Disqus - Latest Comments for BobWarfield

Re: Labor Shortages

BobWarfield — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 19:10:36 -0000

scottb, you are exactly right.

Unemployment is low, but it is the most distorted and manipulated data you can find. They literally take you off the count if you don't find a job quickly enough.

A better stat is percentage employed. It shows we're nowhere near pre-recession levels yet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

I read everywhere that highly skilled workers like software developers just can't be found. I'm here in Silicon Valley, and it's total BS. First, there's huge age discrimination. People don't want to pay for experience. Second, the market has held down salaries like crazy. Salaries for developers have been almost flat for a long time. Here they are for UX people:

https://www.nngroup.com/art...

Not a fan of radically opening up the visa situation. I know the VC's love it. They're not interested in giving any developers a raise, they just want their dollars to go as far as possible.

Re: Scaling In Lower Cost Locations

BobWarfield — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 19:06:30 -0000

Why on Earth would a SaaS company need 50+ engineers until very late in the private phase?

Some maybe, if they need to integrate to a LOT of platforms. Even then it's iffy.

Back in the Bad Old Days, when we had none of the slick dev tools available today, I took over running research and development for all our products at Borland. These products ranged from software development tools (Delphi, etc.) to Quattro Pro, a spreadsheet, to databases like Paradox and dBase.

When I took over, I was tasked with cutting expenses. I surveyed all the teams sizes, including contractors, vs complexity / size of code. One team stood out: Quattro Pro was getting the job done with about half as many as the rest of the teams. 10 developers wrote its large code base (we had to build all the features Excel had in the day and then some for Windows).

I downsized every team to match Quattro Pro's team size. Despite widespread predictions to the contrary, not a single schedule slipped at all. In fact, I would submit the bigger teams would've missed their targets had they not downsized.

In the end, the limiting factor for developer productivity is still communication and you can't get more than about 10 to communicate effectively. The Mythical Man-Month hasn't really ever changed.

That's why I can't imagine 50 developers being a good idea, especially outsourced and offshored which only makes communication worse.

BTW, many of the principles that made that original Quattro Pro team so successful are the foundations of what we call Agile and Scrum programming today. James Coplien from Bell Labs found we had the highest productivity of any team he had measured using these techniques:

https://www.scrumalliance.o...

BTW, once you realize you can only use 10 people effectively, you work a lot harder to make sure they are the best 10. And you also quickly realize the corollary:

Good software is not that expensive to develop. It just doesn't cost that much to hire so few people. Bad software, OTOH, is extremely expensive when you consider it can sink your boat totally.

Re: Striking The Right Balance

BobWarfield — Sun, 04 Aug 2019 13:37:14 -0000

I will paraphrase the old 3 envelope joke for executives.

A new Board Member asks the Chairman what the role of a Board Member should be. The Chairman hands the Board Member 3 envelopes and tells them, "When you're wondering what to do, open an envelope."

Well, the new guy has no idea what to do at his first Board Meeting so opens his first envelope. It says simply, "Be an effective sounding board for the CEO, tell him what you think, then get out of his way and let him make the decision."

Sounded good and that's what our man did. And all was well until the company hit a rough patch. That Board Meeting was quite agitated, and wondering what to do, he opened the 2nd envelope.

It said, "Stand by the CEO in times of trouble. Support him and help him to succeed without undermining him or playing the politics that always erupt when there's trouble."

So he did. And the company got through the rough patch. In fact, it made it through several. But after a few years, things got really really bad. Despite all the good sounding board work and support for the CEO, they just weren't able to turn things around. The company was in dire straights.

Reluctantly, the Board Member opened his last envelope. It said simply, "Hire a new CEO."

Those are the choices folks. Anything else is meddling. Anything else will undermine an effective CEO or at the very least waste a bunch of his time and attention which would be better focused managing his Company and not his Board.

If you feel any desire whatsoever to micromanage the CEO, you have put the wrong CEO in place and your own judgement is as much in question as the CEO's. Think you know it all? VC Board Member?

How much real operating experience do you have? "Oh but I've got years on Boards of successful (and not so successful) companies."

Great. So you spent 2 hours a month hearing the carefully tailored story the CEO and his Team prepared for you. That's nice. You're gaining 24 hours of experience a year. At that rate, you will have 1 year of real experience in about 20 years. And never mind how much the world will have changed in the course of your 20 years.

Stick to your 3 envelopes.

Next!

Re: Growing a Site from 0 to 10k Visitors in a Month: Noah Kagan Edition

BobWarfield — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 11:01:23 -0000

I have to say, I was disappointed to try to visit SleepSumo.com and found the domain was for sale. I guess it's barely plausible that monetizing it by selling the domain was the goal, but it certainly suggests the traffic was nowhere near permanent. Not even close.

You can see in the Google Analytics report that it falls all the way back to pre-giveaway levels very fast when the giveaway ended. I was trying to access the business so I could get some idea of what today's traffic is when I discovered it had shut down.

Re: Facebook Marketers are Already Fumbling News Feed Change

BobWarfield — Wed, 24 Jan 2018 11:50:21 -0000

Actually I do translate it to Facebook, and I do have something to worry about. Because FB's algorithms are so weak, they're just going to paint all businesses with a broad "no reach for you" soup nazi brush.

Re: Facebook Marketers are Already Fumbling News Feed Change

BobWarfield — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 09:55:52 -0000

And like it or not, you can't educate enough customers to play some game like this.

As I said in my comment above, this is all about greed and FB's lousy algorithms. Not fixing spam.

Re: Facebook Marketers are Already Fumbling News Feed Change

BobWarfield — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 09:54:09 -0000

Do marketers publish spammy stuff to newsfeeds that offers little or no value? Of course!

Do ALL marketers do it all the time? Nope.

This is not about spammy content or stupid marketers. This is about Facebook not having adequate algorithms that can tell the difference. And yes, it is totally about Facebook constantly turning up the "Give us more money" volume knob.

Google manages to sift through the spammy content way better and that's how you know this is much more Facebook's fault than the Marketers. I get plenty of crap I could live without from friends on my FB feed, and this change will not help that in any way. It may make it worse.

If there was any sign at all in any traffic statistics for FB that their users were unhappy, I might give them the benefit of a doubt. But all the statistics suggest FB is a happy, healthy, smug, and very controlling monopoly that's extorting everything they can get and still wanting more.

The drop in reach on the platform has been breathtaking. There's no way to argue this all about FB doing some kind of community service to help its users avoid spam.

Until FB actually gets a clue about how to build decent algorithms, why invest in them? Until FB figures out how to value their paying customers and not just extort them, they're putting their business at risk.

There's easier ways to make a buck, by far. I can't see putting my business at risk by investing much in FB. I get over 5 million visits a year to my solopreneur site because I write high quality content and don't spam.

Do I have any confidence at all FB will reward that?

Nope.

Re: 7 Blog Posts That Every Startup Team Should Read Right Now

BobWarfield — Sun, 29 Oct 2017 12:46:00 -0000

Alex, some great stuff here. My #1 thing is reverse engineering how the leaders do it, and Sumo's breakdown of Shopify is spectacular in that respect. Thanks!

Re: Veeva: The Biggest Vertical SaaS Success Story of All Time (Video + Transcript)

BobWarfield — Wed, 30 Aug 2017 15:23:15 -0000

Love the idea of vertical saas. Analyzed the players of the day years ago and discovered they spent a lot less on marketing to grow ARR largely because the verticals were underserved. Wound up starting my own vertical SaaS company.

Veevo has a great story, but biggest all time vertical SaaS success story? I don't know about that one. Blackboard was a much earlier pioneer and is huge. I haven't looked into the category lately but i remember multiple public vertical SaaS companies back when I did my original research on the metrics.

Re: I hate MVPs. So do your customers. Make it SLC instead.

BobWarfield — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 15:17:35 -0000

Finally, someone calls out the Emperor for having no clothes.

The MVP fan boys are always going to claim the "V" covers any sins or omissions, but it really doesn't.

Let's talk about another Emperor's wardrobe while we're at it. VC's want to reduce risk as much as possible for themselves regardless of what that means in terms of increasing risk for entrepreneurs or their customers.

I've worked with them through 6 different startups and that's a black and white fact, not an opinion.

Michael Porter defines 3 successful strategies:

- Build the Best
- Sell the Cheapest
- Serve a niche that #1 and #2 aren't adequately serving

There's no, "build the minimum viable product" competitive strategy there, but you can certainly see how those 3 benefit the customer which is more than I can say for MVP.

Make your customers happy by delivering something they want badly and can't get anywhere else. That's all any entrepreneur should be worried about.

Re: Hacks to Make Your Work Day Go Faster

BobWarfield — Wed, 09 Aug 2017 13:09:36 -0000

Here's a weird one to get you through your day:

Instead of listening to music or podcasts, listen to white noise generated by the free noisli app (https://www.noisli.com/).

I like their wind channel. It puts you in a blissful state where you can really concentrate and the time just flies by so quickly. Plus, you're much more productive on your tasks.

I have no relationship or interest with noisli, I just discovered it and adopted it as one of the many productivity hacks I give in my free 5 lesson online productivity training:

http://tinyurl.com/worksmar...

Re: Announcing Saved Responses

BobWarfield — Wed, 05 Jul 2017 19:12:25 -0000

Love this idea, but trying to think how to make it super convenient to integrate with Gmail. Sure would be awesome if I could simply forward a gmail message to an inbox, perhaps with a particular subject, and an ActiveCampaign automation would sort out what to do by sending a saved response based on the subject and personalized too!

Re: 50 Reasons Why Some Businesses Fail While Others Succeed

BobWarfield — Tue, 23 May 2017 16:58:24 -0000

George, sure, would love to do an interview! You can track me down any time on my entrepreneurship blog, BobWarfield.com.

Re: 50 Reasons Why Some Businesses Fail While Others Succeed

BobWarfield — Mon, 22 May 2017 15:58:39 -0000

Great article!

But, I think it is important to differentiate different kinds of businesses, especially venture capital startups versus plain old small businesses. The failure rate for VC startups is much higher than for other small businesses.

Surprisingly, this is by design!

I don't mean that the VC's want you to fail at all, they don't. But what they want even less is for their VC fund to fail. In order for a large VC fund to succeed, they need to make sure they get a couple of GIANT successes. These are billion dollar companies they call "Unicorns".

A small success just isn't helpful. I've done 7 VC Startups now--I founded 3 and participated in 3 others. My success ratio is actually very decent. 2 of the 3 companies I founded were successful and 1 of the 4 others IPO'd. That's much higher than the VC success ratio.

It may surprise you to learn that the VC's would consider all 3 successes to be failures--even the IPO! None of them produced billion dollar results for them even though they all produced 7- to 8-figure results for me. On the very biggest deal, the VC's initially told us to walk away from a $10 million dollar payday after just 10 months of work because it didn't make them enough money.

My conclusion after working that world for years is that if you want to succeed, and you don't need to be a billionaire to call it success, avoid VC's. Start your own business.

Re: 7 Types of Lead Magnets to Grow Your Email List Like Wildfire

BobWarfield — Mon, 22 May 2017 15:27:46 -0000

I've tried most of these, and they all work well. It helps to change them up every now and again to keep things fresh. Probably my biggest conversion rates have come from personalizing the lead magnet. My web site is very large (4.5 million visits a year), and I have 5 distinct customer personas I serve. I try to come up with a lead magnet that would appeal to each and offer them in areas of the web site where those personas are most commonly seen. Really improved my conversions!

Lately, I invested the time to create a free online training. It's a 5-lesson video course on personal productivity hacks. It even includes free software!

I've been a productivity junky all my life, and even helped invent some great techniques that are famous in certain circles. I put that all together for folks to get for free by joining my email newsletter. Check it out here if you want to see an example of this kind of promotion:

http://bobwarfield.com/work...

I saw your article over on #bloggingboost and was glad I came over to read it!

Re: My April 2017 Monthly Income Report

BobWarfield — Sat, 20 May 2017 13:07:46 -0000

Pat, as you of all people surely know, there are mostly good people out in the online world, along with a few trolls. You definitely did the right thing taking the high road.

I would like to point out a third thing that potentially comes from a course beyond the convenience and accountability. Let's call it the "authority" of the course.

Yes, you can find out most things in a course for free if you search long enough. But in searching, you can also find out a whole lot of other things. Often they will be contradictory. At the very least, a comprehensive research of any deep course-worthy topic will yield much more than anyone can possibly take action on. There are so many ways to do any given thing.

This is where the authority comes in. A course puts you on a path that clarifies a subset of things from the giant universe of all things related that work together well. At least that's what the best courses do.

So, instead of wading through 579 different factors that affect SEO, you may discover the 9 factors that Brian Dean or some other recommend you worry about as the most important.

Here's another aspect of authority and it is closely related to your notion of accountability. The course has a name associated with it, and that name is both a proxy for the value of the course and a beacon for accountability. If I found a course that looked identical to yours but that came from a no-name source, which course am I more likely to buy? Yours, of course. You are a recognized authority versus the no-name.

One of the great things about the digital marketing world is this authority and accountability is much more transparent than people think. There are some very simple metrics that are available to anyone who wants to look them up that will tell you immediately who you are dealing with when it comes to digital marketing. I follow these metrics religiously when evaluating advice and it's helped me grow my solopreneur business from 0 to 4.5 million visitors a year.

People kept asking me how I was doing it, so I finally did this blog post that explains how I separate the real experts from the posers so I know who I should be learning from:

http://bobwarfield.com/desp...

Re: Research shows we may be at the end of the startup era

BobWarfield — Sat, 29 Apr 2017 16:27:26 -0000

There are a lot of factors at work here, some good for small business, some bad.

It's never been easier for a small business to reach a huge market than it is today. I've built my Solopreneur business to 4.5 million visitors a year all by myself. 20 years ago, that would've been impossible. Even 15 and it probably would have been difficult. I did most of that growth working part-time without quitting my Day Job until I was ready.

OTOH, before my latest venture, I was involved with 7 VC startups. A number of them were quite successful and resulted in nice exits. Today, they would all be judged failures by the current VC mindset that it's "Unicorn or Bust." Two of them were public companies, but they would still be failures in the eyes of the VC's. Personally, I think the VC's have made startups way too risky for individuals and I wouldn't do a VC startup again. I've written about the odds here: https://smoothspan.wordpres...

I think that middle ground--bigger than a bootstrapped "lifestyle" business and smaller than a Unicorn has been gutted by a series of things. Sarbox and other regulations radically raised the bar for going public, snatching that source of capital out of reach. The recent spate of huge bubbles inflating and then bursting in 2001 and then 2008 has also been tough on small businesses.

Lastly, the whole offshoring/outsourcing trend coupled with excessive costs levied on small business and the disruption of firms like Amazon on bricks and mortar has really hurt mom and pop small businesses. The younger generations have lost faith in the American Ideal that hard work will be rewarded.

These things are all fixable, but we have let an awful lot of them pile onto our Startup and Small Business Economy and it has taken a toll. In retrospect, we've made America's Golden Goose (Entrepreneurship) pretty sickly.

Re: Content marketing success and the crappy quality myth

BobWarfield — Thu, 06 Apr 2017 12:17:50 -0000

I have to say, I'm not finding the case studies and data to be compelling. They're based almost entirely on social traffic, not SEO traffic. The problem is we all know Facebook and others are reducing your ability to get reach in order to force you to buy their ads. Personally, I think that data is tainted.

There are great existence proofs that you can still start a significant business that's relatively young and grow it quite rapidly via content marketing.

I'm a solopreneur who has a software company. I get 4.5 million unique visitors a year to my site. It was built entirely with content marketing written by me, and I had to find time to build the software, and take care of all my customer's needs while doing it. It has decent, but not incredible page rank, and I don't have time to invest in a lot of link building or outreach. It was all a function of the content being worth reading and linking to.

Social Traffic? Yeah, I have some, but it's tiny compared to the search, referral, and direct/email (i.e. loyal visitors who come back for every story). I don't have that much time to fool with it.

What'd I do right to get there? I have a system (doesn't everyone?). Since I'm an engineer, it's very analytical and process oriented. But, it works to ensure I produce good enough content in the right areas to bring the traffic. It's been scalable (30-40% growth a year since I can remember), practical, and straightforward to implement.

It's help me beat a lot of companies with big VC dollars, a high visibility TV show, and a fair few marketing experts with my traffic.

I don't see that glut of super high quality content that's created a roadblock. But, I will tell you this--I read a LOT of marketers like yourself. The world of marketing to marketers (like your friend writing SEO articles) is just different than a lot of the rest of the world. Things that work in that world don't work nearly so well elsewhere, and things you're bored with still carry a lot of juice in the real world.

Maybe there is a content glut when it comes to marketing content and most especially SEO. Certainly I feel like I read less and less new and earthshaking under the sun there. But for the vast majority of spaces, content marketing is a wide open and very green running field.

Re: Money

BobWarfield — Tue, 14 Mar 2017 15:32:46 -0000

Maxim, it's quite the opposite, and provably so.

First, you can't raise real VC unless you are a bootstrapper for the most part. The days of raising several million dollars on an idea, a slideshow, and a team are long gone, though I did it in my own career several times. They first wanted you to not raise until you'd bootstrapped a product. Then you had to have a handful of positive reference customers. Now you need a fair bit of momentum on top of that.

Second, you don't have to make millions in net profit every year to do extremely well as a bootstrapper. But those that do, are far more numerous than Venture startups. They just fly well below the radar until they get really big. There are not just a few of them, there are many, but you've never heard of them. In fact, the vast majority of successful online businesses didn't get venture capital, they bootstrapped.

Jason Lemkin has written about some of the most successful bootstrappers. Companies like Mailchimp, Atlassian, and yes, Basecamp. But there are many more well below the size that you'd even notice. I own one (CNCCookbook.com), and I employ a gaggle of services to make it go that are from companies like SumoMe. Yes, the Founder was involved with VC earlier in his career, but not now. Maybe he knows something? That's just one example, but there are many more.

The economics of VC for non-Founder individuals are particularly bad:

https://smoothspan.wordpres...

But even for Founders, the risk is less of getting to life-changing FU money via bootstrapping. Not only that, but it doesn't even take that much longer. Jason Lemkin estimates that doing it with VC gets you there 4 years sooner than bootstrapping. And the Basecamp guys are right when they talk about how many excellent companies the VC's have crashed trying to turn them into Unicorns instead of merely excellent very profitable small businesses.

SmugMug is another favorite example of a bootstrapped business that's been wildly successful without VC. They quit talking about their revenues a while back, but their growth curve was breathtaking. Who would've thought given how many VC-backed free photo sharing services there were back in the day?

BTW, Basecamp didn't take Bezos' money because they needed the capital. They took it because they wanted him as an advisor. Who can blame them?

Re: Money

BobWarfield — Sat, 11 Mar 2017 17:20:20 -0000

If you're an entrepreneur doing it for money, bootstrap. The odds are much better than for a VC startup, and you can make darned near as much except in the most extreme Unicorn cases.

Re: The American Formula

BobWarfield — Sun, 26 Feb 2017 14:01:58 -0000

What a great sounding quote, and so much the better that it was made by Warren Buffer. But that doesn't make it right.

America's economic dynamism was created by only 1 thing: a Middle Class that was empowered to make themselves successful, that did steadily better over time, and that were the majority of the population. It's the same story as the Renaissance, when the merchant class arose and brought light to the Dark Ages.

That's the core, and anything else that isn't actively making that happen is just noise. That Middle Class has not been empowered and has not done steadily better for a long time. Moreover, it is actively shrinking as a percentage of the population.

We have a party that takes from them for the 1% and another that takes from them for the poor--it's no accident the Middle Class largely pays for Obamacare and many other things.

Now we're bitterly unhappy because after so many years, the Middle Class is tired of being abused and had the temerity to vote for Trump. He is unlikely to help them much, but then neither were any of the others.

Be as unhappy as you like. Bemoan this President constantly (I know I will). But until we restore the dynamism to the Middle Class, things will get a lot worse before they get better.

That's the missing piece that isn't talked about nearly enough.

Re: Too Many Startups Like Playing Startup

BobWarfield — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 11:19:43 -0000

Phew! I was terrified I might just be playing at a startup. Fortunately, none of the 7 apply. But I will remain vigilant!

Re: Is software a great industry to job hop?

BobWarfield — Sat, 09 Jul 2016 12:51:21 -0000

Jason, you're right about the absolute amount IF YOU SUCCEED. But you haven't considered the probability of success. Having multiple jobs is the only way an individual can get a portfolio effect like what VC's take for granted.

Let's do a simple Monte Carlo simulation. Here are the assumptions:

- You can either stay in 1 job for 8 years (about what it takes to go from 0 to liquidity in round numbers) or you can take 4 jobs and stay 2 years each.

- Your chance of picking a winner is 1/8. 1 in 8 deals wins. That's actually pretty good odds for VC's, perhaps an individual can do better, but perhaps not.

- If the 1 job guy gets a win, he gets 100%. If the 4 job guy gets a win, he gets 30%.

Now we do 5000 iterations of that in an Excel spreadsheet for a Monte Carlo simulation. Here are the results:

- The 1 job guy only has a 14% chance of getting his 100% of shares to return. I wonder how many would sign up for a startup if they soberly concluded those were the odds?

- The 4 job guy has a 42% chance of getting his 30% of shares in the money.

Whoa!

Way better odds for the portfolio effect. So now the decision is a utility curve issue. Say we're talking $10 million. Do you want a 14% chance at $10 million or a 42% chance at $3.3 million?

How lucky do you feel?

Here's a fuller analysis on my blog: https://smoothspan.wordpres...

Re: The “Losing Jobs To China” Discussion

BobWarfield — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 14:20:45 -0000

There is so much BS and so many Myths around Manufacturing Jobs in this country, it's ridiculous. Yes, we screwed up manufacturing. No, all the manufacturing jobs are not going away (not even close) because of robots despite what Fred or Andrew McAfee might think. For the most part, the situation we're in with these jobs was entirely manipulated, entirely reversible, and it is very much in our best interests to do so.

http://blog.cnccookbook.com...

Re: US Congress To Examine 3D Printing Advances

BobWarfield — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 12:59:58 -0000

I'm waiting for the hearing where they invite CEO's like Cook from Apple to discuss why they offshored so many of our manufacturing jobs and when they will bring them back.