My rss feed now has 594 unread items. My podcasts have stopped downloading: I have neglected them so long. I try and keep the list of both of these that I check to a minimum, but it’s getting bad. So, when I have a spare moment, I check the following rss feeds (in this order):

Every week

Seth’s Blog
Not web design, but philosophy about how to think about things. I often find, when overworked, I need to reinforce messages to stop myself from doing poor work. I need to remind myself that the goal is to have my own business and my own startup. It’s hard to take the leap, and Seth’s short posts are perfect mindset builders.

Maybe once every 2 weeks

IT Freelancers and Contractors….making IT work
This blog is fairly unknown, but it’s consistently got good tips for people like me: people running their own IT businesses. Often, the tips are obvious, but he always finds very concise ways of putting things that make sense to me. The posts aren’t too long, so I don’t have to feel like I am invested for an hour.

Signal vs Noise
I love this blog, and they’re pretty good at making their point quickly, but sometimes I find their stuff a bit too varied, and reading one post doesn’t always give me the hit I need. When I’m in the mood for people who draw business inspiration from just about anything, they do a great job.

On Startups
It’s no secret that I long for the days when I can have my own business, focus on that, and minimise client work.  That day is not now, but hopefully in the near future.  Anyway, I really like On Startups.  The guy who writes seems really personable and honest.  And I always learn something.  Posts don’t happen too often, which means that I never feel like I’ve fallen too far behind.  Which I like.

Maybe once a month

Gary Vaynerchuck
I like Gary’s enthusiasm, and his zest for working.  Nothing guilts you into working harder than listening to one of Gary’s rants.

Smashing Magazine
I love SM, and have written for them, and I KNOW I’m going to learn something new, but when I’m uber busy, reading an article that takes minimum 30 minutes mean that it gets relegated to when I have that time to spend!

The blog of Tim Ferris
Anyone who’s met me recently will know that I’m on a health kick.  I drink wheatgrass.  I have a personal trainer.  So, I love reading about the obsessed Tim Ferris, and his ideas on moulding your body.  Good clean obsessive fun!

What about the rest?

I’ve decided to cut down on my client work going forward– less clients, more personal projects, more blogging, more activities and much more education.  I need to keep up my learning, and I have 30+ blogs that I don’t check that I know I should.  Until this crazy time ends though, I’ll stick to my skeleton service.

Something has to give when you’re uber busy, and you find out what is really important to you!

Safetygoat all business gear

But I’m almost an adult now, starting to think about weird things like curtains and pensions, and doing web design full time now has meant that safetygoat can no longer do it all. Thus, I have moved my business life away from safetygoat’s youthful exuberance to Capra, the new safetygoat, just wearing a tie and top hat.

“But, what’s wrong with safetygoat?”, you might be asking.

As I got more serious customers, I ran into two problems with this site. 1) Trying to explain what safetygoat means is not where you want to start a conversation with someone with whom getting their trust is so important and 2) I like to rant and rave and I want to have a personal space to write about all the stuff that’s pissing me off, or maybe silly things that I find hilarious. Not something that’s good for a business first impression.

On the web, you can’t really keep your different web identities totally separate, and I have no problem with snoopy clients coming to read my personal blog. But, creating different personas for yourself, depending on where you’re writing, can mean that you can be relevant, professional, fun and all those things that you are.

And, at the end of the day, being yourself, wholeheartedly is what safetygoat + capra are all about.

Highlights

1. Starting my own business

This year, I went full time freelance.  After a few weeks worrying about getting enough work, I spent the rest of the year worrying about how I was possibly going to finish all the work, and how to turn down work I didn’t have time for without losing good clients.  I have been completely blessed with amazing referrals, the opportunity to work with more talented people than I ever have before, and the opportunity to spend some time working on my own projects, which I feel have really good potential for growth and prosperity in 2011.

2.  Spent more time with family

Due to some unfortunate visa and family issues, I got to spend 1/4 of this year in Canada. Even though I went home for reasons I wish were different, I feel so blessed to get to spend time with my family, see one of my best friends just after her baby was born and get to celebrate my other best friend’s birthday in Montreal.

3. Moved to the country

I have moved out of London to a small town south of Guildford.  Originally nervous, I have now embraced my country living, especially the vegetable gardening and the incredibly friendly people. Hopefully 2011 will bring me further country joys… stay tuned!

Goals for 2011

- Make more money than last year
- Make money from one of my apps
- Develop my corporate website to a full blown agency
- Work on bigger projects
- Develop a more diligent bookkeeping and marketing schedule
- Go on more English adventures

So, basically, 2010 was a huge year of change for me, but 2011, I hope, will be my year of growth!  Happy new years everyone!

A bit of background…

I have had the privilege of hanging out with my 8-year old niece, Abbey, these past two months, and we had a fantastic time exploring the city, and creating, especially on the computer. Besides becoming a pro at photo editing, learning to type and more, I wanted Abbey to learn some graphic design skills, so she could become an all-round computer pro. With the incredible skills and creative development of Elliott Draper, we brought alive, Mr. Snowflakes, a space where we can put our Christmas web givings and fun winter activities!

This year, while listening to Christmas music in November, Abbey drew and photoshopped Christmas tree decorations so that you could decorate and then send an e-card to your friends. There’s a zombie, a safetygoat, Santa’s snacks (for both UK and Canada), Rocky (Elliott’s dog), Dexter (Abbey’s dog) and more!  Mr. Snowflakes is just in its first iteration, but Elliott, Abbey and I are all keen to hear what you think!  It’s free for you to decorate and send as many cards as you like.

http://mrsnowflakes.com

Merry Christmas

The facepainted crew: Don't we look fantastic?

My uncle is a friendly guy, and while I got my goat, Abbey got her butterfly and Bill got his tiger, he talked to the facepainter about her life, her business and more.

Janet doing her thing on Bill

She was originally going to be an interior decorator, she said, had started in fine arts and now she did face painting parties, children’s murals and painted storefronts.  From visiting her website, you can see that she’s grown her business really well into areas that make a lot of sense, and as soon as she gets the Lorem Ipsum off the homepage, has a very nice, clear design (I also don’t really like the use of *stars to indicate things are links* either, but you all know how picky I am!).

Her website. People love her and it's easy to see why

It is so nice to see such talented people using their skills in a way that pays the bills.  She seemed very happy, and there was a huge line to get their faces done.  They had free face painting at the place too, but when you see what someone can do for a few bucks, well, that’s why she can make a business out of it!

No visit to the farm though, would be complete without seeing a goat.  This little guy was soooo sweet, and would let you pet him, and pick him up if you wanted.  Dangerous to let me near the goats… I am in love!

My new best friend. I almost put him under my jacket and took him home!

Happy Halloween everyone!  Love, Safetygoat xxx

Deciding on the name, one month ago

Last Friday (the 15th October 2010) we launched a little web app called Watchy.  I’ve just checked my skype history, and the name and idea started on 15th September.  In exactly one month we built and launched a fully functioning website while working on other freelance projects.

This project was built by a webdesigner, Kat Neville (me), and a developer, Elliott Draper.  We built it because we wanted to, because we love working on things that get us fired up, and mostly because we’re nerds who would rather stay in and code rather than go out with friends.

So, while I have now done the ‘build a web app in 24hours’, a month is a reasonable amount of time to actually get your app built, tested and working how you like.

Why do some apps take months and potentially years to build?  Why do people overstep their deadlines?  Why do some apps never launch?  I want to give you some tips to make sure you complete your web app in a reasonable time.

Maintaining your momentum makes the difference between a project that excites you and one that gets pushed under the carpet.  So, here’s some tips for fast app creation.

Tip 1: Have some skills

Nothing makes an app development drag out faster than someone running it that doesn’t do any coding.  When you’re building fast, you need to be flexible in what features you put in and may have to redesign to make it work.  For example, I am a web designer, who does all the html and css.  It meant that while Elliott was making things work, I could go in after he was done to tidy up without much need to discuss anything.  If you don’t have any skills, you’re going to be sitting around twiddling your thumbs.

What skills should I have?

Choose only one area that is your responsibility, but allow some overlap.  The best team is a small one: one developer and one designer.  Both do the planning, both do the copywriting, both do the marketing collateral.

Be able to compromise, and find a hustler like Elliott

Tip 2: Pick a good team member

Again, a team of two is amazing.  The less relationships you need to manage the better. You will be working very closely with this person, so make sure you can talk to them, that you share working philosophies and you’re happy with the quality of work that they do.  Make sure that they have the stamina to push through and get things done too. Everyone is enthusiastic at the beginning.
Find out if they are good at the details, that they’re flexible to change and able to make compromises.

Finally, and most importantly, make sure they are shit-hot at what they do. There’s no point working with an amateur. Lucky for me, Elliott and I are ’skype colleagues’ (meaning I’ve worked with him on projects before), and since I hate calling people ‘rockstars’, I’ll call him the most competent, qualified, quick and talented developer I know (ninja, obviously).

Tip 3: Be willing to compromise

The reason to have a developer and a designer is that they approach things from different angles.  This is a good thing, and leads to a more complete, usable web app. Your team member and you will not always agree, so make sure you talk through things before you do them.  Let them win some, too.  Make sure you don’t get angry or defensive and back your opinions up with reasons.

Tip 4: Understand the difference between ‘want’ and ‘need’

Maybe something doesn’t work as well as you’d like.  Figure out what is a deal breaker. If things break without one feature, that needs to be fixed.  If a process is a little bit awkward, you could possibly wait until the next release.  At some point, you just have to say, “Go.”  For example, I wanted to do tooltips on the account settings page, as it’s not really clear what the labels want you to enter in.  But, it would have meant a re-jig of the forms.  So we’ve pushed it from our initial release to the next one.  It still works, and hopefully people will feel comfortable enough to contact me if they have any questions.  It doesn’t stop the app from being working.

Tip 5: Start with the bare bones of what you need to make it work

Nothing extends dev time longer than: “oooh it would be so cool if we did this!”  Often times it is more than enough work to get the core offering working and the userflow and experience to where you want it.  Every new feature adds a layer of complexity that you don’t need at the beginning.  The whole idea for our app was to give clients access to their hours.  We could have tried to build it for every accounting software, but we didn’t: we built it only for FreeAgent.  We could have built loads of client management tools, but we didn’t: we didn’t know how other people would be using it, so we’re waiting for that.

Tip 6: Give them something to get excited about

Sure, you’re keeping things simple, and focusing on the most useful components.  But, there’s something about people that melt when you show them something cool.  In this spirit, we built graphs and pie charts to display your data in a different way.  Not only is it really cool looking, but it makes our app feel more polished and useful.

Tip 7: Spend the time on pixels and speed

A sloppy design gives a bad impression, so make your design as close to perfect as you can.  If you’ve done a logo, make sure you’ve spent time on polishing: it’s the first impression of your company. While Watchy isn’t perfectly done design wise yet, I’ve still made an effort to make everything look clean and professional.  Please feel free to taunt me if you see anything out of place.

For developers, make sure your website is fast.  There’s nothing worse than a site that hangs.  With Watchy, we were having some serious speed issues as it grabbed the data from FreeAgent every time you refreshed.  It could hang for up to 20 seconds and was debilitating to the user experience.  Elliott took the time to get caching working so that it’s 1000 times faster now.

Tip 8: Set an ambitious deadline

Deadlines push people to act.  When you’re a freelancer, you’re always busy: if we’re not working on client work, we’re looking for new work.  So, how do you make time for these side projects?  After the logo was designed we put a holding page up with a deadline of 2 weeks: very ambitious.  We even had a public timer (with a watch themed site, you kinda have to) so that we would feel shame if we put it back.  We agreed that we could do a very basic version by then.  And we did.

Not everything worked though.  So, even though we felt a bit guilty about it, we pushed our launch week back by a week and spent the whole next week making sure things worked, adding subtle features that made navigating easier and more.

If we had not set that initial deadline, Watchy would not have come out last week.  It was because we were keen to move fast that it happened.  It takes a dedicated team and a lot of elbow grease to fit it around your other jobs, but make the effort to make your deadlines:  don’t push them back for no reason.  If things aren’t finished, take features out so you can get it out!

Week 1: Main design, logo done. Development environment set up, and stucture decided.  Landing page goes up.
Week 2: Design is refined as well as secondary pages designed.  Main pages rendered in html/css. Development should have enough in it so that front end code can go in.
Week 3: Most of the html/css and development should be finished. Refine app! Test to make sure user flow makes sense, people won’t get stuck. Decide what features you’re going to launch with and remove partially completed features (for example, we decided to launch without payments for our first week, as we felt getting the user flow was more important).
Week 4: Continue to refine, make sure emails work, invites work and cross browser testing looks good. Make sure it’s fast and looks good. Complete ‘about, terms, privacy’ copy

Tip 9: You can’t be everything to everyone

You can’t make an application work for everyone.  And the more things you try and support from the start, the less good the support will be for each of those things.  So choose a specific target market.  For us, we went ultra specific: we wanted to help freelancers and contractors who use FreeAgent. Moving forward we may pick some bigger agencies to target and we may integrate in with other accounting software.  They key is to find out 1) If the idea is good, 2) If you can make enough to at least cover your expenses and 3) you have the basics and userflow designed well.

Tip 10: Have a launch plan

Choose a time that you’re both going to be around with nothing urgent to do.  If something breaks, you want to be there.  If a person signs up, is frustrated and you’re not around, you could risk losing a customer.  Most people understand when stuff is new, that it won’t be perfect, especially if you acknowledge their frustration and let them know you are dealing with it.

Before you launch though, see if there’s any interest.  We had a landing page and managed to talk to FreeAgent on twitter before the launch.  It meant that we had 50 people to email on launch day, as well as got 30 new followers on twitter from legit people that wanted to help us test.  Sure, 30 is not a very big number on twitter, but in terms of quality, they were ace!  Friday, we averaged over 3 minutes per user on our site, set up emails for feedback and had a twitter account.  There’s loads more stuff we need to do, but the initial interest was amazing, and we’ve been so excited about it all day.

Tip 11: Building it is just the beginning

“If you build it they will come” is the most untrue thing on the internet.  So even though we built this app in a month, we will be spending the next few months improving it, marketing it, testing it and more.  Marketing it is not easy, and it’s this effort that means the difference between a profitable, successful app or just one of those ‘cool things’ you made but never went anywhere.

Wish us luck on building up Watchy!  We’re in ‘beta’ until next week, so it’s by invite only. If you’re a FreeAgent user, please follow @watchyapp on twitter and I will DM you an invite code!  (And please, let us know what you think! )

Watchy : due to be launched by the end of next week!

This is a mini project I’m working on with KickCode, specifically Elliott Draper, the best rails developer I have ever met.  We both work for some clients on an hourly basis and they are constantly asking how many hours we’ve worked so far (they’re watching their pennies).  Watchy integrates with your FreeAgent and allows you to give clients access to their time sheets.  We’ve also added a bit of nice visualization tools for the freelancer too. Feel free to register your interest… there’s a free version for everyone!
Visit landing page

Briefy: Basic beta version due in November

Briefy is my baby:  born of the frustration of trying to get good client briefs, I thought there must be a tool out there that can help you build them.  After a search, I found nothing.  With the truly organized and creative dev skills of Dave Sumter, we’re building Briefy so that you can embed questions onto your website, as well as create client specific brief questions based on what functionality they’re looking for.  We’ll be looking for beta users, so please register your interest!

Visit landing page

Festivapp: Beta version due in December

Last but not least, we have Festivapp. This is an iphone app builder for festival owners. I am working with Dan Wichett, one of the most versatile and talented developers I have ever worked with (I also sat next to him for a few years at our last full time job, so I know we work well together). This is his baby, but it’s quite challenging design wise, especially since it’s not just an iphone app. It will make it fast and simple for smaller festival owners to get the technology that the bigger festivals can afford. If you’re a festival organizer, or know someone who is, we’ll be looking for beta users closer to the end of this year, so please register your interest!

Visit landing page

Lots of projects, little time! As usual, I have my fingers in many pies and it keeps me busy evenings and weekends, but I am very excited about these projects and can’t wait to show you working versions of them!

The whole idea

You have 24 hours to come up with a concept (and hopefully a working version) of tools that help charities engage with their customers, raise money and more. They brought in Mission Fish and Just Giving who had brand new apis you could use. And, of course, Paypal has a multitude of tools, including micropayments that make getting the money together safer and easier.  It was great to have the actually developers who wrote the apis sitting right there with you.

We were stationed at the Paypal offices and were buried in copious amounts of food and drink (Thanks so much to organizers and helpers Lorenza @johnxcom @anthonyxcom @amanda Deb Musaab and Corrado… you made the whole experience so smooth and wonderful!).  Everything was informal: you could do anything you like, you could change your team anytime up to 9am the morning everyone presented.  Teams were limited to 4 and your final presentation was 3 minutes.

My team

I was lucky enough to be asked to come, so finding a team was no problem.  Here’s our team:

1. Michael Heap, a brilliant developer and problem solver.  If I came up with anything, he always said sure.  And he did it. Definitely the hero of the group!

2. Todd Francis, likewise brilliant developer.  After some frustrations trying to get complicated apis working, really cleaned up getting the scenarios and database logic working really well.

3. Carolynlyn, an ideas lady who researched out some great scenarios and found some great apis and resources for the team to use.

4. Me, who did the design and html/css and basically badgered the two devs constantly to implement changes (I should have said yes to being involved in version control so I didn’t have to wait for Michael or Todd to go use the toilet so I could steal their machines).

We were up until almost 3am and got to about 80% finished.  From all the redbull I drank, unfortunately, I was unable to sleep.  I got back up at 6am and found many of the other teams hadn’t bothered with the sleeping bit.  I spent my time cleaning up the designs and adding in dummy facebook/twitter integration. The team was up again at 7:30, and we worked pretty much solid until cut-off time at 1:30pm.  Around mid morning, deliriousness set in.  The last 20% truly takes the most time! Of course, it’s still not perfect!

Our idea

Very Hard Choices homepage: You can only use it with Facebook

We wanted to find a way of engaging the younger audiences and make the woes of charities feel more personal.  So we created an integrated facebook Choose Your Own Adventure game called Very Hard Choices (you can actually play it now).  The idea is that you become homeless, and your girlfriend/boyfriend are there, and a few of your friends are too.

Your friend asks if you boyfriend/girlfriend had hurt you. Eventually we want the head on the main image to be yours and your friend's too.

You go through the adventure, making hard choices that people face on the street.  Eventually you either make it off the street or die.  We then explain that homelessness is no game and prompt them to make a donation to a homelessness charity and share your survival rate on twitter or facebook.

We pull in their birthday if they've displayed it on the facebook page to show a proper gravestone. We then give them options to share their survival rate and donate to the charity.

We really enjoyed testing our own app even, which I think says a lot for its stickiness: we wanted to know the fastest way to die, and to figure out all the ways to the end point.  Everyone who tried our adventure game loved that it was personalized and it was great fun to build!

The hack day is done…

There’s only so much you can do in 24 hours, and I especially want to thank the two devs who not only had amazing ideas, but also performed miracles in getting this up and working.  We’ve set up a proper backend so we can add in new stories, new loops and lots more (there were only so many story lines we could finish up in the time we had).  It is also easy to add in other types of stories for different types of charities.

Here is an example of a few other ideas we had for story lines. The choices are endless really.

And the winner is….

Not us, unfortunately. We’re very pleased with our efforts and while we would have liked to win, I’m not too disappointed (honestly!  Even with my hugely competitive ego!).  There were so many good ideas, and I do believe CharityBox (where you give affiliate money from vouchers to charities instead of the affiliates) was the best hack and deserved to win.

All the winners had great hacks too: people really made a big effort to make their projects amazing (and hilarious, including CharityShock, where you could shock someone by donating money, as well as BlessTheWeb where you can confess your sins and repent with money).

Another non-winner I really liked was Pitchinin, which gave artists the opportunity to give away a song to their fans in return for donating to a charity.  So, if I had a song, I could say that if you raised £1000, it would be unlocked for everyone who has donated.  I enjoyed talking to @kzhu about his plans for it, so I hope he gets the development funds in to make it happen.

Many of the people I spoke to said that they really wanted to continue building on their projects and get them to proper production quality.  There was so much condensed passion and enthusiasm in that room (probably fueled by all the wonderful free food and drink provided by Paypal), but I’m looking forward to see what people actually do. I know we want to continue working on our project, so watch this space.

I know it’s cheesy, but I’m going to say it: I feel like I won anyway, knowing that we had a great idea, it was well implemented and useful to charities.  For a first hack day, I can’t really ask for more!

Now: time to catch up on my sleep!

Everyone wants to be able to choose what they listen to, read, watch etc, right?  We can discover more depth to every story by being able to research and find different view.  But I think that, like in the consumer economy, too many choices paralyze us and cause us to never make any choices.

No choice is sometimes much better.

Let’s take me as an example.  I have started working from home.  I read blogs, people tell me things over twitter, but it turns out, I had no idea what was going on in the world.  It was 3 days before I found out about the volcano in Iceland.  So, how does someone who is connected to the internet, who reads a lot, miss out on what’s happening?  It’s because I was choosing things I wanted to read, and the breath of what I found interesting enough to click on was so narrow.  I would click on links about usability studies, or new ways to create web apps.  Real world, interesting things outside the scope of my narrow world have been forgotten, even though I really am interested in them.  I was out of touch;  this needed to be fixed.  How do we get the knowledge in?

Experiment stage 1

In order to remedy this, I have decided to try and read more news:  I would check the guardian.co.uk and bbc.co.uk every morning before work.  It didn’t work: I would remember some days, and I would still pick which articles I found interesting.  I was still not getting a very good breadth of knowledge.  I could choose to read things or not.  I had the choice, and I had better things to do.

Experiment stage 2

I then tuned the radio to bbc radio 4 in the kitchen (the talk radio show for the UK).  Because I work from home, I only listen to it when I’m preparing meals or washing the dishes.  Just today, I got to hear about:

1) A panel discussing the 1970 Miss World Contest, where Jennifer Hosten from Grenada won, where South Africa sent a white and black contestant, and where women’s rights protests occured.  I got to listen to the experience from Jennifer Hosten’s perspective (who actually went on to study Political Science in Ottawa, where I’m from!), and hear about Bob Hope getting heckled off the stage.

2)  Learned a bit about the Mitford Sisters, a group of 6 strong-willed sisters, 1 of whom was friends with Hitler, one of whom was a fascist supporter.  All this from the youngest of the sisters (who is now 90) at the beginning of the war.  You not only hear about the facts, you get to hear about their personal relationships.

About half the programs that I listen to on the radio now I would never have chosen for myself.  Because it is an old radio that’s hard to tune (especially out here in the country), even if I’m not originally interested, I stay put.

Media choice makes you stupid

Because you can often decide in seconds to flick away, we are learning very little about things that we know nothing about.  Why?  Because it’s hard work absorbing new information, and most of us in the web community spend our days trying to keep up with all the technology.  We feel full of new information already.  The problem is, it’s got no depth.  We end up incapable of talking about anything outside our little world of interests.  While I know many people are diligent about reading the papers, I expect you still choose which articles to read, to your detriment.

When we get comfortable learning only things we already know (olds), we run the risk of losing our curiosity for news.  In an industry where we talk about finding inspiration from everywhere, maybe limiting our media choices, forcing ourselves to learn something different, can make a real difference.  I know that my life has become so much richer since I have started listening.

(I also am going back to listening to cbcradio3, Canada’s independent music station, as I have got stuck in a rut on my music too.)

Question: do you participate in limiting media experiences (ie. ones where you have little choice what you listen/watch)?

I was fully booked in for work this week when I checked my calendar last Friday.  It was a well-paid week.  I am not taking on any new clients, as I’m technically overbooked.  I really love the projects I’m working on right now too.  They’re challenging, interesting, and I like the people.

But, with the exception of regular maintenance stuff, all my booked in projects have been hit with delays.  Most of them are understandable, and I’ve agreed to delay them. So, I’ve gone from a well-paid week, to making practically nothing.

Should you charge?

With clients that constantly change their schedules, I sometimes tell them that if they continue to schedule in time with me, I’ll have to charge them for that time, even if they don’t use it.  My problem is, I feel guilty about this: I’m not working for them then.

But, at the same time, I want them to understand that it’s really inconvenient for me to not be able to depend on the work and be able to organize my time:  I could take on other projects in those days.  This week has been the first time it’s been an issue: usually I’ve got enough projects on the go that I can fill my time and offer them a little flexibility, which works well for everyone.

The question

Do you charge?  How much do you charge?  How do you let them know, to encourage them to be more diligent in their organization?  Or, is it merely the price you pay for being a freelancer?