I picked up a copy of the Problogger book and flipped to the Blog Promotion chapter. In it they recommended – Create compilation pages.
I crafted a new post, selected some of my blogs most popular material, organized it with nice punchy one line summaries, and after about 20 minutes posted it. Hey what the heck, I’ll give it a try.
There are other great chapters on Social Media to get your posts going viral, and of course the ever important monetization topic is covered nicely.
Go pickup a copy of this book. It’s worth much more than the cover price for sure!
I meet a lot of people in NYC. Friends, colleagues, small business owners, people with a great idea, artists, musicians, people with a dream, people who hear the startup story, namely the Google, Zynga, Apple, Facebook, or Amazon story.
Sometimes I’ll hear:
“I’m working on a business plan.”
“Why?” I ask.
“I want to make my business grow and get investment money.”
Then I think about this a little, and consider if a business plan would have ever helped me. Would it help a deli owner run a deli? Or a laundry run a laundry?
[quote]The essence of running a large business is the day-to-day of running a small business.[/quote]
Let’s consider a less savory business – drug dealers. Their business may not be one we respect, but let’s consider the economics behind the scenes.
That’s a business plan in a nutshell. If you’re not selling any product, that means people don’t want it. It may not be as valuable to the world as it is to you. If it’s valuable, people will buy. That’s the measure of good ideas. When people aren’t buying, they’re voting with their wallets.
Entrepreneur and blogger, Andrew Chen says:
Business models are a commodity. The answers are all obvious.
Sometimes all this talk of business plans sounds like therapy for people who don’t have a successful business.
The hard truth is if people aren’t buying they don’t want the product. Change it or tweak it until they do. A business plan won’t help with that.
Six months ago I got this crazy idea. Why not leave the mothership? Give up on iPhone and try Android. This is what being tech-agnostic is about, I thought––not being wedded to a single platform. Besides, the iPhone’s digital keypad just wasn’t working for me.
I got a monthly Boost Mobile plan, which uses Sprint. Service was stellar and I mean really good. I could call anywhere and always had a signal, even inside all these pre-war buildings you find in downtown Manhattan. How is this possible I thought? Service is one thing, but thats where the fun ends. A few months into Android hyperspace and I find myself grappling with a system that just doesn’t seem to understand what users want.
On Android – first Samsung Transform Ultra then Sidekick 4G I found the app store was like wild, wild west. Buggy apps sat along well tested ones, and only a very discerning eye and mobile guru might know the difference. Syncing was absolutely horrible. The whole platform assumes you want to sync up with Google accounts. I went with Missing Sync from Mark/Space. My addressbook started getting corrupted, duplicate records appeared, syncs would fail halfway through.
What’s more there were tons of started services I didn’t even use like Smart Navigation, Group Texting, and so on. These services seemed to run in the background, hog & bleed memory, and slow down my phone til it started crashing. I actually had to download an app called Easy Task Killer. Apparently a very popular app on the Android phones, I wonder why?
Later on I found out that T-mobile was no longer supporting the Sidekick. No wonder it was so buggy. I can’t believe they’d ship something like this.
I’ve long since quelled my desire for a physical keyboard. I was struggling with every other thing I would do with the device. Sometimes I’d just give up.
I really wanted to get along with my Android phone but my experience with it only gave me an insight into three crucial areas where it falls short.
People complain about Apple’s iron fist in app store approval. You can’t have it both ways. Android completely lacks discipline and users suffer hugely because of it. That weakens the platform.
Developers building for Android must test on a huge spectrum of hardware. Smaller shops are likely to choose a few of the biggest ones only. Phones with a smaller user base likely have a lot of bugs just in the Android version they run. All this bodes badly as users just see buggy software, they don’t know why or how. This perception further weakens the platform.
Building apps costs businesses money. Businesses must balance the costs of building features, test, debug, troubleshoot & release. That’s cheaper on the iphone because you have one device that is much more mature. This has a pile on affect as it strengthens the platform, users spend more on their devices, more users pile onto the iphone platform, so more money can be made building an iphone apps. On Android higher costs, lower margins further weakens the platform.
This whole experience has brought me back to the iPhone 4S, and I have a whole new love and appreciation for the platform and the device.
I also learned that sometimes less is more… much more!
We cherry pick the top 5 most popular posts of various topics we’ve covered in recent months.
We use a broad brush to highlight the biggest no-nos in web application scalability.
We dig into scalability, steering to the richest areas to focus on.
MySQL on Amazon EC2, the what, how and when.
We highlight some of the big differences between the two database engines. We’re also working on revamping this content, so stay tuned for more.
Interviewing a MySQL DBA – a guide for managers. Also helpful if you’re gearing up for an interview.
This two part guide for a hiring manager, focuses on the MySQL Database Operations role.
A long time favorite, a hiring guide for Oracle DBAs.
Devops is the latest craze in bringing the worlds of operations and development together. We talk about how to identify and attract such a candidate.
Today the cloud is *almost* synonymous with Amazon Web Services and their Elastic Compute (EC2) cloud offering. Want to hire the best, here’s the step-by-step guide.
Caching caching everywhere. Learn to do it right.
Hotbackups make building replicas a snap. Avoid the downtime & speedup the process.
Get your backups right so you can get some sleep at night!
Learn how to automatically spinup new MySQL slaves in Amazon EC2.
A decade ago startups large and small were running on Oracle, but no longer. As the shift intensifies, it becomes harder and harder to find the right talent. Here’s why.
High availability ain’t what it used to be. Here’s why nobody is really achieving so-called five nines.
We argue that technologists with broad experience are needed to achieve scalability for today’s high traffic high transaction websites.
You’ve heard all the hype. Now for some medicine.
Our three part guide takes you through ten steps to building a successful consulting business. This is as much a guide for freelancers or wanna be consultants, as it is for startups, and those wishing to hire good temporary resources.
Learn about scalability from the guys at AKF.
Here’s a great how-to book, short and to the point. Optimizing those queries!
Building a startup doesn’t have to mean big money. Stay efficient and build those margins.
Jeff Jarvis champions Google, but we flip the question around.
Cut through the hype. Which types of applications really do lend themselves to deploying in the cloud?
Ask some tough questions before you deploy everything in the cloud.
Migrating your application from Oracle to MySQL, you may be in for a bumpy road. Here are a few things to watch out for.
Soup to nuts guide to deploying applications on Amazon Web Services EC2.
Recently I was searching Google for “startup consultant” to see what I might find. I came across this article by John Greathouse titled Beware the Consultant. No self-respecting, hard-working consultant would sit back and take hits without defense, so in true poetry slam style I thought I’d write a quick retort.
Beware the Client…
Truth is often stranger than fiction
Of course in the real world things are much more nuanced than this black and white picture. Certainly there are probably some consultants that fit John’s description, but there are others that are loved by their clients.
As far as performance based compensation goes, I would say two things:
Although Mr Greathouse may describe *some* real-world or big-corp consultants, they are by no means representative of the lot of us.
In the last two posts on how to build a successful consulting business I shared advice and tips on closing deals and managing and completing your engagements.
This post will look at where to focus your efforts in order to sustain your consulting business, and build skills.
Being a subject matter expert takes years of education, and professional experience to build. It’s your most valuable asset. Build it, and use it. This is not to say there isn’t great value in being a generalist as I’ve emphasized in blog postings. But don’t get distracted trying to do things others can do better. Web-based newsletter managers can do it better than you can, professional invoicing solutions as well. Though you might be able to do a bit of HTML and graphic design, if that’s not your expertise, hire someone to do your website in WordPress. You’ll save time and money in the long run, and their professional experience will surely include a few surprising nuggets of value that you wouldn’t have known yourself.
There are a myriad of online tools to help you run your business better.
Google Analytics – Get insights on what parts of your site your customers find valuable. Learn to convert those visitors with downloads, newsletter signups and ebooks for sale.
Freshbooks, Zoho or Paymo – There are many online invoicing solutions, so best to evaluate them for your specific needs. The point is, using a solution will save you money in the end, and make you more professional in the process. It’ll help you track monthly & yearly, send reminders, and summarize things for you all in one place.
Mailchimp – Newsletter creation can’t get any more fun than with mailchimp. With endless video howtos, documents, and great support, plus templates for your newsletter that come in every shape and size, these guys have really thought of everything. What’s more the graphs and campaign reports will give you insight into what topics are popular, and what resonates with your audience.
Google Docs and Calendars allow you to share your schedule and work with a small team. So whether it’s communicating things with your clients, or your subcontractors, these tools are essential.
Dropbox – Another indispensable tool for collaboration, share documents easily across the web.
If your prospect is asking you for a resume, and comparing you to some outsourced resources provide, you’re not going to get very far as a consultant. Don’t be a generic resource that sits at the keyboard and churns out code.
What’s the alternative? Learn about business, talk to business stakeholders, listen to their concerns, and learn to speak their language. Use stories, and analogies. Reach across the table to speak in terms that everyone can understand. Your value is in symplifying complex technology.
Being hungry means continuing to improve on your weaknesses, experimenting with different rates until you match the market demand, managing multiple projects and always networking widely. Spend less than you make and build up six to twelve months cushion. This will allow you much more freedom to take only the projects you want. Learn to pick and choose.
There are lots of other areas you’ll lean about, running a successful consulting business. Here are a few:
This is the second in a series of three articles on Consulting Essentials.
Read the previous post, Consulting essentials: Getting the business
Communicating well and knowing when to step in or stand back is the linchpin of successful consulting.
Some people have natural charm. If you’re one of these people you’ll find consulting is definitely for you. You’ll use that skill all the time as each new client brings a half dozen or a dozen new people to interact with.
If it doesn’t come easily, practice practice practice. Try to get out of your own head space, and hear what troubles your client, and what big business challenges worry them.
A decade ago I worked for an Internet startup. They were having serious performance problems which was slowing down the site, and turning users away. When digging into the systems I found serious security issues besides the performance ones, and got distracted trying to wrap up those lest someone break in and destroy or steal their business assets. Communicating the situation to the client, they looked aghast. After explaining the situation to them, they understood the risks and explained that the current priorities were to get users back online.
The technical problems I saw may not have been aligned with the business priorities. Your job is to make your client happy. Provide your professional opinion and advice whenever and wherever your skills come into play, but let them run their own business.
If you’re focusing on one area, and you discover other problems or things that may need resolving going forward, bring this to the attention of the client. Allow them to prioritize for themselves. It’s their business not yours. Your job is to give your professional opinion, raise concerns that you see, but most importantly solve problems they want you to solve.
Smile a lot and listen to people. Make sure you’re talking less than half the time. When you first engage with a client, they should be speaking more like two-thirds of the time. You want to get in the habit of listening, and stepping in your clients shoes. You want to understand their pain, their business concerns and how to satisfy them.
Get things done. Everybody talks about it, but not everyone does it. I personally avoid all the faddish tools for this, and use a simple checklist. Focus on the task at hand. Give yourself a doable list of tasks each day, and check them off as you go. Try hard to avoid working on things not on that list. The last point relates back to the principle of solving only the problems that you’ve been asked to solve.
In many engagements you’ll come upon struggles and get blocked by situations that seem intransigent. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to communicate with the client during these situations. Don’t get stuck thinking it will make you look weak. Communicating with the client has a number of surprising advantages.
For one sometimes they’ll have a solution, such as a different angle on the business problem, or insight and details that just simplify the problem you think you thought needed to be solved.
Second, it allows the client to adjust schedules in advance if something will take a little longer. You’d be surprised how often a client will sympathize with a difficult problem.
Lastly, involving the client intimately allows them to enjoy the triumph when you solve the problem. This helps morale, communicates more about what it is you do day-to-day and how you work through a problem. And overall it helps them appreciate the intrinsic value you’re providing.
Over the years, a lot of people have approached me asking how to become a tech consultant. What do I need to do to get started? How can I take my first step?
I also hear from managers and CEOs that have asked how I got my start, and how I keep the business running. What lessons from consulting can be applied to startups and small businesses? Having worked independently for many years I’ve built up my own cache of strategies and methods which I hope can be helpful to anyone looking to strike it out on their own.
This is the first of a series of three articles on consulting essentials. Part two covers managing engagements and part three: Building your business.
If no one knows about your services, it doesn’t matter how good you are, you won’t have regular work. Some consultants get involved in a regular full-time engagement, and after a year or more experience a lot of down time when that gig ends.
Want to avoid the feast or famine cycle? Get out there and meet people. Go to meetups, and exchange cards. Go to startup and venture events such as Ultralight or The Hatchery. Participate in General Assembly and related incubators. Start a newsletter, and say something interesting and useful every month. Add every professional colleague you encounter to your list. A newsletter is an invaluable way to keep in touch with folks in your professional world, and the value keeps growing over time.
Build your network, connect people together and keep in contact with people. This makes you a focal point, and that will bring business to you.
If you’re drawing a wide net, you should have tons of opportunities to meet prospects. Sometimes these may be framed as interviews, while other times a meeting of peers. Ultimately as a professional services provider, you should think of it as a partnership where each party contributes to solve a business problem. Hone your speaking skills, compliment people, smile, listen carefully to people’s concerns and try to frame answers in language that works uniquely for each person.
In order to get hired for your services, ultimately you’ll need to be talking with the person who manages the budget for such hiring. However often there are gatekeepers or even human relations folks between you and that person. If you’re being asked for a resume you’re probably going down the wrong road. Typically a stake holder will ask you about solutions you’ve provided for other customers, how you executed, and what were some of the highlights. They won’t be giving you a test, or asking you to solve a riddle or coding problem.
If you are active in business, networking regularly and reaching out to new contacts and colleagues then you should find many asking for advise and expertise. Always be sending out quotes. Sending out a quote is not a do or die arrangement. You should be sending out many many more than you expect to win. By continuing to pitch, you test the market for the demand of your skills, package your services in new and creative ways, and frame solutions that should hopefully resonate with your prospects.
All clients are not created equal. Some are trying to get a lot for less than market value, and will try hard to micromanage and squeeze value out of you. This isn’t personal. Business is about maximizing value for a given price. It’s important though to qualify the client, make sure they have the budget to be worth your while, and do your due diligence. Better to have a half dozen to a dozen projects in one year, than fifty tiny projects.
If you’re good at consulting, you’ll gain a lot of experience, exposure to many types of businesses, many technologies, and many environments. This is valuable experience, and business owners and startups will try to hire you. As part of the *listen* part, it’s always ok to hear out a prospect. Leave the “door open” as they say. Provide real explanation for what appeals to you, from independence, freedom of schedule, choosing projects, and compensation. Creative discussion about budgets and pricing options can well turn such a discussion into how you might work together on a situational or project basis.
Although independent consulting isn’t for everyone for those who’ve made a career out of it, taking a fulltime opportunity is a step away from that freedom unless you’re making a deliberate career change. Doing this can be a signal you don’t have a full stream of work, that you’re experiencing the famine cycle, and you’re looking for safety and security.
Consulting services cost more hour per hour than a fulltime resource. But typically you work in shorter bursts or stints. What’s more your availability is always a business value. Lastly because you can ride the crest, stay in demand, stay relevant and stay fresh, you’ll continue to command top dollar.
I’ve met many freelancers over the years who struggle to get paid, or struggle with cash flow. If this is happening you’re either not keeping the pipeline full or not charging sufficiently for your services. What exact price is right for you of course will vary. My personal recommended method is to research the large firms in your services space. Find out what their junior and senior folks are billed out at. These firms of course have a lot of overhead, so 50% of those rates should be a good base number to work around. Furthermore these calculations can be used in discussions with prospects to sell your services. Remind prospects that they’ll be getting the same professional experience, more customer focus because you’re a one man shop, and pay half the price for it. A proverbial win-win.
Beware taking too much pro-bono work, or giving discounts at the outset of an assignment. This signals to the savvy firm that you’re keen to close the deal, and will probably negotiate further. You’ll have little room to renegotiate rates higher, once the engagement has begun. You’ve already set a precedent.
So if a firm asks for a discount, be sure to reduce the entire package in some way. Total number of hours, on-call coverage, amount of software or widgets delivered etc.
Hourly billing is not the only model in town. If you’re finding it’s a lot of work to keep track of hours, or you and your client are staying unduly focused on these details, consider other models. Pricing by the day may work, for example. Further options may include billing by the week or even by the month. Chances are you’ll want to discount somewhat for larger incremental steps in pricing. Keep in mind that with monthly billing for example, your project cannot end on June 10th or July 5th. It will always roll forward to the end of a month. So offering a discount for larger billing periods may even out in the end.
In the next post: How to manage and complete engagements.
You’ve heard all the buzz and spiel about the cloud, and there’re good reasons to want to get there. On-demand compute power makes new levels of scalability possible. Low up front costs means moving capital expenditure to operating expenditure and saving a bundle in the process. We won’t give you anymore of the rah rah marketing hoopla. You’ve heard enough of that. We’ll gently play devil’s advocate for a moment, and give you a few things to think about when deploying applications with a cloud provider. Our focus is mainly on Amazon EC2.
You might also be interested in a wide reaching introduction to deploying on Amazon EC2.
One of the biggest hurdles we see clients struggle with on Amazon EC2 is performance. This is rooted in the nature of shared resources. Computer servers, just like desktops rely on CPUs, Memory, Network and Disk. In the virtual datacenter, you can be given more than your fair share without you even knowing it. More bandwidth, more CPU, more disk? Who would complain? Well if your application behaves erratically, while you suddenly compete for disk resources you’ll quickly feel the flip side of that coin. Stocks go up, and they can just as easily come right back down.
Variability around disk I/O seems to be the one that hits applications the hardest, especially the database tier of many web applications. If your application requires extremely high database transaction throughput, you would do well to consider physical servers and a real RAID array to host your database server. Read more about IOPs
Everybody has heard the saying, don’t hand someone a loaded gun. In the case of Amazon servers, you really do load your applications onto fickle and neurotic servers.
Imagine you open a car rental business. You could have two brand new fully reliable cars to rent out to customers. Your customers would be very happy, but you’d have a very small business. Alternatively you could have twenty used Pintos. You’d have some breaking down a lot, but as long as you keep ten of them rented at a time, your business is booming.
In the Amazon world you have all the tools to keep your Ford Pintos running, but it’s important to think long and hard about reliability, redundancy, and automation. Read more about Failures, Lessons & the Chaos Monkey
Managed hosting providers vary drastically in terms of the support you can expect. Companies like Rackspace, Servint or Datapipe have Support built into their DNA. They’ve grown up around having a support tech that your team can reach when they’re having trouble.
Amazon takes the opposite approach. They give you all the tools to do everything yourself. But in a crunch it can be great to have that service available to help troubleshoot and diagnose a problem. Although they’re now offering support contracts, it’s not how they started out.
If you have a crack operations team at your disposal, or you hire a third party provider like Heavyweight Internet Group Amazon Web Services gives you the flexibility and power to build phenomenal and scalable architectures. But if you’re a very small team without tons of technical know-how, you may well do better with a service-oriented provider like Rackspace et al.
Hot backups are an excellent way to backup MySQL. They can run without blocking your application, and save tons on restore time. Percona’s xtrabackup tool is a great way to do this. We wrote a how-to on using xtrabackup for hotbackups.
Just because we love hot backups using xtrabackup doesn’t mean mysqldump isn’t useful. Want to load data into Amazon RDS? Want to isolate and load only one schema, or just one table? All these great uses make mysqldump indispensable. Use it in combination with periodic hot backups to give you more recovery options.
While replication provides a great way to keep a hot copy of your production database, it’s not the same as a backup. Why? Operator error, that’s why! People make mistakes, drop tables and database schemas that later need to be restored. This can and will happen, so head off the disaster by doing real backups.
As an additional note, if you’re using replication, you surely want to perform regular checksums of your data. These ensure that the primary and secondary do indeed contain the same data.
The only way to be sure your backup is complete is to test restoring everything. Yes it’s a pain, but it will inevitably be a learning experience. You’ll document the process to speed it up in future tests, you’ll learn how long recovery takes, and find additional pieces to the pie that must be kept in place. Doing this in advance of d-day is
Different backups have different recovery times. In the industry vernacular, your RTO or recovery time objective should inform what will work for you. Although a mysqldump may take 30 minutes to complete, your restore of that data might take 8 hours or more. That’s due in part to rebuilding all those indexes. When you perform the dump one create index statement is formulated from the data dictionary, but on import the data must be sorted and organized to rebuild the index from scratch. Percona’s mysqldump utility will capitalize on MySQL’s fast index rebuild for Innodb tables. According to the Percona guys this can bring a big improvement in import time. Yet another great reason to use the Percona distro!
If you want to be able to do point in time recovery, you’ll need all the binlog files as well. These are being created all the time, while new transactions are completed in your database. If your last backup was last night at 3am, and you want to recovery today until 3pm, you’ll need all the binary logs from the intervening hours to apply to that backup. This process is called point-in-time recovery, and can bring your database restore up to the current commited transactions.
Don’t forget that lonely /etc/my.cnf file. That’s an important part of a backup if you’re rebuilding on a newly built server. It may not need to be backed up with the same frequency, but should be included.
Stored procedures, triggers and functions are all stored in the mysql database schema. If you are doing a restore of just one database schema, you may not have this, or it may make the restore more complicated. So it can be a good idea to backup code separately. mysqldump can do this with the –routines option. Hot backups by their nature, will capture everything in the entire instance – that is all database schemas including the system ones.
Grants are another thing you may want to backup separately. For the same reasons as stored code, grants are stored in the system tables. Percona toolkit includes a nice tool for this called pt-show-grants. We recommend running this periodically anyway, as it’ll give you some perspective on permissions granted in your database. You’re reviewing those right?
MySQL allows the running of events inside the database. SHOW EVENTS or SHOW EVENTS schema_name will display the events scheduled.
You may also have cronjobs enabled. Use crontab -l to display those for specific users. Be sure to check at least “mysql” and “root” users as well as other possible application users on the server.
Backups are a nit picky job, and often you don’t know if they’re complete until it’s time to restore. That’s why we recommend firedrills above, and they’re very important. You can also monitor the backups themselves. Use an error log with mysqldump or xtrabackup, and check that logfile for new messages. In addition you can check the size of the resulting backup file. If it has changed measurably from the recent backup sizes, it may indicate problems. Is your backup size 0, something serious is wrong. Half the size of recent ones, it may have failed halfway through, or the filesystem filled up.
This is often overlooked area, but may be a concern for some environments. Is the data contained in your backup sensitive? Consider where the backups are stored and retained for long term. Reason who has access to those files, and make use of the least privileges rule.
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