theAdmin.orgGrowing a simple software business

In my last review, I thought I was overbooked for only the first half of April. By the end of the month, I ended up being overbooked the entire month. Good news is I worked on a a couple of really cool projects. Bad news is I didn’t make any progress on my goals.

April Goals Results

1. Complete all my Level 1 marketing habits - I couldn’t make the time to work on my marketing regularly. I would dig into working on customer projects and by the time I looked up, it was dinner time. If I can keep my workload to a sane level, I’ll have time for other goals.

   Completed: 0%

2. Open Source three applications - This goal hit the same roadblock as my first goal; too much time spent on customer projects. I’m still planning to open source the projects, it will just be bit latter.

   Completed: 0%

May Goal

Taking the advise of several people, I’m going to focus on only one of my 2008 goals this month, Meeting 15 new people. I’ve been making good progress in 2008 but I still have a long way to reach 100 new people. By striving for this, I can boost up my other other marketing activities and help motivate me.

Eric

The first quarter of 2008 is now over and I’m still trying to catch up.

March Goals Results

March ended up the same as February, too much time spent on work and not enough time spent on marketing. I’m having to face the reality that I really need to learn to say no and to start asking for more help.

1. Complete all my Level 1 marketing habits - I completed all my Level 1 habits one week. Too bad there was three other weeks in March. I see a pattern here. now, whenever I get busy I stop marketing. It’s about time I admit that I need some help balancing my time.

   Completed: 50%

2. Release a large Redmine plugin - I almost completed my large Redmine plugin. I’m using it myself now but it’s missing a few critical features before I can release it. Finishing it up and releasing it is part of my April goals.

   Completed: 73%

April Goals

I’m already overbooked for the entire first half of April so I’m taking on some goals that are smaller in scope.

1. Complete all my Level 1 marketing habits - Going to try this one again, it’s going to be difficult but I’m going to start to weed out a lot of unnecessary projects to reach this.

2. Open Source three applications - In April I want to open source three applications. Two of them are just waiting for the final polish and the third is about 70% ready. Once I open source these, I’ll be at 50% for my 2008 goal.

Lesson learned:

• Turn down projects - Once you get to a point where you are busy, you will start getting flooded with requests for side projects. Many of them are good, but you need to really evaluate the time commitment each one needs.

How was your April? What new knowledge did you get?

Eric

As promised, here are 8 steps to Turn your Marketing into a Fun Game.

1. Brainstorm

Write down all the ways you are marketing right now, the ideas you want to try, and anything else you heard of. Don’t worry about how hard or efficient each idea is yet, you just want stockpile of ideas right now.

2. Rate each idea

Take a few minutes per idea and rate it on how much work is required and how rewarding it will be. Keep your ratings simple, I used high, medium, and low. If you don’t know, take a guess.

3. Collect the High Rewards

Collect all your high reward ideas and separate them from the rest of your ideas. These are the ideas you will be focusing on.

4. Sort the ideas by effort

Sort your high reward ideas based on the amount of work. What you are looking for are the ideas that will give you the most reward for the least amount of work. These will be the cornerstone of your game.

5. Commit a set amount of time

Decide how much time you can budget for marketing every week based on your workloads. You want to know how much time you have available when you are:

• barely busy
• busy
• over committed (my standard operating condition )

I picked 10 hours for barely busy, 6 hours for busy, and 3 hours for over committed. These will be your budgets for your levels:

• Level One - over committed
• Level Two - busy
• Level Three - barely busy

6. Add tasks to fill out your levels

Using only the high reward ideas, pick out enough tasks to fill out each of your Levels. Ideally you will want 3-5 tasks per level.

7. Evaluate and tweak

Give your levels a quick evaluation to make sure they sounds like will work together. You should be making sure your levels are full of tasks that:

• will energize you
• motivate you to reach a higher level
• are not dependent on any other task

If your tasks look unbalanced, move them around until you are happy with your mix.

8. Set goals to reach a level every week

Now that you have a game plan, we need to commit to reaching specific levels each week. To start out, try to complete Level 1 every week. After several weeks, you will start to form a habit and routine around those tasks. Then move on to Level 2.

Eric

Marketing is damn hard. It’s even harder when you run a business solo; you’ll never find the time to market, so it doesn’t get done until it’s too late.

I’ve had a lot of problems marketing over the past several months. The root cause is because I haven’t been able to get myself into a habit of marketing a little at a time. I realized, to make my business succeed, I need to change my marketing process so I can tolerate it and even (gasp) have fun with it.

To con myself into marketing, I related it to something I enjoy; playing a game. In every game you try to get from one level to the next using a set of defined rules.

My Marketing Game

To build my marketing into a game, I needed some simple rules and a few levels. These rules are meant to build on each other and to motivate me to move to the next level quickly.

1. Each levels get progressively harder
2. Reward for completing each level
3. Reward for beating the game
4. Level timer, all levels get reset every Monday

My Levels

1. Level One actions:
   • Write blog entries for 2 hours per week (typically 1-3 posts)
   • Business branding for 1 hour per week
   • Ask for referrals at the end of every project, successful or declined
2. Level Two actions:
   • Comment on 1 new blog every week
   • Work on an Open Source project for 2 hours per week
3. Level Three actions:
   • Work to create an online services, 8 hours per week
   • Get published (yes, it’s vague because I don’t know the first steps yet)

How I’m doing

I’ve been playing this game for a few weeks now and I’m starting to see an improvement with my marketing. Instead of putting my marketing off, I’m starting to spend a little time here and there to slowly grow. As long as I can keep this up, I’ll be able to meet this month’s goal.

Eric

Stay tuned, I have another article that will help you setup your own marketing game. Subscribe to the RSS feed and I’ll tell you when it’s ready.

February flew right by me. I don’t know if it was the missing day or just being in a constant state of busy but I’m exhausted.

February Goals and Actions

I was planning on having February be a strong marketing month for me. Unfortunately I overcommitted to both my marketing and my customers. Since my customers are the most important thing in my business, I had to drop a lot of my marketing.

1. Logo Designed - My logo is almost done. I have unlimited revisions on it so I’ve been tweaking it the past coupe of weeks. I’m expecting the final copy ready this next week.

   Completed: 66%

2. 100 new RSS subscriptions - Well, instead of stepping up my online marketing in February I let it slack. This caused my subscriber base to remain flat for the month. Around the 17th I decided to cut my losses and drop this goal. I would rather work to complete another goal than to spread my focus and get nothing done.

   Canceled

3. Meet 15 new people - I tried to push this amount to 15 people, but I should have left it at my regular 10 people. By the end of the month I was able to meet 9 new people and a few could turn into potential customers.

   Completed: 60%

4. Release a large Redmine plugin - Couldn’t find the time for this either. Between customer projects, keeping the business running, and getting Sproutwire launched; I just ran out of time. I did get enough time to create a smaller Redmine plugin but it’s not released yet.

   Canceled

March Goals

Over the past months, I’ve discovered that my goals have been too aggressive for me. Alone, each goal would be a good stretch but together they are too much to accomplish in a single month. My March goals are more realistic and focused on the areas I want to grow in.

1. Complete all my Level 1 marketing habits - Ilana and I spent some time last month and classified all the different ways I’ve been marketing. My Level 1 marketing habits are the actions that have given me the best return for my time. I’ll post more about the levels in a later post but for March I’ll be focusing on three actions:

   • Write a blog entry twice a week
   • Spend one hour a week improving my brand
   • Ask for a referral at the end of every project

2. Release a large Redmine plugin - I’ve decided to make another attempt at creating this plugin. It’s going to be difficult to schedule, but I’m starting to waste a lot of time without this plugin.

Some lessons I learned from this month:

• Use your goals to help you focus: You always have hundreds of things you want to do, but you will never get any of them done unless you can focus on the important ones. Setting goals should provide focus for you, not scatter it.

How was your February? Did you get everything accomplished that you wanted to?

Eric