theAdmin.orgGrowing a simple software business

My second month of business is complete and the honeymoon is over. Last month I used my contacts at my previous employer to bring in all my new projects but because I wasn’t marketing, this month started out slow. I went though the usual questions of doubt every business goes through “Is this the right thing to do?”, “What if I’m wrong?”, and my personal favorite “Does anyone really want my services?”. One great thing that happened, while reading some blogs I caught a reference to a book titled “Get Clients Now!”. The Amazon reviews were pretty decent so I picked up a copy of it from my library.

Since I had no real billable work, and I wasn’t attracting anything new I decided to go ahead and implement the program “Get Clients Now!” was talking about. As you can see in this post, it generated some great results and brought a lot of work my way at the very end of the month.

After a few days of implementing the program I started to see some results, from the most surprising of places. One great lead came from a personal blog post I made to someone’s blog. This is turning into a great relationship and will provide a lot of value for both of us in the years to come. Another great lead came from just asking my friends and family if they knew anyone who needed my services. This lead is taking awhile to solidify but will create more than twice than what I made in all of July.

Some lessons I learned from this month:

• Marketing doesn’t have to be cold-calling or shaking hands at a networking event. In my case writing, helping people, and creating a nice website paid off more than me stammering though a rehearsed speech about why I am great.
• Actively work to keep your “sales pipeline” full. What happened in July was I worked so hard my pipeline ran dry, which made August a very slow month. Once it started to fill up at the end of the month, I started to get busy again.
• The main goal of any freelancer, consultant, or contractor is to provide value to their customer. The more value you provide the more business you will create.

Redmine is an Open Source project management application created by Jean-Philippe Lang using Ruby on Rails. I have been using it to track ongoing projects for my business.

One great area where Redmine shines is how simple it has been to add custom data. I have used many project management programs and bug trackers, and a vast majority of them require you to hack on the code to add new fields. To illustrate how simple it is to add custom data to Redmine, I am going to walk you though how to set it up a custom field for your projects.

Decide what custom data you want

The first step is to decide what custom data you want to track. Taking a post from my friend Shane Pearlman, I decided to score my customer projects to help me evaluate them. So I decided want to attach a “Profit Score” to each project.

Setup your custom data

Login to your Redmine installation as an administrator and on the Administration menu select “Custom Fields”. You will notice that Redmine allows you to attach custom data to “Issues”, “Projects”, and “Users”. For now we want projects so click the projects link. Now you can click the link “New custom field”.

Different types of data

Redmine gives you a lot of control over your custom data, including restricting what type of data can be entered based off of length and matching a regular expression. For those who don’t know what a regular expression is, think of it as a pattern that your data needs to match.

To track the “Profit Score” I could enter a number from 1 to 5 but I would really like a drop down box to select a value. This will not only be faster but help me keep the data consistent for all my users. Redmine has different formats for the data including:

• Text
• Long Text
• Integer
• List
• Date
• Boolean

For “Profit Score” I want a List. After selecting List, Redmine automatically changes the view and gives me a set of text boxes I can use to enter the possible values. I only want to use 5 values but from what I can tell, you can enter as many values as you need.

Marking the data as required

To finish up the process, I decided not to check the option to make this field “Required”. Even though this will make my data for consistent, sometimes I don’t know how profitable a project will be when I set it up in Redmine.

Enter your custom data

All that’s let is to now check your project and test that custom field works like you want. If you go to the project overview Redmine will show the custom data. The project Settings is where you will be able to edit and change the custom data. Below is a screenshot of one of my projects with the new custom field.

Notice the other fields “Project Status”, “Cost Estimate”, and “Time Estimate” are other custom data fields I have setup. Each of them were set as “required” so they have the little red asterisk to remind the user that data must appear in their fields. If the form is submitted without data in those Redmine will display a message and will not allow the form to be saved.

Try it out

I hope this article explains a great feature of Redmine. Don’t forget, Redmine will also let you attach custom data to your Issues and Users.

So if you are looking for a project management application that is easy to use, I would highly recommend giving Redmine a try. There is also a fully functional demo of the latest code at http://demo.redmine.org. I want to give a big thanks to Jean-Philippe Lang and the rest of the Redmine team, your software makes it easier for my business to run.

The Rails Rumble 2007 programming contest is now accepting votes for the best applications. My entry is called Whats your habit? and is a web program designed to help people easily track their habits. Please go and vote at the Rails Rumble Voting site and leave your comments here.

My goal with the program was to apply what I have learned about AJAX and REST to an actual Ruby on Rails application. I was pretty impressed with what can be done in the short amount of time I had. I was able to stay awake enough to track the total development time, which came out to 27 hours. Not bad for a functional Web 2.0 program.

I am looking forward to continuing development on it after the competition is completed. I already have about several new features and improvements planned. If you can think of a feature you would like to add, contact me and I will see about adding it in the next version. The official version will be launching as a free service at WhatsYourHabit.com after the voting at Rails Rumble is complete.

What is your opinion of the program?

Eric

Update: A new dedicated product blog for What’s Your Habit has been launched.

This is being posted a little late but I think it is best to start off with the review of my first month in business.

My first month of freelancing was a typical honeymoon period that most freelancers go though. Usually they had some change to their life and as a response they jump into freelancing. This change could be leaving a job, an opportunity offered to them from an acquaintance, or a personal change in their family. In my case it was an out of state move.

Right after moving I jumped into my first month of business by getting four contacts for some small programs my previous employer needed. At this point I didn’t have a website, business email address, or even a company name picked out. These small contracts basically gave me the seed capital to get all of legal and government paperwork done.

Some lessons I learned from this month:

• Time based fees don’t feel right. I billed based on the amount of time I put into each project but it felt awkward. Your client wants fast work so they don’t have to pay as much and get the software sooner but you want to clock more time so you get paid more. I feel it’s a no win situation for either of you and could start to strain the relationship.

• Get help if you lack knowledge in an area of your business. You can educate yourself or hire an expert but try to learn at least the fundamentals. That way the expert and you can communicate easier and you are able better prepared to review the experts services.

  In my case I was weak in marketing so all the marketing I did was so unfocused it would have been better to not do anything at all. Since I don’t know any marketers, I used Amazon.com and my local library to read up on what the experts are writing about.

• A little planning can go a long way. Try to take some time to plan out your day, week, month, and year. This can be as simple as writing down what you want to accomplish and reviewing it later.

  Planning out the market I want to focus on has helped me target my writing and marketing. Taking ten minutes the night before and writing down some tasks I want to accomplish helps me focus the next day and not get distracted by being at home.

Overall, the month ended on a good note. I make a lot of little mistakes, learned a lot, and got on track to succeed.

Eric

Anything you do over time would benefit from a good review every now and then. Reviewing your progress helps you focus on the results you want and keep you heading in the direction you want.

Every month I going to be reviewing what I accomplished in my freelance business and what lessons I learned. Hopefully this will help you lurkers who are on the fence with freelancing gain the confidence you can succeed in your own business. It will also serve as a record for me to come back in the later years and say “What the — was I thinking!”.

P.S. If you want to find all of them I am going to try to tag them all as business-reviews

Eric