Posts from — September 2009

I have had the joy of working on the Delta Squadron launch for the past couple of months.  This prelaunch as really picked up steam.

I really do dig this project.

But when looking over the site’s contents to test the functionality, i absorbed the courseware itself and learned alot.

As i’ve complained about on my blog, I have definitely been in a bit of a black hole regarding internet marketing.  Somehow, I have managed to get out of that hole. Believe me, it wasn’t easy. It took a lot of climbing to get back on solid ground. This is very common in internet marketing. Thousands of marketers are being swallowed up by these killer Black Holes every single day. Some manage to get right back up. But some are completely sucked and can’t get out. You don’t want this to happen to you. No one deserves this! The trouble with internet marketing is that you never know what’s around the next corner, where the dead-ends are and how to avoid those killer Black Holes. Until now.. Thanks to one millionaire marketer, you are now being given the chance to see into the future and spot the dangers in advance: Start with this: http://www.deltasquadron.com/.  You’re going to discover how to make massive cash FAST. And you’ll be given the secret weapons to explode your income. So you’ve been shown videos of how people have somehow made it to the millionaire league. Aren’t you tired of watching them? Wouldn’t you rather be the one ON those videos? Of course you would! And if you start following this guy, maybe you can.. So stop falling into those deadly Black Holes, start getting the real secrets of what works online and start making massive cash fast. It’s totally possible but you have to take action.

You have to start now.

You have to start here:

http://www.deltasquadron.com/

As I mentioned in a previous post, I had to switch from providing consulting services to finishing my own products.  I went on a long rant about how consulting is not a scalable business model for a 1-man developing operation, as time is your primary product and it is not a scalable/automated resource.

After spending a day dropping work load with clients (some were easy, some you’d think we were engaged), I was able to dedicate an entire work day to a project of my own.  I was able to do more work in the 1 day for my project than I had gotten done in almost two months.

I’ve pointed a few of my friends over to the post to get their thoughts on it and gauge whether or not i had been a bit melodramatic, or whether i was on the right path.  All of them agreed that focus is the key to success.  And I have seen that already.  Focusing on a single project has given me the opportunity to pinpoint when i see it getting done.  Pulling out a handy excel spreadsheet, I was able to see myself that just completing this project would net me more money than if i had been doing consulting work the entire time.

Either way, dropping consulting for my own products has been a win.  Let’s wait a couple months and see if that is still true.

As some folks may have noticed, I have not at all updated you on the outcome of my vista vs. ubuntu dilemma. Nor have I made any other types of updates.

Why has this been?

With a scarcity/safety mindset, I took on several hourly consulting clients when I decided to leave my full time job to focus on my own business. 2 months later, with 2 months to go in the experiment, I’ve found that I have made 0 progress on any of my personal projects. It have effectively replaced my full time job with mini-full time jobs. At the end of the day, I’m working MORE on those projects and almost not at all on my own projects.

While it is true that when you have your own company your customers ARE your boss, the entire reason I left the corporate world was to be my own boss and make my own hours. In 2 short months, I managed to build up 6 separate bosses who all thought they were the #1. Pitting them against each other doesn’t work so well. Giving each of them the excuse that I was working for the other is getting old hat as well. They are all (rightfully so) expecting direct attention on-demand for the premium they are paying.

Remedy?

Drop them all. That’s right. I have decided to shift focus back in house. Use the 10 hours or so a day (6-7 days/week) to focus on the completion of my own products. I have 2 that are half-baked. They can very easily become full-baked if i simply remove my head from my keaster and FINISH them. Focus is key to success. Running around like a consulting chicken with my head off is not focus.

To look into this a little bit deeper, I would argue that a successful consulting service IS, in fact, a valid business model. The problem with that though is that the product is quantified in time, the one resource I have been striving to get back. When offering consulting service, you are selling your time. The sales process for this requires 1-on-1 attention which cannot, and should not, be billed for. You want to give them a taste of the product, and get them coming back for more. But to fill a full schedule, you need multiple clients. You need to court them all and give them all special attention. Not only that, as a developer, you need to wrap your mindset as well as your passion around what they are trying to deliver. With 1 or 2 concurrent projects, that’s easy. But to replace a full time income, you need to make sure that you can fill 40 hours at a premium price per week, which means maintaining 4-5 concurrent projects.

Let’s be reasonable. Clients don’t want to pay $5,000+ for development of their project. While marketing, USP development, scalability and usability analysis are all extremely valuable commodities; (does that go there?) all customers see (and say) is “I paid $5,000 (50/hour * 100 hours) for my program. I could have gone to scriptlance and paid $1,200″. They then use that as an argument to grab more billable hours from you. The difference between a techie who speaks marketing and a code monkey is ROI. More of my clients have received the full package and have developed sustainable business models off of my product (time) than they would get from your average “code monkey”. The problem is, they just don’t put the 2 + 2 together.

Greed, short-sightedness, call it what you want. But i’ve seen the same thing happen in the Joint Venture brokering and consultation game. High level marketing consulting is business mentorship and hand-holding. I know several marketers who have gone from simple affiliate promotions to multi-million dollar business models off of the right joint venture/launch broker/consultant. Once they reach that high level, they look back down the ladder and all they see are numbers. “He brought in 500 affiliates, i paid him WHAT?! my list is 300k now, screw him, i’ll farm my own “JVs” from my past affiliate lists”. “He developed 1 program?! I paid him WHAT?! screw him, i’ll hire a scriptlancer for 1/5 the price”.

They don’t realize that time from the right consultant is a multi-dimensional product. There are not enough metrics to quantify consultancy. Fortunately for the cause (but unfortunately for the individuals) I have had the opportunity to see people realize the folly in this way. They discard what they found to be an over-priced resource. This resource is replaced by a more “cost-effective” resource. The bottom line goes down. They blame every other aspect of their business. Fire/churn employees like they are a retail chain. Scrape together clones of “hot” products. All to no avail. Meanwhile the folks who have seen value in the resource have doubled their empires in the last year to the point where they could control entire markets and print money with products they slapped together in a couple of weeks.

Bleh. Rant over. The point here is that the main teaching of many internet marketing and self-success lessons is to build multiple automated and scalable streams of residual income. This means more physical (or digital) resources that may be tweaked and sold. I plead to other developers out there who want to build a successful business. Stop selling your time. Create another product. Perhaps with a stable of 3-4 developers, one can sell “time” as a product. They have more of the time resource to map.  They can then bring on bulk clients and have fall-backs in place. But right now my personal time is the only resource i have and that is not a scalable resource.