-off when one company is allowed to own so much of the market?

 

South West Bootstrappers meetup No. 2

I am organizing a regular meetup in Swindon (UK) for people who are running (or are interested in running) their own bootstrapped (i.e. not VC funded) software product business for web, Windows, Mac or mobile. Come along and talk shop with other aspiring and experienced bootstrappers.

The next meetup is on the evening of Tuesday 25th August 2015. So far there are 14 of us signed up. You can find out more and RSVP at meetup.com/South-West-Bootstrappers/.South West Bootstrappers Meetup

South West Bootstrappers meetup

I am organizing a regular meetup in Swindon (UK) for people who are running (or are interested in running) their own bootstrapped (i.e. not VC funded) software product business. Come along and talk shop with other aspiring and experienced bootstrappers. It doesn’t matter if you are developing for web, Windows, Mac or mobile.

The first meetup is on the evening of Tuesday 16th June 2015. You can find out more and RSVP at meetup.com/South-West-Bootstrappers/.

swindon meetup

10 years a microISV

I have been running my own one-man software company for 10 years today. Coincidentally it is also my 49th birthday, so it is perhaps a good time for a bit of reflection.

I did a physics degree and then worked full-time as an employee for nearly 20 years. I developed systems in FORTRAN, C and then C++ for operational research, satellite image processing, printed circuit board design, environmental modelling and distributed systems. I learnt a lot and met some great people, but I yearned to strike out on my own.

I set up my own company in January 2005. I was a techie and had very little experience on the business, sales and marketing side of things. It was quite scary.

I released v1 of my table planner software PerfectTablePlan at the end of February 2005. It was very rough and ready, but I sold my first licence in less than 24 hours. PerfectTablePlan has exceeded all my expectations and is still selling well. I have sold over 40,000 licences with revenue well into 7 figures (£) to date.

I started this blog in April 2007. It has had over 2 million hits to date and has been helpful for promoting my consulting. But mostly I do it because I like writing, when I can find the time.

I started offering a consulting service in January 2008. I have provided consulting to lots of other software businesses, mostly 1 day engagements concentrating on marketing. That has been very interesting and has added some variety to my work. It has also been helpful to find out what works and doesn’t in other businesses.

I ran a weekend face-to-face training course for people wanting to start their own software business in November 2013 and March 2014 in the UK. The course is 460 slides + various exercises. I enjoyed doing it and the feedback was very positive. But it was hard work to get enough people in one place at one time to make it viable. I could do it online, but I think it would lose a lot of the interactivity that made it work so well. I would like to run it again in 2015. Email me if you’re interested.

I released v1 of my AdWords keyword tool Keyword Funnel in March 2014. This was a commercial quality re-implementation of various tools I had written to help myself run my long tail AdWords campaign for PerfectTablePlan. The plan was to produce v1 within a couple of months, part-time. But it ended up taking nearer to 6 months. Feedback became more patchy and ambivalent as I got closer to v1. But, having got that far, I decided to push it out anyway. It didn’t sell well, for various reasons which I might go into in a future post. I also decided I didn’t want to spend all day thinking about AdWords. So I stopped selling it and took the site down. But it seems a shame to have wasted that work, so I may resurrect it later this year as a free product.

I am just about to release v1 of my visual planning software Hyper Plan. I have worked on this part time since September 2014. I am very pleased with how it has turned out. But I have no idea how successful it will be (as was the case with PerfectTablePlan and Keyword Funnel). I think a lot of people could benefit from it, but it is in a crowded market. Watch this space.

I have attended various conferences for small software businesses and spoken at MicroConf (Europe), ESWC and SIC. It is always great to meet other people in the business.

I am a moderator and regular contributor on the Business of Software and bootstrapped.fm forums.

All sorts of strange and wonderful things have happened, including:

  • PerfectTablePlan has been used for some very famous organizations for some very famous events (which I sadly don’t have permission to mention). It has seated royalty, celebrities and heads of state.
  • PerfectTablePlan was used as part of a demonstration of the (controversial) first commercial quantum computer by D-Wave.
  • A mock-up of PerfectTablePlan, including icons I did myself, was used without my permission by Sony in their ‘Big day’ TV comedy series.
  • I got to grapple with some interesting problems, including the mathematics of large combinatorial problems and elliptical tables. Some of my customers are now seating 4,000 guests and 4000! (4000x3999x3998 .. x 1) is a mind-bogglingly huge number.
  • A well known wedding magazine ran a promotion with a valid licence key clearly visible in a photograph of a PerfectTablePlan CD. I worked through the night to release a new version of PerfectTablePlan that didn’t work with this key.
  • I found out that CDs are edible.
  • An early article I wrote for the blog generated 56k hits in a day and got me a mention in the Guardian newspaper.

I employed my wife as bookkeeper a few years back. But decided I didn’t want to take on any other employees. I outsource a few things that I can’t do, but I still do most things myself.

It has been hard work and a bit of a roller coaster ride. But overall, it has been great! I wonder what the next 10 years will bring?

See also:

Lifestyle programming

Announcing a new date for my ‘Start your own software business’ course

AH111220CO-2000x1297I ran my first ‘Start your own software business’ course in November last year. It was a lot of work to write the course and organize the logistics. But I am very pleased with how it went. I have had a number of enquiries about the course since then, so I am announcing another date: 22/23 March 2014. As previously, the location will be Swindon, England. The course is limited to 10 people (first come, first served) and there is an ‘early bird’ discount if you book by  07-Feb-14. For more details (including comments by previous attendees) go to the training page.

My new ‘Start your own software business’ training course

Things have been a little quiet on this blog as I have been busy on some new projects as well as continuing to work on PerfectTablePlan. I am announcing one of those new projects today.

Start your own software business

A two day intensive training course on how to create a profitable business selling your own software product

22/23 November 2013

Swindon, England

There is a lot more to running a software business than knowing how to program. The last 8 years of running my own software business have been a huge learning experience for me. In this course I am going share as much as I can to help others succeed with their businesses. This is the course I wish had been available when I started out. I am looking forward to getting out from behind my computer and meeting aspiring software entrepreneurs.

There is a £50 discount if you book before the end of September and the course is limited to just 10 attendees. If you have ever dreamed of escaping your cubicle and becoming your own boss, what are you waiting for?

Click this link for more details

I am just beginning to publicise the course and I would really appreciate a mention on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, social news sites etc.