Innovation in Software

On the GeekUp mailing list, some business development advice was being asked for in terms of growing revenues and finding sales channels.

The advice being offered was to specialise: choose a niche and excel within it. Good advice, but the recipient started talking about the problems that come with specialising in CakePHP – a technology framework for rapid development of web applications – and I felt compelled to chip in with advice I think might be worthy of putting to a wider audience:

Don’t get caught in the trap of thinking specialisation means technology specialisation.

Business people don’t know about CakePHP. They know about e-Commerce, or customer forums, or customised marketing emails, or intranets where employees share knowledge.

Talk in their language, not yours.

When I go out and do sales, I talk about using Agile methodologies, iterative development, growing the technology base as revenue and budget allow. We use methods that ensure desired behaviour is captured and tested against cheaply, so changes in business assumptions are cheap to re-factor in the code – i.e. we reduce the cost of change to as close to zero as possible.

They couldn’t give a stuff what I’m actually saying is “we code Ruby on Rails with Cucumber, Culerity and RSpec tests”, because that doesn’t mean anything to them.

So, follow the market specialisation, not the technology specialisation when you speak to clients. Sure, choose the tech you like working with, but talk to your clients in terms of eCommerce stores, bold new ideas, e-mail marketing or super-slick brochureware sites as part of marketing campaigns.

Same as with selling anything: you sell benefits, not features*

All the big agencies I’ve seen thrive have chosen this style. The small guys seem to bang on about technology (or even worse “we only use GNU/Linux tools in production of your website”), and being able to do “anything” and get frustrated when people aren’t lining up at the door – the clients who like those shops generally aren’t the ones most of us want anyway.

* Before somebody points out that some gadgets “sell” on feature lists, that’s not what’s happening. When I say “this camera has triple 15 megapixel CCD sensors”, you might think I’m selling a feature. I know though that a geek who is into this price niche will likely transfer that feature in their head into “I can take really sharp pictures with good natural colour definition pictures with that camera”. I sold you a benefit via your own knowledge of the possibilities of the feature. :-)

It seems obvious, but most people miss it. Talking in the language of technology and features is a mistake I made for several years and am still struggling to deal with as I develop my new marketing material. The simple truth is, if they knew what all this BDD and Agile stuff was and why it was so good, they probably wouldn’t need our services. Now all I want to talk about when doing sales is business problems, issues and ideas and how to address them. Take heed, young grasshopper.

As Manoj said, I am now the lead on organising OpenCoffee Manchester. Manoj has done some great work on bringing these events to the North, so I just hope I don’t completely break everything and nobody turns up from now on.

One of my goals is to give these events a slightly clearer agenda and to make them geared more towards collaboration rather than networking. There’s going to be no major changes, but I’m fascinated by some of the success stories of past OpenCoffee events.

For example, as I understand it edocr was effectively conceived of at OpenCoffee and the partners attending decided to take an equity split in it. It wasn’t until several people (particularly Manoj) prodded me last month into releasing flaky code and “getting on with it” that I got around to releasing vagueware.com. At the same meeting I saw a prototype for a project that was discussed at a meeting a few months ago and several offered feedback that will get reflected in the code before launch. I’ve met people who I already know I’m going to end up collaborating with in future.

OpenCoffee Manchester then isn’t just about networking. It’s about finding people who you can work with and getting on with it. It’s about quickly developing ideas. Nobody intended for it to be like that – although Manoj has been an instigator in many of the success stories – but I think that’s where we need to set out the agenda for the future. A kind of mini-Project Sahara whilst we wait for that project to show results and to get buy-in from the key players in this city.

Of course it’s also a nice way to spend a Tuesday morning once a month.

I hope to see you all at the Starbucks behind Central Library next month on Tuesday 27th November, starting at 10am. This will be our last meeting of 2007, as the December meeting would have landed on the 25th – I think we all have alternative plans for that date – so it will be interesting to hear what people want to do from 22nd January onwards.

I’m almost human again after last week’s ‘grand tour’. I am however a little behind on blog articles. As promised though, some notes from Thursday’s mashup* event:

Sun Microsystems were providing space for this event at their office in Sale. It’s a great venue, but the trip out of central Manchester during rush hour left your correspondent a little frazzled. All trips out of Manchester leave this correspondent frazzled though, and it may have just been the task of crossing 8 lanes of heavy traffic that did it.

We opened with David Terrar from Blognation giving us a run down on where he’s seeing ‘Web 2.0’ technology in the enterprise. He touched on the BBC using blogs and wikis extensively, and discussed Pfizer’s use of the same. A lot of people seem to be trying to lock into consumer-orientated applications because the current success stories – Facebook, Flickr, MySpace – are in that arena. I think David is onto something in that the real money is bringing this style of social technology into the enterprise.

Simon Grice then did a more bi-directional talk on the premise that Web 2.0 doesn’t exist. I piped up and got agreement with Simon on the point that indeed the very first web browsers had “edit” capabilities and at some point, somebody decided it was too anarchic and turned the web into a broadcast medium. We’re now just getting back to where the web should have been more than a decade ago.

I also had to admit to the room that I have hired deviants in the past. Long story, I’ll fill you in some other time…

Simon discussed the disruptive nature of new media, and cited his own recently-launched testcard.tv – a site lawyers working on behalf of media companies will no doubt be particularly interested in.

UPDATE: Checking URLs, I notice that testcard.tv has been put into an “Under maintenance” mode, citing the takedown of a similar service and asking people to head over to their blog – it’s one way to get traffic I suppose. :-)

Next up, was Lee Strafford of Project Sahara. He’s trying to gauge interest on this side of the Pennines in what could be an interesting project. Talking to people after the meeting, the consensus was “wait and see where it goes”, which is unfortunate as it needs people to get involved now for it go anywhere. I’m going to do some talking around over the next few weeks and see what interest there is in getting stuck in at an early stage.

We then skipped the break – Ouch! Don’t do that again! My brain was hurting! – before moving onto case studies of NetVibes, edocr and Meecard. All interesting stuff, but I was already quite familiar with NetVibes and edocr – Meecard was a little food for thought though.

There then followed some discussions, some light networking, some pizza and a few beers before wandering off home.

All in all, this is a more polished and business-focused version of GeekUp. As a format it has a lot of potential, and providing the case studies and speakers can be lined up it could be a regularly anticipated event. Some people complained about the £25 entry fee (a sentiment I broadly agree with), but I know several people want to try and help out on that front.

I also find myself a little disappointed that I’m going to have to wait until February until the next one, so that has to be a reassuring thumbs-up for Manoj and Simon.

Whilst some may ask what could you do with infinite bandwidth, others are actually trying to get there. Internet2 – a research project that is surprisingly low-profile outside of those directly involved – has recently reached 100Gbps and there are, as ever, plans to go faster.

We’re at an odd period in the history of the Internet when it comes to bandwidth. We’re at speeds fast enough to provision most people’s textual and audio requirements just fine, and a few years away from being able to provide enough space for everybody’s HD video requirements. The question is, what next? What uses can we put higher speeds to? We’re quickly reaching the point where we can send data around between nodes faster than the nodes can do something useful with the data.

Once we’re at the point where data can consistently be transferred quicker than it can be processed – either by a computer or a human – we’re at a new point in the history of the network. Suddenly the big powerful boxes stitched together with string become mere silos for the data. And we, the users, reach a point where there is true saturation. At what point will the capacity for data transfer outreach the collective human capacity for making use of it?

I just got back from OpenCoffee Manchester which is being run by Manoj Ranaweera on the same model as Saul Klein’s event in London.

Today as a first event, it was only attended by a small handful of people but the mix was good and the conversation was really interesting.

Rhys Jones whose current business card – you get the impression he is a serial entrepreneur, and therefore business cards are transitory – currently says he’s doing interesting things at Accountis, but he showed me a cool piece of code he’s been working on.

I won’t blurt out what the deal is, but it’s the first time I’ve had to stop myself from giving somebody a standing ovation in the middle of a Starbucks: a cool idea, well executed, a clear path to monetisation, and you’ll hear about it a lot in coming weeks/months. I see a lot of code, and a lot of great ideas, but I wasn’t expecting that this morning and it caught me off-guard. It convinced me there really are people out there coming up with innovative ideas and executing them well in the region, and we just need to get talking to each other more.

Ed French was there from Enterprise Ventures and we had a great conversation around investment in software companies in general, and talked about Co-working ideas in Manchester a great deal. His angle on it was interesting when it came to getting it bootstrapped.

I talked a little about my business model, and there was interest in how I planned to grow it organically. Maybe it is just that Ed’s a good salesman, but I’m half-tempted to go out and talk to investors to see if this can get bootstrapped in a better way than through organic growth. The point I discussed was that too often we’re worried as developers about losing control of the company, or even the idea, but that comes at a cost of not getting really great advice from people with a vested interest in making it work. I’ve ‘recruited’ a customer to take an interest, and that’s helping, but the lack of cashflow within my business requires me to take on work elsewhere. That means he’s not getting the rapid iterative development needed to make it work: in a sense that model is working then, as it’s exposing my weaknesses, which is the most valuable part of a beta programme.

Also keen to talk about Co-working was Phil Hemsted of Yuuguu. It would seem that there is a real appetite for the kind of collaborative office I’m talking about within the business community, and there was a lot of discussion about how to make it happen, how to get money to get it started and how to make sure there was a great mix of people involved. I’m hoping to start getting more concrete terms around this over the coming weeks, but talking to people who are enthusiastic about it is always a good motivator to getting on with it.

I’ll definitely be trying to get to these events in future despite the early AM start. It would be great to see more developers and entrepreneurs turn up, as there was general consensus that too many people worry about keeping ideas secret and keeping their head in a bucket.

I’m going to try and get more people I know at start-up stage going along just to shoot ideas around. Whilst at the moment it still has a business feel to it – I was the only person not wearing a suit – I think it could act as one of those great little incubators of geek/business collaboration if we all give it a go.

See you there next week, and hopefully I’ll have worked out how my alarm clock works by then…