Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been doing some (off-and-on, hit-and-miss) research into automating production of The Journal on CDROM. Back in November I wrote about how I had to be convinced to even offer The Journal on CDROM back in 2003. Ever since I wrote that, I’ve had the idea of automating in the back of my mind. And, hell, it’s the holidays. What else was I going to do?

 

I seldom get much real work done over the holidays due to interruptions (like ice storms and family gatherings and even a few birthdays–including my own). So what I tend to do is “free associate”. I work on or look into weird things that strike my fancy and that are very unlikely to ever receive scheduled time anywhen else in the year. This year, I’ve mostly spent the time playing host, creating a home gym (weight bench, Olympic bar, free weights), watching the prices of 46″ LCD HDTV’s come down (but not down enough yet, damn them), reading (Guns, Germs & Steel last week, Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story this weekend), and looking into “on demand CDROM fulfillment services”.

 

What I want in a “on demand CDROM fulfillment service” is someone that can create a package that looks as good as what I’ve been doing at near the cost I’ve been paying. Because while I don’t mind sharing, I still want to keep most of my profit margin.

 

I found 3 that caught my eye:

 

So far, it looks like I’m going to go with CD-Fulfillment. They have a good selection of options, and their prices (for what I want) are very reasonable. Plus, they listened and responded to my new feature requests. But the final decision hasn’t been made yet.

 

It wasn’t until after I had made the decision to automate CDROM fulfillment for The Journal, though, that I realized how much I had come to dread creating those CDROM’s each week. And finally saw how much of a drag on my productivity my weekly assembly line had become.

 

Here’s how:

 

It was easy to lose an entire afternoon to CDROM’s.

 

Further, I saw how I had not taken certain marketing actions for the simple (stupid?) reason that I didn’t want to increase my weekly CDROM workload. I feared losing my entire development workweek to the CDROM assembly line. And, well, I’m not that big of a fan of the post office. It’s nice and all, and usually clean, but it’s a massive productivity suck to stand in line. Even the nifty new automated postage machines don’t speed things up considerably.

 

I finally know what it means to be “frightened of success”.

 

Seriously. The vision of having to warehouse large quantities of CD-R’s, DVD cases, pre-printed DVD wrapsheets, shipping envelopes, and more, and then spending Monday through Friday burning CD’s and assembling everything and making daily trips to the post office scared the shit out of me.

 

Not the least because it sounded a lot like work.

 

And, worse, not work I’m particularly good at.

 

Now that I’m within a week or two of having the process automated, though, I find that I’m much more open to marketing ideas that I had once left alone. For example, as of last night The Journal’s Web page much more prominently mentions that a CDROM option is available. It’s been available for years, of course, but you kinda had to look for it. Not so any more. You want a CDROM? Here ya go! Will it impact sales? It might. Before, I was scared to find out. Now we’ll see if I was right to be cowering in the corner. Or just jumping at shadows.

 

Anyway, this whole exercise has made me wonder: How else am I slowing myself down because of a fear that too much success too soon (does that even exist?) might make me uncomfortable?

 

Definitely worth some free associative pondering in these last couple days of 2007.

 

Happy New Year!

 

-David

 

It rained this morning, which canceled my plans for chopping fallen branches with my new chainsaw (it’s electric, and electric power tools don’t often mix well with precipitation). And so I found myself with unassigned time on my hands, which I spent (as I have often spent such time in the past) twiddling with The Journal’s Web page.

 

A user of The Journal sent me a link to a search engine optimization video tutorial, so I watched that. I normally wouldn’t, but I wasn’t sure that a user sending me such a link (instead of some random person promising me 2 million  hits if I pay them) wasn’t a hint of some kind. Made me paranoid. Anyway, I thought what the video had to say made sense, so I made some improvements (specifically, I made sure each page on the site has a unique title).

 

Then, because another user had brought it up recently, I pondered how to create a “knowledgebase” out of The Journal’s accumulated newsletters and the user email discussion list. And then, using a “custom search” from Google, I created such a beast. Amazing, sometimes, the inexpensive tools that become available when you’re not paying attention.

 

All in all, I’m calling it a “productive afternoon”. I (hopefully) improved my search engine performance (at least a little bit), and I made available the accumulated tips and tricks and explanations about The Journal available with a very simple “Search” button.

 

Productive, yes. Especially for a Saturday afternoon, 3 days from Xmas.

 

Earthshattering, though? No. Not hardly.

 

But that’s a large part of how I’ve grown my indie software business over the last 12 years: A long succession of non-earthshattering improvements.

 

A lot like compound interest, I guess. Even a little bit adds up over time.

 

-David

 

One word: taxes

 

I can hear you now, “Taxes? Saving money? You’re insane.”

 

And, yeah, I agree: It’s not an obvious path. So stick with me.

 

Back during my days of corporate welfare, and continuing into my early self-employed days, I sucked at saving money. Not only in the modern sense of the word, since I seldom bothered to find the best price for anything I decided I wanted (preferring instead to just buy it on sight/impulse/decision), but also in the more traditional sense of the word: not spending.

 

Sure, sure, I would create savings accounts, and sometimes even put money in them. But … life happened, as it tends to. Like when we cleaned out the savings account we had setup for our first child and used the money to buy our first house. “Hey, you want a backyard to play in? Think of it as an investment.”

 

More often, though, the best of intentions provided the least of motivations. Contributions would stop and eventually something would come up and we’d gut the account–because the other alternative was unthinkable. “What? You mean we should change our lifestyle?”

 

The only savings I managed during that period of my life involved the company-sponsored 401k plans (and, yes, I contributed the maximum that the company would match; I was a lousy saver, but not stupid). I did pretty well with those too. Up until the dot com bubble burst, and then when our own bubble burst a year or so later.

 

Obviously, being a fulltime employee, I was paying my taxes even then. But that wasn’t so much “paying taxes”. That was just noting the amount automatically deducted on my pay stub. I never actually held that money in my hand and chose to do anything with it. Which is why I didn’t learn much of anything about saving from my time at work.

 

When I first start selling my own software and games over the Web, though, two thoughts quickly flashed in my mind. First, I declared the income “mine” (under the somewhat misleading title “the company”). And second, following hard after the first thought, came the horrible realization: “I’m going to have to pay taxes on this, ain’t I? Crap …”

 

Combined, those two thoughts prompted me to do something I had never done before: track my income and expenses. And, even more importantly, to start accumulating money.

 

Granted, the small-but-growing pile of money didn’t feel like savings at the time. It was more the hoarded loot of a suddenly profitable hobby. I was still working fulltime and earning enough to support our lifestyle at the time, so there was no pressing need to press this newfound money into immediate service.

 

But that’s not when I learned how to save money. Because even though I was tracking my income and expenses, I still tended to spend all of the accumulated money. Usually in the form of reinvestment into the company, but also a good chunk kicking back to the family.

 

Oh, sure, I should have learned it then, and applied the lesson to the rest of my life, as well. But I didn’t. No, when I became self-employed, life (and spending habits) continued on much as they had before.

 

The lack of learning continued until a big project in 2000 paid well enough that paying my taxes the following year became … onerous. And involved loans. Including a whole new loan against the car we had just paid off. Because while I had faithfully tracked company income and expenses–and shared a lot of the windfall with the wife and kid, of course; I’m not totally selfish–I had totally failed in setting aside enough money to cover that year’s taxes.

 

All I can say is: “Oops.” And: “Shit. That hurt.”

 

That tax bill rather kicked the crap of the 2001. Hard enough that 2002 was hurting really bad too.

 

But pain can be a motivator, and I (finally) started setting aside a set percentage of every bit of income towards paying the current year’s taxes. It took a couple years to get it tweaked so that I was saving enough–without saving too much (I still can’t believe I overpaid my estimated taxes for 2006 and got a return; it’s shameful). In 2005, I posted about my “simple tax plan”.

 

It wasn’t easy, at first. Because there was all that money … just sitting there … and there were things to buy … sometimes legitimate bills that needed to be paid. But we held strong. It helped, of course, that the money was in a credit union account that was easy to put money into, but rather a pain to get it out again (first, you have to call and tell them to cut the check, then drive downtown, find parking, go through security to get into the building …).

 

Once I had learned to save money for taxes, though (and after our personal financial implosion of 2002 taught us that reducing your standard of living (a) won’t kill you, and (b) can even be a good thing), I discovered I could save money for other things. Like for my kids. And eventually even a house.

 

So I learned how to keep a detailed record of both income and expenses, and how to save money.

 

Because of taxes.

 

(sigh)

 

Don’t get me wrong, though: I really hate taxes.

 

-David

 

I wrote an article for The Journal’s December newsletter over the weekend about writing a post mortem. Check it out here.

 

-David

 

 

I know more about using PHP to create Web pages now. I’m not sure how that will be useful in my more business-oriented pursuits, but I’m not worried about it. I’m a programmer. I like programming, and learning new programming languages–and how to use old ones better.

 

Gotta stave off technological obsolescence, y’know.

 

-David

 

Not a damn thing.

 

We got lucky, though, and never lost power. From what I can tell, that means we came down on the positive side of a 50/50 chance (50% of Tulsa lost power, 15%-20% of Oklahoma as a whole). My folks, 2 brothers, and 1 sister all live in or around Tulsa, all with separate households miles apart. I was the only one who didn’t lose power. So I’ve been playing host a lot. It’s been a long week.

 

 

I didn’t take any pictures of the devastation. Just the pretty stuff. Before it all got ugly.

 

We lost an entire tree and large chunks of a few others. We had to clear more than a cord’s worth of wood off our driveway to get the car out of the garage. Before this week, I had never used a chainsaw. Now I own one. And I’m still not done cleaning up the mess on the lawn.

 

At least, being an indie, I continued to make sales over the Internet–even when my Internet access was down.

 

Still looking for lessons learned. I’ll let you know if I find one.

 

Welcome to Winter!

 

-David

 

So many of the bloggers I keep tabs on have cats, and post pictures of them. Sometimes pictures of cats with bacon on them.

 

Me?

 

No cat.

 

I suppose I could borrow a picture of a cat. Or borrow a cat and take pictures of it.

 

No dog, either. Won’t even consider borrowing a dog.

 

Maybe I could post pictures of my children? They’re kinda like pets. Mostly housebroken now, and they can do a few tricks.

 

 

We have a hawk that likes our backyard bird feeders. How about that?

 

 

We chase the neighborhood cats out of the backyard. But we let the hawk do what he wants. Mostly.

 

 

And here’s a picture of me. Sorta.

 

 

It’s all because I don’t have a cat.

 

-David

 

Today I was noticing that payments for The Journal using a check (sent by mail) had accounted for 0.25% of sales in 2007. In Ye Olde Days [1] of the Internet, AKA “the late 1990’s”, cash and check made up a much larger percentage of my sales, especially for my online games.

 

So I thought it might be fun to track the demise of cash and check as payment methods over my own sales history.

 

Year	The Journal	Artifact	Paintball Net
1996-1997	43.15%		61.02%
1998	16.93%		45.16% [**]
1999	8.86%	18.07%	35.44%
2000	7.57% [*]	11.90%	28.23%
2001	6.75%	11.63%
2002	0.83% [*]	11.05%
2003	0.23% [*]	11.66%
2004	0.36% [*]	6.67%
2005	0.27% [*]	5.13%
2006	0.43%	2.15% [+]
2007	0.25% [*]	0.90% [+]

 

[*] These years for The Journal saw no use of cash payments at all. Only credit cards, the occasional PayPal and checks. In 2006, the last year The Journal received a cash payment, it was someone from outside the USA with no supported credit card sending in a couple $20 bills.

 

[**] 23.77% of Paintball Net revenue in 1998 was in the form of cash that came in the mail. That was the oddest sensation, at first. Because I explicitly said “check or money order”. But teenagers didn’t have checking accounts then, and they sure as hell didn’t get to use their parent’s credit cards very often. So they sent what they had: cash. From 1996 through 2000, I almost never went to a cash machine.

 

[+] Artifact had no cash payments at all for 2006 and 2007.

 

Neither The Journal nor Paintball Net supported credit cards when they first came out in 1996. That came only in the last quarter of the year. For The Journal, the users of which are more typically adults, credit card payments pretty much ended cash and checks, and cash and checks all but disappeared after 2001. For Paintball Net, it wasn’t until 1998 that credit cards accounted for more than 50% of revenue. Artifact was more expensive than PBN from the beginning, and didn’t launch until online sales were pretty well established in 1999, so it saw a majority of credit card payments immediately.

 

I’m not sure this information is all that useful. But I found it interesting to compile and review. =)

 

-David

 

[1] Today’s Random Fact: there used to be a single English character that was pronounced “th”. This character had no print form, and so “Y” or “y” was used as a substitute. Thus “ye” is actually pronounced “thee”. Feel free to use this information to mock Ren Faire attendees who should’ve learned better.