Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob and Mike discuss StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath

Rob and Mike discuss 32 iPhone and iPad Apps that they use.

Rob and Mike discuss a recurring pricing model.

Rob and Mike answer more listener questions.

Show Notes No show notes this episode. Transcript [00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 34. [00:03] [music] [00:12] Mike: Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or are just thinking about it.  I’m Mike. [00:19] Rob: And I’m Rob. [00:20] Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made.  How you doing this week, Rob? [00:25] Rob: I’m doing good.  I’m just coming back from about 10 days off.  It was Thanksgiving last week, so that will give everyone an indication of how far in advance we recorded this episode.  But took a long break, went to San Francisco with the family. [00:38] I was really pleased with how things turned out work-wise, because I basically just left.  I barely checked email.  I only brought the iPad.  A few times during the week I popped on just for kicks.  I did a lot of reading on the iPad, read some blogs and stuff purely for fun.  But I spent maybe two hours total on email over the course and really no major repercussions.  So I was excited about that.  I’m always glad to get back and… [01:04] Like I said, I kept on eye on if anything were to explode while I was gone.  But to really get back and have a little bit of work this morning…I mean I did have 150 unanswered emails.  Aside from that, it feels good.  How about you?  What’s new? [01:18] Mike: I took the family to Disneyworld for vacation last week during Thanksgiving.  I had the pleasure, instead of a Thanksgiving dinner, we had Domino’s pizza.  [laughs] [01:26] Rob: That is awesome!  How did you possibly convince your wife to do that? [01:30] Mike: You know, it really wasn’t that difficult, because when we down there…we have a timeshare, and the way things ended up working out, we ended up staying at three different places.  And on the day after Thanksgiving we were going to have to move to a different place and go to a hotel for just one night so that we could catch our flight out on Saturday morning.  And because of that, we really didn’t have any way to store leftovers or anything like that, or any time to get rid of them.  So instead of trying to do something or trying to figure out after we got down there how we were going to arrange for a turkey dinner or something like that, we just said the heck with it and we went to Disneyworld instead. [02:08] I’m pretty sure it was Magic Kingdom that day.  And it was actually not nearly that busy as I would have expected.  But the day after we went to the Wild Kingdom, which is their animal themed park, and that was even less busy.  There was virtually nobody there, as compared to earlier in the week on the Friday after Thanksgiving.  So it was pretty cool. [02:29] Rob: I have an update on something I talked about in a couple of the earlier episodes, and it’s the audio version of my book “Start Small, Stay Small”.  I finished recording it and it’s all edited, and it’s actually been up for sale now for about two weeks.  I had emailed everyone who purchased the paperback or the PDF version and gave them a deal on it, basically. [02:53] So if you’re listening to this and you didn’t get that email, certainly let me know.  So now I’m offering package deals.  If you get the PDF you get the audio book for another 10 bucks and blah, blah, blah.  But it’s had a really good reception and I’m very pleased that I did it.  All told, it took somewhere between seven and eight hours of my time to read it. [03:15] And I could have hired out the voice talent, but I just did not want to do that.  I really wanted it to be my voice, and I felt like I could do it more justice than anyone.  It’d be kind of like outsourcing my blog; these are just some things that I really want to have my voice to them. [03:29] So it took a lot less time than I thought.  I had estimated 12 hours of reading time.  And then sent it to an editor and it was all [...]

Show Notes Moraware Software Paychex ADP Transcript [00:00] Rob: This is Startups for the Rest of Us, episode 33. [00:03] [music] [00:12] Rob: Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or are just thinking about it. I’m Rob. [00:20] Mike: And I’m Mike. [00:21] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. [00:26] Mike: So for today’s podcast, this is going to be a continuation of last week’s podcast where we were talking with Harry Hollander of Moraware Software about some of the different professional services you may need for your business. [00:37] [music] [00:40] Harry Hollander: The other topic that we’re going to talk about is corporate benefits and payroll services, and maybe then HR.  For us, even though we have five employees, we’re spread out in four different states, and dealing with healthcare, vision plans, 401Ks, payroll and benefits would have just been a nightmare for us to manage individually.  Just the amount of time and effort it would have taken to figure out what to do and how to do it would have been really difficult. [01:07] So when Ted and I hired our first employee, already the two of us were in two different states, and our employee was going to be in the first state, we decided the only way we could do it practically was to get a professional employer organization. [01:20] Basically, what that is, it’s outsourced HR.  It’s been awesome.  It’s definitely a cost for us, but everything related to all of the benefits you would expect if you go to work at a big company, we’re able to offer to our employees and not have to deal with anything in terms of the time it would take to figure out what to do. [01:41] Like, for example, I’m in Oregon.  I have Blue Cross insurance.  Our employees in California have Kaiser or whatever they want.  There’s choices, and we do the 401K plan for everyone.  And it’s been really awesome to be able to consolidate that and not have to deal with it. [01:57] Rob, how do you deal with your own benefits, and retirement savings, and that kind of stuff? [02:02] Rob: Yeah, that’s a good question, actually.  I noticed really early on, before I had transitioned fulltime into the business, I was saving in a personal IRA or whatever.  But it tops out at like, what, three grand or four grand a year?  And I was thinking like, “I’m never going to be able to save as much money as I need to save.” [02:18] And so pretty quickly, I think I did a simple first and then a SEP IRA, and those are just sole proprietor type things.  But they’re very simple.  And even if I hired a couple of employees, I could still maintain that structure.  So I wouldn’t have needed to gone down the 401K route, which, from what I’ve heard it just gets a lot more complicated.  You don’t tend to want to administer that yourself. [02:39] But that is how I handle retirement now.  And I talk to my accountant about that every year.  So if someone’s out there and you’re thinking, “I want to be able to put a lot more away for retirement, more than this $4,000 personal limit,” then I would definitely recommend looking into something like that. [02:55] And then in terms of insurance, I’ve been lucky enough…I did pay my own insurance a few years ago, and I would just go out and find insurance.  Again, since I don’t have employees, I don’t have to worry about real complexity there.  And now my wife has a fulltime job.  She has her PhD now, so I’m able to be on her insurance, which has been quite a welcomed change. [03:14] And then in terms of payroll, that actually was a bit of a challenge, and I was trying to figure out how to do that, and then Mike recommended Paychex.  I think similar to your experience with kind of outsourcing the employee benefits, Paychex has been a godsend.  They’re super inexpensive for thei[...]

Show Notes Moraware Software PayPal Authorize.net 2Checkout.com Feefighters.com Travelers Insurance Lloyds of London Transcript [00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 32. [00:12] Mike: Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product, or are just thinking about it. I’m Mike. [00:19] Rob: And I’m Rob. [00:20] Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. How you doing this week, Rob? [00:25] Rob: Doing pretty well. I’m looking forward to the Thanksgiving holiday next week. I’m going out of town for a week, so gearing down for that. Getting ready to go into holiday mode. [00:34] Sales always are treacherous in some of my businesses during November and December, just because people are off a lot. So certainly no sales the week of Christmas, and often lower sales levels in Thanksgiving. [00:46] Mike: So you just decide the heck with it, and throw in the towel? [laughs] [00:49] Rob: Cash it in. Yeah I’m going to be out of town for a month. [laughs] I’ll see you in January. [00:52] Mike: Very nice. [00:53] Rob: How about you? What’s going on? Anything new? [00:55] Mike: Well, I have a couple of things. I’m still working on that database that I talked about in our last podcast. I’ve come to the realization that I think I actually need a third database, not just two. I think I need three now. And all three of them need to be a little bit different because of the information that I’m storing. [01:09] [music] [01:13] Mike: For today’s episode, we actually have a guest on today, our first guest ever. So today we have Harry Hollander from Moraware Software on here. How are you doing, Harry? [01:21] Harry: Doing pretty well. How about you? [01:23] Mike: Not too bad. Well, Rob and I already introduced what we’re up to. What about you? What are you up to? [01:27] Harry: Just working hard. Still full of great ideas from that Business of Software Conference, and we’re trying to do all kinds of new products and new ways of dealing with the existing customers that we have. [01:37] Mike: Very cool. [01:38] Rob: To give people some background, I met Harry at the 2009 Business of Software Conference. Then he and I emailed and just had some chats over the course of the past year. Then Mike met him this year, and Harry and I caught up over the past year. I met his business partner and everything. [01:55] So we really wanted to bring Harry on, because he actually had some ideas for a topic as well as certainly some good input that I think will be beneficial to everybody. [02:03] Harry: Well, I was hoping I could just ask you guys the question, and then you’d come up with all the answers. [02:07] Rob: I was going to leave that part out. Yeah to really give you the detail, Harry emailed me and said, “Hey would you guys be interested in discussing this on the podcast. We’ve just gone through all this stuff, and I think it might be beneficial.” So I told Mike. I said, “Hey psst, free content. Harry could come on and share all his info,” because he’s done all this stuff. [02:24] It’s going to be more of a typical discussion, and Harry’s just another participant. [02:28] [music] [02:32] Mike: So for today’s episode, we’re going to talk about some of the professional services that you may need for your business. [02:37] We expect that this podcast is probably going to go long. So we’re going to edit it, probably about halfway through. We’ll post it as two different podcast episodes. We’ll make sure that we try and cover everything that we possibly can. [02:48] [music] [02:51] Mike: So the first professional service that we wanted to talk about is getting an attorney. One of the most common startup questions that people have is, “Do I need an attorney up front?” And second is, “Where would I find one?” [03:02] My feeling on it is,[...]

Rob and Mike discuss 5 ways to monetize your product.

Mike and Rob talk about the some of the business differences between web based and desktop software.

Rob and Mike discuss 5 steps to beating your startup demons.

Mike and Rob continue their discussion about the Business of Software Conference and discuss what they would do if they didn't have to worry about money anymore.

Rob and Mike discuss Dell Support, WPEngine, and becoming a successful blogger.

Mike and Rob discuss mainstream media and the fact that they really don't tell you the whole story. In fact, most information sources don't give you the whole story.

Mike and Rob record their podcast from the 2010 Business of Software conference.

Rob and Mike discuss the Kindle Bookstore, inDinero, whether PCs will lose their file system, if email is making a comeback, and whether or not the web is dead.