Specificity

Wow! Two posts in one day.

I had an acting teacher in college who used to tell me that my problem was “specificity” – In acting I understood that I had a hard time nailing anything down – “Here take this thing”

I now think that in the business world the same problem exists -

• I’m going to market to businesses and to consumers (both of which are fuzzy terms by the way)
• My business develops software… (for who?)

So it sort-of ties into what Carmack said – focus is about deciding what NOT to include in your grand plan.

John Carmack

Had 2 neat quotes:

“Focus is a matter of deciding what things you’re not going to do.” – John Carmack

“Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren’t sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.” – John Carmack

Maybe he has EXTREME FOCUS?

Contracting Shop to Product Shop

I’ve been pondering why contracting shops have such a hard time making the transition from service business to product business (and of course we all want to be in the product business because that’s scalable… er most of the time).

I don’t actually have hard numbers on this. I’ve seen several service companies which I think will never make the transition and several which have shut their doors before they made the transition so I think it’s true.

Having been involved in a product company, I understand that the thought processes and mind-set that are needed to be successful at building products is very different than the thought process and mind set involved in doing one-off projects. So I can see how that transition could be difficult.

I’ve seen successful transitions though and pretty spectacular transitions – usually companies which succeed at this become “real” – that is, they become “profitable”; something which is surprisingly rare here in the Silicon Valley.

Thinking back, I couldn’t really transition when I was contracting 3 years ago. I think this is because I was more or less randomly taking work from lots of different industries (horizontally focused) – since I never developed an industry specific sales channel, I couldn’t settle on a specific idea to implement and more importantly I had no idea how I’d get a new product I would develop into a specific group of customers hands.

I think that most companies which are horizontally focused will not be able to transition. These are the ad agencies, creative houses and dev shops of my industry and they are very good at landing big bids and building artistic, beautiful, somewhat technically complex sites, but they rarely launch products because they are not in a position to be working with problems common to a well defined set of customers.

It’s interesting how different types of businesses work – when contracting (at least the ways I started contracting) involved honing in on a piece of work I thought I could do and landing that work.

I guess product companies have to do things differently. They’ve already done the work so first off, they’d better be darned well sure that they understand why they built their product and who they built it for. After that, it’s less about finding work than it is about finding certain types of people.

So I think that a contracting shop can improve their odds if they think like a product shop – serve a vertical. Only take work related to a specific vertical your company has decided it’s going to serve. The beauty of this approach is that the contracting shop gets to make money while they’re discovering the sales channels they’ll use when they later roll out their product.

Will this work? I don’t know yet. I’m going to explore these ideas and see if they work.

Industry Search

These are the industries I think are most interesting at the moment.

Agriculture/Grocery

Marketing

PR

Advertising

GreenTechnology

Alternative Energy

Efficiency Analysis

CleanEnergy/Efficiency

Travel/Hospitality

NanoTech – I read the Diamond age and a couple of other books – so I’m really fascinated by this

Robotics – What can I say – incidentally, if any of you ever want to go to http://dorkbot.org/dorkbotsf/ Let me know.

MedicalTechnology

Biofeedback – Measure everything I always say

CommunicationsTechnology

Entertainment

Nightlife

Live Theater (comedy/improv)

Speaking

Events/Event Planning

Transportation

Space

Business Marketing 101

Most of the people who I work with on a regular basis get work from job boards and networking. The conversations we usually go something like this:

Job provider: “We’re looking for a INSERT LANGUAGE HERE developer to work with us on a revolutionary new product.”

Job seeker: “I/We are skilled in INSERT LANGUAGE HERE how much time are you in need of?”

… and so forth and so on.

I think that there are some problems with this approach to job hunting. First, it doesn’t really provide the job hunter with what they REALLY want. Second, it doesn’t allow the developer to support a specific group of customers – this means that the developer can never really graduate from developer to business person. Last, it requires a very sophisticated empolyeer.

So what do I mean?

As far as what an employeer REALLY really wants, 90% of the time it’s the same thing (especially in the web world). That is – more sales, users, awareness, eyeballs and occasionally customer satisfaction. Most web work I do is supposed to generate this. But when an employeer hires on language skills, they’re sending the wrong message to the developer – don’t think, I’ll do that – what matters is that a project get done, not that an EFFECTIVE project get done.

It’s bad for the developer because the developer is constantly jumping from industry to industry. A developers’ passions usually center around a narrow set of problems + they love languages, so why don’t developers search for work solving the problems they truly care about? I think it’s because developers usually hunt for jobs off of job boards and that means they more or less take whatever comes along.

Pitching as a developer with a specific skill set requires a sophisticated employer. This is why, in most cases employers hire based on past clients and references – because they can’t tell if you’re going to be able to solve their problem based on the claims you put forward. Charging for value delivered is obviously a stronger way to market oneself since in the end employers are trying to get their problems solved and you’re positioning in relation to the employers problems. If a developer picks a specific specialty (say web marketing) and then records successes – like the traffic drawn through a web marketing campaign, then it seems to me that the developer sets himself up to be able to talk to employers with less sophistication and solve their problems better than a developer who sells on a specific technology.

So I say all this… and I pitch myself as a Flash/Flex/AIR developer. But I think there is a better way.