A couple of days ago i wrote about how i had removed all my twitter friends. And i thought pretty much, that that would be the end of my days sifting through the spam on my twitter account. But it seems like Twitter may have a few bugs.

For example, for some reason everytime i log into my Twitter account in the morning, im following 2 or 3 extra people then what i was the day before. These people are people i have never ever heard of before, and often they are showing down below the people i have added manually.

Whats the significance of them being below those that i added manually? Well the fact is that twitter orders your followers in the order that you added them. Because these are below my manual followers, Twitter is trying to tell me i have had these guys added since basically the dawn of time. Even when i delete everyone and start all over again, the next day a few more random Twitterers end up on my list.

Not only that, but there is some bugs within the display of twitter. Like such :

Notice how it says i have 1 follower, and yet the pictures show i have 2….

I mean all of this is tiny tiny things that really dont matter. I just find it interesting that a service that merely saves 140 character messages into a database has so many issues still. Twitter arent rolling out updates like Facebook, and it certainly isnt as packed with features. And yet there is little oddities that never seem to get fixed.

A few months ago i wrote about the introduction to the ShoeMoney System. In that post i said i didnt know what the price would be, but i was hoping it was cheap. I guess my head was up in the clouds when i said that. The price for the Shoemoney Course is :

$197

Gah. There goes my thought of trying it out and giving a review for you guys. Im not really interested in the course itself, but just wanted to take a look, and give out my thoughts. Instead, ill give my thoughts about about the pricing.

To me $197 is too much. We already know that this course has been dumbed down so a complete dumbass can understand it. But complete dumbasses usually dont have a spare $200 to spare. I seriously think, that shoemoney has gone over-priced for the market he is supposed to be going for. Will he sell a gazillion memberships? Hell yeah he will. But they will be people who are already in the game, and are more interested in getting a few inside tips, then wanting a complete walkthrough of how to create a facebook account.

Did i forget to mention that its actually $197 per month! I mean as i say, people do have this money. But not the people who the course is aimed at.

Interestingly enough, the course is limited to 500 seats. Which i find kinda low, mind you, 200 * 500 = $100,000 per month. I honestly think that half those seats are going to be snapped up by Bloggers/Reviewers who just want to take a look into the system, but arent going to be following it. Only time will tell. Maybe next week Shoemoney posting a blog post about “Only 400 seats left”.

An interesting topic came up the other day in a conversation between myself and a few of my friends about some of my applications that i have in development. The main focus was, providing a service with those products, instead of selling them outright.

Personally, I’ve taken both roads. Ive had Pyrogenius Commenter where I have sold the application outright (Or atleast “copies”). And then I’ve had Lynxlinks, where ive developed an application to do all the work, but decided instead to provide the service the application gives. So which is better?  Well, i think they definitely both have pro’s and cons.

A service, I found, is much harder to get off the ground, and you get alot less “customers”. Especially at the beginning. Alot of this is to do if there is a product, an actual piece of software, that provides the same functionality for a similar price. So for example, at lynxlinks we charge on average $30 per pack, the only real comparison product out there at the moment is Xrumer. But there is quite alot of difference between the two, and ofcourse, the biggest being the price range. However if there was a product that was say even $100, it becomes much less viable to use our service.

Alot of people will be thinking to themselves, “But your still providing a service, your charging for your time right?”. While yes that is true, Aswell as charging out our time as a service, we are charging that little bit extra almost covering the the cost of the application running in the back end (Even though i develop it).And so i cant imagine too many people still hiring us, if there is a software to do it within a cheap enough range. Although, i could be wrong because people who OWN SENuke, still pay people to do the work for them.

Another thing to remember with a service, is that you get the repeat customers. With a product, unless your doing a membership type system, they pay once, and only once. And you have to support that for the rest of your life. With a service, we do the work, and thats it. There is no ongoing commitment to a customer. And so if he wants more work done, he pays once again. This means, atleast for me, there is definitive boundaries on where our service starts and stops.

Onto the Pro’s of a Product. Take my PyrogeniusCommenter for instance. While yes, i develop new features, it is nothing like the time taken to process orders of a service. And alot of that work is done in my own time, not when a customer orders. And its more when i feel “inspired” ill lock myself away in my office and program away for 10 hours straight.

At times, i actually felt a bit sorry for the kids wanting to do a service of blog commenting. And then i come in with Pyrogenius, demolish that dream for them. While there is still a market for high quality dofollow comments, Automation software at times is demolishing the services.

If that’s all a bit confusing …

Service Pro’s

• Repeat customers
• Definitive start and end of customer support. Once the service is done, its done.

Service Con’s

• Hard to get off the ground.
• You have to spend alot of time doing work, when the customer needs it, not when it suits you.
• If someone releases a product that does essentially the same work as your service. Your stuffed.

Product Pro’s

• Initial development, then easy going
• Develop new features when you feel inspired. Not when the customer does (Or atleast, not all the time).

Product Con’s

• Ongoing support if not a membership scheme.
• One off purchase, no “repeat” customers.

Looking back on the list. I guess the simple way to fix it all would be to provide a membership scheme. That atleast carries with it a “repeat” purchase. But it comes bundled with its own set of issues.

I’ve always been one of those guys that rags on other blogs that update once a week, or sometimes once a month. Especially the ones that say its because they don’t enjoy writing that much (Probably shouldn’t have started a blog then!). But i can see this blog on that slippery slope once again. Its been ages (Well ages for me anyway), since i last posted here. So what’s been the hold up?

Lynxlinks.com
I posted about this a while ago regarding profile links aswell. Not many people took notice then, but just recently business has taken off. Essentially the service is for “High PR Backlinks”. The ones that Angela and Paul sell in packets over at Warrior Forum. Only obviously we do all the work for you, and hand you a nice report at the end. But me being me, there was no way i wasn’t going to build some crazy robot to take over my mouse and do all the work for me!  And so alot of my time has been spent developing this beast of an application to automate almost every part of signing up to a forum, and leaving your link. While it may not be as fast as xrumer, its beginning to be just as effective. For my own sites, ONE blast of PR4+ links (50 links in total), usually gets me front page. Then its just a few other SEO tactics that get me that number one spot.

But ontop of me developing the application, we posted a few ads around the place. Most of all one in the ShoeMoney MarketPlace. Tbh, the marketplace is pretty dull, and we weren’t making any sales from it sitting there. But once a week Shoemoney sends out all the latest marketplace listings to his 50k+ RSS readers. Which certainly gave us a good influx of orders.

PyrogeniusCommenter.com
Most of you should know that ive been running this since Day 1. But up until recently, i was merely a developer behind the scenes. I wasn’t providing support or doing the marketing. Well, that didn’t turn out so good. I’m not one to rest on making “OK” bank each week. Especially because in my mind, this application is a beast. So me and my old partner agreed to pass over the reins to me, and so im running that full time aswell. I sent out a mass email to all our buyers (And trust me, there is ALOT), and unfortunately for me, almost all of them emailed me back with issues. Its so strange, that i never heard about this before when my partner was running the show. Alot of people have messed up logins, or they just have a simple question that, according to them, they have asked 5 times through email and no reply. Anyway, you get the idea, the emails have bogged me down.

And then to add onto the weight already on my shoulders. I’ve decided the only way to progress forward with Pyrogenius Commenter is to start again from scratch. So all this week ive been redeveloping the application from the ground up. This time around, i have a fair idea of where i want to take it, which is good because in the old version, i was just tacking things onto the end, with no real goal in mind. This new version will allow me to add sites indefinitely, and essentially scale this thing up as high as i want to go.

Already on the programming slab is adding in support to comment on Youtube, Dailymotion and Yahoo Video pages. I know people have been looking for a reliable Youtube commenter for sometime (There are ones out there now, but they sell for like $150, ludicrous). And so im gonna fill that market space . Quite a number of people looking for JustinTV and UStream commenters aswell, which im also looking at developing.

Contracted Work
About a month ago i went to a meeting with a business about developing a completely custom (amazing) piece of software for them. And then i say this thing is amazing, i mean like, its just nothing that you would have ever even crossed your mind. It isnt just something to automate simple web tasks, this thing is monstrous. But the downside being, this is the real world. And it doesn’t quite work like the internet circus. The company is willing to pay me a lump sum (At the end), but most of all they are wishing to give me a large chunk of the ending company (Shares). While i could seriously be sitting on a goldmine, and have it made, its so hard to work on something that will take me 3 months to finish. And still not see alot of money to compensate for that work (Atleast not right away).

Aswell as that, its hard to take time away from things that are making me money right now (Lynxlinks, Pyrogenius), and throw them into a project where money is only in the distant future

And thats it for the sob story of the day. Ill be back writing posts here soon (Infact alot of my workload has eased today), but until then. Cya round.

… And the death of xrumer?

While saying this is the death of the old “text” style captchas may be going a bit far. I think we definitely need to start taking further action when it comes to controlling spam. While for the most part, its ironic that i spend my time developing bots that often need to bypass captcha/anti-spam systems. No one likes seeing their forum destroyed.

Whether animations will fully take over text captcha’s, i dont think so. Because smartphones often need to login while on the move, and they often cant process flash movies, or in some cases, their internet speed is too slow to even think of viewing it. But its something to look out for in the future.

I was reading an interesting article on wired the other day about how Duke Nukem 3D essentially never came to be because of lack of milestones and goals.

It got me thinking alot about my personal internet marketing goals (I dont have any really, just a general idea), and all the current projects i have rolling along, but with no particular milestones in mind. Particularly all my half finished applications that i have pretty much finished coding, but never taken that next step towards releasing. Some are simply because i am no longer interested in developing them further and were just a way of me learning some new techniques, but others are staggering because i just dont know where to take them, and dont know how to plot out where im going with them.

In the wired article this particular paragraph caught my eye :

Broussard simply couldn’t tolerate the idea of Duke Nukem Forever coming out with anything other than the latest and greatest technology and awe-inspiring gameplay. He didn’t just want it to be good. It had to surpass every other game that had ever existed, the same way the original Duke Nukem 3D had.

I find this all the time happening in my applications. Especially when i am developing something right on the edge of technology with others competing with basically, the same application in a different wrapper. When you think about it, Duke Nukem while pretty original with the way you could interact with the objects around you, was just your typical first person shooter. What’s so different from Duke Nukem and every other FPS out there?

When i developed my very first version of Twitter Friend Adder i found myself swamped by people wanting new features that were said to be in other paid versions of similar tools. In the end, i actually ended up with far more feature requests then i could ever program (Even though the requests were nothing to laugh at, some were actually really good ideas). And when i did manage to develop some requests, by the time i had finished them, i had a whole stack of emails with new ideas that i soon had to program up. Meaning that i ended up delaying releases so often because there was always “Just one more feature to add”.

So how to buck the trend?

Set Release Dates – With A Feature Set In Mind
For my applications. I wrote down dates that i want to release new versions. And what those new versions will include. In some ways it has made me relax alot more because when i get a new feature request, i add it to my notebook as something for a release further down the line. Not something i will do write this minute. It means that i have a set idea of what i want, what i need, and when it will be done.

Manage My Time During The Day
Something i found very useful from an early stage was The Action Machine. Basically its just a small (No make that large!), application that gives you set times to do everything. When i wake up in the morning, i write down what i need to achieve that day. Including things outside of sitting on my ass on the computer. I can then input these into the action machine, and give it how much time i need for that task. So for example i could have “Write A Blog Post” and set it as 30 minutes. With a timer ticking in the background, i dont waste my time, i dont get sidetracked, i just sit down and do the job. Ontop of that, the timers run onto each other. So once the timer goes, a little alarm sounds and i have to move to my next task. It makes me 10x as focused as i usually am.

I guess the bad thing about the action machine is that it aint free (Well, except for you pirrrraaattteess). You can do fine just using any sort of timer (Google them, 1000′s out there), and setting yourself a limited amount of time to do tasks. Aswell as a limited amount of time to read forums, read blogs, check emails etc.

Use Google Calender
You can use any sort of online calendar, hell even a real one i guess . But writing down what dates i need things done by has been a massive help in seeing deadlines. And if that means working late, then that means working late and i should have worked harder earlier on. People think IM is all fun and games and you can slack off anytime, but really it just means you gotta work even harder to make deadlines for your own self. Using google calendar i have written down all my milestones for applications so that i know what i should be doing and when.

Most of all though, people need Self Discipline! It doesnt matter how many tools you get for yourself to get you motivated. If you dont have self motivation you will never reach your own personal milestones.

Anyone got anything else to set milestones and get motivated?

Check out the auction here.

Wow, thats all i can say. Anyone who’s given free web hosts a go in the past couple of years will know 110mb.com. They were one of those webhosts that gave out free web hosting that had absolutely no ads on user pages. Its hard how to describe how influential 110mb has been in young web developers careers in the 2000′s. But i think it would be up there with the recognition Freewebs got in the 90′s. (If you didnt know, freewebs was the first free webhost that i can remember in my lifetime).

Unfortunately i dont have a spare 500k in hundred dollar bills sitting next to me in a briefcase. But i would be mightily tempted to jump on this offer. Unfortunately the owners dont want to share 110mb’s revenue to the public, but if we use the old addage of *Months Revenue* x 12 = *Total Value*. Then we come out with :

500k / 12 = 41.66k a month. Which isnt unreasonable to think of either.

Ofcourse im just purely guessing here. I actually think the revenue will be alot lower but we wait and see.

But the question still lingers, will it sell? I highly doubt its going to sell on flippa. Flippa is generally used for site flipping (Hence the name), and i really dont think any serious buyers (Or ones with even 100k spare), are hanging out on flippa waiting for deals. But, i look on with anticipation

I’ve had good partnerships, ive had bad. And looking back, they all follow one trend. The good partnerships are ones with people who work it like they need it.Im meaning that should something go down, software break, bad customer service cause riots, those people wont be eating for that week. Or atleast wont be living their lavish lifestyle for a while.

Ofcourse its not always true that every good Joint Venture (JV) is someone desperate, but certainly every single bad JV ive done, has been with someone who couldn’t give two shits should the business succeed or fail. It shouldn’t just be “If this fails will this person not be able to feed his family”, if you wanted to run things that way you should start your own foodbank charity. But if that person truly wants that money, and he needs it to get through his day to day life, then you get bet he is going to work long hard days to get it.

But how can you tell?

Well, its a bit hard really. But like every JV you should not just go with someone after meeting them 2 days earlier. If you get to know them, you certainly get to know if they are a hardworker and really want to try and bank. However you should keep in mind that someone who already has alot on their plate, cant really give you all the time in the world to work on a project together. No matter how hard that person works, he still has other commitments to keep.

To be perfectly honest. My best partnerships have been with fresh faced newbies to the Internet Marketing / SEO world. Not so new that they dont know how “Google does it’s rankings”, but new enough that they dont have much going on and are rearing to go at a chance to make the big time.

Finding the people in the first place?

JV partners do not come from getafreelancer, nor do they come from rentacoder, elance, or any freelance place. If you think you have a million dollar idea, you sure as hell aint going to be finding angel investors on getafreelancer are you! All i can say is that people come, you meet through friends of friends. There isnt really a set way to find people wanting to help you with your dream. Its just pure luck, and try and keep it that way.

OpenSource is a fluke, there is no doubt. Its like viralness with a slight bit of planning, but a hell of alot of luck. You see, ive been thinking about my early apps that i made 1+ years ago. I’ve given out so much stuff over the years, mostly with nothing but a donate button in the hope that people give back. It doesn’t happen. People have written whole ebooks centered around using various applications of mine, and even they themselves haven’t given back. It doesn’t really agitate me when people don’t donate, but it does infuriate me when people tell me that OpenSource is the future, and that everyone can live off donations or ads within the applications.

At the centre of everything is this ideal that, nothing is truly original nowadays. When i sell an application that is built in C#, all im really doing is building ontop of what Microsoft has given me. Even building upon code that i find on the web. The ideas coming from my head aren’t really original. When im building my Twitter applications, im only building on a service already provided by Twitter. Hell, even an API provided by Twitter. So can i be selling something that isn’t 100% mine? Surely nothing in this world is 100% original, right?

People often say to me. “But look at Mozilla, Look at Firefox”, or “Look at the thriving SourceForge projects”. Really thats only a tip of the iceberg where you see success from a free and open application. But that is not widespread at all. Most opensource applications that make it big manage to get a massive community behind it that really drives it to success. And thats fine. But to say that every application could be like that is over the top to say the least.

I had this debate with a friend of mine. About, “Would technology be where it is today, without closed source and monetary gain guarantees”. I said hell no. We would seriously be in the stone ages. As much as linux is all cool, and Windows is bloated as shit. Windows has everything integrated, everything plug and play, everything just one click and we are away. Cant say the same for linux.

Maybe thats not the fairest comparison, maybe because Microsoft has billions of dollars to play with and pay developers with. But thats the whole point. Because Microsoft has the monetary backing, they have the drive and the will spending months working on driver compatibility. They have the drive to push technology further and further.

A couple of times per week i field emails and messages on forums about developing software for people. Very rarely do these people have straight up front cash, usually they want to do a profit split at the end. Which for the most part im happy with doing. I certainly prefer straight lump payment (Or per hour),mostly because it means i dont have to deal with on-going support, the upkeep of the app etc. If the application works, it works. But, Joint Ventures are often fun to do because you really get to know a true partner and see how he actually works, not just talking on forums.

However, whenever someone offers me a profit split im always dubious. What if the person cant pull through? What if the person is a slacker? What if the product isnt even marketable? People come to me with really unique ideas, but they are either ideas that are easily replicable (Meaning that there isnt much room for expansion), or they are totally out of left field and i have no idea how they would work.

When i get one of these projects, i usually ask the person for some kind of lump sum payment. As a backstopper incase the product fails, but i have still stuck in my time and effort into building this person the application. With these types of payments though, i let the person take the first X amount of profit for himself so that we are on even terms before we start splitting. At this point it is less of a Joint Venture, and me just wanting royalties on future sales. It does sound dubious if your not in my shoes, But with an application that does something you have never ever read,seen or heard of before. I have no idea how much of a market there is. Afterall im supposed to just be developing, not doing the market research.

Given that, aslong as we make something like 5 sales usually on a product, you would have made your money back on the lump payment. I would think that more people would be up for it. Unfortunately 0% of people are willing to do this. What does this tell me?

1. Either im dodgy as hell and no one wants to deal with me if they have to pay me $500 upfront.
2. The person has no faith in what he is doing. Doesnt believe he can make the lump sum back, and so doesnt want to enter into something where he could potentially lose money.

I usually think the latter of people. Its not that im greedy and want all the money for myself. But when someone comes to me and they want to automate a site that i have never heard of before, and all i have to go off is the persons word that there is a huge market for something like this. Its me who is put in the position of losing a week or so’s work where i could have been doing something profitable, instead of wasting my time building something for a non existant market.

I would never partner with someone, that doesnt have the believe in their product to come up with a bit of capital to get the ball rolling. Who would?