In hopes of meeting my goal of saying bye-bye to the day job by the end of the year, I’ve gone and set some crazy goals for myself lately. It’s all good, but trying to meet my goals hasn’t left me much time to blog. Many apologies!

As a fellow or aspiring microISV-er, I’m sure you’ve read over and over about how important it is to not only set goals, but to review how you’ve done so you can decide if you are headed down the best path. So a couple of weeks ago, I dedicated some time for analyzing iKollect.com’s past year (actually a little less than a year) to see how we’ve done. Here’s some of the highlights.

The History First
My wife and I came up with our plan for the iKollect.com website after some serious soul-searching. I wanted to be around my family more so we were aiming for the micro-isv lifestyle that might make that possible. We also knew that the venture needed to eventually replace (and hopefully exceed!) my day-job’s salary+benefits. So from the get-go, it was mostly going to be my baby.

The decision on what to build was made by doing lots of research, and following that with a process of elimination on the dozens of ideas we had thought were decent. After all was said and done, we had narrowed our list down to two items. A Windows based app (I’ll tell you more about that in a future post), or an online application. Because the world is being dragged towards online apps, we decided that was the way to go.

We had several web based application ideas, but in the end, we decided to build an online application for collectors to store their inventories. This decision was based on several factors including (but not limited to)

• lots of potential users
• a fragmented market
• and an inexpensive start-up model that would meet my personal needs (i.e. being able to work on it sporadically, while still having decent output on a very demanding day-job).

Designing the Application
For the day-job, I write Java code mostly against a DB2 database, but for this venture, I decided to go with the PHP-MySQL combination. I found PHP to be super easy to pick up, easy to find cheap hosting, and for my long term plans, I believe it will be easy to farm out some of the work with this technology. I have never second guessed this decision.

In designing the actual application, I did a lot of research into what other inventory applications looked like. I’m a big proponent of programs being easy to use (over adding lots of doo-dads), so I spent a while on this detail. And since I had no money to spend, I made my loved ones become be my guinea pigs (poor them).

For instance, while researching different applications, I had my grandmother tell me if she could figure out how she would enter data into a screen. For screens she could figure out, I would dissect to figure out what made them simple. It was a great process, since most of the designs I showed her easily frustrated her, and were easy to rule out.

Before long, I had a working prototype limping along on my local windows machine. When I showed it to Grammie (without her know that it was a my application, and not just some other app I wanted her to try), she said that this was “the best one yet”. I was happy, and so was Grandmother - I think she was mostly happy that it was over!

So I think my approach in designing and building the application went well, and I stand behind the decisions made in that phase too. It cost me next to nothing (I used an old laptop that I already had laying around, and development tools that were free). And from when we went live in June to date, we have received literally dozens of compliments from our users who like the system and find it easy to use. So I think these early design and build decisions were good ones as well.

Marketing
Marketing. Ahh crap. I wish I could say I’ve done something well in this area. I have tried everything I could from advertising on Google AdWords to contributing on forums to writing a bunch of articles, and lots and lots and lots of other things in between. Yet nothing has given me the results I was looking for. Sure, they all worked a little. But they all were a lot of work, with very little reward.

The only reason I’ve had a steady stream of customers being added every day is because I have a lot of great users who tell their fellow collector friends about our website. Those friends come and sign up and tell their friends, and so on. Thank God for nice people, or I would have maybe 50 people signed up for accounts (instead I have a many many times that).

My wife gives me some of the credit on this one (she tries to make me feel better). She says that it’s the easy to use application and great customer service that has our users referring others to the site. I can see her point, but I feel that all the other work I put into marketing should have paid off at least a little!

To summarize, I suck at marketing. Hey, at least it’s not as much as I used to suck! (just trying to be positive!)

Also, in my defense, unless you are hiring someone to do it for you, traditional Internet marketing (the type of marketing that you read about in every “10 tips to blah blah blah” article) really requires a lot of your time. I feel like I’m whining when I say that my defense is “it’s just sooooo hard”, but there you go. I’m a whiner.

When I was little, my grandfather said something like, “when you are just learning, every failure is worth five successes”…so I may have had several failures in this area, but I’ve had a plethora of successful learning experiences. ‘Nuff said.

Note: Although those traditional internet marketing methods haven’t worked for me, I’ve been taking some different approaches to marketing lately that have worked really well. I’ll share more about these lately, but I can certainly tell you that it’s less about the types of marketing you read about every day, and more about thinking like inspiring and wicked smart guys such as Patrick McKenzie
of Bingo Card Creator.

There’s Money…
I have been excellent about not spending much money on this venture. Even though I have a lot of things going on with this project, there are very few things that have cost me anything. If I had to just fold it up tomorrow, it would not be a big loss. Really! I feel I can pat myself on the back for this one. I didn’t want to bury myself in debt along the way, and I didn’t. In fact, just for the silly little PageRank of 4 that iKollect currently has, the site is probably worth more than I have spent on it. But hold on, it gets bad…

Then There’s Monetization…
There’s a stupid thing to have to admit. During all the early phases of planning out this project, I never thought out exactly how to make the money. I knew I wanted to make money, but I never created a plan on exactly how to monetize the site. Yup. For some reason, I figured that once I had a successful site running (success being measured by having lots of users signed up for accounts and lots of traffic), it would be easy to monetize it. At a minimum, I could slap some AdSense ads up there and be rolling in the dough, right?

What did Ben Franklin say? By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail? Something like that…sheesh. Looking back, I can’t even begin to explain why I skimmed over this important detail. Talk about a rookie mistake!

If my time machine wasn’t broken, I’d go back to the beginning of this project and do just this one thing. I’d spend a lot of time on this task too, as it is extremely important. I’d say to myself things like:

“Okay, I’m planning on having lots of traffic, and if only a small percent of those people click on my ads, I’ll have a lot of clicks, but wait - how much profit will each click bring in? Am I going to earn an easy $5.00 from a click like some of those financial sites get, or am I going to earn just pennies with every click?”

If you are just starting out your microISV, do yourself a favor and don’t be stupid like me. Plan out how you are going to make the money, and especially, how much!

Summary: Hindsight is 20/20
I think you’ve heard enough of my lessons learned, so here’s the summary of my analysis of the past year:

I can tell you honestly now that if I had done a better analysis on the money topic, I might not have picked this project at all. Yeah, seriously. Because in a nut shell, what I have right now is a lot of users, who visit my site a lot, who tell their friends a lot, who seem to really like my site, a lot. That’s great! Except it’s not. Because when they click on the ads, I earn, well, *not* a lot. I’m obviously covering my costs, but in order to be doing really well, I’ll just need another gajillion (or so) users to sign up. Which puts me back on marketing. Did I mention that I am not so good at that?

So although in hindsight I wouldn’t have started this project in the first place, I do recognize that some good things have come out of it as well.

For example, I have learned so much it is unbelievable. No joke. Way more than any book could have ever taught me. If you are a newbie microISV-er and are hesitant about diving in, I think I could give no better advice than “Go for it!” followed by my second piece of advice “It’s okay to Be Cheap!” (sorry, I can’t help it)

Another example of a “good thing” that has come out of this is the rather large list of email addresses of users that actually like hearing from me. That’s worth something right there if I wanted to use it a certain way, right? When I sent out my bulk mailing to all my customers saying that I had made some major updates to the site, I received some outstanding replies. What an ego stroking that was!

But what’s really got me excited lately is the realization that I have a tremendous amount of data gathered about a group of a certain kind of people (data which I have been spending a bunch of time analyzing lately). Put that together with all the emails from people asking me “do you have the ability to do x?”, and you have the recipe for several, even more exciting products. Which is exactly what I’ve been spending my time on lately!

Tags: iKollect, lessons learned, microisv