Carsonified

Gill, Marty (our kitten) and I just wanted to wish you a happy holiday and a wonderful New Year!

We’re launching two new events, in addition to The Future of Web Apps:

1. Future of Web Design (FOWD)
2. Future of … (can’t tell you yet!)

The Future of Web Design is in London and our other event is going to be in New York City. Gill and I are in NYC right now, pounding the pavement and viewing venues. What’s been most fascinating to me is learning about the business models of venues and hotels.

I love figuring out how other companies make their profits, cut costs and make business decisions. I think there’s always opportunity to gain from other’s wisdom and experience.

Here are a couple interesting things about the hotel/venue industry:

• They’re absurdly profitable on their guest rooms but make almost no money on their venue space. Therefore, they basically give away their venue space, as long as you fill lots of guest rooms.
• Hotels will use their venue space as a powerful way of selling guest rooms
• Venues that don’t have guest rooms look to make all their profit on the food and beverage
• They’ll try to sway you by throwing in larger rooms for you and your staff, if they haven’t sold those rooms already. They’re not losing any money, as the larger rooms would’ve gone unsold anyway, and they’re gaining your good will.

So the most valuable lesson I’ve learned? If you have something (product, service, etc) that’s going unused, find a way to use it to encourage potential clients to do business with you. Make that resource work for you, instead of wasting it.

After viewing the Waldorf=Astoria, their Head of Sales kindly treated us to Champagne Afternoon Tea. It was amazing! I know it was a tactic to help win our business, but it was still wonderful (and ironically, will probably make it more likely that we’ll go with them).

If you ever get the chance to talk shop with people from a business that’s totally different than yours, I’d highly recommend it. It’s a great chance to pick up tips for improving your own business.

Here’s the latest on the DropSend sale …

YouSendIt, one of the big buyers, has dropped out. Here’s the whole story.

It started at Web 2.0

I received an email from Khalid Shaikh, one of the founders of YouSendIt, asking if we could meet up at Web 2.0 and chat about DropSend.

I obviously got excited as YouSendIt seemed like a great fit for DropSend. It would help strengthen their offering while also making a powerful statement to the industry that they’re serious about dominating the large file sending industry.

I sat down with Khalid in the hallway at the conference and we had a nice chat. I broke out my laptop and showed him some of the stats from the backend of DropSend. He was impressed and it was looking pretty positive. (By the way, there’s a great lesson here: potential buyers love quality stats. The fact that we had very detailed reports and graphs on DropSend impressed Khalid quite a bit.)
I figured I’d cut to the chase so I asked “Do you want to know how much we’re looking for? We might as well get it out into the open!”. He smiled and said “Sounds good. Hit me.” (or something like that). I said “In the range of $1M US. What do you think?” He was said he was relieved as he expected me to say something crazy like $5M - $15M.

We chatted for a little while longer and he said he’d make a presentation to the board and get back to me. He didn’t promise me anything but said he liked DropSend and he’d let me know what they said.

Waiting …

And then the waiting began. Khalid emailed some facts to the board, including Ivan Koon, the CEO of YouSendIt. I asked if I could blog about our conversation and Khalid said the board wasn’t comfortable with it (Damn!). I had a couple quick chats in the hallways of the conference with Mike Arrington (TechCrunch) about the possible sale and I said I’d let him know first if they make a solid move.

Well, that didn’t happen right away. Khalid said that if they board was interested, they’d let me know and I could head out to their office in Mountain View for a quick meeting before I got on the plan back to London.

For whatever reason (Khalid didn’t tell me), that meeting didn’t happen. I think things were busy over at their office and they just didn’t have enough time to prepare for the meeting.

Khalid said he’d be in touch and let me know what happened.

Phone meetings

Once I got back to the UK, I received an email from the personal assistant of Ivan Koon, the CEO of YouSendIt, requesting to setup a phone call. Of course I got excited about it and we set up the meeting.

Ivan and I had an interesting chat. He’s a very smart man (ex-Adobe) and I respect him very much. He basically said that he didn’t need DropSend’s technology. Their system is very impressive and the number of paying customers that DropSend would be offering just wasn’t big enough to warrant an acquisition. At that point, my heart sank.
However … they were very interested in our access to the creative market. DropSend has made large in-roads to the design and moving image industry. We have a ton of clients on the Business Plan that are designers, motion artists and creative professionals.

Obviously YouSendIt wants to dominate this market as these are the folks that are willing to pay for sending large files. If you are creating large PDFs, JPGs, QuickTimes, etc, then it’s worth your money to pay for a reliable system to deliver these to your clients.

Acquiring DropSend as a marketing move

So what it came down to is that they were interested in buying DropSend as a statement to the creative industry that they are the market leaders.

And this is where the talks started to break down. They just couldn’t justify spending $1M on a marketing move. It’s just too much. If they needed the technology and the paid customers, it would’ve been a different story.

The final phone call

We setup one final phone meeting with myself and about five of the YouSendIt folks. It was pretty intimidating, actually. Thankfully everyone on their side was super friendly and easy to talk to.

At the end of the conversation, we all basically agreed that the only reason they would acquire us was to make a strong marketing statement - and that’s just not worth $1M.

What’s next?

Well, we’re still in talks with two large buyers and we’ll see what happens. I’m still hopeful that we’ll sell it, but even if we don’t we’ve got two great things going for us:

1. We’ve learned a ton about how to sell a web app / business. It’s been fascinating, scary and exciting.
2. DropSend is still profitable (and continues to increase in revenue)!

We’ll keep you updated.

Sheesh kebab! We are reaping a whirlwind of pain for not having a proper dev environment setup for FOWA.

Here’s the problem: when we launched the site, it was just Gill (my wife and co-Director of Carson Systems) and I FTP’ing files up to the site and using PayPal to allow people to buy tickets.

The new site has a mini web app (”The Lounge” - which allows attendees to network), a proper e-commerce system and a lot more pages than the original. It was designed by Apples to Oranges and built by Dave Stone. It’s hosted on a Rackspace server with Plesk installed.

Here’s the problem - we didn’t setup a proper Subversion repository and deployment script. Updates are a total nightmare now as there are three different parties working on the site.

Plan ahead

Here’s what we should have done (duh!):

1. Setup a Subversion repository
2. Make sure everyone on the team has their own username/pass to the repository
3. Get everyone setup with a subversion client
4. Create a development and live environment
5. Have a one-click deployment setup for pushing code from dev to live

The problem is that it’s a pain in the ass to get these things setup, so most people (including us) don’t do it for every site they have. It’s tempting to just get the site live and start working on it. “We’ll deal with it later!” I said.
Now I know - it’s absolutely necessary (and we’re currently getting this set up for FOWA, Vitamin and our other websites).

I recently ran across Dave Seah’s Printable CEO and I love it. It gave me a great idea for my to-do list.

Instead of prioritizing my to-dos for the day, I give them a point value of ten, five or two. I do this during my 20-minute daily to-do review (where I move items from my “Week” list to my “Today” list).

• Ten points = Things that help me move towards my primary goals (for me and the company)
• Five points = Things that are important, but not vital
• Two points = Things that aren’t important, but need to be done

It’s strange, but I find myself getting excited about finishing an item and getting ten points for it. It’s like getting one of those “1-Up” mushrooms in Super Mario World.

If it was marked “High Priority”, instead of “10 Points”, there isn’t a reward for finishing it. It’s just another thing that needed to get done.

Try it and let me know if it works for you.

If you’re in the business of building or designing web sites and web apps, you need to be using my current setup. A brash thing to say? Not once you see it.

New Parallels Beta changes everything

I switched from a PC to a MacBook Pro about three months ago. One month ago I bought Parallels ($79) and last week I upgraded it to the new Beta (Parallels Desktop for Mac Build 3036 Beta).

It is freakin’ amazing. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to a perfect computing experience. Seriously.

Here’s why: You can simultaneously view IE 6/7, Firefox PC, Firefox Mac and Safari (and any other browsers you want, whether they’re Mac, PC or Linux) on your OSX desktop.

No switching back and forth between virtual desktops - it’s all right there (click for larger image).

Here’s another screengrab to help you understand how it’s working (click for larger image).

In the above image, I’ve got IE7, Firefox PC, Safari and then Firefox Mac.

In addition to this amazing capability (called “Coherence Mode”), its got these great new features:

1. You can share the clipboard between OSX and XP/Vista
2. You can drag and drop files between a XP/Vista window and an OSX window
3. No need to “click into” the XP/Vista window. As soon as the mouse is over the XP/Vista window, it’s active (if you’re in Normal Mode instead of Coherence Mode).

How to set it up

Convinced? Here’s how to get rocking:

1. Buy a MacBook Pro
2. Buy and install Parallels
3. Download and install Parallels Desktop for Mac Build 3036 Beta
4. Install XP/Vista (you need to buy a legit copy)
5. Boot up XP/Vista
6. After it’s booted up, go to “Tools > Install Parallels Tools …” (click for larger image)
   
7. Once Parallels Tools in installed, open up the browsers you want to test
8. Go to “View > Coherence” (click for larger image)
   
9. You’re done! (Click for larger image)
   

Still not quite perfect

As with most things, this setup is not 100% perfect (but it’s very close). If you don’t use the XP/Vista windows for a little while, the screensaver starts up and takes over the whole screen behind the active OSX window. However, you can deal with this by turning off the screensaver in XP/Vista (click for larger image).

Time to switch

There are strong feelings on both sides of the PC/Mac debate, but this is the clearest and most compelling reason for switching to a Mac. You get all the benefits of the beautifully designed and executed OSX interface, with all the access and testing you need on XP/Vista.

I know that not everyone can afford to go out and buy a MacBook Pro, but if you can, what are you waiting for?

I’ve got a really simple tip that will help you with your RSS feeds.

Here is the problem: none of us have time to read all of our feeds. I’m subscribed to around 60 RSS feeds and I rarely have time to read all of them.

Lisa, our editor at Vitamin, had a great idea: Create a folder of the top 5 - 10 blogs that are very important to you. The ones that are must-reads. Call the folder “* High Priority” (the asterisk makes sure it appears at the top of your feeds).

Every time you read your RSS feeds, read these first. That way, if you don’t have time to read the rest, you simply select everything else, “Mark as Read” and move on with your day.

You’ll feel better, waste less time reading stuff that doesn’t really matter and become more effective.