Information Technology Dark Side

I’m No Stranger to Self-Publishing
I’ve been self-publishing my writing for a long time. I figured out a long time ago that a good blog page with a few ads on it will return more money in the long run than an article in a magazine or on someone else’s web site. Let’s take my two most highly-visited blog posts of all time as an example:

• How To Pronounce Indian Names
• How to Write a Self-Appraisal

These two pages are highly ranked in google and account for most of my search driven traffic. As a result, they generate between $800 and $2000 per year in ad revenue. If I had sold them to a magazine, I might have made $300 each. Once.

But that’s not my only self-publishing experience. The books for the classes I teach are also self-published. Exploratory Testing Practicum is published on Lulu and I publish Immersive Agile and User Stories for Business People at FedEx. Granted I sell them privately, but the point is I am no stranger to the work required to create a printable book.

I also published one of my works of fiction, Alter Ego, on Lulu.com. I laid out the book myself and designed the cover on my own as well. It shows. I can’t wait for the new version of Alter Ego to be out – the cover is infinitely better.

The Manuscript in my Drawer
I wrote Genesis 2.0 several years ago and for a long time I was determined to publish it traditionally. Even though I already had a grasp for the long tail of publishing independently, my egotistically need to win the approval of the publishing establishment held me back. I wanted it. I got pretty close to getting it, I think. I was able to interest a top agent to read it twice and send me an extensive critique of it. But I also garnered a pile of rejection letters from people who couldn’t be bothered to read a single word.

About three months ago I finally got over myself and decided to self-publish. Wary of my not-so-stellar artistic work preparing Alter Ego for publication, I decided to enlist the help of a real artist for the cover and creation of the eBook. Genesis 2.0 is a story I really love and I wanted the book’s appearance to reflect that.

An Option I Couldn’t Afford
Based on the recommendations of Joe Konrath and others, I contacted artists who create eBooks and eBook covers and quickly learned that it would cost $400-500 to prepare Genesis 2.0. This isn’t necessarily a bad investment, but at that moment in my life I couldn’t afford it and I decided to wait. I also wanted to re-issue Alter Ego more attractively (the new version is coming soon!), and altogether I would have been out at least $800.

That wasn’t happening, not after I burned through a small pile of cash on a small marketing experiment with TroopTrack.

Along Came Booktango
Partly because of the work I’ve done on Author Learning Center and partly because of my love for writing, I was asked to participate in the beta program of a new self-publishing package called Booktango. With Booktango, you can create an eBook from your manuscript and distribute it to all the major channels for free. Or, if you’d like additional help with your cover or some art inside the book, you can purchase a package for $49 or $189 depending on your needs.

I used the $49 package and published Genesis 2.0 and Alter Ego. I was surprised by how easy it was to take a Word manuscript and turn it into an eBook. Really, you just upload the file, spend a few minutes resolving any errors it finds, fill out the metadata about your book, describe your cover, and submit. It was quick and easy.

I was naturally skeptical about the cover design that I would receive. After all, the prices I had been quoted by artists were a lot more than $49, and I wanted my cover to look good.

I was stunned when I saw Genesis 2.0′s cover. It’s awesome. I love it.

The other thing I was worried about was what the interior of the book would look like. There’s currently no way to preview your eBook, but again I was very pleased with the end result. I’ve been told previews will be in a future release of Booktango and I look forward to that.

I was pleased that the table of contents was created for me – that was something that was a bit unclear to me at the time.

In the interest of true disclosure, I did run into a few problems while I was creating my book. There were some small issues with saving data along the way, and the user interface, while not bad, is also not awesome. But it’s easy enough to use. The cool thing I learned as I encountered and reported my problems is how responsive and helpful the Booktango staff is. They made it super easy.

The Bottom Line
I couldn’t be happier with the Booktango product. As soon as I saw Genesis 2.0 on my Kindle I decided to re-issue Alter Ego through Booktango as well. I can’t wait for the moment when I can take the old picture of Alter Ego down from the side of my blog and replace it with the new one.

So, would I recommend Booktango to other writers? Heck yes I would.

Minutes after posting this, I discovered that Alter Ego is complete – the cover on the right is the new cover, not the old one I designed myself.

Just to Recap…
Bootstraps are a version of the lean startup with a 37-signals-esque twist, i.e a lean bootstrap. The goal of a lean bootstrap is to run in the black as early as possible, preferably from day 1. Boostrappers don’t need or want outside capital for the most part, and they are always conscious of the need to validate that they can actually make money doing whatever they are doing.

Basically, if you (metaphorically) placed Rework and The Lean Startup in a blender, turned it to high, then ran the puree through a mumbo-jumbo filter (basically the last 1/3 of The Lean Startup would get removed), the remaining juice would be called “The Lean Bootstrap”.

Starting a company is easy
Anybody can start a company. You can probably start a company and request a federal EIN in less time than it takes to read this post. The hard part is what happens next. And next. And next after that. And next afta afta. And so on. For a really long time.

A lean bootstrap is like Mormon heaven
When Baptists die and go to heaven, they get to spend eternity leisurely singing in choirs and enjoying freedom pain and stuff like that. When Mormons die and go to heaven, we get to keep on working. Forever.

(Please note: This bit is meant allegorically. I’m not an expert on Baptist or Mormon heaven. Comments about either religion where the author appears to be wrapped around the axle or totally off-topic will just be ignored).

I’m not trying to paint a drab picture of what a lean bootstrap is like, or of Mormon heaven either, for that matter. In either case, if you are motivated by your love for solving a particular problem, and not just chasing Dante’s banner, the news that you are going to spend what could be years and years of your free time working on that problem is not exactly bad news. But you still need to take steps to make sure that you can sustain the effort required for as long as you need to.

A supportive life ecosystem is key to sustainability
Shannon and the kids believe in TroopTrack. When my founding partners quit a few years ago, I got a bit despondent. I almost gave up, but Shannon wasn’t having it. She KNOWS that someday we will make enough money off of TroopTrack to support our family, whether it’s another two years or another ten years she doesn’t care. I also have friends who have started their own lean bootsraps with their spouses, and we encourage and support each other.

But that’s not the only part of my life ecosystem that is supportive of TroopTrack. My employer, DeveloperTown, is also behind me. When things go wrong (like OOM errors on my productions server last night), my colleagues at DeveloperTown help me out. When I need work in an area where I lack talent, like graphic design, I can get that help at work. My work schedule is also flexible – I get to choose when I work on TroopTrack and how much, as long as I continue to meet my work obligations. This is a very big deal. Just sayin’.

Financially, I can’t afford to lose much money on TroopTrack. I have to be careful about what I spend on infrastructure and marketing, because I can’t burn money like a VC-backed startup. Heck, I can’t burn money like a single kid leaving in his Mom’s basement. I’m working on changing our lifestyle so that I can spend more on TroopTrack each month, but no matter what I’ll probably never be able to lose more than $1000/month on TroopTrack. Right now, I try to keep it under $100/month on average.

Your life ecosystem is different from mine, but you need to take a good hard look at it. Is it going to help you or get in the way? When your face is swollen and bloody and your head feels like it’s going to explode, is your life ecosystem going to push you back in the ring or tell you to throw in the towel?

You Can Make It Easier to be Supportive
Running a lean bootstrap is a choice. Don’t make supporting that choice harder than it needs to be – you want it to be as easy as possible for your life ecosystem to support you. Here are some things things I’ve done over the years to make it easier on my life ecosystem to believe in and support my ongoing commitment to TroopTrack. Most of them involve me giving up my personal time so that TroopTrack steals less time from my family.

• I all but stopped watching TV, including 95% of all the sports I used to watch.
• I knocked my personal spending down a big notch – no more weekly trips to Fry’s, no more casually dropping an unplanned hundred bucks at a bookstore
• I changed jobs to work for a company that is supportive of my efforts
• I learned enough about taxes to be able to deduct the money I spend on TroopTrack
• I (temporarily) gave up on a plethora of hobbies I love, including reading (I only listen to books when I drive now), writing fiction, wakeboarding, working on my boat, working on my beetle, etc

Don’t be Bob Kearns
Some people will ruin the best part of their lives in pursuit of a lean bootstrap dream. Don’t be that guy. Don’t be Bob Kearns, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper. His stubborn determination to beat Detroit cost him his family and friends. His obsession with winning overtaxed his life’s ecosystem and wrecked it. Or at least that’s how the film “Flash of Genius” portrays his life.

Every entrepreneur is, in a way, like Bob Kearns. I have an idea I feel passionately, perhaps even obsessively, about. I work on it every day. I’m trying to take on and beat bigger, older competitors who already have a product that is well-liked and well-used. I have scant resources outside of time and expertise. And yet I still feel like I can win. True victory doesn’t come at all cost. It needs balance and support from the outside. Do what it takes to make it easy to support you by sacrificing the unimportant stuff you love like TV, hobbies, and the latest books, not the stuff that matters.

Note: It’s worth mentioning that my family is not supportive of the fact that I’ve stopped writing fiction, stopped working on my beetle, and stopped wakeboarding. That’s fun stuff we all enjoyed and they want it back.

Just to Recap…
Bootstrapped startups are a version of the lean startup with a 37-signals-esque twist, i.e a lean bootstrap. The goal of a lean bootstrap is to run in the black as early as possible, preferably from day 1. Boostrappers don’t need or want outside capital for the most part, and they are always conscious of the need to validate that they can actually make money doing whatever they are doing.

Basically, if you (metaphorically) placed Rework and The Lean Startup in a blender, turned it to high, then ran the puree through a mumbo-jumbo filter (basically the last 1/3 of The Lean Startup would get removed), the remaining juice would be called “The Lean Bootstrap”.

Dante’s Banner
In Dante’s version of hell, the souls of the uncommitted reside somewhere between heaven and hell where they are condemned to chase a banner blown around by the wind, never catching it, forever pursued by a mob of angry hornets.

Ouch.

Dante’s Banner for the Lean Bootstrap
In the lean bootstrap’s version of hell, the soul of the entrepreneur resides somewhere between success and fail where they are condemned to chase a hundred dollar bill blown around on by the wind, never catching it, forever pursued by a mob of demanding users.

Don’t Start a Lean Bootstrap Just to Get Rich Quick
Early on in TroopTrack’s history my partners and I had impossibly naive expectations about growth and profitability. I honestly believed all three of us would be working on TroopTrack full-time within a year of launching. The market was RIPE for a superior product to sweep in and steal a ton of market share before the competition could respond. So we set up an agressive timeline – we would launch a beta product within six months, then sit back and watch the money roll in.

Because we knew we were just a year away from being rich, we worked on TroopTrack in an unsustainable way. We got worn and burned out, stress started to pile up, and we began to have the disagreements typical of people who have sacrificed emotional, physical, and mental health for a “greater good.”

Our launch was a big thud. Our product was buggy and unstable. We didn’t have good ways of keeping track of customer feedback or monitoring exceptions as they occurred within our code. We didn’t know how bad our product was!

During this time, my desperation to generate revenue and prove that we had a “good” product took me down a thorny path. I started chasing deals with sponsoring organizations of multiple troops and tried signing them up en masse at a steep discount. The fact that I was occasionally successful at generating interest and once even closed a deal only made this inclination worse. I chased deals with churches, scouting districts, and charities with programs that are similar to scouting. I even considered a massive pivot to re-tool TroopTrack to support the Air National Guard!

The toll of this constant churning plus the feeble response of the market place was too much for our partnership – roughly eighteen months into it we dissolved and went our separate ways.

Start a Lean Bootstrap to Solve a Problem that You Care About
It took some soul searching and a certain degree of stubbornness, but I didn’t give up on the TroopTrack product after the original founders split up. It’s been years since then, and time has given me a certain amount of perspective about why I continued on alone. I think there is a lesson to be learned from my experience and the differences between why I was involved in TroopTrack and why my partners were.

In hindsight, I think the critical factor was the source of my interest in TroopTrack. It was based on my involvement in Scouting as an adult. I was frustrated by the products that were available – they were total crap and I needed something better. My partners, on the other hand, were recruited (by me) and persuaded to join based on the MARKET POTENTIAL of a superior product. They didn’t have any real experience in scouting but could see what a windfall capturing a corner of the scouting market would be financially.

In other words, I finally realized that I persevere with TroopTrack because, among other things, I am trying to solve a problem I really care about.

Love It or Leave It
Years later, I wish I had approached my partnership in a different way. Nothing against my former partners – they are both fine people and good programmers. But if I could do it all over again I would pick someone else. I think it’s fair to say that if THEY could do it all over again… they wouldn’t.

I believe now that I would have been better off picking a business partner who was motivated by a love of scouting and was also frustrated by the quality of products available to scouters. Even a non-technical partner of this sort would have been a better choice in the long run. Their insight into the way scouters perceived TroopTrack would have been much more meaningful than the acceleration gained by recruiting additional development talent.

I think I also would have been better off if I had just had a different attitude about TroopTrack in the early days. I convinced myself that it was an easy way to get rich doing something I cared about because I didn’t realize that just caring about something is enough justification. There doesn’t have to be an obvious path to wealth to make something worth pursuing. If you’re going to trudge the long road of a lean bootstrap, you better get on that path because you care about solving a problem, not because you want to get rich.

What’s a bootstrapped startup
Bootstrapped startups are a version of the lean startup with a 37-signals-esque twist, i.e a lean bootstrap. The goal of a lean bootstrap is to run in the black as early as possible, preferably from day 1. Boostrappers don’t need or want outside capital for the most part, and they are always conscious of the need to validate that they can actually make money doing whatever they are doing.

Basically, if you (metaphorically) placed Rework and The Lean Startup in a blender, turned it to high, then ran the puree through a mumbo-jumbo filter (basically the last 1/3 of The Lean Startup would get removed), the remaining juice would be called “The Lean Bootstrap”.

I’ll let you read those books yourself – I just wanted to introduce the idea so I could then tell you how to sink it.

Lean Bootstraps are Hard to Sink
I’ve been running a lean bootstrap for about four years now called TroopTrack.com. I’ve made pretty much every mistake possible you could make and still be able to qualify for the moniker of “lean bootstrap”. I’ve blown big sales. I’ve blown small sales. I’ve blown really, really big sales. I’ve made bad partnerships. I’ve ignored my customers (unintentionally). I’ve had failed marketing experiments. I’ve gotten distracted by crazy ideas. I’ve gotten so sick that I couldn’t work on it for several months.

Somehow TroopTrack.com survived all that. And I learned from it, and the cumulative effect of all these “mistakes” is that I have a vision for my product that my customers are excited about. Finally.

The point is, a lean bootstrap is hard to sink. As long as you don’t go into debt, give up, make huge commitments that you can’t fulfill on a part-time basis, get sued, or run in the red for extended periods of time, you can keep working on a lean bootstrap for as long as it takes.

A Premature “Big Picture” Pivot Is Your Lean Bootstrap’s Iceberg

A big picture pivot is a pivot designed to expand the “small-time thinking” of your lean bootstrap into an enormous market, usually by making the product more universal

In TroopTrack terms, a big picture pivot might be pivoting from Boy Scout Troops and Packs to all youth organizations from soccer teams to student councils. Or to the military. This type of pivot is tempting because your potential market just went from cute and cuddly to super-model hot.

Resistance is not futile. Giving in to this kind of temptation at the wrong time will sink your lean bootstrap, for the following reasons:

1. You will lose focus on the problem you are trying to solve before you ever solve it. If you haven’t learned what you need to learn to succeed in a small market, you don’t have what it takes to succeed in a large market.
2. You will alienate the customers you already have – when you transition from trying to feed a village to trying to solve world hunger, the villages you leave behind will not be happy with you.
3. You will convince yourself that you need outside investment. Outside investment can be incredibly limiting. It comes with deadlines, burn rates, and other obligations and expectations. Raising money for a big effort can be a full-time job, which will only further exacerbate the problems mentioned above.

The big picture pivot is a big deal, and it can have a huge return, but it needs to happen at the right time. Don’t sink your lean bootstrap by doing it too early.

Make Big Picture Pivots in Small Steps
When your product is successful and you are making your customers happy, big picture pivot opportunities come out of the woodworks uninvited, only they don’t look like big picture pivots on the surface. For example, I recently got an email from someone who had heard about TroopTrack and was wondering if it supported Girl Scouts (it doesn’t). Supporting Girl Scout advancement is definitely on the TroopTrack radar, and we’re actively researching it right now. And a “early adopter” just popped out of nowhere, just like that.

Adding yet another type of scouting organization to TroopTrack isn’t exactly a big picture pivot, but it’s a step towards one. Every time I add a new type of organization to TroopTrack it gets easier to do. It’s also something I can do without outside investment, without running in the red, and without alienating my customer base. It also will give me greater insight into what my customers find valuable about TroopTrack that will help me on my way.

Big Picture Pivots are Just Crystal Ball Gazing Anyway
Creative lean bootstrappers are visionaries. They see possibilities that are endless. They aren’t bothered by the flying pigs in their grand dreams or the snowball fights in Hell. This is something that is totally awesome about being a lean bootstrapper – you can see the potential.

But let’s face it – big picture pivots are an extrapolation into the future based on a myriad of assumptions. You can’t make the leap straight to the big picture without testing all the assumptions along the way. You’ve got to start with the little picture, solve it’s problem, and then move on.

When Should You Make the Big Picture Pivot?
Don’t worry so much about this. As one of my favorite former bosses, Mike Herrick, now of Urban Airship fame, likes to say, “Do good things and good things will happen.” Build a compelling product in the space you are focused on and the marketplace will tell you when to pivot. If you solve your problem really, really well, and make money doing it, early adopters will drag you into the next market when the time is right.

Scrum is a poor man’s agile
I won’t lie. I’m in a fairly contrarian mood today, and that is likely to influence this post to be harsher than it would be if I’d written it on a day when all was well. But, nonetheless, even on a good day I think I would agree with the gist of what you’re about to read.

Scrum is, in my opinion, the least “Agile” of all the agile methodologies. It is also the easiest to learn, the easiest to try, the easiest to add to your bull-crap resume, and the easiest to completely fail at. More on that later.

I don’t like the branding association it has with agile
Scrum is the de-facto brand of the Agile Alliance. I don’t really have anything against AA, but it bothers me that the only agile training they offer is related to scrum. It feels to me like AA positions “Scrum” as “Agile”, when in fact it is really only one of many methodologies that was inspired by the Agile Manifesto. The net effect is that when scrum projects fail, it’s not just scrum that gets a black eye, but also agile. And I don’t like that, because scrum projects fail a lot.

I don’t like the training
I’ve never taken a scrum class, so you may conclude that I don’t have any business trashing it. You might be right.

That said, I know a lot of ‘scrummasters’, and I’ve debriefed a number of people after they’ve taken a certified scrum master course, and as a general rule the training they received has failed to

1. Give them an adequate appreciation for the values and principles that make Agile agile
2. Convince them of the importance of absolutely critical development practices such as test driven development
3. Prepare them for the intense resistance they will face attempting to introduce agile in an environment where it is new

I don’t like the certification
I’ve written training curricula before, both for professionals and for college students. I’ve never offered to “certify” anyone. I don’t really place much value in certification as a hiring tool or as a job-seeking tool except in certain very special areas where I know the certification is a bonafide test of competence at some level (assuming the possessor did not cheat or somehow fake the certification). Some examples of such certifications:

• Diplomas from real colleges & universities (schools that don’t fail anyone are not “real”)
• A license to practice law
• A license to practice medicine
• Certification as a professional engineer

These certifications are difficult and expensive to obtain and therefore demonstrate a fairly significant level of dedication on the part of the obtainer. They are also very rigorous and they police their members – if you screw up in a big way they will kick you out.

CSM is about as far from this certification as you could possibly get. Anyone with $500 and two days to kill can become a certified scrum master. That’s not impressive – being the proud possessor of a scrummaster certification is only a differentiator in the stupidest of organizations. In fact, if I am interviewing you for a position and you have a CSM my skepticism toward you just went up.

The true value of scrummaster certification is to the companies that sell it. They benefit immensely from it. So far as I can tell, they are the only ones.

I don’t like the club
Because CSM is easy to get and because Scrum pays short shrift to the values and principles from which Agile was born, there is a community of scrummasters who evangelize the Scrum process without grasping why Agile works. Take this genius for example:

Every CSM class I teach, I emphasize the complete nature of Scrum as a single tool, not a collection of tools. Learning Scrum is about learning the tool, not learning how to pick and choose pieces of a tool. Let’s explore this metaphor of Scrum as a tool.

Consider a hammer. A hammer is ideally suited for pounding nails into wood. It has two parts: a head and a handle. If you take the parts and use them separately, they can still be used for pounding nails into wood… but they are very ineffective compared to the hammer (although better than using your bare fist). It is non-sensical to decompose the hammer and try to use the pieces separately. However, a hammer is not suited to other purposes such as driving screws or cutting wood. It’s perfection is not just in its form, but also in its proper application. A hammer works through a balanced combination of leverage and momentum.

Scrum is like a hammer. It has parts (daily Scrum, Sprints, ScrumMaster, etc.), but taking the parts and trying to use them separately is… you guessed it… non-sensical. The parts of Scrum combine to be an extremely effective tool for new product development. Just like a hammer, there are things you wouldn’t want to do with Scrum such as manufacturing or painting a wall. (We might not all agree on the limits of the use of Scrum… that’s something for another article.) Scrum works through a combination of pressure on the organization and “inspect and adapt” (continuous improvement).

Please. Don’t modify Scrum. If you must change things about Scrum, please stop calling it Scrum.

Source

This is in direct opposition to a number of agile values and principles, most notably that individuals and interactions are more important than processes and tools. It is also ludicrous to say you use “inspect and adapt” to obtain continuous improvement, but only so long as you don’t inspect and adapt scrum.

That’s just plain stupid.

Scrum is full of people who think like this, and it makes me sad. There is little point to scrum if you do not understand and embrace the values and principles from which it sprang. It’s just another flowchart.

I don’t like the methodology
Scrum is too rigid. It imposes a structure and process on an agile team that doesn’t always fit, and it puts pressure on teams to use that structure or else. It’s not true to the fundamentally critical cycle of experimentation and evaluation that is at the heart of agile.

I also think it puts too much emphasis on the scrummaster, and not enough emphasis on emergent planning, good design, and disciplined software development.

I don’t like the results
Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed brand new certified scrummasters are failing to deliver working software all over the place, mostly because of the three things their training failed to give them. As a result, lots of organizations are back-pedaling from their scrum implementations, mistakenly blaming agile for the failure.

Well guess what? It’s not agile’s fault. If you just “do” scrum without understanding or appreciating the values behind it, you didn’t “do” agile. You just did a totally empty version of scrum.

Is there anything left?
Nope. I think that’s pretty much it. Scrum is the new waterfail.