Carsonified

I’m a huge fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology. I’m also an obsessive reader of Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders (the best blog in the world for productivity obsessed Mac owners).

I’m pretty proud of my GTD setup and I feel that I’m very effective at getting a lot of things done without being stressed out. In light of that, I figured a quick video tutorial of my method would be helpful to Carsonified readers. Here you go!

RSS readers, view the video here.

Thanks to my lovely wife for being the camera woman.

In case you missed it over on Bare Naked App, we’re in the process of selling DropSend. I’ve decided to move the discussion over here at Carsonified.

I thought it would be useful to share some of the questions we’re getting about the app. This way, if you want to sell your app, you can research these things before you sell:

1. What is the churn rate?
2. Are there any patents held by Carson Systems that relate to DropSend? Are they included in the sale?
3. In your opinion, how long will it take for a developer/product manager on our side to ramp up with the application so as to be able to add features, debug, trouble shoot, etc.?
4. How do you handle security of files during transfer and storage? Do you manage SLA’s at all with your SMB clients?
5. I have looked up traffic figures on Alexa for DropSend, do you use a different tool?
6. How goes the process with the other two interested parties?

DropSend Churn Rate

The most interesting figures are in our Churn Rate. Note: Churn rate is defined as what percentage of your customers cancel the service per month.

We’re really excited over here at Carson Systems headquarters!

Our SXSW panel idea “Barenaked App – the Figures Behind the Top Web Apps” just got approved and will be on March 12th from 10:00 - 11:00am.

Hope you’ll join us! If you’ve built a successful web app, are looking for great publicity, and are willing to share vital figures (for building, maintaining, revenue and profit) please get in touch. You can reach me at [my first name @ carsonsystems d-o–t c–om]

Today I checked our bank balance, updated our cash flow Excel sheet and had a financial meeting with Gill (my wife and the other Director of Carson Systems).

Always being pessimistic

One thing that I continually have to remind myself is that cash flow projections should always be pessimistic. There’s just no use in saying “Hot damn, we’re going to be filthy rich if we exceed our sales goals!”. In can be exciting, but it’s useless.

Here’s my tip for cashflow projections: Cut your sales by 1/2 and then a little bit more.

If you’re still comfortably in the black 3-4 months in the future, then you’re good to go. Note: This advice applies to small businesses. If your company is bigger, you’ll need to look much further into the future. Also, if your company is fairly new, you might need to check your cash flow monthly or weekly. (We did, in the beginning.)

Don’t forget the tax man

The easiest mistake to make, is to look at your bank balance and forget that a part of it belongs to the Tax Man. If you don’t account for this you could be out of business before you know what hit you.

Plan for inflation, bonuses and pay increases

When planning your 3-year cash flow projection, don’t forget that you need to give your employees pay rises and bonuses. You also need to account for 3% inflation.

Formula errors are hard to spot

It’s extremely important to double check your spreadsheet formulas. Then check them again. Go through each Sum and Total and quickly check it’s correct. A great way to do this is ask your accountant to have a quick check over the spreadsheet - they’re great at spotting these kind of things.

Share the love

If you have good cash flow planning tips, or example spreadsheets, feel free to share below.

So we’ve finished Amigo … and now the fricken hard work has begun!

I’ve decided to devote 25% of my time (one day a week) fully concentrating on Amigo. That may not sound like much to you, but when you’ve got this many projects …

• Carson Systems
• Future of Web Apps
• DropSend
• Amigo
• Vitamin
• Carson Workshops
• BD4D

… you have to allocate your time carefully.

Today’s To-Do List

Just to give you a peek into my to-do list for a day focused on Amigo, here’s a visual (I use OmniOutliner for my to-do list. I’ll go more into this later on a “Getting Things Done” style post):

Hopefully I’ll be able to crank through these and knock some other things out as well. Time to get on it!

I got all excited about launching Carsonified because it was going to give me a good chance to try out Vox and WordPress.com (the hosted version, not the open source version we’re using here).

WordPress.com and Vox both promise a lot of exciting integration with nifty services like Flickr, YouTube and Delicious - so I quickly registered for accounts on both platforms and started investigating.

Vox: Full of ads

I started off with Six Apart’s much heralded Vox blogging tool. Here’s what I liked:

1. It looks great (you have a choice of a ton of different templates)
2. It’s super easy to use
3. It’s got built in support for embedding videos, photos and more
4. It has interesting social elements built right in (being able to choose who can view content based on their relationship with you).

But geez, there were ads everywhere. I understand that they need to monitize free versions with ads. But why isn’t there the option of upgrading to a paid version without ads? I’d have done this in a second.

So I scuttled my Vox account and moved onto WordPress.com …

WordPress.com wins (Almost)

I created an account at wordpress.com and added my first blog. For those of you who don’t understand the difference between wordpress.org and wordpress.com, here’s a quick summary:

• wordpress.org is the open source version of WordPress. It’s free to download and install on your own server.
• wordpress.com is a hosted version of WordPress that has all the latest bells and whistles

After toying around with WordPress.com, I was completely hooked. Here’s why:

1. No need to download and install the software, create a database and configure a database user
2. Great usage stats built right in
3. All sorts of nifty features that aren’t yet available on wordpress.org (version 2.0.5)

But … (and this is a big but) you can’t change the auto-discovery feed to a FeedBurner URL! Let me explain: If you really want in-depth stats on your readers, you need to use FeedBurner. Every serious blogger uses this service and I find it really hard to believe that the Automattic folks haven’t sorted this out for WordPress.com.

So WordPress.org (version 2.0.5) it is

So after spending a whole day getting the blog set up, I had to ditch the whole thing and start over with a hand-installed version on our Rackspace server. Yuck!

Vox and WordPress.com just don’t give you enough control if you’re a power user. I’m sure that Six Apart (makers of Vox) and Automattic (makers of wordpress.com) would both say that they’re aiming for the mass-market audience and not power users. That’s totally cool, but it means that there’s still a serious gap in the market for a hosted blogging platform for people like me (users who want a lot of the great features that Vox and WordPress.com offer and absolute control).

Someone please build one. Please, pretty please.