At my house, I have two little shelves underneath my TV I have filled will all sorts of geek goodies:

• Xbox 360
• Linksys WRT-350N wireless router (flashed with DD-WRT v24)
• Cable modem (for my 16Mb Internet connection)
• D-Link DNS-323 NAS server (1TB, RAID-0)
• Denon AVR-3308ci Receiver
• Mac Mini
• DirecTV Plus HR23 DVR
• Center channel speaker

“Does it all really need to be right there?” my wife asks. “Of course” I reply. You see, they all need to be plugged in together — with wires.

That’s right: wires. I hate wireless stuff. It’s slow, laggy and stops working altogether whenever I decide to make myself a Pop-Tart in the microwave. I’ll deal with the monthly blackout at my house in order to have my devices communicating in a pure unadulterated manner.

I believe I’ve discovered the nirvana of home digital audio management.  Like many, I have a sizable collection of digital music. I want to play those songs through my entertainment center.  Every other solution I’ve tried has failed for the similar reasons: clunky library browsing, poor search capability, terrible displays, and clunky on-the-fly playlist creation.

My home audio solution

The DNS-323 feeds my music to the Mac Mini through a wired gigabit network connection.  Music is played on the Mac Mini using iTunes and the audio signal is sent from the Mac Mini to the Denon receiver through a mini-Toslink to optical adapter.  I usually have the Denon upconvert the 2-channel stereo signal to 5.1-channel surround using Dolby ProLogic II.

And the crown jewel of this setup is… the iPhone.  One of the first apps Apple released for the iPhone was a little gem called “Remote”.  It allows you to control iTunes on a desktop computer from your iPhone, using a native iPod interface.  This setup rocks for a number of reasons:

1. Search and browsing are instantaneous
2. The UI is slick and doesn’t require the TV to be on
3. It operates over Wi-Fi, so you don’t have to point anything at anything (I can change the volume from upstairs)
4. You can create playlists using Genius
5. Multiple iPhones can co-create playlists on the fly with iTunes DJ
6. You can browse your collection any way imaginable.

Until something better comes along, I’ll be sticking with my setup.  And yes, if they made a 30-foot cable that would connect my Mini to my iPhone, I’d use it to avoid the wireless connection.  …OK, maybe not.

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That’s why we hired Mark.

Mark was on the payroll for a couple of years and helped us out tremendously with our marketing efforts.   During his employment with us, we dramatically increased our lead flow and the number of deals we closed.  The thing about Mark was that he didn’t know anything about marketing – he didn’t  really know anything about anything because he wasn’t a real person.

Shortly after Clate Mask joined the company, he came to us a bit puzzled as to exactly who this “Mark” guy was that we were paying $3,000 a month.

So we explained to him:  “Mark” was the persona we had given to marketing.  We knew that marketing was critical to the success of our young business, but like most start-ups, we didn’t have a CLUE how to market ourselves or our product.  So we decided to start by budgeting $3,000 each month to marketing and that we’d figure things out from there.   Our only rule was that we spend all the money.  Kinda like Brewster’s Millions, only with $3,000 instead of $30,000,000…

And we put him on the payroll to make sure that “he” got paid before we did.

Of course, Clate turned that $3,000 budget into a successful pay-per-click campaign and with the help of influential marketing coaches like Reed Hoisington, Dan Kennedy, and Bill Glazer, we were off and running.

What was your first experience marketing like?  Did you have a coach?  Did you just figure it out?  And what have you found that works for you?

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“You will frequently hear the claim that software engineering is facing a quality crisis of some sort. I don’t happen to agree with that claim—the computer software most people use most of the time is of ridiculously high quality compared to everything else in their lives—but that’s beside the point. This claim about the “quality crisis” leads to a lot of proposals and research about making higher quality software. And at this point, the world divides into the geeks and the suits.

The geeks want to solve the problem automatically, using software. They propose things like unit tests, test driven development, automated testing, dynamic logic and other ways to “prove” that a program is bug-free.

The suits aren’t really aware of the problem. They couldn’t care less if the software is buggy, as long as people are buying it.”

This geeks-vs-suits battle is played out in almost every business, big or small. The smaller the business – the more likely the debate turns into a schizophrenic dialog inside one poor guy’s head:

The angel on one shoulder tells him to never sell out – that craftsmanship and quality should never be sacrificed just to make a quick buck. The angel gets up on a soapbox and preaches about the evils of money-grubbing big business – how they don’t care about the customer and how their product sucks because they cut corners to save money, etc, etc.

Then the devil on the other shoulder reminds him that he has a mortgage payment due in two days.

It’s not the gap between “product quality” and “revenue” I want to talk about – I think this debate is actually pretty healthy. There is a gap far more dangerous to a small business: the gap between quality and perfection.

You see, small businesses can rarely afford the luxury of perfectionism – in fact, unchecked perfectionism will usually transform your business from “small” into “small-er” or “out of”. In the early days of Infusion, we had to constantly battle perfectionism. It crept in from all aspects of our business: product development, marketing, sales, accounting. These are a few of my observations:

1. There are three situations where perfectionism hits: when you’re performing your craft (whatever it may be), any time you have to write something, and when you have to make a decision. Case in point: I should have been done writing this an hour ago!
2. Perfectionism working alone = bad = expensive
3. Strict deadlines and accountability combat perfectionism better than anything.
4. It is absolutely critical that you recognize the “good enough” point. Anything beyond “good enough” gets more and more expensive the more time you throw at it.
5. Don’t confuse quality with perfection. There’s a BIG difference. And don’t fight perfectionism so hard you lose quality. That’s an equally devastating mistake

And if all that isn’t enough to get you to shed you perfectionist tendencies, check out a study that showed perfectionists to be more “anxious, neurotic, and exhausted”.

And this post is officially “good enough”.

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Case Study:
In 2005, I wrote an integration piece for SomePlatformProvider.com that would help small teams manage their weekly catered lunches. The first thing I did was research SomePlatformProvider.com’s customer base. What I found was that the average customer size was 50-100 employees. Because I knew I would be selling to SomePlatFormProvider customers, I thought it would be wise to tailor my offering to fit the budget and needs to companies with 50-100 employees. Doing this paid off huge for me! Soon I was the #1 provider of catered lunch tracking and making a ton of money. Everything was great. But then, my sales started dropping off. I did a little research. Most of the new companies that signed on to SomePlatformProvider’s services didn’t do catered lunches, I found!! After more research, I discovered that instead of the average company size being 50-100 employees, it was now 400-800 employees. And what I found out was that companies that big never did catered lunches – They all hired in-house chefs to cook because it was cheaper. It was only the smaller, more entrepreneurial companies that did catered lunches. Slowly my sales dropped off to the point that I had to shut down my business.

I wonder how many people who sell platform bolt-ons have really considered this. What if the target market of the host changes to something that’s not compatible with what I’m selling?

When people talk about “platform”, they usually use the word ecosystem. This is actually a really good word – because the balance is just as delicate as an environmental ecosystem. The smallest change could cause hundreds of businesses to fail!

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- If you want code to be reusable, you have to take the time to plan and code it right.
- Nobody (and especially small businesses) wants to pay you to do that.

My mentor’s argument was that I was rushing the projects and in turn creating dreaded “spaghetti code”.
My argument was that he was taking waaay to long to “do it right” and we were losing money because clients wouldn’t pay for the work.

Under these circumstances, I was the one who found success. It wasn’t because I was the better programmer, though. In fact, he had much more sophistication in his design than I did. But when it came right down to it, I was the one who could deliver a product that worked, was on time, and within budget.

We had a mantra in the early days: Customers want their software good, fast, and cheap. They can pick two of the three, but can’t have all three. And naturally, almost every small business chose fast and cheap.

Now our company is in a much different position. We have a product and our customers don’t dictate HOW we develop. We get to do that now. And preparing for the long haul, we are definitely bringing the “good” back. Now we just have to decide if we want fast or cheap to go along with our “good”.

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