Accidentally in Code

Tag: business

  • Reaching Profitability – 7 Things I’ve Learned

    Reaching Profitability – 7 Things I’ve Learned

    water vole
    Credit: Flickr / Peter Trimming

    In May, I met my revenue goals, and in June I’ll take a pay-check – my first since I escaped my gilded cage. It’s an exciting milestone, and one I’m proud of.

    However when people say they envy my life, or that I’m “living the dream” I get quite irritated. Yeah, it looks good, now. It didn’t two years ago when I walked home from work in tears several times a week. It didn’t look that appealing a year ago when I came home from “work” to continue “working” – and given the restrictions of my contract, not even on what I actually wanted to do when I went out on my own… but things I gave away for free hoping they’d help in some way. It didn’t look that appealing every month until now when I transferred money to live on from my savings account to my current account.

    When I talk about “revenue goals” and a pay-check. We’re talking about ~1/3 of what I used to make at the Conglomerate. I’m happy with this – for now at least – but I made a conscious choice between being paid well at a job I hated in a city I despised to being paid badly doing things I enjoy and working with people who treat me well, wherever I want. This choice was partly a function of privilege (having savings) and partly of desperation (I couldn’t go on in that environment).

    Some Things I’ve Learned

    Work at your relationship with your cofounder. Plenty of companies implode because of infighting. I think the biggest thing my business partner and I do is: we let each other make our choices, and we don’t express resentment. I hope we don’t feel resentful either, but I can only speak for myself there.

    Keep your operating costs low. No, lower. Decide the absolute minimum you can live on, and eliminate anything extra. You can think “oh [luxury] is just X a month” but if that logic is applied to a number of things, it really adds up. For me being homeless is part of that – it means I can go wherever, but it also means that I don’t have a set amount of rent to find each and every month. This is absolutely not viable for everyone.

    Focus on what you’re doing. “Culture” is a word that gets thrown around a lot and as an abstract concept it’s not one I have a lot of time for. Culture evolves from what you do, and is a function of your processes. Essentially I think any success you have in “culture” is meaningless before you’ve achieved sustainability, and discussion of it is just a distraction.

    Build strong collaborations. I expected this adventure to be much more lonely than it is. In reality, I have people who I work with over longer time frames, or on multiple projects. Working for yourself doesn’t mean not dealing with people! I’ve realised how important it is to keep working at these skills, even if it means allocating some time for projects that don’t contribute to the bottom line (for me this is Technically Speaking).

    Work with people who want to pay you. I feel like this is the catchy snippet capturing a number of disparate learnings. I want to work with people who value and appreciate what I do for them, and the best metric I know to indicate that is that they tell me to send them an invoice. There are people who will never pay you, and I avoid them. And then there are people who might but are really difficult about it, and I have decided that I don’t have the time or inclination for them, either. The way think about this is in placing “manageable bets” – like I’ll bet one hour of my time on that potential project, or four hours on that big, interesting one. And then I let things fall where they may. I think this has made for a longer timeframe to profitability, but does mean that the contracts I have I feel really good about, and that is a trade-off I was happy to make.

    Let things change. I had this idea when I started all this, that I wanted to help non-technical founders with the technical aspects of what they were building. Whilst I do kind of function like a senior engineer on call, it’s not quite as I envisaged. In general what I found is whilst people really do need this help, they aren’t prepared to pay for it (e.g. they don’t want to pay someone to explain why they shouldn’t build their own e-commerce system). I have some ideas on this that I hope I’ll get to later in the year, but for now I’m focusing on other things.

    Large projects require focus. I have probably 4 big projects I want to achieve this year. Because part of my time is already allocated, typically I can only focus on one of them at a time. I tend to be trying to move forward on two – one writing, one coding (e.g. I focus on the writing project when I’m low on or without internet). I’ve learned to be pretty ruthless about ideas that aren’t current priorities – they are on the list, but they won’t move forward until the thing ahead of them ships.

    And Some Things I’m Figuring Out

    Balancing client work and your own is hard. In theory, I bill out 2-3 days a week and work 2-3 days a week on my own stuff. In practise… well I’m working on it.

    Taxes and forms and everything. We have an accountant and my business partner is good at this stuff, but this really stresses me out. I had to fill in some terrifying US form and call the IRS and I worried about it for a week.

    Outsourcing and contractors. At first we wanted admin help, but it was really hard to hire an admin and eventually we just decided not to. I’m trying to look for things I could break out and have someone else do either because it’s not a competency for me or because I’m short on time.

  • The Pipeline is a Bullshit Argument, and Other Rants

    The Pipeline is a Bullshit Argument, and Other Rants

    melting girl
    Credit: Flickr / Charis Tsevis

    The latest comments are from a guy who runs a startup incubator, but next week it will be someone else. Men, so many men, would like to explain why there are no women in the tech industry, and how it is not, actually, their fault, and there is nothing they can do, so can we just stop complaining, please? Why do they have to feel so bad about it? It’s just how the world is. Watch your tone.

    It’s The Pipeline, Stupid

    The pipeline argument is the ultimate refuge of the tech company or incubator that would like to pass the blame. There aren’t enough women graduating, so that explains the numbers. There aren’t enough girls going into the right courses at university, so there is nothing they can do.

    This argument is blind to privilege, but also, I think, classist. The tech person making in excess of $100k a year, would like to blame the school teachers who make a fraction of that.

    The school teacher could argue that 63% of women working in STEM report experiencing sexual harassment, why would they encourage students to go into that kind of toxic environment? They might be better off being accountants.

    The pipeline leaks from the age of 5 until all women have dropped out, or died. (See The Primer). Handily it means that everyone can divert attention from the leaks closest to them by pointing to leaks further away.

    Fast, Cheap, Good – Pick Two

    A constraint of project management is – Fast, Cheap, Good. Pick two. My understanding is that the VC model is built on Fast and Cheap. Postpone as much as possible (including finding a business model) until after the big exit.

    Women are shut out of this, and so women run business tend to more the Cheap and Good – bootstrapping – with a business model, and customers! – over a long period, with lower rates of failure.

    The myth of the 20 something male, is correlation, not causation. What are VCs really looking for? Hubris? Lack of interest in anything else, willingness to work 80 hour weeks and put their life on hold in pursuit of some definition of success?

    10,000 Hours and Other Nonsense

    One argument is that starting at 13 is necessary in order to have put in the 10,000 – as explained by Malcolm Gladwell in his best selling book – in order to be good enough at 23. Except it’s not just about the sheer number of hours thrown at it, it’s about the type of work done. 10,000 hours will get you a middle ranking at chess, but it takes 5,000 hours of deep practise to become a chess grandmaster.

    Also, this level of dedication is when you aim to become the best in the world at something. This is a master craftsman level of wood carving. Except what we are actually talking about is something closer to assembling a bunch of Ikea furniture, albeit in a tight timeframe. We wouldn’t extrapolate that playing with hammers and bashing together chaotic structures with no stability bears much relationship to the wood carver. And yet, writing terrible code with little feedback other than “it works” – for some definition of works, not a definition that includes any QA control – is seen to bear a significant relationship to the ability, 10 years later, to build a production quality service with millions of users and 99.9% uptime.

    The level of “deep practice” during universities is unclear, but at the very least, whilst men definitely outnumber women in university computer science, I can’t find any data that suggests they outperform them – I’ve actually heard the opposite, that women tend to do better in 3rd and 4th year, by which point they outperform men. The thing that women do score less well on than men, is confidence.

    So back to that argument about hubris.

    The One True Way of “Hacking”

    I posit that programming is a way of thinking, and that programming languages and technologies are just tools that we use. Why is there such a fixation on tooling? This is just an extension of the Vim vs Emacs war.

    In sports, something much more measurable, as things like how fast someone can swim 100 metres of butterfly has a definite answer, path is less prescriptive than it is in the tech industry. There are different ways of training, people who come to the sport late and still succeed – I heard a talk by Alisa Camplin who won Gold in aerial skiing at the Olympics, who didn’t consider the possibility of competing as an aerial skier until she was 20.

    Why is there this limited view on what it means to become good at something? Is it because we don’t really know what it means to be good at it? Or is it a deliberate attempt to keep the barriers to entry artificially high? Oh you’re learning to code at 18? Wow, you left it too late, may as well give up.

    Inclusive, Not Pink, Makes $$

    The video game industry was saturated, and then Nintendo launched the wii – opening up the market to people who had not bought video games previously. This included women, but please recall, the wii wasn’t pink.

    Women control the majority of consumer spending. Women are the dominant users of social networks. Inclusive products, make a lot of money. Under-powered pink products get cancelled.

    In 2014, still the idea of making something “for women” means making it pink (hilarious parody commercial of a pen for women). As a business strategy, this is stupid. This experiment in funding teenage boys to work incessantly and build things has only demonstrated what adult women have known all along – teenage boys have no idea what women want. The result is that the female market (and British women actually spend more money on technology than cosmetics) is completely underserved. The old way hasn’t worked. Surely, it’s time to consider the assumptions?

    Meanwhile, women have been bootstrapping companies, and turning to Kickstarter, and it might take longer, but I do think that eventually women-led technology companies will show the adolescent boys and their admirers what women really want, and importantly, what they will pay for.

    Such products may or may not, come in pink.

     

  • Web 2.0 Presentation

    This week my supervisor, two of my office mates (Amir and Payam) and I have been working hard putting together a presentation we’ve recorded for a conference in Algeria on Sunday.

    I laid out the slides in Keynote, using my color scheme (luckily the others were OK with the pink). We’ve been impressed with how easy it has been to record in Keynote, although I think due to the number of takes there are some glitches where the audio doesn’t quite match with the slides.

    It’s taken longer than expected – I think we all got quite perfectionist, and when checking it the playback always started from the beginning – meaning with each additional person it took longer to check everything was working OK! Also – I hate listening to myself present. I say “So…” at the start of every slide!

    The slides are available on slideshare (I’ve embedded it below). You may notice that my section is very similar to the presentation I prepared the other week, although I’ve had to add some text to the slides. You can also download the QuickTime movie here (it’s Benyoucef.mov and note – the first section is in French) my section starts at around 32:30.

    As ever – let me know what you think!

    Web 2.0

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