A laptop, some ideas, and a one-way ticket.
S3stat had an issue that stopped us from being able to run reports during the last 10 days of November. We successfully backfilled all missing data, and were then hit with a related issue that stopped reports for 3 days at the end of December. While we're backfilling that second hole, I'd like to take a moment to explain what happened, what we did about it, and why it shouldn't happen again (for a…
Have you ever noticed that nobody is allowed to be successful on the internet? Woe unto you if you've bootstrapped a successful software company and want to help other people do the same. No matter how straightforward the steps you took were. If you write them down and share them, the Internet will respond by telling you that they had no bearing whatsoever on your success. The real reason you…
Two things worth mentioning about bootstrapping. First, getting a product off the ground is hard. Second, nearly all of your products will fail . The first bit is common knowledge. But nobody seems to prepare themselves for that second one. And when it happens, it often hits hard. Don't give up though. I live primarily on the income of a single SaaS product . It is the fifth complete project that…
Way back when I used to wear a tie , I worked as a salaried employee for a large consulting firm. They made their money by charging their engineers out at an hourly rate on these big Time and Materials contracts, but they paid their employees a regular salary. I'd record my hours on a timesheet so that they could bill the right clients, but anything over 40 hours a week was ignored on my paycheck.…
I've been thinking a lot about Funnels lately. You know, that thing where a bunch of people sign up for a Free Trial of your product, but only a handful of them eventually give you any money? Yeah, that kind of Funnel. The Software as a Service Trial Funnel . It's totally exciting. The cool thing about these Funnels is that you can kinda adjust either end of the thing. You can pour more Trialers…
I take a lot of vacation. I find it more enjoyable than working. That's not to say that I don't like working. I write software for a living, which is crazy fun in and of itself. If you'd have told little 14 year old Jason, writing games on his Commodore 64, that he'd one day have a job doing basically the same thing, he'd have been pretty stoked. But over the years I've found a lot of other stuff…
I bet you didn't know that I used to wear a tie to work every day. Yeah, my first job out of school, when I was working as an Environmental Engineer for a Big Consulting Firm. This was way back in the early 90s when Computer Programming was still this low status thing that people did down in some dark basement, updating the modeling software or whatever while the Engineers up on the 14th floor ran…
This is a technical overview of the techniques you'll use to collect Metrics on your SaaS Trial Users so that you can leverage that information to stop your trial users from churning , which in turn will make your business a lot of money . But be warned: There Is Math Here. If you'd prefer to step back a notch and learn what this whole Onboarding Analytics thing is all about, here's a much more…
Computer Programmers make me sad sometimes. We're so good at so many things, and so good at learning whatever we want, but there are certain things we simply refuse to get better at , despite them not being all that hard, to our own detriment. Talking to girls and negotiating salary are two things that we're historically bad at. We're actually bad at lots of things, but these two are unique in…
I spend way too much time on Hacker News . It's a fun place, and a good way to keep up to date on all the new tech that us developer folk seem to need to know about. But it also leaves a fella feeling like he really needs to keep up with all this stuff. I mean, if you don't have a side project using the latest client-side framework, well, good luck ever finding a job again in this industry.…
I run a little single player software empire, and right now the product that’s paying my bills is S3stat . It’s a SaaS product that processes human readable reports from the basic logfiles that Amazon produces from its Cloudfront and S3 services. It’s kinda like Google Analytics, but for your Cloud stuff. You should totally sign up. But anyway, the way it works is that you sign up for a Trial…
I kinda stumbled into this idea a few months back. I had added a feature on S3stat where Users can create extra logins for other members of their team. So instead of printing out reports and sending them to their boss, they can simply add Mr. Boss Guy to their team and he can check his own reports. Less work for the account user. But it turns out that it was a better idea than I'd thought. Because…
There's something rather romantic about the notion of living on a tropical beach and working away on your laptop. And you know what? It's one of those few instances where the real version is actually just as awesome as the romantic ideal. In fact, you need to quit thinking about it as a romantic notion. It's something you can do. And it's high time you did it. Here's how. Have you noticed how much…
You should probably be working remotely. Seriously. Take a quick look around you right now. Do you appear to be sitting in a felt cube? Does the word "software" appear in your job description? Cool. You're in a position to make your life a whole lot better. I've been working 100% remotely for the better part of ten years now. The short answer for why? Because I can. That's really the single…
Common knowledge: You need to do A/B testing on your site. Why? Because it will make you more money. Cool, but why? Because if your business sells things on the web or otherwise makes you money as a result of people doing stuff on your website, you want to maximize the percentage of people doing stuff. That's where A/B testing comes in. What is it? Basically, if you test one version of your…
We're happy to announce that S3stat now offers support for CloudFront Streaming distributions. We've offered S3 and CloudFront Analytics for quite a while, so it was an easy decision to extend the service to include Streaming . Basically, we'll handle all the setup and configuration needed to get Logging enabled on your CloudFront distribution, and each night we'll download and process those…
I remember the day I got my first Spam post at Blogabond , back in 2005. It was actually kind of flattering, since the site had only been live for a few months. I deleted it by hand and moved on. Things have progressed substantially since then. Automated Spam Bots gave way to armies of cheap workers posting by hand, and now we've reached a point where roughly 90% of new blog entries on the site…
I wrote an article last week describing ASP.NET's Internationalization (i18n) scheme in less than favorable terms, and it occurs to me that I should probably offer up a proper justification if I'm going to start throwing terms like 'Hopelessly Broken' around. As several members of the ASP.NET community so eloquently pointed out in response to that article, ASP.NET does in fact offer a way to…
I've been building websites with ASP.NET for a little over 10 years now, and I have a dirty little secret to confess: I've never Internationalized a single one of them. It's not from lack of trying, I can tell you. I've got a good dozen false starts under my belt, and plenty of hours spent studying the code from other people's sites that implement Internationalization (abbreviated as i18n for us…
About twice a week, I'll get an email from somebody asking "why does S3stat need my AWS Credentials???", followed by an explanation that this individual would be happy to set everything up at his end so that he wouldn't have to hand over sensitive information. Ok, fine. Enough asking already! You can do that now . A little background for those of you who couldn't parse a single word of that.…