Welcome to Chez Cliff!

This is kind of neat.

It has been a real treat, working on this vision plan.

In that book, the eMyth, the writer discusses the three levels of entrepreneurship.  There’s the technician, the manager, and the entrepreneur.  The objective, of course, is to get out of the technician level, eventually leave the manager level, and focus on the entrepreneur level.  The technician level has been pretty much abandoned, thanks to Guru.com.  If I need some footwork done, I get someone to do it cheaper and faster than what I could do it.  By default, that makes me a manager when I employ a technician and that’s ok.  I’d rather manage the workforce than be the workforce.

At the entrepreneur level, you’re really building and leading your vision.

This requires some use of the imagination.  Something I love to do.  Being able to paint a final state, a future state of what your company is going to do is quite fun.

When I cruise the competition, which I do quite often, I’m amazed that they haven’t done more.  But maybe that is their ultimate state: reach a point and maintain.  Or maybe they are lacking fresh ideas.  Or they don’t have a real vision.

If anything I now understand more than ever the importance of having a vision plan.

My only problem: I have a hard time tearing myself away from my desk in order to go to my 9 to 5.  Which effectively kills my creative juices.

Oh well.  Things are only temporary.

“If I don’t know what’s wrong, I can’t fix it.” – Clifford

Two friends are in my circle who seem to have no problem being honest.

Many times, people are afraid to tell their friends when something is not right or they’re making a mistake.  I blame this partially on the whole “politically correct” phase inflicted on the American public.  People seem to think that any criticism will be taken badly, thereby ending the friendship.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not sadistic.  If people say to me “Cliff, this sucks.” and fail to provide ideas on how to improve it, then their commentary is useless.  Believe me, the internet is chucked full of anonymous critics who love nothing more than tear people down without providing useful feedback.

Of course it must be stated that useful feedback peppered with personal insults is not welcomed.

This last weekend, one of my friends sat down with me over coffee.  On the table was my eBook.  I almost didn’t recognize it with all the red markup.  His comments didn’t revolve around grammatical mistakes, which I first suspected.  It was the writing style of the book he had an issue with.

My friend is a professor.  After teaching for 20 some odd years, he has a lot of experience in writing material to keep people’s attention.  The feedback he provided in how to “Jazz Up” the book was incredible.  During the entire conversation, I had to keep reassuring him that his feedback was important and I wasn’t offended.

A quick example: I seem to be suffering from an acute case of the passive voice.  An English expert I am not but I do understand that the passive voice is boring while the active voice is engaging.

Passive Voice:  The boy was bit by the spider.
Active Voice:  The spider bit the boy.

Both are grammatically correct.  One is more engaging than the other.  When your book is 110 pages, you need to have engaging content or people put your book down.

Readers putting your book down is not good.

Things have been hectic this week.

First: my mentor told me that I need to create a vision for this company.  He’s right.  My rush to create a product, albeit with good intentions, has left a sort of vacuum as to the direction in which I’m going to head.  Without some final end state, you can’t create a map on how to get there.

This gets back to the “Setting Goals” aspect of life.  It’s simply not enough to say “I’m going to sell something!”  You have to map something out and say “I’m going to sell 10,000 units by this specific date” and then formulate a strategy on how to get there.

Second:  I’m getting all kinds of great feedback from customers (and prospects) regarding the site, the application, and the tools.  This has become an exercise in patience for me.  Initially I find myself in a somewhat defensive mode, trying to explain why I did something a certain way.  But after a friendly slap-down, I realized these were my customers who were making these suggestions.

I have two ears and one mouth.  Listen more, talk less.

Third:  New product launch.  The Pro version finally cleared quality control and is ready for show time.  All that needs to be done now is wait for Apple to approve it.  With this launch comes a myriad of activity on the site.  The mobile site, which is hurting at the moment, needs to be updated the instant the application becomes available.  All that infrastructure behind it needs to be changed.

In a way, it’s kind of exciting.  It sounds like work and at times it certainly feels that way.  But I keep telling myself “This is for me and my company.”

I like the sound of that.

I’ll be off on Thursday and Friday.  I’ll be back on Monday.

Will wonders never cease?

My contract to sell applications has finally been approved.  We’re rolling forward.  My Lite software will have a few enhancements, based on customer feedback.  My Pro software will go on sale.

Now we’re going to introduce the whole guarantee, coupon, package deal concepts.  Tracking which works and which ones don’t.  Once that’s set into motion, we’ll get into Google Adwords.  Since Google is my payment processor, it only makes sense that I advertise with them.

Google Advertising and their Payment Process (Google Checkout) are a 1 to 10 ratio.  For every dollar you spend in advertising, you get $10 in free payment processing.

Let’s say I’m selling widgets for $40.  To process credit cards, Google charges 2% + $0.20 per transaction.  So for my $40 widget, Google would charge me $1.00 to process the credit card.  If I sold 100 widgets, putting $4000 in my pocket and Google would take $100.

If I use Google Adwords, for every $1 spent in advertising that I get $10 in free credit card transactions.  Instead of just giving Google $100 to process my payments, I use that $100 in advertising.  Then $1,000 worth of transactions are processed for free.

What can $100 in advertising get me?  If my ad-click through costs $0.05 per click that means my little ad will appear in front of 2,000 people when they search for my key words.  Two thousand may sound like a lot but when broken up over a 30 day period it is 60 people a day.  Still if 60 people a day were to give me $40, I definitely wouldn’t complain.

So it’s important to have your wits about you, if you’re doing this.  It’s easy to get nutty and think “If I sell $4000 in a month, then I should spend $400 in advertising!”  Don’t get nutty.  Track everything.

If $100 per month generates $4000 in sales, then I would have spent $167.50 ($100 advertising + $67.50 in transaction fees).

If $400 per month generates $4000 in sales, then I would have spent $400 in advertising + $0.00 in transaction fees.

Ideally would be that my site be listed in the top search results organically.  Then I would spend zero on advertising to get $4000 in sales, which would cost $100 in fees.  That’s the cheapest option of the bunch.

Here’s an example that just popped up.

During my previous discussion regarding iPhone apps, I mentioned that Apple can deny any product that doesn’t meet their standards.  And their standards are not applied evenly across the board.

In this article, the company has released the same application with three updates.  On this last update, Apple flagged them for violating something or another and denied their application completely.  Yet this application has the exact same functionality has a bunch of other applications, which are still listed in the store.

A similar situation occurred with me.  On my original Lite design, I had a button that when pressed would inform the user that this functionality was only available on the Pro version.  Apple denied my application, stating that all buttons must be fully functional.

Fine.

This photo application gets rave reviews, thumbs up across the board.  Guess what?  When the user tries to edit a second photo, the application pops up and says this functionality is only available in the Pro version.

Huh?

If Apple wants to deny applications for not following their guidelines, fine.  No problem with that.  What I do have heart burn with is the indiscriminate way in which these rules are enforced.  And since it’s people who review all these applications, maybe we can assume that there are guidelines for their actions.

If you got lucky last night, approve all applications.

If your girlfriend dumped you last night, deny all applications.

If you want to be a go-getter, deny 75% of applications.

If you’re tired and want to go home, deny all remaining applications.