Normally I do a round up of the weeks inspirational/useful links in Friday’s Wunderkammer post. However, this was just too good not to share. From “You’re a Little Company, Now Act Like One”.
I’ve long been a fan of Douglas Rushkoff (previously mentioned in discussion on virtual currencies [here and here], speculative economies, and media viruses). Honestly, how many other hardcore media theorists also have written a fairly successful line of comics? And while implementing his more profound ideas remains puzzling (at least for me) the overarching themes are incredibly seductive.
His latest book, a successor to ‘Get Back in the Box‘, is Life, Inc. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such succinct, forceful answers result in stunned silence on the Stephen Colbert show (you could hear a pin drop after his line that “It would be best for GDP (gross domestic product) if everybody in the audience would get cancer). Video embedded below.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Douglas Rushkoff | ||||
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Thought provoking stuff. I love this kind of analysis. It’s that along with the business ideals discussed at events like Small and Special that make me hopeful that mutually beneficial, niche ecosystems of like-minded, small teams have a place.
Last week I had the distinct pleasure of attending the Small and Special Conference, an event about people that had turned their passions into businesses. It was put on by Jackson Fish Market, a quirky software development firm made up of ex-Microsoftees (full recap is now available on their site). There were a number of takeaways – the inspiring stories of overcoming adversity, the eye opening diversity of how people are able to make money, etc. However, for me and my Vox Pops, what was most valuable was the reinforcement that there are alternatives to going big and selling out.
There has been a lot of discussion lately among similarly size conscious firms about labeling. What do you call an organization intent on staying small, nimble, and cash-flow positive? Till now, “Lifestyle Businesses” is about the only thing that has stuck. The problem with that term is manifold, as the 37 Signals blog rightfully points out:
The question was put to many: “Do you want to build a nice lifestyle business or do you want to build a real business.” How condescending is that? I’m not positive I understand the subtleties and nuances of these labels, but I think I have a good idea of what’s meant by them: A lifestyle business is for the hacks and amateurs while a real business is for the big guns and grown-ups.
The Redeye VC blog is currently calling upon its readers for new name ideas. My favorite so far? Freestanding Business. There’s no reference or implication of diminutive size, sounds strong, and reinforces the notion that the doors will stay open without wheelbarrow of investment.
I’ll finish with a great video featuring David Heinemeier Hansson. Sure, he’s a pretty boy. But in a world enraptured with quick wealth and completely automated income its refreshing to hear there are other measures of success.
Working in small, distributed teams can be an exercise in loneliness. The solitary existence can mean missing out on a shared revelation or not getting feedback on a forming assumption. The Vox Pop Pow Wows are a chance for a group of peers to get together over Skype, talk about the news of the day, and provide that professional support that we otherwise might go without. Here’s the transcript from a recent talk [edited for readability].
A. – Matthew Reinbold, Founder and Creative Principal, Vox Pop Design
B. – Matthew Orstad, Founder and Chief Engineer, Rocket Midwest
Accounting for Freelancers, Quickbooks, Outright
For accounting I downloaded the free version of Quick Books like you had suggested. And I looked at it for about four minutes before my brain started to trickle out my ear. There was a tear in the space time continuum. It was a painful experience. I know that is the professional way of doing it, it’s just, for whatever reason my mind doesn’t work that way. I feared that it was going to take me a long time for me to get up to speed when in fact I needed something kind of quickly. I also checked out Gnu Cash…
B. …Oh dear…
A.…is it that bad?
B. Well it doesn’t do email invoices, if that’s any indication.
A. I looked at that. They had a very nice introduction for things like “Double Book accounting”.
B. Mhm…
A. but I never made a single entry. Again it just seemed like a lot of stuff that was made for a very different set of use cases than what I needed. I ended up settling up on a program called Outright. If you go to Outright.com it claims to be built for contractors, freelancers, developers.
The thing that really appealed to me is that they have built in support for taxes. One of my biggest pains with keeping everything in a big spreadsheet is that when tax time came around my internal categorization of all this stuff is completely different than the way the IRS wanted to see it. So I was having to go back through all of these records and figure out “okay, if I’m paying domain fees, what do I put that under? Is that a utility? Is that an other expense? Do I just write that out? What do I do with that?”
It’s not perfect but it does have the tax categorizations built in. I’ve been happy so far. Obviously there’s a huge amount of work that I have to do bringing all of 2-3 year information into this program just so I know I’m comparing apples to apples. But so far I’ve been really happy.
For example, at tax time it goes through and figures out which contractors or freelancers you’ve paid, and breaks it out. It says “all right you need to send a 1099 form to these people”, “you can send 1099’s to these people but it’s optional”.
It also does estimated tax liability, not just at the end of the year but over the course of the year. So you can kind of get a sense as it’s coming okay this much might be due.
Outright.com has some built in connections with Fresh Books for invoicing. Maybe I need to move over and try Fresh Books. It would be nice, but it’s not a deal breaker. Have you heard of this company at all?
B. No I haven’t. But it looks interesting. But before you totally give up on Quick Books I just suggest some training. I know if you have to read the manual the program has failed. But, I actually watched a couple of the little tutorial videos in there and that’s kind of how I got my feet wet. I also went to a training class but that was optional.
A. My wife was really pushing for Quick Books because both Quick Books and Turbo Tax are done by Intuit. We use Turbo Tax and she really wanted me to use Quick Books because of that tight connection. Maybe I’ll come back to it. What’s the biggest benefit of Quick Books for you?
B. The e-mail invoicing. That, and if I have any questions, everybody knows Quick Books, whereas if I pick something else I’m kind of on my own. It’s not one of those tools I really want to learn. I don’t mind taking the time to figure out how it works. Like I said I took a class on Quick Books. It was sponsored though the South Dakota Small Business Association, it was like through SBA.gov but like the South Dakota chapter or whatever. It was free to take, and it was like a two and a half hour class. They offered it various sites across the town. At the end of the class there was a power-point presentation and they gave me a step by step book: “here’s how you do an invoice”, “here’s how you do this”, “this is how you do inventory” and it was sort of a general overview. That’s sort of the blessing and the curse of Quick Books: it’s a general purpose business tool, so they have to be able to deal with plumbers as well as-
A. -So let me ask you this, how do you record hosting? Is it a cost of good sold? Is it a utility? Does it go under other expenses? How do you classify hosting?
B. I’ll have to look. I think it was like sales and support or something.
A. Well it’s just that there’s so much there that gets in the way from just doing what I need. And im sure if I try using this Outright for awhile there will be limitations. There will be things that it does not do, on purpose. That will be a drain but right now I just want to get in and I wanna put the stuff in there and I wanna go. I understand that I may kind of shooting myself in the foot for future purposes because if I ever bring on an accountant part time they’re gonna know Quick Books and they’re probably not going to know this. I’m not going to be speaking a language that’s familiar to them. However, it is better than keeping a bunch of spreadsheets where it’s my own cryptic elvish syntax for this stuff.
Are there any limitations with the free version that you’ve run into?
B. Well there’s a big one right off the bat and it’s 20 clients. The nice thing about it is once you hit that point you can just transparently upgrade to the full version of Quick Books. I would still recommend buying the CD off of Amazon because I got it new for like less than their upgrade price. I contacted their support and asked “Well can you give me a better deal than this? Because I can get it off Amazon for like 30 bucks cheaper.” And they were like, “Uh, we don’t price match.”
(laughter)
A. Right. A useful thing out of this whole process is that it’s highlighting a lot of recurring costs that aren’t really necessary. There’s a lot of fat in the system that’s built up over the years, five dollars here, five dollars there. But over the course of time it really starts to add up. For example I’m paying 5 bucks a month for an extra database on one of my hosting accounts. Now, at the time I had a client we were using that database for some information processing. However, I haven’t had that client since 2007. And it was just one of those things, “Meh, it’s five bucks a month and it’s a little more pain than it’s worth getting on the phone and getting it canceled”. It’s not a good excuse. I acknowledge that up front. So, month after month I get hit with a five dollar charge for an extra database. Same thing with Qwest: I have Qwest DSL here at home I’ve finally, after four or five years broke down and bought my own router for. Up until now, I had been renting it, this antiquated router. Well the thought was “I don’t want to buy my own equipment-I’ll just rent. It will give me more flexibility.” I’ve been getting hit with the five dollar charge, month after month after month.
And here’s the REAL stupid deal: I bought this new router about three months ago. I’ve still got the Qwest box sitting on a shelf and I still need to call tech support and get it returned. And in those three months I’ve been hit with a five dollar charge. So, I’ve been going through and I’m seeing all these charges and they really add up. I went through all these different little things and I could be saving almost $1400 a year. Forget Geico.
B. I could have had a V8!
(laughter)
A. Yeah, that little creepy stack of money with the eyeballs on it. That’s not from insurance, that’s just from the little crap that’s gotten built over time and I just don’t take the time to cut that out. It’s always been an opportunity cost question: whether the time spent looking at something else is costing you potential revenues that you could be doing meaningful work.
So, do you have any stories like that? Where you went through and were astonished you were getting nickled and dimed for…
B. …Well uh, yeah-
(laughter)
That would be another thing that I was going to mention, just to beat that dead horse Quick Books again. You know if you price out 12 months of Quick Books, and 12 months of Blink Sale…
A. IT’S NOT THE PRICE! It’s not the price, it’s the time, the time spent learning it and the time spent maintaining it and the time spent going gray because I’m trying to come up with what in the world these modal boxes are asking me to put in, it’s time it’s not money!
(laughter)
B.…Well, there is that too. But, I guess I have run into that and it seems like the ISP’s and the cell phone companies worked it out to a science. They can figure out the maximum amount of money that they can charge you. Like they send you a bill that deducts 9 dollars from your banking account every month, but it’s just like, “oh man I have to call”. There is a classic example of when you sign up for like their free offer to get the free month and I don’t use it because I’m on vacation. But they make it like impossible to get off. You have to go through like, “Oh, do you really want to cancel? Can you fill out this survey first?” And most recently I suppose with my cell-phone company I really nailed down that bill because we ended up just self-insuring our phone. Otherwise we’re forking out $5 a month per handset for phone insurance.
A. Now, I know that’s exactly why they do it that way. It’s inconvienient to take it off and so in your mind you justify it as being, “Oh it’s not that much, I’ll get around to it eventually.” I mean there’s no reason why a lot of this stuff couldn’t be a couple of form boxes on a webpage: you log onto your account, you want this, you don’t want this, click click, boom. Especially when it comes to geeks who are kind of anti-social anyway the thought of calling somebody, and this still to this day, for me I have that little nervous moment of panic, oh my gosh I have to talk to somebody. Let me tell you something, automatic gas station pumps are a godsend. Self check-out at the grocery store is a godsend. There are times I do not want to have personal contact with anyone. Those machines are fantastic. I know other people have problems with the UI, they can’t stand them – they site them as an example of how society is falling apart. Bullcrap! Bullcrap! I am happy to have that convenience of not having to have awkward interchange.
(laughter)
Working in small, distributed teams can be an exercise in loneliness. The solitary existence can mean missing out on a shared revelation or not getting feedback on a forming assumption. The Vox Pop Pow Wows are a chance for a group of peers to get together over Skype, talk about the news of the day, and provide that professional support that we otherwise might go without. Here’s the transcript from a recent talk [edited for readability].
A. – Matthew Reinbold, Founder and Creative Principal, Vox Pop Design
B. – Matthew Orstad, Founder and Chief Engineer, Rocket Midwest
Natural Docs, Autodocumentaion from Source Code
A. I wanna spend a little time talking about Natural Docs. It’s a effort that spans a number of different languages including php and Java and, in our case, ColdFusion. It’s a natural way of writing documentation in code. When you’re all done you click a button and it generates either pdf or html based rich documentation based on your project. I’ve been increasingly been looking for something like this because I need some form of formal documentation with certain projects. Having the headers of the various CFC’s is not enough. I certainly don’t want to have to have two different unrelated files: a code file and a documentation file and have the situation where I do a bunch of updates and then I forget to update the documentation and vice versa. That’s one reasons why I don’t’ think having all of the documentation on the wiki, like in Trac, works. Most of it needs to be driven by the code itself so as you’re changing and modifying the source the documentation is going to be updated automatically.
It looks fairly straightforward. I haven’t played with it but I want to. And, it may be something that going forward this becomes kind of like a Vox Pop standard; that when you do your code if you have any documentation you need to write it in the syntax so that it gets sucked up into the documentation in the expected way.
B. Neat.
A. I’ve also been looking into Ant for streamlining some of the roll-out processes. This certainly seems like something that would be very easy to incorporate into an Ant script. For example, you get done with a piece of code and, before you check it in, it goes through a batch of Selenium tests and makes sure that everything is okay. It runs some unit testing and then – if all that completes successfully – ANT generates documentation, ftp’s the code to the appropriate server, and finally pops some champagne cause you’re done. Something like that. Something modest.
B. I’m really kind of interested in this. I have been a little unimpressed with the documentation generation for languages other than Java, unfortunately.
A. Right.
B. But I haven’t seen this one and it looks like it’s got some momentum.
A. It has such broad support (C++, C#, Java, Pearl, Php, Python, Visual Basic, Action Script, Pascale, java script, Ruby, TLC, Cold Fusion). I’m wondering if it’s not on it’s path to becoming a standard. If you learn it in one language, like ColdFusion, then that’s not information or knowledge that you need to throw away if you happen to be doing a PHP project. You learn it once and use it across a broad base of different languages. That’s not a bad thing.