Six Software Products in One Year

Nothing spectacular has happened lately. It’s just been a lot of the usual hard work.

The amount of work involved has surprised me. It’s not just the fact that I’m running multiple parallel projects - just bringing a single project to market is an amazing amount of effort. A lot of the work will be faster the second time around, so I’m not too concerned. I do find it amusing that it’s been almost six months and I don’t have any products out yet.

The Mutex Labs website is finally at a state that I’m happy with. You should hire me as a consultant. Now. Do it!

I’ve been running AdWords to drum up some more consulting work. So far, the response has been mediocre. I think that part of the problem is that there just aren’t that many people searching for Python geeks in Australia. Additionally, I don’t think people are searching on Google for them. It’s not like it’s costing me much to keep the ads going, but I don’t have high hopes for them yet.

I also set up Microsoft AdCenter. So far, they haven’t given me a single impression. I don’t know why - even if I search for the exact terms, the ads don’t appear. I guess I’m USD$5 in the hole until I can figure out what’s going wrong.

I am amused that AdCenter appears to have been ‘inspired’ by AdWords. And by ‘inspired’, I mean ‘completely ripped off’. I’m mostly using it because Live is the default search in the new versions of IE and I’m expecting large growth in the amount of their search traffic soon.

My experience with online freelancing websites (Elance, Rentacoder, etc) has been very poor so far. I’ve seen a few good ideas float across, but so far very little interest from the people advertising the projects. Most projects fit into one of three categories:

• Advertiser has no idea what they want and gives a ridiculously vague spec (which we then nut out during IM and discover that it’s a lot harder than they thought originally)
• Advertiser gives a good spec with a few glaring flaws. I ask for clarification and get no answer.
• Advertiser is only offering slave-labour wages, and so I can’t afford to take the work anyway.

Most of the problems are with specs. I’m not going to bid on a project that has +/- 50% wiggle room in its spec, and so far that’s been the good case. And since the hourly rates are very low to begin with, I can’t afford to take the (high) risk of scope creep with the spec that is in place.Contrasting with last month’s money concerns, I’m now inundated with work requests. Nothing concrete yet, just a number of separate inquiries. This sort of highlights one of my frustrations with treating advertising and measuring response rates as a statistical system - noise drowns out your actual data.

I’m still waiting on PCBs for my data loggers. I think it’s been… three weeks now? The manufacturers’ website quoted one week. It took them a week just to acknowledge that I had sent an order. Sigh. I have another place in mind for the next batch, and they’re pretty quick to respond to emails as well. I also have quotes from a few local places who can do short-turnaround orders - it’s not cheap, but it’s good to have the option.

Data logger firmware is about 60% complete. Of course, most of it has only been compiled, not executed, since I still don’t have hardware. Still, it feels good to make such rapid progress.

SyncDroid is stalled. I’m going to run out of data logger code to write soon, so it’ll get some more attention shortly.

I’ve also been playing with a ‘keyword mixer’ that generates all possible combinations of words, intended for AdWords and the like. It’s come up because I have a number of skills that I want to advertise (for example, ‘Python’, ‘AVR’, ‘Gumstix’). Using ‘Python’ as a bare keyword gets a lot of clicks but no conversions (too generic), so I make the search terms more specific by adding terms like ‘development’, ‘consultant’, ‘expert’, and so on. So, the mixer generates every combination from the two lists. Then you copy and paste it into AdWords and tweak from there.

I want to do similar mixing with ad headlines and bodies to help with comparative benchmarking.

It took me about half an hour two write as a Python script. There are a few programs that do similar jobs, but you have to download and mess around with them (and pay, in many cases). I’m thinking of sticking this online and just seeing what happens. I have no solid monetization ideas right now.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 1:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.