Information Technology Dark Side

What Are You Worth?

Whether you’re looking for a new job, consulting, or starting your own business there’s the question of what you should charge. Think of yourself as a great product in limited supply. When you walk into a job interview or meeting with a potential client you’re selling this product. They’re already interested enough in the product they’ve taken time out of their day to evaluate it. They don’t even realize just how great of a product you really are yet. Here’s the catch, there’s only one of you. So if they want you they’re going to have to pay for it.

Don’t Hold Back

Don’t hold back when deciding what to charge. A few years ago a friend of mine was working three jobs, trying to escape what she called the “golden handcuffs” at a large corporation. She was worn out and sick of working there. One of her other two jobs was conducting training seminars. One day she got an email from a prospective client asking her if she would teach a two-day class in Alabama and how much she charged per day. The usual answer was $2,000 per day but she said $5,000. She half expected the client to run for the hills. But the client didn’t even blink. They accepted, she taught the class, and soon after left that job at a large corporation. Her new standard rate is $5,000. Now that she’s armed with the knowledge that clients will pay that much she can walk away from clients who can’t afford her.

The 20% Rule

So this isn’t a common rule. It’s actually just my rule. But it’s one I always advise others to use because it’s worked for me. When I go into a job interview I’ve already got a good idea of what the pay range is for the position. I look for jobs where the maximum salary for that job is 20% more than what my current job pays. If the average raise is 4% per year I’m giving myself an instant raise that would take 5 years to earn at my current job. The point is you can afford to take some time to find the right job at the right pay. Unless you simply must jump ship from your current employer now or risk going crazy you should keep looking for that job that pays 20% more. If you follow this rule you’ll step up a pay grade with each new job.

Price as a Signal

Whether you’re looking for someone to teach a seminar or you’re buying a new computer price sends a signal. We all know that you get what you pay for. When you sell yourself short not only are you missing out on lost revenue by setting your price low you’re telling the customer or employer, “Hey, you could get better, but I’m the cheaper option.” Other clients may pass you over because you’re not charging the price other experts are. If price is your competitive advantage you’re not in the right industry.

95th Percentile

The product you’re selling is about quality. Look around at where you currently work. If you were the hiring manager which of your coworkers would you have hired? I doubt many of you would say more than half. But you’re different than most of them. Most of them leave on the dot at eight hours each day. Bob and Suzy spent an hour today talking about last night’s American Idol. You on the other hand are working late on tomorrow’s presentation. If you were a hiring manager and someone with your drive and abilities walked into an interview you’d count yourself lucky because they’re hard to find. You’re in the 95th percentile. You’re worth a salary in the 95th percentile.

About the Author
Jared Brown is the founder of Talentopoly.com, a web startup improving the job hunt by helping talented candidates be found. Free your resume from the pay walls of other job sites by posting your resume publicly on Talentopoly. Let us help you get more exposure.

Disclaimer
Look, I’m a 37Signals fanboy. Why deny it? I’ve been reading their blog for years, and the stories behind their success with products such as Basecamp and Highrise inspired me to launch TroopTrack.com, which will be two years old pretty soon. So don’t expect me to be all critical. Just sayin’.

Here are five things I learned by reading this book that really stuck with me. They are simultaneously very intuitive feeling to me and also in diametric opposition to the strategies and approaches I observed in the ten years I spent in corporate IT.

1. Apologize like a human
Everybody screws up. The way we deal with our mistakes can either endear us to our friends, customers, and colleagues or alienate us as cold and unfeeling. Which would you rather have happen? Rework give solid advice to help you avoid non-apology apologies and it inspired the following apology to my TroopTrack users:

Over the weekend I attempted to improve the single-sign-on feature between TroopTrack.com and TroopTrack Help Desk. Sadly, I didn’t do it right and caused two problems:
1) A brief outage over the weekend that impacted some of you.
2) Many of you are now unable to access the help desk.

The first problem was fixed within a few minutes, but it was still a pain for those of you who were online when it happened. I’m sorry about that.

I’m still working on the second problem. Hopefully it will be fixed soon. In the meantime, if you are having trouble accessing the help desk and need support, please email me directly or call me.

Thanks for understanding. Software is hard – I learn something new every day. Unfortunately sometimes I’m learning from my mistakes!

2. Fire the workaholics
This chapter was kind of bitter for me. If I follow this advice I have to fire myself! Sometimes I forget about the role I have in building the culture of a workplace, and I appreciated this reminder of how workaholics put a lot of pressure on their colleagues while impairing their own productivity by working too much.

I don’t want to fire myself, so I’m just scaling it back instead. Sometimes that’s hard, but it has already made me feel better.

3. Don’t be a startup
Startups are all about the exit. Yesterday I watched a video by Steve Blank explaining why founders are forced out in the transition from a startup to a big company and it reinforced this lesson to me, although I don’t think that’s what Steve’s intention was. You don’t need venture capital. You don’t need an exit strategy. You need a business. So be a business, not a startup.

4. Learning from mistakes is over-rated
Learn from your successes. Focusing on what not to do is far less valuable than focusing on what to do.

5. Don’t be in a hurry for huge growth
This is one of the mistakes I made when I first founded TroopTrack. I built up growth expectations that created a lot of pressure to deliver a “finished” project in a short period of time. That was a hard pill to swallow when reality set in – TroopTrack needed to be a much better product if it was going to grow quickly.

Today I don’t advertise. I don’t buy a single Google ad word. I add roughly one trial account per day, and lately a little more than 10% of them convert to paying customers.

That’s not much growth, but it doesn’t bother me. In fact, it’s become a powerful asset to me. I’m not as nervous about breaking things as I would be if I had 10,000 troops paying to use TroopTrack. I’m able to interact with my customers at a reasonably friendly level and they are pretty tolerant of my mistakes. Many of them are excited to see the little improvements I make on a daily basis, and if I unintentionally make a feature worse there is no outraged mob on my virtual porch in the morning.

This small user base has gone from being an emotional drain (why isn’t it growing more rapidly? when will I generate enough revenue to hire someone?) to being a source of creative freedom. I can perfect the product at a sustainable pace, tackling each problem I encounter without killing myself or impairing my ability to perform my real job well.

Buy this book
The advice in Rework feels emotionally healthy for me. I’ve been building TroopTrack.com based on a lot of the things I’ve learned from the 37signals blog, and the more I use the advice from authors Jason Fried and DHH the more confident and optimistic I feel that I can make TroopTrack successful. It also helps me see ways that I can make my day job better for myself and others.

Buy it. Read it. Try it.

Have a nice day.

This isn’t the kind of thing I usually write about, but since so many of you travel I thought you should know about this problem.

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) – The discovery of special “toilet cams” in multiple U.S. airports has left airport security experts scratching their heads and travelers wondering whether their private moments have been recorded and posted on YouTube.

The cameras were first discovered by John Velasqualia, a plumber at Dallas/Ft. Worth International Airport.

“A large number of our automatic flush toilets kept flushing as users entered and left the stalls,” Mr. Velasqualia states. “Normally they only flush when you leave. At an airport with over 4000 public toilets, that’s a lot of wasted water. So I took apart the flush activation sensor to see what the problem was. That’s when I discovered the camera.”

Automatic flush toilets rely on motion sensors to determine when to flush the toilet, using simple circuitry that is stored in the toilet ‘head unit’.

“The motion sensors had been replaced by cheap wireless cameras,” Mr. Velasqualia told us. “These cameras were connected to the head unit so that they turned on when they detect motion. Unfortunately for whoever did this, it goofed up the sensor logic, causing the toilets to flush as a person enters the stall.”

Since the discovery of the first camera, over one hundred other toilet cams have been found at DFW, and the effort to locate them all isn’t finished. “We’ve got a lot of toilets to check,” DFW said through a spokesperson on Friday. “It could take up to a week to search them all for cameras.”

Further investigation of these devices revealed something even more troubling: the cameras were using the airport’s public wireless network to upload videos of travelers dropping their shorts directly to the internet.

“I’m not sure where the videos were going,” Mike Frackensense, IT Security Manager at DFW told us. “Maybe YouTube, maybe some fetish-oriented porn site, who knows. All I know is I’m not using a toilet that flushes when I enter the cubicle.”

At least twelve other airports have reported finding similar toilet cams in their stalls. Lincoln International Airport in Nebraska discovered that every one of their 14 public toilets had the cameras installed.

“This type of voyeurism is appalling. I’m deeply disturbed and hope that none of our employees were involved in placing these cameras,” said one airport employee anonymously. “We can remove the cameras now, but what if the perpetrators just keep coming back?”

“The cameras are not sophisticated,” says security expert Maude Palienski. “You can get all the parts at Radio Shack for $20 and build the device in an hour. The installation is the trickiest part because you have to disassemble the toilet head without alerting others.”

“The location of the toilet head unit is perfect for this kind of privacy invasion. It captures the images just as you are pulling down your pants and sitting down, giving whoever did this a perfect view of your backside.”

“Cleaning this problem up is going to be a giant mess. I hope they catch the people who did this.”

Police say the perpetrator doesn’t appear to be targeting a specific gender. Cameras have been found in all types of restrooms, including the popular family restrooms.

There are two bright spots in this new kind of cyber crime:

“Detecting the presence of these cameras as a traveler is pretty easy,” says Ms. Palienski. “If the toilet flushes as you approach it, odds are there is a camera in it. Move on to the next stall.”

The other bright spot?

“The cameras don’t have audio capabilities. I’m personally feeling pretty grateful about that.”

More information: Fort Worth Star Telegram

Believe it or not, this post is eventually a book review.

The Presumption
There is a strange logical commonality between those who deny the feasibility of creationism and those who deny the validity of the science of evolution. I say it’s strange because the two factions couldn’t be more at odds with each other – they are locked in a fierce battle for the textbooks and science classes of American children. Millions of dollars are being spent in this battle. Lawsuits are filed and tried. And yet, at the heart of the conflict is a shared belief, a belief that is the whole reason for all this ridiculous hullabaloo that is wasting money and passion. What’s the belief?

If Moses is right then Darwin is wrong, and vice versa.

If Darwin is right then Moses is wrong. And if Moses is wrong then Darwin is right. That’s what they believe, and it’s why they fight.

It’s also why both sides are wrong, and why I say the whole fight is a shameless display of abject ignorance of both depictions of the origins of man.

I suppose I should explain that, but…

First, a Story
The six year-old me was standing in line at a Safeway with his mother, who was pregnant with her sixth child. While waiting for their teenaged cashier to work her way through all the mothers ahead of them, I began to ponder the mysteries of life and loudly posed a question to my mom.

“Where do babies come from?” I asked. More than one head turned to watch the response.

My mother was, and is, unflappable and frank. She could care less if a thousand people were watching – she would tell her kids the truth. This is how the truth went when I was six:

“Sometimes, when Mom and Dad kiss, Dad’s pee-pee goes inside her and puts a kind of seed in her tummy. That seed combines with an egg that Mom’s body has already made, and together they slowly grow into a baby.”

This was incredible news to me, and I just had to see it. Yes, the six-year old me badly wanted to see a baby get made. So, I devised a plan to witness the baby making event.

My mom and dad kissed in the same place every night – at the bottom of the stairs right when he came home from work. They would kiss for a long time and my dad would say nice things to my mom, grossing all four older boys out.

That night I sat at the top of the stairs and waited for my dad to come home. It was a perfect vantage point – I would be able to see everything. Dad came home, they smooched at the bottom of the stairs, but… my dream of witnessing procreation were spoiled. Nothing happened. I watched. Nothing came sneaking out of the bottom of my dad’s pants leg and then back up my mom’s dress.

I realized then that it was impossible. Nobody was that well endowed.

The Point
Did my mother lie to me? Did she misunderstand how babies are made? Was her depiction of procreation inaccurate?

Certainly not. Instead, it was simply appropriate for what I could, and should, understand about procreation as a curious six year old boy. It wasn’t a users guide, and it certainly wasn’t a scientific treatise.

Years later, when I found out the rest of the story, I didn’t conclude that my mother was a liar or an idiot. I simply filled in the gaps and realized she had wisely left out a big chunk of the story: sex.

This is how I think of Genesis – as a simple explanation for a lesser intelligence that was meant to be sufficient but not detailed. I would suggest that reading the first two books of the Bible gives you an understanding of the origins of life and man that is adequate but probably not complete. Further, I think some of the missing pieces can come through science, but not all of them have yet been uncovered. Perhaps we’ve gotten to candles, nighties, and bedrooms, but the rest of the picture is still a mystery. Viewing evolution and creation as competitors in a zero sum game only delays your understanding and creates unnecessary conflict.

Fortunately, a smarter guy than me thinks similarly. Welcome to the book review part of the program.

The popular understanding of Genesis is totally wrong, on both sides of the fight
Let me sum up popular creationism: God made the earth and all the stuff on it in six days, culminating in the creation of man. This popular notion is not a very accurate one and is not supported by anything but cursory examinations of a few pages in the Bible.

I’m not going to belabor this point, or the next, because Gerald Schroeder, PhD, wrote a whole book about it. Let me just say this much: if you compare what contemporaries of Jesus wrote about Genesis to what we think Genesis means today, you discover that we have evolved far beyond the original intent, whatever it was.

The popular understanding of Evolution is totally wrong, on both sides of the fight
Here’s what the average dude on the street things evolution means, whether they believe in it or not: Over millions and millions of years tiny little changes added up and added up until you got dudes and dudettes who could read, write, build computers, and argue about politics. All of this via a route through whales, monkeys, and ugly Geico haters.

This idea, that our evolution was slow and gradual, is not supported by the fossil record or by modern biology. Sorry. Instead, there is considerable evidence that evolution often happens incredibly rapidly, with major changes coming in single digit generations rather than over millenia.

The general public have many similar misconceptions about modern scientific theory that Schroeder points out in this very readable book and reconciles with ancient interpretations of the book of Genesis.

The big point
Genesis and the Big Bang, by Gerald Schroeder, makes a very interesting case that the fight between Moses and Darwin (and Hawking and Einstein and science in general) isn’t a fight at all. And he should know – he’s a Jewish scholar and physicist.

So, if you’re offended by the notion of evolution because of your religious beliefs, or vice versa, then I suggest you read Schroeder’s book. Even if you remain unconvinced, perhaps you will come away with a better appreciation for the other side, whichever side you happen to be on.

Yesterday I had an irritating incident with ZenDesk, the SaaS provider of the help desk used at Collaborative Software Initiative (where I work) and TroopTrack.com (a hobby project of mine). I asked for a new feature in the public forums and got this terse reply from Jake Holman at ZenDesk:

Automations are for batch administrative ticket operations or notifications – they are not for adding comments. Rules will generally never add a comment to a ticket, and we intend to keep it that way.

This response kind of pissed me off, but mostly it left me bemused. I’m supposed to “love my help desk” – that’s the big idea behind ZenDesk the product. Shouldn’t I also love THEIR help desk?

I thought about this for a while and solicited the response of others. They were a bit dumb-founded as well. “This is support?” we asked. I also considered the fact that ZenDesk, like TroopTrack, is modeled somewhat after 37Signals, and that part of their product philosophy was probably about making their product better by doing less.

I also considered the difficulty of telling a customer no. Sometimes, there is just no good way to do it. It’s even more complicated when you don’t know the customer from Adam, as is often the case with a SaaS product. Maybe I would have been irked no matter what Jake said.

In the end, I decided I needed two things: 1) A better explanation of why my request was rejected 2) A friendlier exchange with my help desk’s help desk. So I asked for it, and I was careful to let my irritation come through (I’m not a fan of pretending everything’s okay when it’s not). Here’s what I said:

When I read about 37 signals telling customers no, I think “what a brilliant idea.” When I experience it firsthand, it stings a little. Would you condescend to explain the philosophy behind automations a little bit for a person who isn’t part of your product team? Specifically, I’d like to understand what values you (ZenDesk) have that prescribe that approach.

Much appreciated.

“Love your help desk”

Dave

The sarcasm isn’t masked, but I also don’t rail on the dude – I simply explain what I want.

It didn’t take long for Jake to respond, and frankly speaking his response left me completely mollified. I won’t bore you with all the details, but here’s the gist of it:

Of course, I’d love to – sometimes people just don’t want to hear me talk about helpdesk geek waffles though, hence I try and keep responses short

There’s a number of philosophies within Zendesk that need to be explained first, so I’ll go through each of them as quickly as I can.

…

For these reasons, we don’t allow Computers’ to make comments in a Human’s conversation.

Hope that clears things up!

Here’s what Jake did that I thought was very smart and left me loving my help desk’s help desk again:

• He recognized a fellow geek and used appropriate geek-speak to acknowledge that I was ticked (emoticons are lame but they totally work)
• He explained why he was terse without an embarrassing apology or even a hint of arrogance
• He gave a patient and defensible explanation of why I had asked for something that didn’t fit in the product vision

I think this is a great example of how to make an unhappy customer happy again. As a fellow provider of customer support, I learned from this exchange. Making customers angry is an inevitable part of providing support. Turning a frustrating customer exchange into a positive experience is an art form that few are good at.

Thanks Jake, for being good at it, and thanks ZenDesk, for being awersome.

Keith Owens, from East Aurora, NY sent this very intelligent response to my previous post Where are the Smart Caterpillars and Cool Humanoids?. This response came via Dave Harp, a friend and neighbor. Thanks to both Keith and Dave! Here’s Keith’s response in full:

First, taking the big picture, there’s no doubt at all that humans share common ancestors with the great apes, with all mammals farther back, and with all life even farther back. There’s tons of fossil, anatomical, and DNA evidence which proves that conclusively. It is a fact from many lines of evidence that we are descended from ape-like ancestors. All that evidence doesn’t just go away because there are aspects of the development of intelligence that we don’t understand.

Your friend is focusing on one aspect of biology, the development of intelligence in humans, that truly is very poorly understood. His observations are astute and interesting. But in skeleton, organs, immune system, DNA, everything, it is just dead clear that we ARE related to everything else.

So there are many interesting, speculative questions you can ask about human intelligence, but you can’t just say that ignorance of this one area disproves the whole edifice of biological evolution. It’s not completely understood how many features of life, for example, flight in birds, evolved. But that doesn’t negate the fact that the evidence shows, overwhelmingly, that they did. You don’t get to throw out a whole branch of science because there’s one thing you’re puzzled by.

But anyway, suppose your friend is right and human intelligence defies all attempts at understanding. I think that changes very little, actually. Humans are just one species out of millions. As shown by the fossils, and anatomy and DNA, there’s no doubt about the common descent part, so you’re left with supposing that something other than natural selection infused our particular species with intelligence at some point in history.

Maybe God did at some point, as many religious people believe. Or, maybe alien benefactors juiced up our IQ as in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Whatever. If that makes you feel better, fine (by the way, where did the intelligence of the aliens or of God come from?) It doesn’t change anything about our common descent or about natural selection for the rest of life on Earth.

OK, moving on to some of the details of the writer’s ponderings. Is the existence of humans as the sole intelligent animals really that big a mystery? I suspect not. I would ask whether your friend has looked into the subject at all, being so devoutly curious about it? There’s been TONS written on the subject, and although a lot of it is necessarily speculative, I think that these questions do have at least plausible answers.

Sagan’s “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors,” which I borrowed from you, is one example. Sagan would argue that the gulf between chimps and bonobos and us is not really all that gigantic. Maybe brains reach a tripping point where if you get so many neurons wired up, you get qualitatively smarter fast. I suspect something like that is true, anyway. Like Skynet from the Terminator movies in computers.

Would elephants benefit from being much more intelligent? That’s not clear, they’re just big herbivores, what do they have to figure out? Dolphins don’t have limbs. Possibly monkeys in trees had a complex environment, there’s a lot of math and physics involved in jumping from branch to branch and judging the distances, maybe that drove brainpower. Brains are “expensive” to develop (Dawkins’ recent book “The Greatest Show on Earth” goes into detail there) so there has to be an immediate, incremental benefit or it won’t happen. Evolution can’t plan ahead for the potential benefit of elephants more than one generation in the future—that’s a misunderstanding.

Why are humans the only sentient species, why don’t we have the Star Wars Cantina Bar scene? It’s a fair question. If you filled a bar with African Pygmies, Swedes, Chinese, Eskimos and Hoosiers, that might begin to look a little funny. We may indeed be on the way to branching, but that takes millions of years and we haven’t been at it that long. Also, like the author notes “perhaps they were the other humanoids and we just took ‘em out.” I think it’s a mainstream theory that there were a number of early human species, Neanderthals and whatnot, and we did just take ‘em out.

Then too, going more into speculation, I suspect that the FIRST species to develop sentience on a particular planet quickly fills the whole planet in a mere few thousand years, and directs resources in various ways to its own needs, thus preventing others from coming along.

And we just happen to be the first, plus we’ve only been this way for an eye blink in geological time. Intelligence may also be a sufficiently rare event that the lightning just doesn’t strike multiple times within millions of years of each other. Somebody had to be first. If the intelligent elephants had beat us to the punch, they’d fix things to their liking, and they sure wouldn’t tolerate primitive humans rising up.

Does Evolution contradict Genesis? Of course it does. Chapters 1 and 2 list how people, animals, plants, the sun, moon, stars, and water came along. It’s all in the wrong order there. Plus, Genesis Chapter 2 blatantly contradicts Genesis Chapter 1! I suppose believers think it is to be taken only figuratively, in which case it can’t contradict anything, after all.

I mentioned a few weeks back that this blog was going to have a broader focus than in the past. Well, this post might suggest that I now have a completely random focus! At any rate, it’s my first attempt at waxing philosophical on these pages.

Disclaimer: Don’t Blame Religion
First off, let me make a disclaimer: I don’t have any religious objection of any kind whatsoever to the theory of evolution. At some other time perhaps I’ll explain why, but for now just accept that I don’t actually see evolution and Genesis as contradicting each other. The reason I say that is because I’m about to dis on evolution a bit and I don’t want to get stupid comments about how I’m biased by my religious views.
Question #1: Why are humans so much awersomer than EVERYTHING else?
There’s something about the idea that humans evolved from other animals on earth that doesn’t jive with the world around me. The thing is, we’re so much more awersome than everything else that is alive on this planet. There’s a huge, miles-wide chasm between us and everything else in terms of brainpower. Even the least intelligent normal human is thousands of times more intelligent than the smartest animal. You put Barney Rubble up against Wilbur the Pig at checkers any day and Barney will win every single time.

There are lots of animals with similarly sized brain cavities, all of which would definitely benefit from a few orders of magnitude leap in intelligence. Take elephants for example – don’t you think they’d be considerably better off if they had a bit of a mental boost? They could store up water for the dry season and avoid all that trek-across-the-summer-desert panic that kills off huge numbers of them every year.

I’m not just being silly here. In every aspect of being human but intelligence we have animal contemporaries. We’re not the only ones with fingers and opposable thumbs, the ability to walk upright, or feel emotions. Other animals have evolved to form social groups, mate for life (not that many humans do anymore), and provide extended care for their young. Why has no other form of life on the whole face of the planet made the same leap to be smart?

Shouldn’t at least one other creature have done it? If you made a bunch of lists along the lines of “Species that fly”, “Species that jump”, “Species that whatever”, every one of those lists would have more than one, usually more than ten, different species in it.

Now make a list of species that can imagine something that doesn’t exist and make it exist.

It’s short.

Question #2: Shouldn’t there be humanoids?

Remember the cantina scene in Star Wars? It was full of humanoids – human-like beings that weren’t Homo sapiens. Why isn’t earth more like that cantina?

I mean, if you had a cantina for squirrels, you’d see multiple species. The same is true of nearly every other type of animal on the planet, except perhaps the platypus and a few others.

Instead, if you go to any bar on earth, every single person there is Homo sapiens, except for those dudes from the Geico commercials. You might question this fact based on appearances, but trust me, blood samples would prove my point.

It seems to me we ought to have more than one species of humanity. This doesn’t make sense to me – if evolution causes branching in human families, why haven’t we done it?

Or did we do it and just kill the other ones off? Maybe that’s where myths of giants, ogres, trolls, etc came from – perhaps they were the other humanoids and we just took em out.

I’m just sayin.

This tip is based on my own experiences of late. I’m very curious how other testers/developers feel about this tip.
State the PROBLEM Clearly in a Single Sentence
It’s easy to confuse stating the CONDITION with stating the PROBLEM. Here are two simple examples, one states the condition, the other states the problem:

The Scout rank does not have a Board of Review requirement.

The Scout badge should not have a Board of Review requirement.

The first is what a user sent me. The second is what I entered in PivotalTracker. Why? Because the first one doesn’t actually describe the problem. It simply describes the condition that, in scouting, the Scout badge is earned without holding a board of review. Depending on how you read that, you might have come to the conclusion that, in TroopTrack, the Scout badge is supposed to have that requirement but does not. In fact, the opposite was true – the user was describing the requirement, not the problem.

Bug reports that do this really well are, in my experience, easier to reproduce and fix, but it requires the tester to make a value judgment about the way things should be. I suspect some testers are philosophically opposed to this.

Lo-Glo as You Go
Globalizing and localizing a Rails app isn’t hard work, but it’s mind-numbingly tedious if you have to do it all at once. Trust me. You’ll be happier if you lo-glo as you go, so just do it if there is the slightest possibility you’ll need to later on.
REST Along the Way
I’m not talking about naps (never been a fan of those). I’m talking about how you structure your controllers and views. If you don’t understand REST at the beginning of your project, just take a little time to learn it. I wish I had. Now, every time I touch something that’s not RESTful, I re-factor it. I lourve the cleanliness, but I wish I’d just done it this way from the very beginning. Even the mistakes I would have made would be easier to clean up now if I’d used REST.
Get Crazy about Plugins: Don’t re-invent the garbage truck, let alone the wheel. It’s sometimes surprising what has already been done for you, from authentication to calendars, there are Rails plugins galore.
Watch the Freakin’ RailsCasts: I was about a year into TroopTrack before I watched my first RailsCast by Ryan Bates. This is one of the best Rails resources on the web and will open your mind to a lot of stoof you wouldn’t think of on your own.
When in Doubt, Pick the Rails Way: Let’s say you had a choice between using cascade deletes at the DB level and using :dependent => :destroy in the model. You might be tempted by cascade deletes, depending on your back-story as a coder. Don’t do it. GO WITH THE RAILS WAY. Later on, when you’ve been around the block a few dozen times, you might feel comfortable with deviating from the Rails way, but … try the Rails way first.

A Goal to Dream On
How do you think a company should set it’s growth goals for a SaaS product prior to its launch? What do you think those goals should be? What criteria might you use to figure it out? Would you look at market size, price point, competition market share, etc?

When I was daydreaming about TroopTrack.com, I did exactly that. After a while, I came up with a goal that was basically enough customers to make $500,000 in revenue after 2 years. Pretty reasonable right?

Wrong

The problem with this sort of goal is that I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I wasn’t even in the market yet, and here I was prognosticating 2 years into the future.

And I call myself an agilist.

I should be ashamed.

A Series of Goals
Goals should grow incrementally, starting with the first attainable goal, and you should really only work on one goal at a time, the immediate next goal. That way, you can adjust future goals based on what you learn form working on your current goal.

A Goal to Start With
The very first goal you should have is to get a customer. One. This can be harder than you think, but whether you convince someone to pay real money for your product on the same day you launch or the six months later, the first time you get an email from Google Checkout that someone has paid you money you will be elated.

Why start here? It’s simple really. If you are focused on getting that one first customer, you will have a different mindset than if you are focused on getting 10,000. You’ll know their names. You’ll call them when they have problems. You’ll get out of bed in the middle of the night if you have to, just to get them to spend $X a month to use your stuff.

You’ll also be less flippant about cost. You’re only trying to get 1 customer, so why get a huge server? You can support one customer with a free (or practically free) account on Heroku. You’ll try hard to make one customer pay as much of the bills as possible.

You’ll also listen to the prospective customers and incorporate their feedback into your application. You’ll learn how much effort it takes to support one customer, and you’ll start to understand how many prospective customers it takes to create one paying customer.

All of this activity will lay the groundwork for your future business. You’ll develop a business model in your head that takes into account the cost of customer acquisition, support, etc. It will show you how to make your business profitable and sustainable.

Note: One of the things you aren’t thinking about when you’re focused on getting your first customer is expensive or broad advertising campaigns. It’s not time for that yet.

Next Goal: 10 Customers
This is the first big test. Can you repeat what you did to get one customer and have it work? Does your conversion rate (prospective customers to paying customers) hold true or spin off wildly in the wrong direction? Can you scale the interaction intensity up without running yourself dry?

Note: the number 10 is arbitrary if you don’t think about context. For a large, expensive SaaS product, that number should probably be 2. If your product is $35/year, then 10 seems about right. And, by the way, you’re still not thinking about advertising.

Can I get 100 people to give me money?
You’re probably starting to sense a pattern here. I’ve got more than ten paying customers, and I’ve learned a lot about my business. My conversion rate is holding steady at about 40%, up from a dismal 2% when I got my first customer. My revenue and my burn rate are holding steady and breaking even, but I don’t have enough profit to build a reserve.

How do I get to 100 customers? It’s finally time to start thinking about advertising. If I need 70 customers to get to 100, and my conversion rate is about 40%, then I need to convince 175 people to try it. How do I do that?

My thoughts turn to places I can advertise for free and target people who might be interested: Facebook and LinkedIn for instance. I can create a “fan” club in Facebook and advertise on groups in LinkedIn.

I also think about how I can add these customers without spending money. I need to preserve some of that revenue so I can have the money I need for my next goal.

And then: 1000 customers open their wallets
Once I’ve scaled my business to support 100 customers, things are a little bit different. I’ll have some decent cash flow, and since my costs shouldn’t really go up I’ll have a small amount of money to spend on advertising.

I don’t have a lot to say about this yet, cuz I’m not working on this goal just yet, at least not in a focused way. But I can see it coming, cuz it’s in my backlog.

Paradise or Purgatory: 10,000 customers
This is as far in the future as I can see. I don’t even know how I would scale up to that. I would need help.

But it doesn’t matter, because this goal is in the icebox and won’t come out until I get the previous goal.

You see, I’m waiting for the last responsible moment, which has yet to come.