Successful Software

A curated list of 200 articles for microISVs and startups

I have been steadily adding to the curated list of links on this site. Currently there are links to 200 articles, loosely categorized into topics such as ecommerce, market research, product naming, Pay Per Click and SEO. I have tried to select articles that contain ‘actionable’information, rather than wafflely articles about ill-defined subjects such as time management and motivation. Some of the articles linked to were written by me, but the majority weren’t. I hope you find something useful. I would be surprised if you don’t.

Go to the links page

Pivot Tables demystified

Online businesses generate a lot of data. Sales data, marketing data, traffic data etc. Pivot tables can be a useful tool for analysing and extracting useful information from this sea of data. A lot of people seem to have heard of Pivot Tables without understanding what they are or how to use them. Despite the slightly cryptic name they are really just a way of summarizing tables of data. Nothing to be intimidated by. I’m going to try to demystify them here with a simple example.

Let’s imagine you have got an Excel spreadsheet with a month of (fictitious) sales transaction. It looks like this:

You want to find out:

1. The total value of sales of each product
2. The number of sales of each product
3. The total value of sales of each product by country
4. The total value of sales of each product by day of the week

How would you do it? You can crunch the numbers using a calculator, but that is very tedious and error prone. If you are a programmer you can export the data to a .csv file and write a small program in your favourite language to read it in, crunch the data and write the results out. You probably think you can do it in 10 minutes, but I bet it will take you at least an hour to get it working and debugged. I did all the above in 1 minute and 20 seconds using Excel pivot tables.

Here is how you can do it (screenshots from Excel 2007). You can download the spreadsheet if you want to try it yourself.

Select all the data, including the header (A1 to D222).

Click on Insert in the Excel Ribbon bar.

Click on PivotTable.

The Create Pivot Table window will appear. Click OK.

The PivotTable Field List will appear. We want to find the number of sales for each product. Drag the product field to Column labels and the value field to Values. This gives us the total value of sales by product.

To change this to the number of sales pull down the Sum of value drop-down list and select Value Field Settings….

Change Summarize value field by from Sum to Count and click OK.

The number of sales of each product are now shown.

Now drag the country field to Row labels. Then click on Count of value, select Value Field Settings…, change it back to Sum and click OK. The total value of sales of each product by country is now displayed.

We now need to add a day of the week column. Click on Sheet 1 and add a new column as shown.

Now select all the data from A1 to E222 and insert a new pivot table, as before.

Drag the fields as shown to get the total value of sales of each product by day of the week.

(We’ll quietly ignore the fact that the number of days aren’t divisible by 7 in the data.)

We can even display by product, day of the week and country with one more drag.

Excel also supports pivot charts if you prefer your results in graphical form.

Obviously this is a very simple example, but pivot tables can be used to quickly analyse much larger and more complex data sets. Next time you have got some data to analyse consider whether you would be better using pivot tables or pivot charts.

Promoting your software

This is a video of a “Promoting your software” talk I did at ESWC 2011. In it I discuss my experiences attempting to try every form of promotion known to man including: SEO, Google Adwords, magazine ads, affiliates, Facebook ads and hanging out in wedding forums using a female pseudonym. With real data! You can’t read the slide text in the video, but I have included the slides below.

A couple of people asked me afterwards whether anything I tried had worked. Yes! I wouldn’t have survived long as a microISV otherwise. But I didn’t really want to dwell on what had worked for me because it might not be relevant for different products with different price points in different markets. Also that isn’t the sort of information I want to give to my competitors.

Things were running a bit late due to problems with the projector, so I didn’t have time for the audience participation at the end. Projector problems are really not what you need when you are just about to do a talk to a room full of people! Many thanks to Alwin and Sytske of Collectorz for doing the video and to Dave and Aaron of Software Promotions for helping to sort out the unruly projector.

Cppcheck – A free static analyser for C and C++

I got a tip from Anna-Jayne Metcalfe of C++ and QA specialists Riverblade to check out Cppcheck, a free static analyser for C and C++. I ran >100 kLOC of PerfectTablePlan C++ through it and it picked up a few issues, including:

• variables uninitialised in constructors
• classes passed by value, rather than as a const reference
• variables whose scopes could be reduced
• methods that could be made const

It only took me a few minutes from downloading to getting results. And the results are a lot less noisy than lint. I’m impressed. PerfectTablePlan is heavily tested and I don’t think any of the issues found are the cause of bugs in PerfectTablePlan, but it shows the potential of the tool.

The documentation is here. But, on Windows, you just need to start the Cppcheck GUI (in C:\Program files\Cppcheck, they appear to be too modest to add a shortcut to your desktop), select Check>Directory… and browse to the source directory you want to check. Any issues found will then be displayed.

You can also set an editor to integrate with, in Edit>Preferences>Applications. Double clicking on an issue will then display the appropriate line in your editor of choice.

Cppdepend is available with a GUI on Windows and as a command line tool on a range of platforms. There is also an Eclipse plugin. See the sourceforge page for details on platforms and IDEs supported. You can even write your own Cppcheck rules.

Cppcheck could be a very valuable additional layer in my defence in depth approach to QA. I have added it to my checklist of things to do before each new release.

ESWC 2011

No proper post this week. I’m too busy finishing off my talk ‘Promoting your software’for ESWC 2011 in London next weekend (19-20 Nov). I am going to talk about my experiences attempting to try every form of promotion known to man including: SEO, Google Adwords, magazine ads, affiliates, Facebook ads and hanging out in wedding forums using a female pseudonym. With audience participation! Plus real data!

There are also some other interesting looking talks. Chatting to other people in the business over coffee or beer is also invaluable. If you haven’t booked a ticket, it isn’t too late. Don’t worry if it is your first time – people are very friendly. Do come and say hello.

On the subject of conferences, the ASP is putting on ISVCon in Reno, Nevada, USA in July 2012. Being UK based it is probably further than I am prepared to fly for a conference. But I hope it is a huge success.

Losing weight with a minimum of willpower

If you are happy with your weight you can skip this post. Normal programming will be resumed soon.

We all know how to lose weight: eat less and move more. So why do so few people succeed? You only have to spend a few minutes walking around any wealthy western country to see that obesity is a huge problem. The human body is truly an incredible thing, evolved over millions of years. It is so much more than just a mere transport and fuelling system for the brain. We only get one body, it is a tragedy to neglect it.

The past is always with us

Our evolutionary past is working against us. Agriculture is less than 10,000 years old. That is only about 400 generations. A blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. While our technology and culture may have changed beyond all recognition in that time, our bodies and brains are still very similar to those of our palaeolithic ancestors. Their innate drives to eat salty, fatty and carbohydrate rich food and minimize their energy consumption helped to keep them alive on the hostile African savannah. But these ancient drives do little to help urban humans with almost unlimited access to food and increasingly sedentary lifestyles. Hence the burgeoning waist lines we see all around us today.

Tightening trousers

Over the last few years I had put on a few kgs. I have been spending a lot of time in front of the computer; working on my software product, doing consulting and writing this blog. Having a young child also reduced the time available for exercise. The 32 inch waist trousers I have been wearing for the last 20+ years (not the same pair, I would like to point out) were starting to feel uncomfortably tight. I either had to lose weight or go clothes shopping. Surely anything is better than clothes shopping.

But how to lose the weight? Previous attempts to lose weight have never lasted:

• I went trekking in the Himalayas, spending 16 days walking up to the top of Mera Peak (6,476 metres). Weight loss wasn’t the goal, but the extreme exertion at high altitude meant I had the beginning of a ‘six pack’when I got back. It didn’t last though.
• I wrote down everything I ate on a spreadsheet and worked out the calories by weighing the food and using the calorie information on the packet or the CalorieKing website. I tried to eat less than 1800 calories a day[1]. It worked for a while, but the bookkeeping was tedious and I got bored and hungry. I gave up after a few weeks.
• I tried the Zone Diet. Again it worked for a while, but I found the constraints (maintaining certain proportions of protein, fat and carbohydrates) tedious. I was also less than convinced by the science. I gave up after a month or two.

Success!

I decided to try a different approach. It is based on the same approach I take to my business – learn the concepts and measure the results. 8 months later I have dropped from 17.5% body fat to 13.0% body fat and lost over  6 kg (13 lb) in weight. I will spare you the before and after photos, but suffice to say that I can now easily fit into 30 inch waist trousers (damn – I still had to go clothes shopping!). And I never went hungry. I wasn’t even particularly disciplined, taking a week off here and there when I went on holiday. I won’t be appearing on the cover of a men’s fitness magazine or slimmer of the year. But I think it’s not bad for a 45 year old with a sedentary job, a distinct lack of ‘thin genes’and a weakness for most fattening things.

I don’t claim to be an expert nutritionist or physiologist. Even if I was, the knowledge in this field seems to be constantly changing. But here is the approach that worked for me. It might work for you.

The slow carb diet

The cornerstone of my new approach was inspired by (but didn’t follow the letter of) Tim Ferriss’slow carb diet. You should go and read his article, but the key elements are:

• diet 6 days per week – eat lots of lean protein, beans, pulses and veggies, no high energy carbs (e.g. sugar, bread, rice, pasta, potato, fruit, beer and sugary drinks)
• binge 1 day per week – pig out and eat whatever you like, all-you-can-eat buffet here I come!

There is more detail in his Four Hour Body book [2].

This approach makes sense in terms of our evolutionary heritage. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors wouldn’t have had access to refined carbohydrates, such as bread, and fruit would only have been available in season. They would also have regularly alternated between feast and famine.

A typical diet day’s intake for me is:

• 2 eggs for breakfast with chilli sauce (fried with a tiny amount of oil sprayed into a non-stick pan)
• a big salad for lunch
• cajun style fried white fish with lots of veggies for dinner
• several teas, coffees and glasses of water plus a glass of red wine

The binge day helps both physiologically (it presumably stops your metabolism slowing down in response to the reduced calories) and psychologically (you are never more than 6 days from eating what you want).

Pick an exercise regime you can stick with

I also increased the amount of exercise I do. The key to this was doing things I found enjoyable and a combination of routine (doing some exercises the same day every week) and variety (varying what I did on other days). I have found that a routine of capoeira, running and kickboxing pad work plus some swimming, weights and cycling for variety suits me. I average 3-4 30-60 minute exercise sessions per week.

I really enjoy capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian fusion of martial art, dance and music. It is very strenuous, but the fact that I am learning a skill (and trying to avoid getting kicked in the head) stops me thinking too much about the exertion. I also find running and weight training quite bearable when I am listening to an interesting podcast. I am lucky enough to live near a beautiful park with a lake. Running around the lake is even quite enjoyable on a sunny day. The fitter I get, the more enjoyable it becomes. Different things work for different people. People have even lost weight combining World of Warcraft with a treadmill or exercise bike. Don’t try to force yourself to do stuff you hate, you won’t stick with it.

Your body burns mostly glycogen stored in the muscles for the first 30 minutes of exercise. So you need to exercise for more than 30 minutes to start burning fat.

It takes a lot of exercise to burn off a small amount of food. About 15 minutes of running is required to burn the calories from a single slice of bread. I knew someone who was significantly overweight despite cycling 10 miles a day. It was only when he changed his diet as well that he started to lose weight.

Any form of exercise that builds muscle mass (e.g. weight training) is good, because extra muscle will increase your metabolic rate which will burn more calories.

Weigh yourself every day

If you weigh yourself every day, you will soon see a direct correlation between weight loss and how well you stick to your diet/exercise regime. I found this daily feedback very helpful for motivation. If you only weigh yourself once a week your progress may get lost in the noise, e.g. due to the varying content of your digestive tract. I weigh myself every morning, as soon as I get out of bed. Here is a graph of my daily weight over the last 8 months:

You can see the sawtooth pattern of the weekly binge day. It is easier to see overall progress using a 7 day moving average:

Each peak was a suspension of the diet and exercise regime for holidays, birthdays and conferences.

A bit of science

Different foodstuffs vary hugely by the amount of calories per gram. You could eat 10kgs (22lbs) of green vegetables per day and not exceed your daily calorie intake (you might get a divorce though). Look at the side of the packet when you buy food, you’ll be surprised. For example, 1 gram of:

• spinach = 0.2 cal
• onion = 0.4 cal
• kidney beans = 1 cal
• bread = 3 cal
• french fries = 3 cal
• sugar = 4 cal

Try to avoid food where you don’t know what goes into it. For example, a lot of home delivery pizza contains vast amount of hidden salt, fat and carbs.

All calories are not equal. One would think that eating fat makes you fat. But there is increasing evidence that carbohydrates, not fat, is enemy number one when it comes to losing weight. Particularly carbohydrates with a high GI (ones that are quickly absorbed into the blood stream). Carbohydrate intake affects insulin levels, which in turn affects fat deposition. I was moderately active before and I didn’t eat excessively, but I ate a fair amount of bread, rice and potatoes. Reducing the amount of carbs has been the biggest change for me and I believe the main cause of my weight loss. Note that many ‘low fat’foods (e.g. low fat yoghurts) contain large amounts of added sugar.

Protein makes you feel full. Studies show that x calories of protein will make you feel less hungry than x calories of carbohydrates or x calories of fat. High GI carbohydrates can even make you feel hungry (as you will know if you have ever felt starving after drinking lots of carbohydrate rich beer).

Low carb doesn’t have to be boring. Pickles, chilli sauce and balsamic vinegar liven things up without adding calories. The amusingly named Ring of Fire (‘so hot it will burn you twice’) is my favourite chilli sauce. It’s not actually that hot.

It is easy to underestimate how much you are eating. Studies show that overweight people tend to be worse at estimating their calorie consumption. I watched a TV documentary in which they asked an overweight women to work out her daily calorie intake. She calculated 1000 calories per day. Precise measurements showed it was, in fact, 3000 calories per day. The large bowl of fruit she ate every morning was 1000 calories on its own.

Smaller plates=smaller portions. Studies have shown that simply reducing the size of your plate can reduce overall calorie intake.

Starving yourself doesn’t work. Not only does it require willpower that few of us possess, but also the body simply adapts to the lower calorie intake by reducing metabolic rate. This can then cause you to put on weight if you return to your old eating habits.

Studies show that most overweight people do not have low metabolic rates. In fact, they typically have higher than average metabolic rates due to their increased mass requiring more work to maintain. If you are fat, the chances are that you are eating too much and not doing enough exercise, rather than it being due to a slow metabolism.

Watch what you drink

Watch what you drink, as well as what you eat. Drinks can contain surprisingly high amounts of calories. A single small can of cola contains around 5% of your daily energy intake. Alcoholic drinks and milkshakes can also contain a lot of calories.

Drink more water. A lot of rubbish is talked about hydration. But water does make you feel more full. So it is a good idea to have a big glas