mooders

Prospect - Excellent array of current affairs articles, all of which are thought-provoking.

Private Eye - Long-standing satirical magazine aimed squarely at the UK establishment.

Wired - Seemed a good idea at the time, not sure how much value I get from it. Probably won't renew next year.

New Scientist - interesting read for an armchair science geek, but even I'm wondering if it is dumbing-down ever so slightly these days. 50/50 chance of renewing next year.

I also get regular access to Harvard Business Review as a business school alumnus, which is always worth a read, even if it is just a reminder as to why I took my MBA and said goodbye to corporate life :)

And the app itself is incredibly simple, which makes me second guess myself as to whether it is too simplistic that users won't pay the few bucks I intend to charge for it. I keep telling myself that they pay for value, not the number of lines of code...

The testing worked well on the emulator so I decided to test it over the public network to an actual handset. Only I forgot to advance a recordset through which I was looping, so the code never hit the end of recordset condition. It took me some time to notice there was a problem...

The fact that I crippled a national SMS network for a few hours was bad.

The fact that my company had to pay for each SMS, wiping out out profit for that month was worse.

The fact the handset was mine and on my first date with a girl later that evening (whom I later married) my handset kept beeping with incoming text messages (about 96,000 if I remember) was the ultimate.

The handset didn't have a silent-no vibrate function (either it beeped or it vibrated or it did both) and the SMS inbox filled up after 200 or so messages meant it took days for the inbox to fill up, me to clear it message by message, then fill up again ad nauseam.

Still, I laugh about it now...

Started to gain some traction, but beyond a (very) few amazon affiliate sales, I couldn't really see how to effectively monetise it.

My point is that as much info as the user cares about should be provided in a clear, accessible manner.

Where personal data and/or legal disclosure laws apply, then more transparency and info is better.

Unfortunately, it is not unnecessary to point out that all information of all types at all times should always be rigorously honest. If you're going to tell your users something, be truthful.

I spent a lot of time consulting for, managing projects in and selling into the wholesale banking industry - pretty conservative, slow to change and hard to break into. I found that simplifying both my offering and my message to focus on one or two major points of functionality and pain helped pique interest enough that I could get a decent conversation going, during which I could gently introduce other features and benefits.

In terms of long lead times I would suggest, if it's at all possible for your product or service, offering risk-free trials for a month or two. Manage the install, the maintenance, the training yourself, so the prospect has little or no reason to say no. Once they become users, and assuming your product or service is good, it will be easier to upgrade them to paying status.

A major feature of selling into the B2B space is to know who your buyer is. It is rarely an IT manager. It is rarely an HR manager. It is not always the Operations manager. It is very often, however, the Finance guy. This is not always true, of course, and many people have more or less influence over a given purchasing decision, but you need to know who those people are, what they care about and how to communicate with them in terms they each understand and care about.

To answer your question about how you decide whether to give up, I would advise you to do the above until you are 3-months from zero net worth. At that point, find a paying gig (consultancy, full-time job, whatever you need to do to keep your head above water), then use those three months to go all in on your startup - phone clients and push them hard, phone/email/meet with as many prospects as possible, and push, push, push. If it's going to fail, there is little harm in being harder-nosed / cheekier about the sales process. I would also, in that last 3-month period, look for a buyer for your technology, to at least get some return back on your investment. If, however, you land a contract or two during those three months, you can cancel the paying gig and continue with the startup.

Really good luck, whatever happens! Please do post an update - I think your story will be of interest to pretty much the whole of HN!

If it helps, I spend a reasonable amount of time helping people formulate business and marketing strategy. Happy to offer a specific opinion and ideas (gratis, of course) if you want to email me.

1. How to Get Rich (http://bit.ly/xGdV8)

2. Small Giants (http://bit.ly/WpvGa)

3. The Knack (http://bit.ly/OcKa9)

[no affiliate links]

A warning though - many 'start-up to success' books are, in my view, hampered by what I consider exceptional circumstances in the story. So you'll find a sentence/paragraph/page that basically says "so then I managed to raise $350,000 from XYZ to get me started", or "then I got stuck in a lift with Jeff Bezos for 72 hours and managed to convince him to invest". Which is great for their story, but it may or may not reflect your story.

So if you are going to try to learn lessons from the stories of others, and just to be clear let me say I believe this is a good way of learning, make sure you understand the differences between their story and yours and how those differences change the dynamics of starting and scaling a business.

A little more info around the jargon would be appreciated - what's a board, how does this influence project structure etc.

The pricing is confusing, as I don't really understand how you define a board, so I can't judge whether I need 1, 15, 50 or 32,767 boards.

I know you have a link to FMi, but a little info about you guys would go a long way. Make me feel like there are people like me behind this would help me trust you with my project data a little more.

I do like it though - keen to give it a try for my own projects!

Plenty of white space, clear typography, showing only what is needed, and aligning vertical and horizontal edges helps hugely.

Two tools that also help enormously: http://www.906.gs - a grid system for layout and http://www.colourlovers.com - Colour Lovers for awesome colour palettes.

I've wondered for the last 4 or 5 years since I have had this idea whether this would actually be something to pitch to the retailers rather than the consumers.

I've written about this on my blog, where I have discussed this and similar topics in greater depth: http://www.fourthirds.com/which-idea-to-bet-on/.

You might also be interested in reading Seth Godin's short book The Dip. This discusses ways in which you can decide when enough is enough.

I'm always happy to be a sounding board, in as confidential a manner as you wish, for ideas and offer advice on what to do next. Hit me up at the blog if you want to take the convo further.

Good luck!

No bright orange shirt but I shall be tweeting the day as we go as @neilmoodley so do say hi!

Bosworth/Holland's Customer-Centric Selling

BusinessLink has been mentioned, but I have yet to find the quality of service to be matched to the breadth of services offered.

I do like the idea of a real tech startups vs the rest of the world kind of feel. Maybe we could get a meetup arranged somewhere fairly central - Oxford? Anyone up for this?

Perhaps there is a need for us to band together and start driving more engagement - i.e. really champion a tech startup group?

Have you explored with him, with you in a Coaching/Mentoring role, where he sees himself heading; who he sees himself being; what effects he sees himself making over the next year / 2 years / 5 years / at retirement?

Once you have the answers to those (and he may not have fully considered these things himself, to that degree of clarity and detail), you can then work together to see if any options exist where you both get what you want.

Predictability is a great comforter for many risk-averse types, a category to which the great majority of engineer-types I have known belong.