My first day was anti-climactic. On Friday, the people at my first assignment told me that they couldn’t possibly start me until Wednesday, so I better stay home. I read up on ASP.NET (I’m definitely into over-preparing now), went to the gym, made dinner, and moved some furniture. (Moving furniture is the surest sign of cabin fever, so the gym visit was really just therapeutic.)

Oh, and Twitter readers already know that I gave up caffeine for today. It’s probably been a year since I skipped a day, but after a Rockstar on Thursday, a Rockstar on Friday, a Rockstar on Saturday (to take care of my hangover, naturally), and Caribou yesterday, I am seeing those diminishing returns that stimulant addicts talk about. If I can stay clean until my job starts Wednesday, coffee / Rockstar might just be a weekend treat. (Or, if I resort to a daily Diet Coke, I’ll be no worse off than my wife, who doesn’t have any caffeine-related health concerns.)

Anyway, there’s a note to let you know what happened today.

As I wrote in part 1, I really thought the best way to make money on the Internet (maybe the only way, if you couldn’t directly accept credit cards) was to build web pages.  It’s obvious now that people make money online doing everything they make money offline, just more efficiently.  That includes everything from selling your junk to taking naked pictures of yourself, except the Internet opened up markets to people whose junk wasn’t locally appealing, or who otherwise should not be naked.

But there are definitely ways to make money that didn’t exist ten years ago, from professional bloggers (advertising or reader-supported writing) to professional eBayer (who relies on the generosity of those who will pay $10 to ship a $5 thing which should really be $3 to ship and actually cost $1).  The existence of Google Ads alone turns any somewhat-narrowly-targeted personal site into a potential source of money: beer money, if not server/hosting money, and possibly rent money.  I’ve had some ideas for these niche blogs, and it always destroys me to find the same topics covered in a hundred blogs already better written than mine will ever be.  But I don’t know: it’s possible that I’ll be first in on something clever, and Google Ads will be more than spare change one day.  I own the top Google result for "fix n mix frosty".  That’s gotta be worth something.

I do have some other personal projects that I’m going to dedicate some time to, if only to tie up the loose ends and get them prepared for deep-freeze.  I spend too much time thinking about the domains I still own, the blog software I’ve got half-done, the books I’ve got half-read, the open source software I want to play with, the development platforms I’m kind of interested in, and the personal / professional self-improvement I sometimes find time for, but frequently don’t. 

I don’t know if I’ll ever own another business.  I did this one sort of half-seriously, and another one (a partnership) quite formally.  Very different experiences, but I think I prefer the formal method.  It enforces a lot of discipline and deliberation about the reason for your actions, and that can be valuable.  There’s this other idea, that those with ideas move extremely quickly, throw something out on a server, and start a billion-dollar company on their lunch break, but there are so many more people who think they’re going to do that, and never do, because there’s no external pressure to formalize any of it.

Thanks, by the way, for letting me monopolize the weblog all week with this.  My least favorite thing about entrepreneurism is that there’s this pressure to keep everything so goddamn secret.  You convince yourself that your ideas, your methods, your contacts, and your price list are the only things that make you different and special, even when your non-entrepreneurial half knows better.  Letting it all out has been a huge relief, so again, thanks.

Now you know my every neurosis and gripe about consulting, clients, and the web / IT world.  Here’s a list that I hope is actually constructive.  It’s stuff that might make your life easier if you are in the place I was.

I hated invoicing.  It’s boring, it involves inkjet printers, Word templates, and envelopes, and then the result of all that stamp-licking is a check you have to go to the bank with.  Of course, the step after that is money, and nobody doesn’t like money.  But even the promise of sweet, sweet money couldn’t get me to put those invoices in the mail every month, and so I started to look really incompetent, lazy, and inattentive.  What I wanted more than anything was a system that would just take the info, print nice invoices, and get the money into the bank.  I never found it.  Actual commercial offerings online are competing for AR, HR, or time management corporate accounts, and start at extremely expensive.

Imagine my dismay to discover Blinksale, which looks like it solves all those problems.  It launched earlier this week.  I don’t think any of my clients would have taken the PayPal bait, but who knows?  That could have been my dream end-to-end system, and saved me my biggest consulting headache.

Seriously, we have to fix web browsers.  It’s come a long way, but over the past decade, the tit-for-tat has been frustrating enough to make you swear off one browser, then the other, then some versions, then some platforms, then not…  Standards have helped a ton, and the next wave of competition should be very interesting, but you can help just by trying FireFox and spreading the word that not everyone uses IE all the time. 

More, more, more products that fill the gap between the computer and the user.  Everyone always talks about how HTML liberated the voices of the internet, and how publishing became instantly easy, but HTML is a bitch, and nobody wants to write it.  What actually liberated the voices on the internet were applications like Blogger, where you typed what you wanted to say into a cute little window, Blogger converted into fancy HTML, Blogger applied the snazzy templates that Blogger designed, and Blogger used the FTP information you entered (once, when you set it up) to FTP the files (that Blogger chopped and sliced into archives, commentable pages, etc.). 

See, computers make people’s work easier.  A lot of people look at things like accounting, and say "we used to have to do this by hand, and the computer saves us a lot of work."  That’s true, but what work are you doing now?  Typing a bunch of stuff into the system.  Is there a way the computer can help you do that?  Probably.  Maybe someone writes a program to automate the entry of that data.  But wait, that’s more work that a human has to do.  Is there a way that the computer can meet the developer halfway?  Every incremental step here is fantastic.

Divide, divide, divide.  RSS is my favorite thing because the content is separate from the container.  That kind of sucks the people who have an interest in the container (banner ad buyers, traffic analyzers, etc.), but great for people who are more interested in the content.  It’s a great part of what’s called a services-oriented architecture, where a system is separated into as many independent systems as it can be, and each of those simpler subsystems can be optimized, replaced, enhanced, tracked, etc.  I don’t know what’s next, but extricating common functionality out of large systems is what’s happening right now.  If I were still actively working with clients, I’d be hammering this into the ground: more system-wide complexity, but made up of very simple components.

More tomorrow

I’m not sure if I’m giving this up to get more time/energy back, or if I need to quit because I didn’t have the time/energy to begin with, but I think mentally it frees up some cycles to work on some other things.  After that, I think I’m done blabbering.

This is getting longer and longer, but the heart of what I wanted to write is below.  It’s what I wish I knew when I tried to go into business for myself ten years ago.

Independence is not as important as you think. 

I am not sure if they teach this kind of thing in business school, but I think 90% of people have a fundamental misunderstanding about small business.  There are certainly typical "maverick" small business owners who negotiate every deal, place every ad, answer every sales inquiry, do every iota of work, lick every stamp, etc. etc. etc.  There are many, many more who have help, directly or indirectly, from a network of supporting stakeholders.  Very few do it completely alone.  You have to be able to ask for help.  You have to be willing to accept it when it’s offered.  Think of it this way: you’re trying to convince everyone that you’re astonishingly competent and there are very few unanswered questions in your life.  But at the same time, you have to honest with yourself, actively assessing your incompetence, and constantly asking those questions. 

For me, it felt awful.  I was sure that doing it completely by myself was the only way to do it.  If I was asking other people for the answers to questions, couldn’t my client be asking the same people the same things?  It seemed dishonest.  But my client didn’t have access to the tools or resources I did, and knowing what to ask of whom, to solve the underlying problem, is a saleable skill in itself.

Your job is half educational, no matter what you think.

I only ever worked one retail job in my life (praise heaven), and that was at a garden center.  Nobody ever came in and asked me what plants were for, or whether one could share a purchased rake with one’s neighbors, or if a certain sprinkler would make your mailbox bigger.  Maybe I attracted lunatics, but the truth is that many clueful people don’t need your help, and won’t hire you, so on average, your clients will be the kind of people who need help understanding what you do and why they hired you.

It seems crazy: a web designer should design websites, right?  But probably half of the work I did (and certainly ninety percent of the aggravation) came from explaining what was available / possible / impossible with current technology (and my skills), and helping clients choose from those options.  I always felt like, if a client could do a little prep work before we met to discuss these things (even with a quick Google search), they’d get so much more out of our conversations.  At the same time, if they knew how to do that prep work, they wouldn’t need to be hiring IT consultants.  Needless to say, it wasn’t a hat with which I was completely comfortable.  I’m not a good teacher, and you almost have to be to do any real "consulting".

Experience is more important than you think.

I don’t mean that experience is required to get jobs.  (There are certainly clients that will pay low rates to anyone who claims to know what they’re doing.)  I mean that, like anything else, you get better with practice, and you’ll certainly be doing things you’ve never done before.  You might think "I can fake competence for a while", which is true, you’ll do a lot of that, but if you’ve never faked competence in front of a client, you won’t be good at faking it until you’ve done it a few times.  By that time, you might not even be faking it.  But it’s all skills you’ll have to build, and there’s no substitute.

Related note: as I mentioned yesterday, I barely passed three CS courses in college, and I took one of those twice.  I’ve sat in on hiring discussions in the "career" and "consulting" worlds, and I can’t think of a single person who valued education over work experience.  That doesn’t mean "skip school", because college or tech school or whatever else is the only way you’re going to learn how to learn, but the specific technologies you’re studying or accumulating are probably going to be irrelevant.  IT managers pretty much have a specific problem they’re trying to solve when they’re hiring, and if you look like you can solve it, you’re in.  People who come in saying "I’ve done that exact thing, here, call my previous boss" look way better than people who sit down and rattle off all the schools they went to, all the languages they learned, the year they spent abroad… they might be solid management material, if they were hiring for that job, but they almost never are.

Okay, More Yet to Come

What I want to address next time is the stuff that I wish I had today, and the things that might make the job easier for the people that are committed to this right now.

On Friday, I basically quit my last remaining consulting gig.  This isn’t sad news: in fact, since the kids came along two years ago, I’ve found myself overcommitted.  Getting Things Done showed me that, even if other people weren’t going to hold me to standards of excellence or deadlines ("get this project done by Friday, or we’ll give it to someone else"), I was failing to meet the commitments I’d made to myself ("I told them the project would be done Friday… why haven’t I worked on it?"), and that’s even worse.  I started thinking about how I’d mark the occasion of quitting my last client, and I thought I’d better write it all down.

The Earlier Years

I started tinkering with HTML in 1994, on the machines in the computer labs at Macalester.  Everyone registered in the computer lab got a few megabytes on the school servers, and so, from the call letters of /~dnordqui/, I started my broadcast into the world.  I’m told Benno, Jer, and Cratchit used to hit my site from high school, but I am fairly sure that nobody else saw it (despite the fact that I had the address on my box of Magic cards).

But by late 1995, I could see that the internet was good for more than posting pictures of Grover or John Flansburgh, or telling people that you’ll update the page again soon.  I actually started seeing corporate web addresses in newspapers and on TV.  I knew the explosion was inevitable, but as a college kid, I wasn’t sure how I could participate.  I don’t know if I was being extremely shortsighted or what, but the only way I could think of to earn money on the internet was to make websites.  I mean, the internet was starting to get full of websites, and they got made somehow, right?  Growth industry!

I threw a "hire me" shingle out on the math.macalstr.edu servers (which stayed there for a year, until someone found it and asked me to move).  I had Christie charge a monthly hosting fee to her credit card.  I used Tim’s computer to mock up designs and FTP my files back and forth.  I did some favors for a guy who had a list of "cheap web designers", and he threw me near the top of that list.  I did work for senators, pornographers, senior citizens, and friends of the family.  Nothing that paid for an Escalade or anything, but beer money, for sure.

An Actual Career

Post-college, I was pretty committed to doing consulting for real, so I bought a PC and burned through my contacts.  Not finding a whole lot, I started temping in the west suburbs, constantly checking the classifieds for any jobs that required HTML skills.  During a phone interview, someone asked me about modifying a hundred pages at once.  I’d never done anything like that, and I didn’t get the job.  Somewhere else they were asking about development - like "application" development.  I’d barely passed the introductory classes in CS at school, and I didn’t know anything about the syntax of Perl or Java or ASP, so I missed out on those gigs.  Anyone who didn’t need that experience wanted an actual design background, which was becoming more and more applicable to the web.  I got a job offer from a crummy phone center that churned out yellow-pages-style minisites for clients, and when I told my temp boss that I might be moving on, he jumped into action to keep me around.  Within a year, I was designing the company intranet, developing small ASP sites, and working with Dreamweaver.  I have no idea why I didn’t experiment with these tools on my own, but time at work was focused, productive, and educational.  Cratchit got me into CSS, and I started up my first weblog with Blogger.  My contacts at work actually led me to independent work with other people inside the company.  Web work wasn’t the first thing I did in the morning, but it took up some of my time, and I wasn’t as active trying to find more work for myself.

The Later Years

A small consulting group found my resume at the Star Tribune job site, and since they’d blacked out my contact info (but not my website address), the consulting company had no trouble tracking me down.  These guys, based in Minnesota, did networking stuff, but not web stuff, so they thought a partnership might be mutually beneficial.  I did some great work for them, and they paid me pretty well.  On the other hand, I had no idea what kind of money I should be demanding.  Back in my pre-database, no-scripting days, I knew that HTML knowledge alone wasn’t worth much.  (In fact, by the new millennium, HTML was being listed alongside Excel and words-per-minute as the requirements for a lot of admin/helpdesk jobs.)  My accomplishments for this period include a shopping cart for a major local greenhouse, some Access-driven apps built in ASP, and some of my best graphic work (for a client that asked for minor, minor changes for weeks before abandoning the whole project).

In the past two years, I’d begun billing mostly just to pay for hosting packages, and not so much for development.  I’d toyed with the idea of only selling hosting packages, becoming a web-based "real estate agent" that matched hosting needs with hosting plans.  But when I decided against that, I told all my clients that I wouldn’t be covering their hosting costs (or billing them) in the future, and they were responsible for their own hosting packages.  I agreed to set up one last client with a hosting plan, but when they changed their plans last week, I told them I’d had enough and would be moving on.

More to Come

Honestly, this was supposed to be about what other people could learn from my experiences, and what else I think the industry as a whole is doing right and wrong.  I think this is good background, but since this is getting to be longish for a post anyway, I’ll get to the good part later on.