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.

Blog Blazers interview from 2008

Stephane Grenier is publishing an interview a week from his 2008 book Blog Blazers on followsteph.com. This week he published my interview from the book. It was interesting to re-read it 5 years on. I never did quite reproduce the success of my early software award scam post, but I am still posting – albeit not very frequently.

Swisscom Pocket Connect #FAIL

This rant is for the benefit of anyone thinking about hiring a Swisscom Pocket Connect device for WiFi access in Switzerland. Regular readers can probably skip this post. Summary: good idea spoiled by lousy service. I’m just jotting a few notes down here to vent some spleen and to warn anyone else thinking of signing up for Swisscom Pocket Connect (hopefully it will get on the first page of the search results for relevant terms).

I recently went on a family holiday, touring Switzerland by train. I needed to be able to check my emails every day (preferably several times per day). I have a mobile data contract in the UK, but roaming data costs in Europe are prohibitive, and I didn’t want to depend on the vagaries of free hotel WiFi. So I paid to rent a mobile access dongle from Swisscom for the duration of the trip. It sounded great on paper. You pay a fixed fee in advance, pick up the pre-configured dongle from an airport or train station on arrival and then put it in the post when you leave. I could check my emails as often as I wanted. Even on the train. Perfect! In reality it was a shambles.

I paid swisspasses.com for 13 days of use. They emailed me a voucher which I printed. I presented the voucher a Geneva train station ticket office. The staff member passed me on to a colleague, who looked a little irritated. Not a good start. It took her some 30 minutes to issue the dongle and she said it was the first one she had done. She assured me that it was for 13 days.

I turned on the dongle and accessed my email. It worked, but Swisscom had sent me an email saying the dongle was activated for 6 days. Damn. Also I was able to access the dongle without the printed WiFi password. So my communications with the dongle were completely unencrypted. Pressing the WPS button made no difference. Double damn.

I went to the Swisscom shop in Geneva, thinking they might be a bit more clued up. After waiting an eternity to be served, they phoned someone at Swisscom and assured me it was activated for 13 days. When I told them about the lack of encryption they said they weren’t involved in pocket connect and that I should call the non-free support number (an expensive proposition with roaming fees). I asked them to call it for me. They refused.

I emailed Swisscom technical support to explain the WPS problem. They (eventually) emailed me to tell me to return it for a replacement. I emailed them to tell them what I thought of their service so far. They didn’t bother to reply.

I used Google to find the instruction manual and worked out that holding the power and WPS button for 3 seconds did a factory reset. I now had encryption, no thanks to Swisscom. Things were looking up.

On day 6 the dongle bricked. I wasn’t sure if it was broken or deactivated by Swisscom. I took it too Chur Train station SBB counter. They obviously didn’t want to know. ‘I just issue tickets’ the man said. The queue was building behind me. He tried to get me to go to a Swisscom shop. After about 30 minutes with me getting increasingly hot under the collar and refusing to back down they eventually issued me another dongle for 7 more days. The encryption worked this time. Everything worked ok for the remaining 7 days.

The first dongle wasn’t correctly configured. The rental period wasn’t set up correctly. The station staff hadn’t had sufficient training. The Swisscom shop staff weren’t interested. The email support was very poor. I spent several hours of my holiday trying to sort all this out. Communication issues further exacerbated problems (my French is poor and my German is non-existent). It was all incredibly frustrating. So much for Swiss efficiency.

** UPDATE **

I posted a link to this article to Swisscom support. Here is the email they sent me back (somewhat faster and more detailed than their responses to my technical problems). I am unconvinced by their attempt to blame some of the problems on their reseller, swisspasses.com .

Dear Mr. Brice

We have read your blog entry and we would like to apologize for all the
circumstances. Pocket Connect is a new product which we offer and we constantly
try to improve the service for it.

Because of the credits for only 6 days. We could check it and it had credits for
a total of 13 days on this prepaid card. We can not say now what the error was
that it was not working after that. It could be a network error at the location
you were or another interruption which brought this error.

To the 0800 000 164 Support Hotline we offer. This is a free of charge number if
you call from a Swiss mobilephone or landline. Of course you have roaming
charges if you call from a number of foreign.

Swisspasses.com is only a reseller. If you had reserved/rented it at our
homepage pocketconnect.ch it would all have been easier. 

This should be not a excuse but in our opinion were these three points no
mistake of our side. But of course you became wrong technical informations
regarding the encryption.
As we said in the beginning we are still improve this service. We will take your
feedback very seriously and promise you to take these improvements to our
service in the future.

Do not hesitate to contact us if you have further questions.

Yours sincerely
Swisscom Schweiz AG

Service Center Pocket Connect
Postfach
3050 Bern

www.pocketconnect.ch/contact
support@pocketconnect.ch
Helpdesk 0800 800 164

Asshole x software = Asshole at scale

A builder recently dumped a couple of wheelbarrows full of rubble on the common land behind my house. He’s an asshole. But at least he is limited in how much of an asshole he can be by physical constraints, such as the amount of waste he can generate and dump in a day. With the right software, there is almost no limit to how big an asshole he could be.

Spammers send out millions of emails in the hope of getting a few hundred dollars in sales of Viagra, Ugg boots or whatever other dubious merchandise they might be pushing. According to one study the sending of 348 million pharmacy spam emails resulted in 83 million emails delivered and a grand total of 28 sales. That is a 0.0000081% conversion rate. Assuming that the 83 million emails delivered took an average of a second each for a human to scan and delete, that’s around 23 thousand hours wasted. For 28 sales,  netting perhaps a few hundred dollars in profit. You have to be a massive asshole to waste so much of other people’s time just to make a few hundred dollars.

Spamming is just one of the more obvious and egregious examples of being an asshole at scale. But there are lots more. Article spinning for example. This is where assholes use software to generate lots of small variations on a (usually poor written or plagiarised) article in a desperate attempt to increase their SEO ‘footprint’. It might seem like a clever way to game the system and get one over on the all-powerful Google. But, if it works, the search results will fill up with poorly written garbage and the signal gets squeezed out by ever increasing noise. A tragedy of the commons in which we all lose in the long run.

Comment spam on forums and blogs is another area where assholes can use software to scale their activities. To date this blog has had a total of 77,811 spam comments, most of them undoubtedly generated automatically. Thankfully, the vast majority were caught by WordPress’s Akismet software. But I still waste a few minutes every week sifting through the spam for false positives. If you multiply that by millions of blog and forum owners, week after week, it adds up to a massive amount of wasted time. Again for marginal gains.

As software becomes increasingly pervasive and bandwidth becomes ever cheaper, new areas are becoming available for assholes to exploit. For example using software to algorithmically generate vast numbers of T-shirt slogans for Amazon without properly checking the results. Not only does this fill up Amazon search results with garbage (many of the slogans make no sense) but some of the slogans were deeply offensive.

The best defense against the assholes is more software, for example: spam filtering software and improved search algorithms. I guess that is good news for those of us that make a living writing software. But I worry that the assholes will win the arms race in the long run and the Internet, one of the greatest inventions in human history, will be reduced to the information equivalent of grey goo.

What can we do about it as software developers? Firstly don’t be an asshole. Consider the overall impact of your actions. Sure you could blast out thousands of poorly targeted emails to promote your product. But, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Secondly, consider whether there is a product you could write that could help combat the assholes. People and businesses (especially businesses) will pay good money for products that save them time.

Finally, don’t create software for assholes. Generally speaking, a tool is not inherently good or evil. You can use a knife to stab someone, or cut a sandwich. But if you are writing software specifically aimed at spamming, spinning or other asshole scaling activities, then you are the biggest asshole of all.  With power comes responsibility.’If I didn’t do it someone else would’ is no defense. Of course, if you are a true asshole, you don’t (by definition) care what other people think. But, in the unlikely event that you are an asshole that has read this far, consider this – surely even you don’t want a customer base comprised entirely of assholes?

Upgrade your Adwords accounts before the 22nd July – or else!

google adwordsGoogle will automatically switch all Adwords campaigns to ‘enhanced’ on 22-July-2013. If you don’t do it before then, Google will do it for you. And you can be confident they will be thinking of their interests, rather than yours. The changes are mostly bad news for those of us that sell software for desktop computers. In particular you can no longer choose not to bid for clicks on tablet devices. I would like to have more control over how I bid on different platforms, not less, so I am not happy about the changes. However your choices are either to upgrade your campaigns to ‘enhanced’ or close your Adwords account.

You can at least bid less for clicks on mobile devices. If you are selling downloadable software that doesn’t run on mobile devices, I recommend you set your bid adjustment much lower for mobile devices. My own analytics data tells me that mobile devices only have one tenth the (measurable) conversion rate of desktop/laptop computers. So I have set my mobile bid adjustment at -90% for mobile devices. Presumably you can set it to -100% if you don’t want to bid for mobile clicks at all. I don’t understand why advertisers aren’t being given the same option for tablet devices.

Note that you can’t set a mobile bid adjustment for CPA campaigns. However Google should notice the lack of downloads and sales on mobile devices and adjust the mobile bids down for you automatically.

Upgrading is pretty straight forward and should only take a few minutes. More details on the software promotions blog.

Amazon PPC Ads

The ever-expanding Amazon empire is now offering their own Pay Per Click ads.

Amazon Product Ads is an advertising programme designed to provide Amazon.co.uk customers seamless access to products available on external Web sites. As a seller, you simply upload your catalogue of products you wish to advertise and set your cost-per-click bids and budget. Amazon will then display your ads to Amazon.co.uk customers when they shop for your product or related products. Customers who are interested in buying your product can click through to your Web site and purchase the product directly from you.

amazon-ad

As with Google Adwords, you bid for clicks. Minimum bid prices depend on the category of goods you want your ad to appear in. On amazon.co.uk the categories and minimum bid prices are currently:

amazon ad prices

There doesn’t seem to be any restrictions on advertising downloadable software. So it might be worth trying if you software fits into any of the above categories and has a relatively high ticket price (given that typical conversion rates are 1% there is no point paying £0.10 per click for software that you sell for £10). For example, if your software is related to music, you could advertise it alongside musical instruments. I would consider advertising my table planner software alongside books or DVDs related to wedding or event planning. Unfortunately that isn’t an option at present.

amazon ad categories not supported

I could try advertising my software in categories such as Kitchen&Home›wedding favours. But people looking for wedding favours aren’t explicitly searching for table planners, so the click to sale conversion ratio is likely to be well under 1%. Also the minimum bid price in this category is £0.15 and I am guessing that my ads wouldn’t even show if I bid the minimum. Paying >£0.15 per click with a <1% conversion rate for software priced at £19.95 doesn’t make sense. So I haven’t signed up.

It is inevitable that the bid price will inflate over time. So, if you want to try it, now is probably a good time. Amazon.co.uk are also offering £50 in free clicks if you sign up now. You can find out more on the Amazon Product Ads FAQ.

Have you tried Amazon PPC ads? If so, do you have to bid significantly above the minimum bid prices and how do the conversion rates compare with other PPC ads (such as Adwords)?

The declining profitability of Google Adwords

Google Adwords used to be a great way to get targeted traffic cheaply (if you knew what you were doing). I think those days are well and truly over.

I have been using Google Adwords to advertise my table plan software since 2005. The following graphs show some metrics from my Adwords campaigns over that 8 years. The graphs show 12-monthly cumulative figures (e.g. each point represents the value for that month plus the preceding 11 months). Using cumulative data hides some of the noise, including the seasonal variations that are inevitable in a business related to weddings (more people buy my software when it is summer in the northern hemisphere), and makes the overall trends clearer.

Average cost per click (CPC)

Average cost per click (CPC)

Clickthroughs

Clickthroughs

Conversions (sales)

Conversions (sales)

Profit per month

Profit per month

The trends are clear and it’s not a pretty picture. Less, more expensive clicks = less profit. I can either pay more and more per click to maintain the same number of sales. Or I can continue to pay the same per click and get less and less clicks. Either way, my profit goes down. It isn’t a trend I see changing direction any time soon.

I think these long-term trends are mostly due to increasing competition. As more and more companies bid on Adwords for a finite number of clicks, it inevitably drives up the cost of clicks (simple supply and demand). It also doesn’t help that a lot of Adwords users are not actively managing their campaigns or measuring their ROI, and are consequently bidding at unprofitably high levels. Google also does its best to drive up CPC values in various ways (suggesting ridiculously high default bids, goading you to bid more to get on page 1, not showing your ad at all if you bid too low – even if no other ads appear etc).

Of course, this is just my data for one product in one small market. But the law of shitty clickthrus predicts that all advertising mediums become less and less profitable over time. So I would be surprised if it isn’t a general trend. Are your Adwords campaigns becoming less profitable? Have you found another advertising medium that works better?

Code Club – inspiring a new generation of programmers

code clubYesterday I, and fellow software developer Oliver Balmer, ran the first session of our new programming club at the school our children attend. We weren’t sure what to expect, but it went very well. The children really enjoyed it and so did we. I am just putting a few notes here in the hope that it piques the interest of other software developers.

  • Code Club is a United Kingdom based network of volunteer-led, after-school coding clubs for children aged 9-11.
  • scratchThe first 2 terms are based on the free Scratch programming language developed by MIT. This is an excellent tool for teaching children programming. Programs are constructed by snapping together colour coded blocks – there is no syntax to learn and very little typing. Within an hour all 9 children went from nothing to having created a simple example game with graphics and sound.
  • Later terms progress on to HTML/CSS and Python.
  • If you want to set up a Code Club you need to get a DBS criminal records check (previously called a CRB). We did it through STEMnet. It was free and painless. We had to attend an evening course, but this gave us some useful information about the education system and dealing with children.
  • Code Club provides all the teaching materials, including print-out worksheets for each session.
  • There must be a qualified teacher in the room at all times with the volunteers, so you need to get buy-in from the school staff.
  • The process we went through was:
    • Registered with the Code Club website
    • Discussed it with the school
    • Wrote a proposal to the Headmaster
    • Got our criminal record checks
    • Went into the school and did a presentation to recruit interested children
    • Ran a competition for any children who wanted to join
    • Liased with the school IT co-ordinator to get Scatch on the school PCs.
  • The school has been very supportive and helpful throughout.
  • The proposal isn’t required by Code Club, but we thought it was a good idea to make sure everyone understood exactly what we wanted to do. One of the school governors (who is also a Deputy Headmaster at another school) helped us to write it. It was only a couple of pages long.
  • We showed a 3 minute video about Scratch in the presentation to the children. That had a much bigger impact than 2 middle aged programmers talking about how cool programming is. When we asked how many kids wanted to join, about 40 hands out of 60 shot up!
  • We took care to emphasize that programming isn’t just for boys.
  • We required any child who wanted to join our club to enter a competition to design their own computer game (on paper). This allowed us to restrict the intake to a manageable number, if too many wanted to join. Also it created an entry barrier to the less interested ones. We don’t want to act as a free baby sitting service for children who aren’t really interested. In the event we got 10 competition entries and we accepted them all.
  • 9 out of the 10 children turned up for the first session (6 boys and 3 girls).
  • We created a certificate for the best competition entry and handed that out at the first session.
  • Our club sessions are an hour and 15 minutes. We added the extra 15 minutes to allow some time to get everyone settled. The children were very engaged and had no problems concentrating for that long.
  • There is no fee to attend our Code Club sessions (unlike many of the other after school clubs).
  • You need to run the club at a time that suits the school/children. This isn’t a problem for me as I have my own business and can set my own work hours. If you are employed 9-5, you may have to negotiate with your employer.
  • Our school’s IT suite is well set up, with a projector and enough PCs for each child to have their own. This makes life easier.
  • It was slightly chaotic, but fun!
  • You may be able to join an existing Code Club rather than having to start a new one. Check the Code Club website for existing clubs.

I went to a secondary school a few months back and talked to some 80 teenagers about what it was like to be a software engineer. When I asked how many of them had done any programming at all, only one of them had. One! We are teaching a generation how to use Excel, Powerpoint and Facebook, but not how to create their own software. What a wasted opportunity. Of course, we don’t need or want everyone to be programmers. But I think it is such an important skill that every child should at least have an opportunity to try it. I believe Code Club can go a long way towards filling this gap. Currently over 700 schools in the UK have Code Clubs.

To find out more go to the  Code Club website at:

http://www.codeclub.org.uk/

I believe there are similar initiatives to Code Club in other countries, but I don’t know anything about them. Please comment below if you do.

The imminent demise of Google Reader

Sadly, Google is killing Google Reader on 01-July-2013. If you are reading this blog using the RSS feed via Google Reader, I suggest you start looking for another RSS reader. I have been trying feedly. It is ok, but so far I prefer Google reader. What is your favourite Google Reader alternative?