Why You Should Never Publish Anything Late at Night When You're Tired
I broke one of my own golden rules last night, never ever release or publish anything late at night when you’re tired. If you do the odds of making a mistake greatly increase. And unfortunately last night I broke this rule and a mistake did happen. Luckily for me the mistake was minor, but it helped to reinforce what I should have already known.
You see I published my latest blog entry How Much is it Worth to You? after midnight last night. Although I often stay up much later than midnight, I’ve been going to bed earlier in the last while to catch up on some much needed sleep. In any case, the issue is that I was tired and it was late for me that particular night. Normally in these cases I still go ahead and “publish” the article, but I set the “publish time” to be sometime the next day.
I do this because of several reasons, the biggest reason being that I’ll have had some time to rest and be more awake before it gets publicly released. In some cases I’ve had the time to rethink parts of my post and add more information, sometimes adjust the example, and so on. But overall it’s prevented me a few times from making silly and stupid mistakes.
Well last night I went ahead and pushed the publish button, deciding that I’d break my own golden rule just this one time. And this was my mistake!
Some of you might have noticed it, but I think I caught it before most of you did. What happened is that when I wrote the article I initially left the headline blank. I often do this because I couldn’t think of a good headline at the time I wrote the article. In these cases I just continue writing and come back to the headline later.
Last night I forgot to come back later and write my blog post headline. I left it blank. Above the title being blank, it also meant that my RSS feed subject line was blank. No so bad for a starting blog, but as you get bigger it will be noticed by more and more people. Like I said before, this was not a major issue, but it definitely brought the point of my golden rule home. Plus it’s better to fall and learn (or in this case re-learn) from smaller mistakes than from your larger mistakes.
And don’t think this doesn’t happen to large companies releasing major new versions of their software. To give you an example, early on in my programming career, long before I started LandlordMax, at least 10-15 years ago, I worked for a company where a short workday was 12 hours. And that included weekends (this alone has the makings of a DailyWTF written all over it). As you can imagine we were living in a perpetually tired state. Come release time there was even more pressure to work harder and longer hours. And I did, after all this was very early in my career and I didn’t know any better.
Well the obvious happened. Something eventually went wrong one day. Although I can’t remember the details any more, it’s all a big blur, but I do remember one major release that we’d been working particularly hard to get out the door. We’re talking barely enough time to go home to shower and eat at night (or should I say the wee hours of the morning), never mind sleep. Well eventually we made a mistake, and it was a bigger one. On release night, after what we thought was exhaustive coding and testing, we felt like the current release candidate was ready to go. We decided to release it. We were done. Phew. So we performed one last final build to run one last final test round on (remember this is a time before automated tests were mainstream). And we released it. Exhausted we all went home to catch a few hours of sleep.
Unfortunately within a few hours we were all called right back into the office. Our released version had a major bug. I wish I could remember what it was exactly, but I can’t. To be honest I suspect my brain has intentionally forgotten about it. In any case it was broken and customers were complaining. All hell was breaking loose.
Being already tired really didn’t help to resolve this issue quickly. But lady luck was on our side because it was a very simple mistake and we were able to fix it very quickly (I think it was something like the wrong language properties file was being picked up in the wrong build). So simple a mistake that had we released it in a waken state, well even in a just non-exhausted state, it would never have happened. As soon as we re-released it the phones stopped ringing and we were able to finally get some sleep.
Never ever release when you’re tired. But more importantly, had the issue been a complex or hard one to resolve we would have been in a lot of trouble. Having your development team completely exhausted trying to fix a critical and complex bug during a firestorm is an incredibly dumb place to put yourself into. Would you want to have triple heart by-bass surgery performed on you while you were in the middle of a heart attack by a surgeon who had slept only a few hours in the last week and was living completely on caffeine? Especially when there’s no need for it to be like this.
You can’t win every time, but stack the odds in your favor! Be smart about it. Don’t make my mistake. And you can be sure I won’t break this golden rule again, at least not for a very very long time.
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How Much is it Worth to You?
Today as I was going through my RSS feeds I came across a very interesting post on I Will Teach You to be Rich by Ramit Sethi, which coincidently is one of the bloggers I interviewed for my upcoming book Interview the Pros: What does it take to create a successful blog?.
Although the title of his post drew me in (Why the lady sitting next to me should pay $2,000 for a computer class), what really caught my attention was:
If you take a $2,000 computer class and it lets you get a job with a $10,000 salary bump, you should do it. No question.
If you buy one book per week, for $20 each, that’s $1,000 per year. If you get one good idea per week, my friend Paul told me, it’s worth it. If you apply that idea, I can’t even guess how much it would be worth.
I especially like the second paragraph. I’m a very strong believer in reading books (and GOOD blogs for that matter – where good means it has value to you). As a personal goal I try to read one book a week, but I suspect it’s closer to one book every 1-3 weeks. In any case, I’ve found that I can average out at least one great idea per book, generally much more. Not all books are equal of course, some books offer incredible value whereas others are pretty much useless. However as an average I find the ROI for books to be very high which is why I continue to buy them. For example today I just bought a new book, albeit a technical one, called GWT in Action: Easy Ajax with the Google Web Toolkit.
Anyways getting back to the topic at hand, as Ramit says:
Of course, the excuses will come. I don’t have that kind of money. (Answer: Save up.) How do I know if the class will get me that better job? I could probably take the same class for $100 somewhere else. All this stuff is free online, anyway.
I couldn’t have said it better. And I especially like Ramit’s last example excuse: “All this stuff is free online”. I absolutely unequivocally agree, you can get information for just about anything online for free, assuming your time is worth nothing. Not only that, the net is full of misinformation, which can cost you much more than free!
But let’s get back to this free thing. How long do you think it will take you to find all the information you want? It definitely will take you a lot longer than reading a book. Above this, will it all be fluid and coherent. That is, will the material flow and make sense or will you be struggling and fighting with the material to make sense of it all because it will come in pieces that you have to combine together, all fragmented from different online sources.
How much is your time worth? $20? $30? I honestly would rather spend the few bucks it takes to get all the material combined and nicely packaged into a book than spend days and weeks just trying to bring it all together, piece out what’s what, what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s obsolete, what’s duplicated, etc. The ROI of a book is generally worth it!
If I compare the amount of effort I spent to get my ebook on how to generate traffic to your website, well I can guarantee you that even if you make minimum wage the ROI will be positive. It took me weeks to months to put it all together, and that’s not counting the time it took for me to become knowledgeable on this topic. I can’t imagine someone starting from scratch.
Or what about my upcoming book on how to blog? I’ve spent over 500 hours just interviewing 40 bloggers and putting it all together in a book. And above that it’s being professionally edited right now. Sure you could probably dig through these bloggers blogs to find most (most, but not all) of the information they gave in their interviews, but how long would it take you?
And that’s the key to success; look for opportunities that will bring you more value than what you paid for them. This includes everything and anything: books, courses, conferences, etc. As Ramit put it himself, they key to success is “if the value exceeds the cost, do it.” It’s as plain and simple as that!
**Update: It recently came to my attention that the original idea for this post came from a lunch time conversation between Paul Singh and Ramit Sethi. If you also want to see Paul’s take on this idea you can find his post titled The Best Way to Spend $20, Today at Results Junkies.
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What would it cost to build this site?
Earlier this month there was a thread on Joel Spolsky’s BoS (Business of Software) discussion forum asking What would it cost to build this site. Of course it started innocently enough, with a simple statement:
We recently created a startup on which the website is an integral part. Customers rent our product for a specified time period. When you get right down to it, the required features of the website are no different than what would be required of a car rental web site.
Then came the big question:
My question is, what would a ballpark estimate of the cost be?? Again, the fully functional site would resemble a car rental company such as Hertz.com
This is a completely loaded question!!! There will of course be very large price fluctuations amongst the responses no matter who you ask, these requirements are too broad and open-ended. Sadly however I believe that none of them are near the “real” cost to build this website. I think the highest was around $150k if I remember correctly, with many saying that it could cost as little as a few thousand.
WHAT???
Honestly, to create a car rental service just like Hertz will cost a lot more than $150k. Thinking it will only cost a few thousand is insane. Sure you can say you will outsource it for a few thousand, but I can guarantee you what will come back won’t be what you expect. The price has to be reasonable. If it only cost a few thousand to successfully build this system, than all software, and I mean ALL software, would be outsourced. This isn’t the case. I have no doubt it cost Hertz a lot more.
It’s simple to over simplify how much effort is required to build a software application. So much so that the original poster chimes back in with:
There is just no way this would bet done under $10,000. As I said, the site is about 30 percent of what it needs to do. 5,000 lines of code, couple hundred manhours. The manhours are high as we constantly were changing things. But things are a bit more static now and it would be easier to write a detailed spec for he the remaining requirements.
Some additional “Major” components:
Security/Logins. Certain Admin people will be able to do everything. Lower levels will have limited capabilities.
Audit trails for all changes by personnel. If someone changes a record or changes a reservation it needs to be logged.
RealTime Inventory Management. If inventory is low at certain times then site needs to prevent reservations from taking place. Also ensure inventory was the right stuff when it is returned.
Again, think rental car website. I was thinking more along the lines of $50K to $150K.
Just reading these specs I can very quickly see this site greatly increasing in complexity and scope as the details are filled in. Never mind that the scale of users or data hasn’t even been taken into consideration. In any case, I personally don’t believe that this is possible for $150k, it way too optimistic. The vast majority of the posters are thinking of the simplest solution, but I can already see from this slightly “enhanced” description that it’s not going to be the simplest solution. The requirements are only going to grow, and grow fast they will, otherwise known as scope creep in the software industry.
But alas not everyone agrees. Further down someone comments:
I dunno ’bout 100K. My devs do quite a bit of these sites in the $20K to $50K range … but we don’t have a tight enough spec yet do we? Could (maybe) hit the 6 figures once the full spec is known. The folks suggesting a couple of grand, though, they’re smokin’ crack.
Even though this person agrees that building it for a few thousand is too cheap, he still suggests a price that’s way too low. I have no doubt it cost Hertz much much more. I agree that a simple car rental system could be built for around $100k, but that’s a SIMPLE AND MINIMALISTIC car rental system and NOT a replication of a full blown car system as is suggested. Audit trails, realtime inventory management linked to reservation system, reservation system, scheduling, etc. And these are just listed as “SOME” additional “MAJOR” components. This is not a simplistic system. It will grow in scale very quickly. Just look at some of the questions and issues that came up when we decided to add “simple” email to LandlordMax. And that’s just simple email!
So what’s going to happen. The person will eventually settle on someone who says they can build it for around what they think is reasonable. The delivered system either will not work at all, it will be severely delayed, or it will be severeled scaled back in terms of features and modules. Not only that, but assuming something is delivered, I doubt that it could scale up in terms of traffic load. At least not at that price, scalability takes skill and experience, not to mention effort.
And I haven’t even talked about bug fixing! What do you think happens when a software project can’t possibly be delivered within it’s deadline? Depending on how ethical your company, they might just deliver it in an unstable state where “fixes” will be added to the cost of the project after delivery. For example some software consulting firms are know to do this, deliver a project “on time” only to have the “support” costs be higher than the initial project costs. This way they can be the lowest bidder but yet still charge the real cost of implementing the software. And don’t think it doesn’t happen, it’s much more prevalent than you might think.
Software takes time and effort to build. It’s not that simple yet people continue to grossly underestimate the cost of development and wonder why things it’s late, why it’s buggy, why it just doesn’t work. The answer is simple, extremely simple, many many software projects grossly underestimate the amount of effort required. Although many people want to believe it’s more complex than that, it’s really just as plain and simple as that.
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How to Generate Traffic to Your Website – Free EBook Sample
Yesterday I released a sample (the first 21 pages) of the EBook I’m selling “How to Generate Traffic for Your Website“. In it you’ll find the complete and detailed Table of Contents, as well as the beginning of the first chapter (SEO – Search Engine Optimization).
Like I keep saying over and over here on this blog, you need to try different things to see what works. If you don’t try you won’t ever know. For LandlordMax we offer a free 30-day trial, so why not with an EBook? Except instead of a time based trial, you get the beginning of the book. In this case you can read the first 21 pages before you decide on buying it.
Something else to mention, I’ve had some people approach me expecting the book to be an advanced book about online traffic generation. This book is targeted for people who have just started to those that have an intermediate level of skill and knowledge on traffic generation. It will give you a really solid foundation on which to build. To quote Bob Walsh from 47Hats.com:
“As someone who knows a fair bit about these topics, I found Steph’s down to earth – here’s-what-you-want-to-do-and-why – presentation very complete. His chapters on SEO, AdWords and press releases were some of the best material from a microISV’s point of view I’ve seen to date. Steph pulls from both the experience of his microISV – LandlordMax – and other sources to illustrate and illuminate his points.”
If you haven’t already checked it out, you can read the first 21 pages of the ebook here. And if you’ve already read the sample and want to get the rest, you can buy it here.
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How to Generate Traffic to Your Website – Bob Walsh Review
Bob Walsh recently gave a very positive review of my latest EBook How to Generate Traffic to Your Website on his blog 47Hats.com. To quote his blog post title “An Excellent Ebook for MicroISVs”
The following is an exert from his review:
“As someone who knows a fair bit about these topics, I found Steph’s down to earth – here’s-what-you-want-to-do-and-why – presentation very complete. His chapters on SEO, AdWords and press releases were some of the best material from a microISV’s point of view I’ve seen to date. Steph pulls from both the experience of his microISV – LandlordMax – and other sources to illustrate and illuminate his points.
The SEO chapter in particular is must reading for any microISV because it focuses on techniques that work today – not 5 years ago – and because it gives you for the time invested a solid set of strategies to start acting on now. MicroISVs seldom have the luxury to dive to the bottom of any of the many subjects we have to deal with.”
You can read Bob’s full review here. Thank you Bob for the great review!
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InBoxer – Email Spam Filter for Outlook
About a year and a half ago I was getting really frustrated with the levels of spam my personal emails were receiving so I wrote a blog post asking what others were doing to reduce their email spam. Someone suggested SpamBayes, a free open source solution, which worked great for a while but then I had some issues with it. This eventually lead me to InBoxer, which is basically a commercial version of SpamBayes.
Over the last year or so it’s been amazing! It uses Bayesian spam filtering, so it took a bit to get it fully going. But once up and running things were great. Unfortunately, last week for some strange reason the database corrupted itself. Who knows why but it was frustrating. My greatest fear was that as I was launching my new EBook I’d be in the middle of training the Bayesian spam filter. I couldn’t ask for worse timing!!! In the middle of promoting the ebook I’d have to look at every single email as the spam filters wouldn’t be trained enough yet.
The good news though is that because of the volume of emails I get I was able to train the spam filter to a good enough level before the ebook launch. It has slowed me down a bit, but not nearly as much as I expected. And it’s reminded me of the appreciation I originally had for InBoxer when I first got it. For $40 it’s well worth it!
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EBook is ready!
What an insanely busy week! But the good news is that the EBook How to Generate Traffic to Your Website: How to let people know you exist and get them to come to your website! I promised is finally now available for purchase.
The Table of Content for the book is:
Section 1: Time Based Traffic Generation Techniques
- Chapter 1 – Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Chapter 2 – Content
- Chapter 3 – Freebies
- Chapter 4 – Blogging
- Chapter 5 – Socialize
- Chapter 6 – Social Network Sites
- Chapter 7 – Web Directories
- Chapter 8 – Miscellaneous
Section 2: Money Based Traffic Generation Techniques
- Chapter 9 – Google AdWords
- Chapter 10: Press Releases
- Chapter 11: Domain Acquisitions
Although the dedicated purchase page won’t be ready until tomorrow, for those of you who can’t wait, you can already start buying it here right now for $28.95. It’s less than the price of a dinner at the restaurant, and you’ll get a lot more out of it!
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LandlordMax Breaks Sales Record
Every once in a while I share some of our sales metrics, and this month I’m excited to say has been great. We had some clear successes:
- We beat our previous monthly sales record by a full 25.2% (in one month!)
- Unique visitors for the month is up by another 10% (another new monthly record)
- Downloads of LandlordMax trials were up 40%. This is a very significant increase. And since most sales usual come when the 30 day free trial is about to expire, next month should be very interesting…
- We got a great video review of LandlordMax on theREIbrain.com.
- The feedburner stats on this blog clearly increased more than usual (about 20% more than usual)
- This blog had more unique visitors this month than any other month
And a few other successes that aren’t as publicly interesting.
In any case, as a general philosophy I believe it’s a good thing to share your successes AND failures. I’ve shared both of them here on this blog many times. Today I’m proud to share our most recent successes.
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The Art of Profitability
I have to admit that when I first picked up The Art of Profitability I wasn’t expecting to be as good as it turned out to be. It was good. The only negative I can say is that I didn’t like the overly descriptive and colorful story telling, it was a little too much for me. But the content by far more than makes up for it.
This book is all about the different profit models, not on how to maximize your existing profit model. It CLEARLY explains the difference between the many different profit models. And not only does it explain but it also gives many examples of each profit model.
One aspect of the book I really appreciated was the effort the author went through to create “assignments” for the student Steve in the book. Having had already read several of the “assignments” beforehand (books the student had to read), I found they were very appropriate. And the ones I didn’t I’ll probably pick up.
Overall a good book which I recommend. Even if you’ve already defined your profit model for your business, you might be in for a surprise. If I rate this book on the revenues it will make for me compared to it’s cost and time to read, I’m way ahead.
Therefore I recommend the book The Art of Profitability.
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What's the Secret? How Do You Have Time To Do All That?
A very common, and I mean very common question I get is where do I find all the time to do everything I do. How am I able to run my company LandlordMax, write for this blog, write a book, and so on. Honestly I have just as much time as everyone else, I just choose to prioritize my time differently. I’m a big fan of Paul Graham’s, especially the following quote from his article How to Start a Startup which I use very often when talking to people:
“My final test may be the most restrictive. Do you actually want to start a startup? What it amounts to, economically, is compressing your working life into the smallest possible space. Instead of working at an ordinary rate for 40 years, you work like hell for four. And maybe end up with nothing– though in that case it probably won’t take four years.”
So what’s my secret to be able to do all the things I do in a normal day? It’s simple. Prioritization. What does that mean? I decide to use my time right now differently than most people.
Let’s take an example. Let’s assume you’re a sports fan and you want to watch every game of your favorite team. Or maybe you watch a daily TV soap opera. Maybe you just watch an hour of TV every day. Whatever the case the numbers are about the same so let’s use the sports example since it’s the easiest to calculate.
For our example let’s say you watch hockey. Your favorite team will play at least 80 games a year for about 3 hours each game. It’s probably a little less, but we didn’t include all the games or the playoffs (and the season is a little more than 80 games anyways). If we do the math we get:
- 80 games * 3 hours = 240 hours
Breaking it down further:
- 240 hours / 8 hours a day = 30 days
Breaking that even further:
- 30 days / 5 days a week = 6 full time weeks (or 1.5 months full time).
By just eliminating one activity I’ve added one and a half months of full-time time. Wow! What can you do in one and a half months full-time? I suspect a lot!
Do you have to completely eliminate this activity? No. Almost anything you take to that extreme will generally not work. You’ll probably experience some binging if you do that. Rather I recommend you do it in moderation. I still watch the occasional game. Maybe once a month. But by only watching the occasional game, I’m still at least a full-time month ahead of many of my peers who watch all the games (or tv every night, etc.). And I can tell you there are many, I personally know of over a dozen people who watch at least 2-3 sports games a week. That adds up, and it adds up quickly. Quicker than you think.
So the next time you decide to sit down and watch TV you should conscientiously decide that it’s what you want to do. Don’t just plop down on your couch because it’s the easiest thing to do, conscientiously decide that it’s what you want to do. There’s nothing wrong with it as long as you actively decided it’s the best use of your time. We all need down time after all. But if you continue to consistently choose the easiest path, then please don’t ask me how I manage to find all this time to do the things I do. You can to, there’s no secret. You just need to choose to.
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