Ade in Business

I’m happy to say that we’ve added a new member to the Recursive Function team. Chris Lucas started last Monday, and his primary focus will be planning and executing marketing initiatives tied to FormSpring. This will encompass things like handling PR, managing AdWords campaigns, writing website copy, blogging, and putting together training material. He’ll wear a lot of hats, but definitely has the chops to wear them well.

Before joining Recursive Function, Chris was a Media Relations Specialist at BLASTmedia, a local media relations firm that focuses on serving technology companies. There he spent his time generating national media coverage for a variety of companies, and assisting clients at industry trade shows. He’s also worked as an Account Executive at a marketing and design agency specializing in consulting for pharmacy and life sciences companies, and as the Marketing Communications Manager at a sporting goods manufacturer.

I didn’t blog about my plans to hire another person well in advance like I did the last time, because the process has moved pretty quickly and I haven’t had a lot of time to spend writing. In short, hiring Chris is part of a strategy to be proactive in growing the product side of the business. We’ll definitely still spend a lot of our time and energy doing consulting work as we’ve always done, but up until recently that focus has largely been at the expense of building and growing our products. FormSpring is a great product and has a good base of happy users (with new ones joining every day), but it’s been clear to me for a while that the gap between it’s current position and it’s potential is huge. We’ve got some big plans to tighten that gap over the next few months though, and a stronger team to execute those plans. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, feel free to send a message to Chris to welcome him.

I couldn’t resist writing this post.

I love number patterns more than I’m willing to admit publicly. Clocks always seem to catch my eye at times like 11:11 or 4:56. I have Monk-like tendencies that prevent me from setting alarms to any “weird” number (minutes 00 or 30 are safe, 45 is OK, but 49 is taboo unless it’s 7:49). I’ll strain to hear the TV just so I don’t have to turn the volume to 17.

Some good friends of mine got married on 04/04/04 (but at 1pm … argh!). 05/05/05 was especially interesting because of its significance as a popular holiday. I was pretty much ready for the world to end during last year’s numerical event.

Today, despite 120°F+ temperatures and rogue shooters, I really really want to be in Las Vegas. (It helps that the World Series of Poker main event is going on right now).

(Oh, to give you a clue as to how weird I can be about this sort of thing … this post is 777 characters long and about 7K of HTML without comments.)

I wanted one when they were announced, but had tempered my enthusiasm in the 6 months since — it’s expensive, and was yet to be seen if the product would be as revolutionary as was preached.

But after reading the generally positive reviews, getting a chance to play with one first-hand, and realizing that my T-Mobile contract had expired, I was short on excuses. What really convinced me was seeing that Apple sold 700,000 of these over the weekend, putting it on track to become the best selling consumer electronics device of all time. Given it’s popularity and tight integration with the Internet, I don’t think it’s been overstated that this little device is going to change how people are going to work online. It’s going to push web application development to a new level, and anyone in this industry should get familiar with this device fast.

So I dropped by the Apple store Tuesday afternoon, and have been playing with it since. Overall I’m very pleased. It’s a beautiful device, fun to use, and does a lot of things very well.

My experience hasn’t been all positive though. Within the first minute of use, as I tried to activate it through iTunes I got:

which was followed shortly afterward with a nice Blue Screen of Death.

And Apple, pretty please with caramel on top, give me a way to select multiple email messages for deletion. I’ll pay whatever you want (under $100) to save myself from the boredom of scrolling through messages that I’ve already read with my primary email client.

But yeah, overall this is a pretty sweet tool. It’ll be interesting to see how it evolves over time. One of the best things about it is that it’s mostly software, and it’s not hard to see the realm of potential that Apple will continue to tap with new versions.

And I for one can’t wait until we at Recursive Function release our first web application built for the iPhone. The wheels are spinning….

I thought I’d wait a couple months after moving into new office space before writing much about the process. It’s the second time I’ve leased office space, and while all the work involved still ranks high on the list of things I don’t like doing, I’m starting to gather a handful of tips.

It should go without saying that everyone needs to look for something different based on the type of business and size of budget. Everything below came out of my needs as owner of a small software company with a bootstrapper’s budget.

1. Size Appropriately

I knew there’d be two of us working out of the space for the foreseeable future, and wanted enough room to fit a couple more in if necessary. The space I settled on was ~550 sq ft, which is relatively small, but more than enough for a few desks, a small conference table and kitchen area without feeling too cramped. Figuring out the right size is tricky — too small and it’s not a great environment, too big and you’re throwing away money that could go to better use. The best thing I did to come at a size estimate was measure around the house and try to picture what the ideal space would look like.

2. Look at Usable Space

More important than absolute square footage is the amount of usable space. One of my top requirements was finding a good layout that didn’t waste too much square footage on hallways or barely usable rooms. You get charged the same amount for desk space and hallway, so you might as well get your money’s worth. The space I leased a few years ago looked nice, but we only really occupied about 1/2 of it because of the layout. It included a large conference room (that we used mostly to entertain people who were trying to sell us something), a spacious entry way, a private bathroom, and decent kitchen area. That was all nice to have, but it wasn’t worth the extra money it cost.

3. Find a Flexible Landlord

The danger of leasing space that “just fits” is that if we need to grow more quickly, we’re not going to have much fun sitting shoulder-to-shoulder. I ended up getting a suite in a large-ish office park because there will likely always be plenty of spaces that we can move into down the road, and we’d be able to do so without paying a penalty for breaking a lease. A landlord’s going to work hard to make sure you stay around as long as possible, even if that means moving you into a smaller space. If we’re lucky and time it right so that we move into one of the many empty suites down the hall, we won’t even have to change our address — just grab the sign on the door as we wheel our chairs over.

4. Location * 3

If you’re like me and working in a business that needs zero foot traffic, then location doesn’t matter as much to the bottom line as it would to someone opening a coffee shop. However, location is still obviously a factor in determining your commute time. It’s also great to have space that’s close to restaurants and shops so that lunch meetings and errands don’t become a hassle. It’s a lot cheaper to get space in the middle of nowhere, but extra commute time costs money too. If your commute is an extra 15 minutes per day, that’s about 125 hour of extra drive time per year. If you value your time at any reasonable rate, it’s well worth an extra $1-3/sq.ft. to get a closer space, all things being equal.

5. Get a Short Term Lease

At my last company I was unfortunate to be one of the ones holding a lease with two years left on the term right as we were closing the business. It worked out OK in the end, but it taught me the lesson that I wouldn’t enter another office lease unless I was confident that the business was doing great financially and that everyone loved the space. I ended up getting an 18 month lease on this space (and probably could have negotiated 12 months if I tried hard), which is right about the sweet spot between not feeling like we have to pack up as soon as we got settled in and not getting stuck with a huge monthly bill in case something came along that caused us to have to move.

6. Expect to Stretch the Budget

I haven’t yet nailed an estimate for the true cost of moving into new space. On top of the lease payments I also had to pay for new furniture, decorations, new network equipment, kitchen appliances, business insurance, phone and Internet connection setup charges, someone to wire the suite for phone & data lines, legal fees, updated business cards, and a handful of other things that I’ve forgotten in the dozens of trips to Staples and Fry’s.

7. Get a Lawyer

I’ve read few things more confusing to me than my 25 page lease agreement. I hate paying lawyer’s fees as much as anybody, but it felt like it was well worth the additional expense to have someone read through it on my behalf, point out what things I should be concerned about, and help negotiate any necessary changes. We asked for a small change to the terms, and the request was granted without difficulty. It was worth a few hundred dollars to pay my lawyer now so that I don’t have to pay him a lot more later if things go sour with the landlord.

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I know I have a lot to learn in this area — does anybody have any extra tips to share, or disagree with anything I’ve said above?

I was recently searching the iTunes store and got this error message:

It bothered me more than most error messages do. I knew my network settings were correct and my connection was active. If they weren’t, I wouldn’t have been able to get to the iTunes store homepage where I initiated the search.

The message smelled of arrogance. The programmer who wrote this expected the problem to be with my inability to setup my network connection, not with their inability to keep the server running.

Where does that culture of arrogance come from? Or, if I’m just overreacting, where does my distorted perception of reality come from?

Maybe it’s statements like this from the Apple CEO:

And if for some reason you’ve missed this side of Steve Jobs, take a couple hours to watch Pirates of Silicon Valley and read Woz’ claim that it’s all pretty much true. Sure, he’s brilliant, and an exceptional businesman. But that’s not all that matters.