What’s my search term?
I watched Dharmesh Shah’s excellent presentation on inbound marketing today. His basic thesis is compelling–people have grown such a thick skin towards outbound marketing (like traditional advertising) that the cost of getting out a message has become prohibitive. However, the cost of helping people find your product/site/service has fallen dramatically even as the reach has grown. For most small businesses it is much more cost effective to make your offering easier to find for search engines than it is to blast out a message.
One specific piece of advice he had was to choose a search term that you will own. Do what’s necessary to make your site show up on the first page of results for that term, preferably number one. Pick a term that’s used often enough to create a sufficient stream of visitors to your site, but not a term that is so strongly held by others as to make taking it over impossible.
This shouldn’t be too difficult, I thought. What term do I want to own? No, really, what term? Come on, this can’t be hard.
It’s eight hours later and I don’t have any idea what search term I want to own. If JUnit Max was still going, “continuous testing” would be a good candidate. However, with Max out of the way, it’s not at all clear to me how it is that I’d like people to find me.
This leads to another question–what do I want to sell people when they type in the mythical search term? That’s not clear to me either. What I love doing is programming. I just spent three weeks with teams here mostly hacking. It was great fun, productive, and creative. Do I really want a team here once a month? Could I even get a team a month to come?
The prices for programming have fallen so far that just programming for someone isn’t going to meet my financial goals (4 kids to get through college). For my own satisfaction I need to program but to meet my goals I need to do something more than “just” programming.
I tried the product direction. The variance in the payoff, the long lead time, and the persistence needed to push through to success are all barriers for me. I’d still love to make a go of a product, but it seems a long shot.
Anyway, I don’t have an answer yet. Several people have commented that I whine on this blog. I agree. I’m trying to work out difficult issues, and I choose to do it in public (I still crave attention, although not with the nutso intensity of my youth).
P.S.
Thinking about it now I wonder if “responsive design” should be my phrase. A presentation of mine shows up #1 already. Now I just need to figure out what it is that people might buy related to Responsive Design. Let me know if you want to bring your team to Oregon–the steelhead are biting!
Hi Kent,
I don’t believe you have it in you to just teach just one thing – whether that one thing is responsive design or accountability or best practices for unit testing. You will always teach everything. If I could send my guys to your ‘class’, I’d want them to exxperience total immersion – because that is what you do best.
A little story:
A long time ago, I posted a question about extreme programming on usenet and OMG! Kent Beck answered. It had not occurred to me that an answer from Kent Beck was even possible.
Your niche is that you are Kent Beck.
It probably does not occur to many people that they could send people to come and learn from Kent Beck so they are not searching for it.
Another thought:
When I started out in software, my career plan was to learn enough (and earn enough) to buy a yacht in the Caribbean. I would offer training courses for teams of 6 on my yacht. It would be no more expensive than a week in Seattle or Ann Arbor but it would be In The Caribbean!
A farm in Southern Oregon could work too.
Good luck.
Kent,
I’ve been excited about your threerivers blog, as I’ve been influenced by your writing for years and the direction you’re taking now seems full of potential. Glad to see you’re still pushing forward and challenging existing ideas, including some of your own from the past.
Sorry to read today that you’re backing off from product development. I’ve always had this idea that with programmers hitting the higher productivity ranges (the oft-quoted 10x the norm) ought to be able to churn out and test-market products the way a fisherman casts into a stream. Stuff you’ve been writing lately seemed to confirm this idea of ‘fail fast and try again.’ I’ve never watched you work, but I can’t imagine it costs you very much to develop first versions and release them to the world. What’s this about long lead times and persistence? Can you visit this topic again before abandoning it?
I have the economic equivalent of the “changing the engine while driving on the freeway” problem, where I need to ramp up a new revenue stream while paying college tuition, paying the mortgage, etc. “Ramen profitable” for us requires a big box of ramen. That’s what I mean by “ramp up time”. I need to restrict my product ideas to ones that I can operate without affecting my current revenue.
Hi Kent,
After reading the fourth paragraph in your post… the first thought I had was responsive design. There are several talks on the net that I’ve tracked down of you speaking to this subject, and they are gems to me and things that I watch over and over. I send them to my colleagues, I tweet them out when I find them. Kevin makes an excellent point in my opinion… “Your niche is that you are Kent Beck. ” You bring a unique quality both in your communication style, how you present things, and how you think about and tackle problems that differentiates you from many others.
I personally have been in search of mentors in my profession to grow my craft. I’ve looked both within companies that I have worked for as well as within the overall software development community. Finding mentors that care within companies that I have worked has proven difficult unfortunately. However, your continued public involvement in the software development community is truly a blessing in my humble opinion. It’s like Kevin said, it had never occurred to him that a question he would pose would ever elicit a response from Kent Beck. I understand completely what he means when he says that.
The opportunity to work in a team setting whether it be banging out a product or just simply hacking away at things would be an invaluable benefit for any software development team I think. However, I do see that this type of arrangement could prove difficult to “change the engine while driving on the freeway”. Not enough hours in the day.
Your mentor-ship to the software development community is one that I personally find invaluable and something I would be willing to subscribe to (if reasonably priced). That’s coming from someone that continually hunts for good software development mentors to glom on to.
Keep going Kent, I appreciate everything you post. Thank you. +1 to some variant of the subscription idea above especially if small, optional, and super-easy to activate/deactivate.
[...] read a post today by Kent Beck: The prices for programming have fallen so far that just programming for someone [...]
Kent – don’t sweat the complaints about “whining”. Many of us out here in the Intertubes are trying to sort out the same issues (4 kids, college, etc.). Your ruminations are helpful – keep going.
If you need help, just ask. There are some capable people out there rotting away in boring jobs when they could be taking risks. There are a thousand different reasons for this.
I have no kids and no mortgage, just some student loans. I just can’t figure out what to jump on. If you have ideas, get in touch. Perhaps, with a bit of encouragement and guidance, I can jump in front of the bus and ramp up a product until it could support a team full time.
I know you don’t know me from a hole in the ground, but what does a conversation cost?
gaustin@gmail.com
Sorry if you are already aware of this, but Paul Graham’s essays on startup idaes can be helpfull on ideas for a product, if you indead decide to go through this route:
Ideas for Startups: http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html
Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas: http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html
Regarding more technical products, he claims:
From How to Start a Startup (http://paulgraham.com/start.html):
“No matter what kind of startup you start, it will probably be a stretch for you, the founders, to understand what users want. The only kind of software you can build without studying users is the sort for which you are the typical user. But this is just the kind that tends to be open source.”
From Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas (http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html)
“Work people like doesn’t pay well, for reasons of supply and demand. The most extreme case is developing programming languages, which doesn’t pay at all, because people like it so much they do it for free.”
Hi Kent!
To make a million, figure out how to do what you do for more people for less money.
For you, one obvious option is to teach – via webinars.
For example, you could teach OOD using CRC [or responsive design, or whatever!] for an hour via webinar and conference call. Using google docs for slides and freeconferencecall.com, you could reach 100 students for free. If each one paid $10 for the webinar, that’s $1000/hour. Every participant receives a Certificate of Completion if they pass a test at the end and fill out a satisfaction survey. Advanced training = smaller webinars with bigger price tags. One of these a day = a very nice living
Just an example. What do you love to teach, and how can you teach more people cost-effectively?
Good luck!
You have a unique talent for teaching through writing and speaking. Until you figure out all answers, perhaps you could at least make book-money by doing a series on http://tekpub.com/. I’m a paying subscriber, and I think they’re on to something with their service. The basic premise is high quality screencasts in 1 hour episodes. The series are priced comparable to a book and the idea is that the episodes go into book-level detail.
Thank you for the suggestion, Michael. I will definitely prototype screencasts in the coming year.