Matthew Lang

... Rebel Alliance or The Empire?

I struggled with developing features for Journalong over the last six months. Always at the back of my mind was that I needed Journalong to be profitable. It was this thinking the blocked all development on Journalong. Ideas were put to the side until I could get more paid subscribers using the product.

In time I realized that Journalong as a product was never going to happen. So I let go.

Over the weekend I stripped out all the paid subscriptions from Journalong and it is now a free product for everyone. As soon as I shipped the changes I felt a huge weight off my shoulders. Now with no pressure to build a customer base I can get back to developing a few more features for Journalong over the next few months.

Mmmmmm, shiny!

via FGGT - Photo by Father Tu

Bought myself a couple of books this morning for some light reading. Not the digital kind mind, actual hold in your hand, dead tree books. It's been ages since I done this. For the last couple of years I've bought all my books on my Kindle, but my reading has decreased in the last few months as a result of this.

I put it down to technology wear. I just can't face burying my head in another screen again when it comes to reading at night. Amazon tout the Kindle as a close experience to reading an actual book, but you can never replicate the feeling of reading a book with anything other than an actual book.

I'm not going to completely stop using my Kindle. It's still great for my programming books for quickly looking up something and I've got a ton of books on my Kindle that I read again quite often. There's lots of other reasons why I'm buying books again but the main reason is just to spark my love of reading again.

It's been a year since I started Journalong. It's been a real learning experience. While it might not be the success that I envisioned it to be, the experience of building a product has taught me a few things that I would like to share.

1. If there's no market for it, don't build it

When I first hit on the idea I immediately created a small Google Docs form that asked two questions.

• Would you be interested in using Journalong?
• How much would you be prepared to pay to use Journalong?

Feedback was quite low. Well, really low. Looking back now it was clear that there wasn't demand for Journalong. I should have abandoned the idea and moved onto something else. I didn't though. I wanted Journalong to use for myself so I built it anyway, and added the ability for others to pay for an annual subscription to Journalong if they wanted to use it. Was I building Journalong for myself or others?

What I should have done was simply build Journalong for anyone to use for free. Interest in the product was so low anyway that it wouldn't have made much of a difference anyway. With the focus taken away from trying to market the product to customers, I could have focused on delivering a better experience in using Journalong for myself and others.

If there's no market for your product, then don't build it and put a price on it. Of course you can build it for yourself, just don't expect to profit from a personal project with low feedback.

2. Measure user interaction

The only way to know if your product is being used is to measure key activities in the product. I didn't do this, so it was difficult to see how often Journalong was being used on a daily basis other than looking at page views provided by Google Analytics.

Decide on key activities and interactions you want to measure and build the monitoring of these straight into the product.

For Journalong I should have measured one thing:

• How often were people writing to their journal?

As Journalong writes journal entries straight to Dropbox, I didn't have any record of how often journal entries were being written for each user.

Building metrics like this into your product is just as important as the features your product has. Metrics like this can provide you with data on in-frequent users of your product. You can then survey these users to determine what's stopping them from using your product more frequently and possibly taking a higher tiered plan if you have them.

3. Gather product feedback frequently

Getting feedback using surveys on your product is critical. It let's you find out what's not working, what's attracting users and what's missing.

When I say survey I don't necessarily mean a 10 point questionnaire on the users experience with your product. Bogging users down with surveys like this can turn them away.

A couple of questions would do or you could do something as simple as a 'like' button beside a new feature. A simple button next to a feature could prompt the user when they use the new feature for the first time and ask them if they like it. Once they click it, the response is logged and the button disappears. If they don't click it for a few days then simply remove the button to stop the user getting annoyed.

Using the metrics that I mentioned earlier, you should also survey users that don't use the product very often. The feedback may turn out to reveal a missing feature or an obstacle in your product. You want to convert as many users as possible to using your product

The last place to survey your users is when they delete or cancel their account. This is your last chance to find out why your product isn't to their liking. Is it too expensive? Does it lack something?

Getting the feedback from the customer here, allows you to refine your product for the better to stop users cancelling their accounts for similar reasons.

4. Iterate often

This is important in the early days of your product. After I built Journalong I sat back for a couple of months and watched the activity on Google Analytics. Looking back it wasn't a wise move.

Metrics and surveys will point towards missing features or changes you could be implementing. Getting these in as quickly as possible will mean that less users stop using your product and will attract others. Be selective of the features you implement though. You don't want to burden your users with changes to the product every day. Common sense prevails here. If 90% of your surveyed users are asking for a specific feature that falls inline with your product, then implement it and ship it.

5. Adjust your price based on facts

I've made three pricing changes to Journalong over the last year and making it free next week (that's another blog post) will be a fourth. Pricing products is difficult. I arrived at my initial price based on the value that I thought Journalong would be offering to users and on how much people were offering to pay for the product from my initial survey.

Three pricing changes later and there's still no bite for Journalong. These pricing changes didn't come from any information I had though. I simply thought that reducing my price might spark more interest in Journalong. A stupid assumption to make and one I advise you don't do.

Adjusting your price isn't a big issue. In the early days of your product you should be continually refining the product based on the feedback from your customers. The pricing of your product is no different. Adjust your price based on feedback from customers. They use your product, they'll tell you if they are getting value for money from it.

6. Set a product trial period

Don't flog a dead horse. I've spent far too much time on thinking how to get customers for Journalong when I could have been using the time to build other products. After six months I should have called it a day for Journalong and moved onto something else but I didn't.

Setting a trial period for your product gives you the chance to review if the product is heading in the right direction. Are you getting sign ups on a daily basis? Are you converting enough users to paid accounts in order to be sustainable?

They say Rome wasn't built in a day but that doesn't mean you should continually hold out for a stampede of new users after you deploy that new fancy feature for your product.

After six months ask yourself:

Is it worth investing another six months of my time into this product?

If you have a number of paying customers using your product then it might be worth pursuing the product for another six months. If not, then I say stop working on that product and move onto something else. Six months working on a product is a lot of your free time taken up. If you're like me and have a backlog of other ideas, then it might be better to leave your product and pick something else up.

There's no secret formula

I started this product with the full realization that it could end up like this. A handful of customers and sign ups that bottomed out three months ago. Not all products end up being successful, but there's no rule to say that your product will definitely be a success. Coming to terms with this fact will make the day you give up on your idea a lot easier.

It's not the end of the road though. There's always that next product idea!

... are you going to take at the fence?

When I started working on Journalong over a year ago, the primary goal for building it was to scratch an itch. I wanted an online journal for my Dropbox. Putting a price on it and charging for it came a close second.

For me it was more important to build something useful rather than build something profitable. So why did I put a subscription price on Journalong? Mostly hope. Hope that a few people will take a recurring subscription on it and I would be able generate some side income from it.

It hasn't exactly worked out this way. Subscriptions are now almost non-existant and user activity is down for the last few months. I just don't have the time to focus on creating marketing for the site and generating more interest in Journalong. So I'm calling it a day on Journalong subscriptions.

AS of next week, I am going to start work on removing the subscriptions from Journalong and making it completely free for everyone. You heard me. Free. For. Everyone.

It's time to stop chasing rainbows.

... with Nicholas Bate.

While trawling through my RSS feeds looking for blogs to unsubscribe from, I came across Andrew Chen's blog post about his decision to completely remove the RSS feed from his site.

As of today, I’ve removed the links the RSS feeds on this blog, and ultimately will phase them out completely in favor of email.

— RSS I quit you.. by Andrew Chen

Not a wise decision in my eyes and here's why.

Your inbox isn't an RSS reader

Using email to subscribe to web sites only works for a handful of blogs. You could comfortably subscribe to about five blogs and you would be able to manange reading a few emails a week from these blogs if they were not to frequent. Doing this for anything in the double digits number of blogs is a bad idea.

I don't want to flood my inbox with tons of emails from different blogs. Thats why I use RSS. That's why I use a RSS reader. I subscribe to the sites that I want to follow and then I can batch my reading of those sites to a time that suits me.

It's convenient and it works.

RSS isn't dead

Many people are starting to wonder if Google Feedburner will be next for the chop from Google but even if it was to be shut down, that's no indication to say that RSS is dying or dead. All it says is that Google isn't interested in dealing with a an RSS product.

RSS is alive and well everywhere. You can still find RSS feeds for millions of blogs and websites and Feedly are doing a great job of bringing over hundreds of people from Google Reader to their feed reading service. In the last few years there have a number of great RSS feed readers released on tablets and smartphones so that you read on the go.

Completely removing the RSS feed from your blog is a bad idea. After reading Andrew's post I found another website that I can unsubscribe from.

Sorry Andrew.

I had an idea for an application, so I stuck it into Journalong for later. Two seconds after saving it, I had another idea for an application. Put that in too.

I find this happens quite a lot. Ideas seem to breed more ideas in a short period of time and usually the ideas have something in common. In this case the applications I thought about building were very similar but for different audiences.

Whether I will do anything with them is another matter. The next step will be to flesh them out a bit more with a mind map and see if there is potential in the idea and ask myself some questions.

• Do I want to build this thing?
• Will I benefit from building it?
• Can I monetize this idea? (I ask myself this a lot these days)

If I can answer yes to all these questions, I'll start work on it or schedule it in for later if I'm currently busy. Always having a good side project to work on is a great way to keep on learning.

If I answer no to any of these the idea gets scrapped there and then.

This little workflow has worked well for me in the past. Weeding out the good ideas from the bad ideas means I spend less time on an idea that isn't going to benefit me in some way.

Today I spent an hour getting a script in place that will convert the Wordpress backup of my old Squarespace blog to Markdown posts so that I can pull them into my Octopress blog.

The script itself is almost there but one thing I noticed was how inherently easy it is to work with plain text.

For years I've had the chance of working with a number of different file formats. Some good, some bad. The good ones though were always the formats that contained little or no markup. Not only do they contain less markup, they also require simpler tools to work with them.

Plain text has that advantage.

One thing I will consider in the future when signing up to products and services on the web is how simple the data format is when I need to export data from that service. I'd rather not be wrestling with a difficult to work with file format when simpler formats already exists.

Not often you see one of these with the riser bars on it. Looks good.

via Pedal Consumption

My career has been quite varied when you look at the different sectors I've worked in. NHS, risk management, payroll, retail and technology repair and recycle. I've worked in a number of other different sectors as an ERP developer as well but largely these were for small periods of time where you rarely get a chance find out a lot about the domain of the business.

Since I started freelancing at the start of the year, I've been working largely on public health and information websites for NHS related organisations. Not only do I get to work with my favourite development tools and languages every day but I also get to work in my favourite domain. Health.

I don't know what the attraction is to health but I find it an interesting domain to work in. Providing tools for health organisations to share information with their patients so that they can lead healthier lives is quite rewarding in my view. Over the last couple of moths I've even found myself reading NHS related publications to broaden my knowledge of the work I am doing at the moment. I've never done that for any job that I to have had.

It's got me thinking about whether its worth specialising in health contracts or should I stick to working in different domains to keep things fresh? Working in different domains sure would broaden my experience and there might be another sector that I would be interested in. However health is already such a varied domain that could provide some diversity.

I suppose the real question is this. Which one will allow a steady income of work for the near future?

It's been a while since I went through all the incoming data I receive and did some house keeping on them. Over the last few weeks I've been increasingly adding more and more waves of content that come to me. Anything related to freelancing invariably gets added, but I'm now at the stage where I've spread myself to thin. There's podcasts I haven't listened to in the couple of weeks, books sitting on my reading list that haven't been bought, and RSS feeds that I need to unsubscribe from.

It's time to put up a breakwater.

Books

One technical book. One non-technical book.

That's the rule I employed a few years ago, but in the last year it's been thrown out the window and I've only been reading one book every few months. Part of the reason for this is that I've simply been distracted by other things. Home life, career, finances, programming, gaming, movies and other things have meant that I just haven't read as much. This isn't about limiting what I'm reading, but having more time to read by limiting other distractions.

Podcasts

Since I started freelancing I've been subscribed to a number of podcasts that focus on this topic and on the Ruby programming language. Truth be told, I haven't listened to anything on this topic in the last month. It's merely due to the length of the podcasts themselves. At over an hour each, I find it too long to listen to these. I'll be unsubscribing to all podcasts with the exception of three. I haven't decided which three yet, but I need to put a limit in place here if I'm to get any use out of them.

RSS Feeds

I'm currently sitting at just over one hundred RSS feeds in Feedly. Quite a lot if you ask me. My aim is to get this down to 50. Maybe two or three RSS feeds for each topic and selection of my favourites to take it to 50. I could never completely stop using RSS feeds. I find it such a convenient way of reading good content from my favourite blogs.

Half the feeds I simply skip over these days as I've found that some blogs just aren't that active anymore.

Subscriptions

This is paid subscriptions to things such as Railscasts or Caesura Letters.

I've got a couple of subscriptions in here that I could do without for the moment. Cutting the subscriptions back that I don't need at the moment would give me back time to be doing other things.

One thing I have found though is that the email subscriptions I have can largely replace some of the blogs that I am following. Although this does mean more emails hitting my inbox, but my email is quite healthy these days with everything labeled and routed to the appropriate folder when it arrives in my inbox.

I want to make things

Rather than digesting, I need to be producing. Whether it's a service, product, application or some writing, I'd much rather be making things than reading about what others are doing. In the past I've been guilty of worrying too much about what others think and maybe distracted myself with a dig into what's in my RSS feeds that day. Maybe it's time to get over that and simply produce something that will intentionally make people think.

I find it increasingly tiresome to apologize for my need to be alone to recharge, for reasons that echo why many women are tired of educating men about equality.

— If you want to get everything done, leave an introvert alone. by Pete Forde

I do my best work when I'm on my own and I'm disconnected. I'm not alone in this.

Be sure to click through for a couple of great posts that Pete mentions, especially Susan Cain's TED talk on the subject.

Getting informed is a means to an end, not an end in itself. And life’s too short for bad information.

— A new system for reading by Roberto Estreitinho

Roberto's post was the catalyst for me to step back from subscribing to so many sources of content. Glad to be doing a cull now.

My fixie tends to be a fair weather bike these days, but the weather in Scotland is so unpredictable that it might be worth investing in these Pedal Consumption themed SmartAss mudguards.

via Pedal Consumption

I've just finished Seth Godin's book, Poke the Box and one thing has become abundantly clear. I'm not poking the box enough.

I've got a list of product ideas sitting on my desk and so far I've barely started three of them. In each case I've made the minimum number of steps to get each product idea started, but there needs to be more. There needs to be more poking.

Whether it's a prototype, a mock up or even beta version of the product, I need to get these product ideas out there. No excuses.

Matt Gemmell has an excellent post on the community that has built up around App.Net and why he'd like you to consider joining.

The practical effect, which I notice daily, seems to be that people are more willing to participate in conversations, and also more careful about how they express themselves. Such a broad generalisation has no hope of being true for everyone, but it’s been my consistent perception during the months I’ve been using the service.

— App.Net for conversations by Matt Gemmell

Content is king. I hear this a lot when people refer to what drives the popularity of their blog. Which is okay when your blog is targeted as a specific audience, but does the same rule apply when your blog is personal?

Let me re-phrase that. Is your blog for you or your readers?

I've been very much of the mind that my blog has an audience. Not a specific audience but an audience all the same. My audience likes what I write. Since moving to Octopress though, I have been struggling about what to do with the content of my tumblelog. My heart says to include all the content here, but my head says no.

My tumblelog is a mixed bag of stuff including fixies, tech news and an assortment of links to my favourite posts on the blogs that I like to read. I like posting these things as it's what I like, but I'd still like to continue with a daily essay style post.

One way to maintain two audiences but in the same blog is to provide another RSS feed for readers to subscribe to. One feed will default to only the daily posts that I write while another feed will provide the full assortment of posts to enjoy. This way I hope to blog for myself but also keep the interest of readers in mind by not polluting their feed with posts they don't want to read.

If you continue to enjoy the daily posting routine of myself then stick with the current RSS feed. If you want something more varied then why not think about subscribing to the full assortment of stuff I'll be posting? The new feed will be ready early next week and of course I'll be posting the details here.

Google free. I hear those words a lot now. Ever since Google decided to close down the Google Reader service there's been a question I keep asking myself. What's next in the Google product list to be closed? And I don't think I'm alone. There's been a lot of discussion about how long term other Google services will be? One thing's for sure. Nothing lasts forever.

Rather than sitting waiting though, I've decided to look for alternatives to the products and services that I can. I'm not aiming to go completely Google free, but I am looking to reduce my dependency on the services and software that Google provides.

The Browser

It was a tough choice to make, but I decided to stop using Google Chrome. Yes it's fast and probably the alpha browser for many web developers, but given that I want to stop relying on Google services and products, I had to look elsewhere. Well not too far, after all Mozilla Firefox is a great alternative to Google Chrome. I was up and running within a few minutes with Firefox thanks to the ability to import all my bookmarks and browsing history from Chrome.

Analytics

Site tracking services such as Google Analytics have a bit more of a wide range of options than browsers do. In the end though I decided to use Github's Gauges service. It's simple and cheap. I don't need all the metrics that Google Analytics provides, just a general overview of traffic to my site. A couple of code changes to my own site and the Journalong site was all that was needed to start using Gauges.

Feedburner

Lastly there's Feedburner. Given that Google are no longer interested in providing a service that allows you to read RSS feeds, then I think that a service that publishes RSS feeds is going to be closed down in time as well. Already I have read of a couple of people on ADN who have stopped using their Feedburner accounts and are using the built-in RSS feed that their sites provide.

I haven't found an alternative service to Feedburner but I'm not sure that I actually want one. Subscription stats for my blog isn't something that I am interested in that much, but one thing I will miss about Google Reader is it's trends page. I just want to see how active a blog has been in the last 3 months so that I can decide if I want to unsubscribe from it. I'll be switching away from Feedburner soon.

These are the services that I have decided stop using with Google. What difference does it make? Not much, but I am happier not relying on one provider for all the products and services I use online.

Being a parent is tough at the best of times, but being a parent, holding down a job and working on anything else that takes your fancy is hard too. As a developer I like tinkering with code and ideas, but these aren't a priority and so I only work on side projects when I can. However, even short bursts of coding can be productive as John Polacek points out:

It has happened to me over and over again. I get away from what I’m working on, then when I come back, I focus on it in a fresh way. I can accomplish in 10 minutes what may have taken me an hour or more had I just stayed ‘heads down’.

— How Getting Married and Having Kids Made Me a Better Programmer by John Polacek

My focus is family first, income second and then everything else. So only when I have exhausted all my options about the house do I crack open my text editor and start coding. I might only get 10 minutes or half an hour, but it's all I need to move project forward.

The surprise for me is that I thought that with freelancing I would be able to set aside some time for side projects, but the priority for freelance work is to simply save what I can. When the work stops coming in for a short spell, then I can focus on my side projects for a period of time until I find other work. For the moment though I'm happy to only work on side projects when I can.

For a while now I've been running an essay style blog and a tumble log. They've both got a fair number of subscribers, but one of the complications I have is that in moving my blog somewhere else is that I need to decide whether to bring both blogs over separately, combine them or just bring my essay style blog.

Combining the blogs might mean that I lose readers, but then the offset is that I am brining two audiences together and hopefully they will like the bringing together of content.

Maintaining separate blogs could be a pain, in fact it is a pain. I think I'd like to simply maintain the one blog for the moment.

Bringing my essay style blog over is the most appealing one but letting go of my tumble log might be a bit difficult to do. It's quite personal to me as it contains topics and stuff that interests me personally. However it is only a blog after all.

The loss of Google Reader as an RSS reader is a great shame but one thing that I am definitely going to miss is the trends page of Google Reader. This page provided data on what you've been reading and when you were reading it. Not only that but you could see what blogs you are following are active and which are not.

I use the last feature as a way of unsubscribing from blogs that are no longer active. Every month I look back to see which blogs were not active over the last three months and unsubscribe from them.

So now that Google Reader is being killed off, what do I do about the tracking of the blogs that I follow?

Due to the lack of products that I could find that do this, I thought about rolling my own RSS watch list so that I could see which blogs were not active over a given time period.

The idea is simple. You upload your OPML file of your RSS feeds and the watch list will monitor your feeds on a daily basis always checking to see when content on each blog feed was last posted. Alerts are emailed to you when a feed stops posting after a number of days that you specify.

A simple idea and one that I hope that I can build in the next few weeks.

A few weeks ago I signed up to a project that involved receiving regular index cards through the post with ideas and suggestions for those ideas on them.

In the last few weeks I've spotted a few more opportunities where this idea could be used and I hope that more of these micro mail services pop up.

In a digital world it is all too easy to be overburden ourselves with content and networks. Twitter, Facebook, email, blogs, newsletters, podcasts and more. Where do we draw the line?

This why I'm loving the idea of getting mail again. A chance to stop relying on digital content and subscribe to some real hand crafted content. The kind of content that really makes you stop and think.

I really hope that more of the micro mail services take off.