Need to Improve Your Business?
Start here with Nicholas Bate's summary to building a better business.
Mountain Bikes from NAHBS 2014
Too many beautiful bikes here to recommend one.
Nice to see a few rigid singlespeed steeds in there.
Apps Are Not Solutions
A nice reminder from Productivityist that apps are tools just like other tools and need to be revised every now and again to see if they are working for you.
Fixie Friday - Rose City Fix
Does Freelancing Offer More Flexibility?
Working as a freelancer doesn't offer the flexibility that I first thought it would, but is that a bad thing?
I've been freelancing for over a year now. It's been a great journey so far and long may it continue, but when people ask me if I have more flexibility in my hours, they react with surprise when I say no.
When I first wanted to freelance, one of the benefits that drew me to it was the fact that I would dictate my hours as I would see fit. I would work when it suited me the most. If I wanted to work in the morning then I would. I could take the afternoon off and then do more work in the evening. That's not how it has worked out for me though.
I work four days a week doing client work. Typically my day runs from 9am to 5pm with maybe an hour or two extra done at night if needed. Sounds like your typical work day right? Well that's largely in part due to the fact that is the hours that my clients work. They have typical work hours like most other people so it suits everyone if I work to the same hours as well.
The flexibility doesn't then come from the hours that I work then, it comes from the fact that I work at home. I can do the school run in the morning and the afternoon as well as be home for deliveries coming to the house, giving trades people access for repairs and decorating when the need arises and because I am already at home, I can use my work hour more productively by running a few errands during my lunch break when I need to.
To a degree freelancing does offer me more flexibility. I work the days that I want to and take time off as needed, however it isn't the flexible career that I first thought it was going to be. Yes it is flexible, but only in the fact that I can do a few more things extra in the day as I work from home. Work hours wise though, I'm not much better off than many others but that isn't a bad thing. Keeping to a working day means that I've got time for the family when it comes to the evening and the weekend.
When I first started blogging I thought I could simply keep on writing and the ideas would come. For a while they did and I would keep future ideas on a backlog so that I could return to them another day. Now though it seems that those ideas are not coming as fast as they did in the past. It took me a while to realise what the problem was.
My problem was that I set myself the goal of publishing more often than I could write. Yes I could publish small posts that required little effort but is that what I want to do? Minimum effort? I won't learn anything from just simply firing out a barrage of poorly written blog posts.
What I want to do is improve my writing. That means spending more time writing, editing and proof reading. I want to review my writing a few times to ensure that I am completely happy with it. This takes time, not a lot of time but definitely more than the time it takes me to write a small blog post.
Writing takes time. Good writing I mean. The kind of writing where you write a draft more than once. You sweat over the little things like word choice and grammar. You spend time on each paragraph, sentence or even word.
Writing does take time, but the rewards of better writing far out weigh that of those hasty blog posts that I used to write. It's taken me a while to learn this but it's came at a good time. I'm hoping that this is a time where I can improve on my writing over the next few months.
We'll just need to wait and see.
More & Less
Nicholas Bate has the balance in productivity.
Fixie Friday - GT Team USA
via FGGT
Three pounds got me a tea and hot roll this morning from my local cafe. A pot of tea which should give me three decent cups of tea and a toasted flatbread with sausage. A little bit upmarket when you consider this is a cafe in the West of Scotland but also good value when you consider that it's not your usual greasy spoon morning roll with a slice of cheap meat thrown in. Good value I think you would agree. I get enough fuel to see me through to lunchtime and enough tea to keep me working for at least two hours.
What about value on the Internet though? What determines value in the products and services that we buy but are nothing more than bytes that exist in the Internet?
Five dollars is a common price point for many products and services. Evernote offers extra bandwidth for synchronising data for this amount, Github offers a private repository for the same amount and you can follow more people on App.net for, yes you guessed it, five dollars. It's a common price for many services but the variety of value differs from product to product.
There is a trend on the Internet when it comes to services and value. The older the service, the more value you get. It's not true in every case, but it's certainly applicable to many.
Take Evernote for example. Back when I first took an Evernote subscription the added value I got from it was mainly their offline notebooks and extra bandwidth for synchronising my data contained in Evernote. Now though, Evernote offers collaboration, extra security, presentation and even other premium features from their other apps. Good value if you use these on a monthly basis.
Let's look at App.net now. Out of the box a free account gives you great value including the ability to use their Passport application and follow up to 40 people. On top of that you get 500MB of storage on their platform. For an extra five dollars a month you can follow as many people as you like and also get an extra 500MB of storage taking you to 1GB. Right okay, not the range of extra value that Evernote offers but it is value. App.net is young though and in time they may offer more to its paying customers to encourage free customers to upgrade.
The trouble with comparing these services and more is that there's usually only a handful of great services in each market. Comparing services from different markets isn't going to work. It's not fair to say that Evernote offers more value than App.net but in terms of a basic feature count, yes it offers more, but it depends on person to person what features they use.
For many of us that use the Internet on a daily basis though, we live in a time where five dollars is nothing. It's a fancy coffee or even breakfast. I don't think five dollars to me is a lot of money to pay for a serivce online for a month. Even the most basic service is worth paying for.
If it provides value to you as a consumer then why not?
What's the minimum you would pay for extra features and value from a service?
Also does that price change depending on the important of the service you are using. Would a service critical to your business warrant a larger minimum price so that it continues to support your business?
No More Netterpress For Me
Yesterday I decided to pull the plug on the Netterpress newsletter. Saying no to your own ideas is difficult to do. You want it to grow. You want it to succeed. It doesn't always end up this way though. The journey to a successful product is hard work and needs a significant amount of effort. After working on Netterpress for over a month it was clear that it wasn't something that was worth doing given the amount of money that was coming in from initial subscribers. This wasn't the only problem though.
A Small Community
App.net is still a small community when compared to other well known social networks but it shouldn't be pushed aside for its size though. There's still a fair amount of daily interaction that goes on here and it is growing on a daily basis. It can't be compared to the millions of users that other networks can and that restricts the number of potential customers that a premium newsletter like Netterpress can have.
I was buoyant about the newsletter when I first wrote about the idea, but when I unveiled the sign up page and price, the take up for it was low. The number of interested subscribers just wasn't there. With a bigger network, there may have been more of an interest, but App.net being a small community means that there just isn't enough people there interested in the newsletter.
Sourcing News & Content
I had a plan at the start which involved finding content to put in the newsletter from a number of sources. The first was to follow a number of developer accounts for apps on App.net and a few other accounts that would give me news on app updates and changes to App.net.
The problem with this is anyone else on App.net can follow these accounts and get the same news for free. I was counting on the fact that I would do the leg work in correlating the news and updates from a number of different accounts and present them in one easy to read list.
Another plan I had for finding content was the use of hashtags that people could include in their posts if they want a post with a link to feature in a newsletter. Unfortunately this idea wasn't conveyed as well as I could have and was never used in the entire time that Netterpress ran.
The last strategy I used for finding content was the use of saved searches in the Felix app on my iPad. I setup a number of saved searches within the app and checked them on a daily basis. Some content for the newsletter came through this way but it wasn't the flood of newsletter content that I was hoping for.
Most of the content for the newsletter came from spending a few minutes each day searching links in my own timeline and the timeline for the Netterpress account. It was time consuming and certainly wasn't an efficient method.
Content Curation
One thing I took away from the experience of running the newsletter was that it is a time consuming task. I now have new found respect for those people that curate content for the benefit of others, whether they run a newsletter, a blog or even a magazine. Publishing a periodical for others to read is hard work and it needs a lot of time and thought.
You can get so far by automating the curation process but it still needs a final check to confirm that the final content is okay for the newsletter. Although I didn't get the entire process automated, the curation process for one part of the newsletter was almost fully automated but it did need a last check before publishing the newsletter.
It's Not The End
The newsletter itself is not dead however. Shortly after announcing the retirement of the newsletter, I received an email from another App.net member who wishes takeover the newsletter and publish it on a more irregular schedule for free. I'm in the process of migrating over the assets of Netterpres including the account the subscribers that have allowed their email address to be given to the new owner.
It's good that the newsletter will in fact live on, but it wasn't a viable product during it's first run. This might change with a new owner and perhaps making it free for a while will get enough subscribers so that one day it could eventually pay for itself in some way.
I'm done with this idea though. It's time to sit back for a few days and catch up on reading, writing and code. Another idea will come along soon and when it does, I will start the process of evaluating it as a product all over again.