New Year’s resolutions are pretty hokey and for me they’ve rarely result in any real change, the thing though that makes change is a collection of habits.

I figure if I can roll 1 good habit into another, do the habit every single day and if I keep the good ones then my daily routine will look completely different after not too many months.

Being a bit of a geek, serious about efficiency, and highly paperphobic I figure the best way to track my goals is right here on the blog.

By efficient I mean that if I use my blog to track activity then I get the added benefit of producing some personal content around the site and I also get the added benefit of a blogging habit and what’s more important than a regular content creation habit if you’re doing business online?

Moblr is currently in private BETA. I created Moblr to take aim at the daily deal space. Independent business owners are getting creamed by the daily deal sites. Many of them fail to consider the full ramifications of the deals they’re offering to the public from these sites. The results from a daily deal (Groupon) campaign are often disappointing and more than occasionally disastrous.

The hypothesis for Moblr is this: Daily deal sites like Groupon and Living Social can be horrible for businesses. The ‘value’ these sites bring are almost exclusively the email lists that they’ve built (and some good copywriting) and they only exist because the local proprietors have failed to build their own lists.

Local businesses fail to build their own lists because:

1. The tools available on the market are too much, there are too many features, they’re too confusing for many small business owners who are not technical.
2. It’s one thing to capture customer information online it’s another to capture company information in real life.
3. The busy daily operations of most businesses don’t allow a manager or business owner to sit down and wade through complex marketing campaigns and strategies.

• A school snow day is announced, at 11:00 AM as a pizza shop owner you send a message to your high school list and announce a special ‘snowed in’ pizza deal. Subscribers receive the message via text message or via mobile optimized email. Right target, right time, right offer.
• You have a popular pub that suffers, like most, in the beginning of the week. You build a Monday night football list with in-store marketing during your busy nights. Monday at 4:30PM your customers are looking forward to the end of the day. You offer them a special reason to come in and your Monday night football marketing is a huge hit.

There are endless possibilites. The point is, if you haven’t guessed, to b very specific with your marketing. Sending a ‘snowed in special’ to adults working 9-5 isn’t going to do you any good and worse it’s going to make a lot of people angry when they’re receiving such useless messages, they’ll unsubscribe. The point is to have permission. Permission based marketing opens a whole new realm of marketing possibilites.

Moblr makes permission based marketing dead simple and lets localized business reach customers who want to be reached when they want to be reached.

About Building Moblr

Getting the Moblr BETA out the door quickly, with limited expense but built in such a way that the application could grow through customer discovery were the goals. We achieved these by leveraging some existing assets and not building everything from scratch.

The backend of Moblr, the desktop admin and mobile admin, are both built on ‘off the shelf’ templates.

Responsive Web Design

The front end of Moblr was built by me on a responsive css framework. That means that website recognizes what size browser you’re using and adjusts the view accordingly. Using a responsive web design allowed me to avoid using a subdomain and redirects to show a mobile formatted site. We do still redirect the admin logins to another directory but the front end of the website is fully responsive.

Technologies Used

• LAMP Stack on a Mediatemple DV
• Twilio
• CodeIgniter
• CSSGrid.Net
• WordPress (just for the bog)

Moblr Screen Shots

In 2006 I was in the real estate business and just starting to work with banks selling bank owned real estate or foreclosures as an auctioneer. In 2008 I got the idea to automate a lot of the very tedious research that was required to find the right banks and the right contacts with the right assets to sell.

At first I tested the business concept of selling this data with a  very simple PDF for sale and a single email. I broadcasted an email to a list of people in the business that I was affiliated with professionally and I listed the PDF bank list for sale for almost $200. To my amazement several people bought.

Over the coming months (2009) I developed the idea further and determined that I’d move towards a legitimate software product. The first version was not good… it required a quarterly manual upload of the bank data and had the simplest of Linkedin plugins as a source of contacts. Still, I sold it for $97 per month and I started having sales my first month.

Today BankProspector from distressedpro.com continues to thrive and grow every month. It’s currently in Version 2.1. BankProspector pulls quarterly bank data updates from the federal repository known as the FFIEC every night guaranteeing the freshest bank data available. The application also plugins into 2 powerful contact databases including Jigsaw.com and Linkedin. Members pay monthly or annual subscription rates. The site’s success is built entirely upon organic search and social sharing primarily on Linkedin.

After the most recent rebuild, and adding a money back guarantee, the site became reliably profitable and sustained by an automated sales and follow up process.

Technologies used for this project are:

• LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP) hosted on a Mediatemple DV
• SOAP
• RESTful Apis
• Javascript
• JQuery
• JQueryUI
• DataTables.net
• Highcharts
• HTML
• CSS
• WordPress (front end)
• Genesis Framework
• Amember

Do you really need a technical co-founder?

Lately I’ve been attending more entrepreneurial or startup events in the Boston and Cambridge scene. It’s striking to me how many people are walking around with what they believe to be a good idea and they aren’t acting on it because they want a “technical cofounder”. It seems like it’s a topic that gets an inordinate amount of attention… every time.

I guess I don’t blame people for getting so stuck on it. They’re usually on the ‘business side’ of things and they desperately want to get something going, they think they have a great idea, AND they have no technical skills… and that’s fine. I also hear people say things like “well y-combinator won’t even take you if you’re solo”…. yawwwwnnnn… I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I got rich when I IPO’d and that the way I’m doing it is right, but I’ll tell you this you’re probably not getting into Y-combinator, and SO WHAT. Is that really your goal? Do you want a good story a bunch of VC and no control. What I want to know is –  Why do you want to build your idea, this piece of software (or ‘app’ or ‘site’)? What is the driving force? What is the reason that you feel you need to do this? Is it to ‘get funded’? Is it to IPO? Ugh, then you probably want to stop reading right here.

I built my first software product because I wanted a reliable, recurring income that paid at least my health insurance and ideally my base expenses (mortgage, cars, etc). Not a very sexy goal but it seemed totally attainable to me and I wanted it desperately. I wanted a business that was scalable, that had good margins, little overhead, and that was a product and NOT a service.

In real estate the money can be huge and then… nada. It’s a constant cycle of boom and bust and I was at the front end of a spectacular real estate implosion where no matter how hard I worked or how many deals I put up on the board nothing, nothing, nothing was closing… and I had a 3 month old and a 2 year old and a wife at home. Talk about uncomfortable. We’d have years when I made a lot more than most followed by a year where my gross was as much as I had paid in taxes the year prior. Holy shit that sucks. So I wanted needed a new business model. I landed on software, a subscription web application specifically.

I probably started thinking about what I wanted to offer (and not just that I wanted to make something) shortly before my son was born in the spring of 2009. I had kicked around with some WordPress websites or whatever for a couple of years before that but I wasn’t serious. In July of 2009 I got really really serious. Like do or die serious. I just had some major deal implosion which left me with nothing on the horizon in terms of income (did I mention the baby, the toddler, the wife and the mortgage?). I was on my way to a 3-day conference (not at all tech related) and I had just read the 4 Hour Work Week over vacation (I know it’s kind of cliche I guess but it’s the truth). I decided that I’d load the iPod with business podcasts for the long drive and just let the subconscious run and before I came home I would settle on an idea. That was the end of July 2009. I released my first software product (soft launch) in October of the same year. I made money  starting the first month and every month since. By the way I had almost zero technical skills when I launched and I had no technical cofounder.

I’m not going to tell you the first round was pretty, it was decidedly not pretty, but I still had people signing up at $97 per month and I was getting good feedback (by the way I’ve spent probably a grand total of maybe $500 on advertising in what’s now almost 2 years and income continues to grow).

Since releasing my first ‘alpha version’ (the nicest way I can think to refer to it) I released a rebuilt “Version 2.0″ that is vastly superior to the first . In addition to these I have a new product in a totally unrelated space that I’m releasing very soon.

I’ve had friends ask me over the last year or so about how they’d go about developing their own products and now, as I’m moving around the startup scene, I’m seeing that there’s a real need for some basic info or at least a path. For now on this blog I’m going to focus on laying out everything I’ve learned as I’ve built these products and grown my business and that I’ve learned from the bumps and bruises of ‘solopreneurship’. My plan is to layout a working model of best practices for a non-technical person to get started with producing his or her own software, app, website, or pick-you-nomenclature. I’m going to focus on how to make a real product, not an affiliate website or an eBook or an Adsense site or whatever else, I know little to nothing about those topics except insofar as they relate to promoting a web app. I want to help you with getting your idea out the door and then maybe I’l talk about getting it found. If you want to learn about whether or not you should even pursue your idea, well that’s a whole topic and one that some other people know a whole lot more about than I.

My understanding of what authorship markup is supposed to do today is give you credit for your web content and show your connections your profile photo in their search results next to your content.

If there aren’t already 100 other authorship algorithms at Google around the use of the authorship markup let’s go ahead and bet that there will be. It would seem like an obvious conclusion to say that it will:

• Give focused content from prolific/credible authors more ‘authority‘
• Promote results in search from people you’re connected with
• What else? Tell me in the comments.

If you’re marketing anything at all (aren’t we all to one degree or another? Shouldn’t we be?) you should be producing good original content on the web. If you are producing good quality content it’s a no-brainer that you would do what the Big G tells you to do to get it found, right? So here’s the markup and how to use it. It’s pretty basic.

How to Claim Content Authorship ‘rel=author’ and Google

1. Add the rel=”author” tag to a link that goes to your google profile
2. If you don’t have control over the CMS and rel’s get scrubbed or whatever then you can append ?rel=author
3. If you have a multi-author blog have each author’s bio link to their own google profile page with a rel=’me’
4. Link from your Google Profile page to the site(s) where you publish

If you can automate the process by adding a link from an author bio template do that. If you have a single author site (as I do) you can add your link to the footer or somewhere else that makes sense, maybe put it by your social media icons. I added my rel=’author’ to my Author Box (you can see below). But wordpress scrubs rels in the profile (I found) so I appended the ?re=author to the end of the URL.

My next step is to figure out how to add a rel=author link to my photo. In the theme I’m using presently it’s a bit unwieldy. The idea is that eventually your photo will show up next to your content in the search results and that could mean more click-throughs.

• Came up with a host of different ideas
• Toyed with them for several months, made little pokes at them
• Boiled the ideas I had down to a small handful of ideas
• Started talking to some people, all friends, about the ideas and the reaction was very positive
• Started building an MVP

The Good News

The idea is a good one, it’s timely, I have friendly businesses ready to take the BETA product (MVP) in and start implementing. Also I’m only a couple of weeks away from having a fully functional, albeit minimally functional, product ready. The system is built on a solid CI framework. I built it relatively inexpensively. It’s pretty slick if I do say so myself.

The Bad News

I didn’t follow any particular business methodology to get here. I don’t have throngs of  businesses lined up already waiting for me to sell it to them. I don’t have a big list in this market to sell the product to and I didn’t walk through the product development roadmap that I should have.

The Product Road Map

What I should have done is this:

Running Lean Product Development Road Map

But what I did do is this:

1. Formulated a hypotheses, specifically, that local businesses don’t do proper marketing and certainly don’t maximize technological leverage in their marketing and end up resorting to services like Groupon that are in the end bad for business (google and read some of the horror stories or talk to a couple of recent Grouponers if you beg to differ) and cost them a ton of money. I hypothesize that the average business owner or manager does this for a couple of reasons.
   1. Business owners are BUSY they truly have a hard time carving out part of their day for marketing.
   2. Business owners are too busy running their businesses they don’t have time to learn how to leverage new technologies to handle their marketing they’re making pizzas, or delivering cakes or whatever so DIY is not an option or it is expensive because you need people internally or from the outside.
   3. The only thing Groupon has that you don’t have (you the business owner) is a list, a big local list of customers and the reason you don’t have it is because trying to build a list or train employees to help build your list while you’re in the throes of business is muy muy difficult.
   4. If I gave you (the business owner) a system that automatically built your list without you having to do anything at all really (except be smart) and then I gave you the power to communicate with that list wherever they are from wherever you are and I made it so dead simple your grandma could use it you’d never need to give up 75% of your revenue to an aggregator again and your business would boom.
2. Chatted about this hypotheses with people I know.
3. Mocked up a solution.
4. Hired a developer and bought some other resources started developing
5. Talked to some more people, still friends
6. Made a little early pivot
7. Have a BETA product about ready

So what are the steps I missed? Mainly the customer interviews, hopefully this isn’t bad news but right now it’s time to correct course. So this is my short term goal (5-7 days) is to figure out what my customer interviews should look like at this point. I know who I should be talking to now it’s a matter of formulating the questions, reaching out and asking those questions, then compiling the answers.

I’ve been thinking about why this hasn’t already happened, why I didn’t do this already. I think that is another post.

Today I own one moderately successful online web app. I’m not a developer per se though, no actually not a developer at all. I’ve learned a little.

I’m not a writer exactly though I produce a lot of content, and I’m not a designer but I did design the aforementioned moderately successful web app and a number of other sites.

Today this post is a tree falling in the forest with absolutely nobody around to hear it, and that is just fine. Today I’m saying fuckit. I’m not optimizing for keyword density and I couldn’t give a shit about title tags, META descriptions, or backlinks. Today I begin actively, systematically moving towards a goal via a real plan and for reasons other than just fucking cash and my goal here is to get some of this out in black and white to make it real where I can see it.

I cannot remember a decision I’ve made professionally that wasn’t designed to put more money in my pocket, exclusively, that is to say without too much regard for anything else, sure lifestyle I suppose, control over my time, but in terms of enjoying what I do, I think I can honestly say that it never really came up in the equation. Today I am seriously fucking done with that approach.

When all the things you’re doing you do for money you’re fake. You have to say a lot of things that have nothing to do with who you are, or maybe that’s just being a grown up but I don’t think so, it feels fake and reserved and disingenuous and after a while you (I) gotta wonder WTF am I doing? More importably why?

So yeah, I have this web app. It’s pretty cool, I provide tons of data to a crowd that desperately needs it, the problem is I don’t like the crowd, it’s probably more technical than most of them are equipped to handle and it’s in a really really spammy, get-rich-quick type of space unfortunately so rising above that noise with a legit product is tough, and that’s what I offer, a legit product. The other problem is my crowd is a naaaaarow. OK that’s fine it’s profitable, but I hate writing content for it and the material is too technical to outsource to just anyone, so there you are.

I have a day job, of sorts. Ok it’s not a job it’s more like a gig. This gig I also got into, I think, strictly for the money and god I am bored with it. It is a distraction… but from what? There’s the rub. It’s a distraction I suppose from what I should be doing …. which is… something I like? – right? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do as humans is pursue a thing we like, that we’re passionate about?

So what am I passionate about? Well, I get a major woody for technology. I mean I love tinkering with code and I have since I was 11 and had my first Commodore 128 and an IBM PC Jr., writing idiotic programs in Basic that would whistle and turn the screen colors or a choose your own adventure that lasted all of 8 minutes, but as I mentioned I am not a programmer, no, and nor do I want to be at this point at least not in any sort of a full time capacity, in fact I’ve been in sales in one way or another for the last 14 years and I don’t know if there’s anything more opposite from straight coding than sales.

Which has me thinking… is tinkering with code just my escape from sales? Drop the smile and the hand shakes, stop answering questions with questions and uncovering objections and hide out behind a computer screen for a little while? I don’t know. Doesn’t matter… I don’t think. But back to passion.

So I love all kinds of technology, think it’s super cool, I’m not a code genius and probably won’t be but man oh man do I have ideas. I have an idea a minute and an awful lot of them have to do with services I can provide, mostly in the form of a web app or mobile app or some other technology that would be so dead simple and that would make you so efficient at what you do that is such a  no-brainer that you’ll be begging me to let you pay $97 a month for it, at least. Yes it’s true I have no idea what you do but trust me I have an idea for your business and you are going to love it. It will change your world.

I didn’t say, by the way, that I don’t like need or want money or more appropriately the things that money will do for you but I’ll be damned if I’m going to make my life decisions exclusively with the money in mind.

So I guess that’s what I’m really passionate about is big ideas that make a serious difference in a persons business or work life. Or little ideas that can bring efficiencies to the parts of your business that you don’t love or that are tedious or repetitive or that you’d just rather streamline… or eliminate.

I hate waste, inefficiency, bureaucracy, and any system that favors seniority over merit.

So. There it is. I kinda started before but I’m seriously starting right now. I’m reading and implementing Running Lean right now to rapidly shake out the myriad of ideas that are bouncing around in my head (and in my files). I’ll blog here about my experience as I go through it… periodically I suppose.

I do have one confession to make, I’ve read a bunch of books and then completely ignored everything they had to say and just did what I wanted. RIght now I am stopping this practice.

As I type this I have a BETA version of a mobile marketing product that I’m about to roll out on a limited basis. But it appears that what I really need to do now is back up and implement some of what I’ve read and that means customer interviews as far as I can tell.

I’d apologize for the rambling if I thought you were reading but I know you’re not and besides I’m not writing this for you I’m writing this for me. But then again… if you are reading this God blessed you with patience or a strange sense of humor. Until next time.

Do you want me to lie to you and make you feel good about the value of the property you’re calling me about or do you want to get it sold? I haven’t been asking this question at the beginning of my conversations with potential sellers, but I think I should start. If I did I could probably have significantly easier (or shorter) conversations.

If you’re calling me today to have a real estate auction I am probably not going to tell you anything you want to hear about the value of your property. Values have not recovered and we are not yet headed in the right direction in any kind of meaningful way (yes I know some states have seen some forward movement in residential property over the last few months).

Today I got a call from a broker representing a seller of a commercial property that is listed right now for $1.2MM. The seller wanted to know if his property was right for an auction and what did I think it would bring at auction. The fact is we’re going to get pretty close to market price at our sales (IMO), but then what the hell is market price anyway? Well these are the questions I ask to get down to it (yes in this order).

ME. What is it?
Broker. A mixed office and retail property.
ME. How big?
Broker. About 10,000 square feet
ME. What is the debt on it?
Broker. Nothing it’s free and clear.
ME. Hhhmmm (I like that) What’s the income?
Broker. About $1500 a month.
ME. Huh?!
Broker. Oh it’s mostly vacant, the market is real tough, there’s negative absorption in office and retail, yadda yadda yadda
ME. Ok so you’re 80% vacant.
Broker. Well yeah he’d probably keep it if he could fill it.
ME. What was your last asking price?
Broker. It’s on the market at $1.2MM, we have an appraisal at $2MM.
ME. Wait, what? So how’s that work out per foot on the rents what are you getting?
Broker. $11 per foot.
ME. Gross?
Broker. Yeah.
ME. So $8.
Broker. Yeah.
ME. Ok what are you figuring for a Cap Rate? What’s the math on this?
Broker. What’s a cap rate?
ME. Mmmm well, let’s do some math….

Sometime later I’ve explained the income approach to valuing this property.

ME. It’s worth $480,000 max on the best day, with tenants.
Broker. Well the guy says he’s not going to take something as low as like $600k.
ME. Yeah, I would take this with a reserve of maybe a couple hundred thousand. That’s all there is.
Broker. Ok, thanks, bye.

So here’s the problem. Now this broker, a nice guy, a good kid, has to go back to his seller and decide what to say. Or otherwise I guess he can take down his signs not answer his phone for a while and try to digest the fact that he just wasted a whole bunch of time and money marketing a property at roughly 3X it’s value.

It really doesn’t matter what you want a property to be worth today. We’re back to fundamentals. Where’s the money? Show me how this makes sense? What would you pay for this property? These are the conversations we need to be having with sellers today. There’s too much at stake for the seller and the investment in time and marketing is too great to be spent chasing unicorns. Let’s all agree to just be honest with one another and with ourselves about where we’re at and what we have before that slips away too.

Or I could just lie to you.

We’re using our in-house online bidding system. You can also download a property information package.

For the cost I agree it’s a good method for creating a website -
I think because of what I’m selling it doesn’t work though. They
all have a blog look to them. I’d shell out some money for a
custom website if I had to. I’ll send you some links for what
I’m talking about…

So I wrote that then went looking, and it seems most people
doing video work at my level are using wordpress. Hmmm.

I’d assign the money for a site like this one: { obscured}
This happens to be a guy in RI who does voice
over work, I know he paid something like $500-$1,000 for this site. I think if your in the business of presentation, like video work, your site should pop out. WordPress looks professional, but doesn’t seem to have stand out from the crowd capabilities.

My response:

That site is lame. The only way that it is getting any traffic at all is through traditional advertising or PPC. There is absolutely zero searchability, seriously it has NO search value. There is no text, no regular updates. His is a pretty billboard in the Appalachians it is practically worthless. Take his site to alexa.com or compete.com, he doesn’t even exist.

Just in case you don’t believe me or beg to differ I took it to the street. I’m a huge fan (though not presently a user) of Hubspot, their philosophy and technology. Their Website Grader is very cool. It analyzes sites for web marketing effectiveness, grades go from 0-100. Here’s what WebsiteGrader had to say about the site:

A website grade of 4/100 for [obscured].com means that means that of the millions of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 4% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data , website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.

So what about a WordPress site used as a CMS? The frontend of distressedpro.com runs on wordpress (BankProspector does not) and with ZERO advertising, using exclusively content marketing and social media we’ve grown to over 100 members since December 20th, 2009 (that’s a month and a half). The site has only been live since late September. I think the number of users (and the caliber, though I’m not going to get into that right now) speaks for itself but what does WebsiteGrader have to say about my WordPress presentation?

The website www.distressedpro.com ranks 283,052 of the 2,050,623 websites that have been ranked so far.

A website grade of 86/100 for www.distressedpro.com means that means that of the millions of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 86% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data , website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.

A. Traffic Rank : Top 3.438 %

Alexa is an online service that measures traffic for millions of sites on the Internet in a similar way to Nielsen television show ratings.
Your website has an Alexa rank of 1,069,222 which is in the top 3.438 % of all websites.

Can you make WordPress look professional? I don’t know it but its good enough for The NY Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox, Yahoo, Harvard, CNET, and the list just goes on.

There are a number of Content Management Systems that you could use. But you need to be able to regularly update your site with posts. The only way that guy is getting any traffic is by traditional advertising or PPC. If you build custom you will be rebuilding every 24 months. WP can look like almost anything you want. Other CMS’s that you can checkout that I can help you with (this is an open letter to my friend remember) are Expression Engine, Joomla, Drupal, and Squarespace.

If you are thinking about your website as a placard you are thinking about it incorrectly. You need to think about it as your broadcast station from which you disseminate information. Information through which potential customers find you, visit your site and engage. A CMS will help you to do that and you’d be hard pressed to find one that is as flexible and affordable as WordPress.