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Skills, Artistry, and Competition
I share almost everything I know concerning successful website and business operations. I even share that knowledge with my competition when they ask. I sometimes volunteer to share trade secrets with my competition. I often publish articles or instructional pages with specialized instruction which most people in our situation would not share without charging for it.
We not only sell website services, we also sell webmaster training instruction. So why in the world would I GIVE away what I’m selling? Wouldn’t that undermine my profits and train my competition for free?
That has to be one of the biggest myths of paranoia in the business world. It is perpetuated by people of limited imagination, who think that the only way to do business is the same way everyone else is doing business. When you are competing with a gazillion other businesses and have not truly differentiated your business with a good dose of the best elements in your personality, and when you have failed to truly connect with your customers or clients, then yeah, it is a bad idea to be too free with your competition.
But when you are not just one of the numbers, but something unique, and when your business is as much YOU as it is standards of excellence, and ESPECIALLY when you’ve diverged from the other lemmings in your particular professional arena to develop NEW and BETTER standards, or more effective policies and procedures that give you an edge and make your clients feel the difference, then you can share your expertise freely, and you’ll have little to fear from your competition.
Why is that?
Skills are just skills. If you learned them, then anyone else can. There is no issue of competition there. If you don’t kindly help someone when they ask, and they are trying to learn the same skills you already learned, then they’ll just go learn them somewhere else anyway. So there is no real profit or benefit in NOT sharing them.
There IS a benefit in sharing them. You establish yourself as THE go-to expert. Many of those you help will soon be approaching you with subcontracting proposals, or referring clients or customers to you when they cannot meet their needs themselves. Plus you get a reputation as a REALLY NICE, and HIGHLY QUALIFIED person. Yes, your competition will in fact help you gain that reputation, and to uphold it. They will quote YOU instead of other experts in the industry.
So no need to be paranoid about sharing skills. Be nice, and helpful, and it will help you more than it harms you.
Beyond skills, a wildly successful business also requires something totally unique and beyond the norm. For us, it was development of a totally new and separate standard for small businesses, as differentiated from corporate businesses, because the website needs were totally different, but this was almost never acknowledged by web professionals as a group, and when they did, they merely scaled down the same old corporate standards, which in fact, did NOT scale down effectively. This is the thing that makes you a BETTER option than your competition.
So, with the first thing, that unique thing that you developed and created, those individual methods for operations that separate your success potentials from your competition. The stuff of which trade secrets are made. The same question arises as for skills. Won’t sharing them hurt you and get you more competition?
Not really. In fact, the same thing is true. YOU are the one who developed it. That makes you the undisputed expert. You’ll get MORE people who will cooperate with you, make referrals, and improve your reputation than you will those people who would cause harm to your business by what you share.
Everyone thinks that sharing that kind of information will backfire and someone will steal their concept and set themselves up in direct competition, claim the fame for it, and sink the originator of the idea.
That is actually EXTREMELY rare. Pretty much the ONLY time it happens is when someone has a good IDEA, but no ability to actually do anything with it! If you are already successful based on some unique changes you’ve made to your business, then you are not in that category.
In our years in business, there have been people who tried to immitate us, or even to steal our systems and pass them off as their own. So why am I still recommending sharing openly?
Because the people who are the type to try to steal something rather than build their own, invariably lack the self-discipline and determination to actually turn what they stole into anything effective. They think they can steal it, slap up a quickie website (they’ll NEVER take the time to build a good one), and that the money will pour in without any effort on their part. They are completely blind to the fact that even if you have a great product or service, it takes a LOT of work, patience, repetition of boring tasks, and time, to actually earn anything from it. They make a hasty slapdash effort, and never even climb out of complete obscurity. No one else EVER knows that they have what they stole, because the very characteristics that caused them to steal it will ensure that they never make a profit from it.
You might also feel that putting it out there in print will just mean that other people can read all about it and never have to pay you for it, especially if you are selling training on the topic. Again, there is no need to fear that it will decrease your profits, quite the contrary.
A body of toothsome information validates your expertise. It helps people realize that you know things they don’t, and that they CAN’T find elsewhere. If you hide all the really juicy bits, then they have no reason to feel that you know anything that every other of your competitors does not know.
When you write about just a bit more – and actually start sharing those secrets, then people really understand the depth of your expertise and how different you are from all the rest. Oh, a few will read that, and feel it is all they need. But the hungry ones – the ones you REALLY want as students, they’ll want it straight from the teacher. They’ll realize that they can learn it much better from an organized training program than they can from digging through a website to get it bit by bit, or having to assemble it and sift the quality from multiple websites. It will increase your client base, not decrease it. And it will increase your reputation, not undermine it.
So, again, you really have nothing to lose, and a great deal to gain, by freely sharing information, including your own specialized knowledge, even in referenceable ways.
The last element that makes your business successful is your personality, or your artistry. This is the part that no one else CAN immitate. It is all you, and comes from something within you that you cannot teach to anyone else, nor can they successfully copy it. They’ll inject their own personality into it, and even if they INTEND to become “you”, they’ll persist in being themselves, and they’ll appeal to a completely different clientele than you do. So no need to fear that – you are each an artist, with your own style, and customers like what they like, and having more or less competition isn’t going to make some personality types want to work with YOU any more or less. It is beneficial to have good associates to refer problem clients to – a client who just cannot work well with your style may do well with the style of one of your competitors, and by referring out, you get out of potentially difficult situations and still come out looking good.
Now, I’m not recommending that you give away your product, or that you give away, for example, your website content or other intellectual or material assets. THOSE, they have to get on their own. I would not give away my templates, systems, site structures, custom software, or other items that I typically charge for. I don’t print my curriculum online. But I share most of the secrets in it, here a little, there a little. That sharing goes on working for me night and day, convincing people to invest in our expertise.
There is no need to be paranoid of your competition. Make friends of them instead, cooperate with them, and build a professional network that benefits all of you. There is far more to gain by being open and helpful than there is to lose.
This is true of your customers as well – be willing to educate them into being informed customers so they know how to make good choices. If they are do it yourselfers, be helpful, and answer short questions (there comes a point where you can’t answer time consuming ones, but up to that point, be helpful and generous). You don’t have to give away any hands-on work – but answer emails kindly and generously. It pretty much always comes back to your benefit.
I’ve answered questions for total strangers countless times. Some I never hear from again. Others come to me later for services when their circumstances change – sometimes they come to me many years later. They remember me because I helped them when no one else would. Often, it comes back to me by way of a referral. Someone calls, again, often many years later, and says that they were referred by someone I helped, who could not say enough good about me. They validate my expertise, my integrity, and assure the prospect that I won’t charge them unreasonably.
You can’t buy that kind of advertising.
Once you rid yourself of the resentment of your competition, and open up to cooperation, you start an amazing synergy that helps all of you be just a bit better than you could be on your own.
And there isn’t ANY reason to be paranoid about THAT!
Our company is now offering Cottage Industry Consulting, to help businesses identify and encourage artistry in their own business.
Content Marketing
About three or four years ago, online networking changed. We used to be involved in several forums and lists, where we were able to contribute to lengthy conversations, give advice, help people with website problems, and generally make ourselves look like the knowledgeable experts we are. That interaction and relationship development yielded a steady stream of clients, already pre-sold on our services. They knew we were good, and we were the people they wanted to hire, before we even knew they wanted to hire us.
Then FaceBook and Twitter took over. The popularity of instant and short interaction superceded the appeal of lengthy conversations. Now, networking is almost impossible online, because everybody wants interaction condensed into 144 character blurbs. The emphasis of social has trumped business interactions, and the ability to network through these venues for purposes of gaining pre-sold clients is weak in comparison to the old forum formats. It is fickle, capricious, impatient, and since it has the attention span of an immature gnat, using it with any degree of effectiveness (and it may not be a lot), is completely EXHAUSTING, because you have to keep finding “new” and “fresh” ways to get in front of people and get them to notice you among the SEA of other people screaming for their 2 seconds of attention. Oh, there are people who will hotly disagree with that assessment, but they are pretty much ALL people who are selling something related to marketing with FaceBook or Twitter.
Truthfully, this change threw us for a loop. We didn’t realize it right away though, because we still had lots of momentum going from the previous venues, even though they had dried up. We were also doing a lot of local networking through teaching classes, giving presentations, and attending luncheons and after-hours events.
It became baldly apparent after we moved and those local opportunities were gone, that we had to reassess, and figure out what was still working.
About that time, I decided to consolidate some of my domains. I mean, 86 active websites is a bit much to manage when your life is getting busier for other reasons. So I started letting some of them go. That had more of an impact on our business than any other single change we had ever made. Customers and clients simply dried up.
The reason is Content Marketing. I had many websites that were instructional sites on various topics related to our business. I blogged, and I wrote extensively. All of those sites were interlinked with our main websites, and all of them brought us several clients per year.
Now, you must understand, I am NOT talking about quickly content scraping sites, nor am I talking about sites where you post the same overused articles everyone else is posting, or where you rewrite badly written PLR articles (ok, so they are ALWAYS accurate, ALWAYS grammatically correct, but COMPLETELY unoriginal, and lacking in inspiration or creativity). I am also NOT talking about “Article Marketing”, where you paste your articles into article sites that the search engines now completely ignore.
No, what I am talking about is 100% hand-written, unique, creative, personable, helpful, and informative information, which you put into sites that YOU own.
You, saying what no one else is saying. Writing about answers to the questions your customers keep asking. Writing about your expertise, about things your customers need to know that they might not think to ask. Having fun with it, being yourself.
That kind of writing is like candy to the search engines. They LIKE original stuff. And it is great for capturing less common search terms, which make up the BULK of organic traffic searches. That random, unpredictable, completely spontaneous happenstance that occurs from people just being people, rather than people trying to game the computers into abnormal results. You just create good stuff, and then sit on the sidelines and scrape up the leftovers – which, in the world of the web, are an AWFUL LOT of good quality customers and clients.
This kind of marketing provides a wide range of benefits:
1. About 1% of the search terms used in any given industry are responsible for about 10% of the traffic. And EVERYBODY is going after that SAME 10%! There are a gazillion other terms, which you don’t even have to PLAN for, but which occur naturally in well-written content, which are responsible for the other 90%. They are like seagulls, all fighting over a whale carcass, so thick that most of them can’t even get a nibble, when the whole beach is strewn with fish, which are being ignored as everyone fights over the whale. Forget the whale. Clean up on the fish and it is easy pickin’s in comparison!
2. The clients and customers you get are the ones you WANT. They are ones that looked at the most popular options and DID NOT WANT THAT. So if you are offering something really special, you don’t want people who don’t care about how special it is. They won’t be happy customers. You want the ones who KNOW they want something better, and content writing appeals to them. They’ll dig a little deeper, find you, and be glad they did.
3. The customer is pre-sold. They KNOW you know your business. So you spend less time persuading them of your value, and you are able to get right to closing the deal.
4. You don’t even have to come UP in the first ten pages of the search engines for your main website, and you don’t have to pay for costly ongoing SEO (a single SEO review and optimization, with a short training session is sufficient). If you have other sites referring traffic to it, or other sites helping with the sales process, your main website can have relatively low traffic, and low search engine placement, and you can still clean up. We once had an “SEO expert” criticize our site, and ask us how we got any customers. I told him how I did it, and he flatly told me that there was no way I could make money unless I was showing up on the top positions for the top keywords on my site. He was wrong. Well written content is naturally optimized for the less common search terms, and when you get enough content, it sits there working for you regardless of your position for top keywords.
5. The longer you do it, the more power it has. Search engines like new and fresh content, but they also like old and stable content, as long as it is unique and good quality. So when you write good stuff, and keep adding to it, the power of your writing just grows and grows. Each article is a drop in the bucket, and adds to the existing power. It does this even if each article gets relatively little traffic.
6. When you have content writing as a cornerstone of your marketing, you can feed it automatically into Twitter or FaceBook, via RSS, and increase the exposure. Write once, and automatically cover multiple areas of contact.
Without that, you end up having to find ways to be clever and witty and to market in little sound bytes, instead of being able to be a complete person.
7. A single exposure is sufficient to convert a customer. With most types of marketing, it takes seven or more exposures to a marketing message or individual before someone decides to act. With content marketing, this dynamic changes. Because the exposure is more detailed and more comfortable (they do it on their terms), and because they looked for an answer and YOU provided the one that helped them “get” it. A single article that helps someone understand, or teaches them something they value, or makes them laugh, or which echoes their own feelings on a subject, can do more to persuade in a single encounter than multiple exposures to other types of advertising.
Many things about the nature of the web have changed in the last several years. The nature and expectations of the average web user have changed. But Content Marketing has not changed. Write good stuff. Post it to your own website or blog. Set up more than one, organized by interest, and interlink them. In about a year, it will start to pay off, and it only gets better from there.
Content is still King, and a nice informative or humorous article with an ah-ha moment still has more power to bring in paying customers than any other method of marketing that is not face-to-face.
Good Germs, Bad Germs
I ran across a statement in a study recently that discussed the ways in which farm kids were healthier than city kids. Lower infection rates, and lower allergy/sensitivity rates. I hope nobody takes offense at the labeling of “farm kids” and “city kids”. I offer no definitions, so you are free to fit in whichever category you like!
Well, there’s usually two big differences between farm and city kids.
1. They more often eat food produced at home. That is, food that is NOT sterilized to death, and coated in preservatives, detergents, and artificial colors and flavors, with the good stuff stripped out and a handful of enrichments thrown in.
2. They are usually exposed to WAY more natural germs, allergens, and things like saliva, manure, blood, raw milk, etc.
So how can it be, if they are AROUND more stuff, and that stuff is (according to the USDA), not as clean, how can they be healthier?
For one, the absence of even a portion of the chemicals that load your food is a health boon to anyone. That alone will strengthen your immune system and reduce your allergies. Commercial organic foods are still laden with a host of contaminants, but they are usually a fair bit better than non-organics, so this may be a way for you to test and see if this makes a difference for you.
But beyond that, it is that very EXPOSURE to germs that MAKES farm kids healthy.
Not all germs are bad. In fact, about half the germs out there are actually GOOD for you. Another 40% or so are neutral – they don’t hurt you or help you. The other 10% are the ones that give germs a bad rap.
The good news about those bad ones is, that most of the time, even THEY are harmless – because you are usually not exposed to a lot, and you normally have enough good bacteria to reduce the effect before your immune system even has to handle it, and what is left is easily dispatched.
So from that paragraph, maybe you start to understand that even bad germs really aren’t that much of a threat most of the time. And there are more factors than just your immune system at work. And one of those factors is….
Ta-da…
Germs!
That’s right. Good germs.
Normally, the world has a pretty good complement of good and bad germs. And the good germs do a lot to keep the bad germs in check. They are a great ally. This is why traditional fermented or aged foods are able to be safely consumed, even though they’ve not been refrigerated. Traditional fermented and aged foods include:
- Sauer Kraut
- Pickles (salt brined pickles, not the vinegar kind)
- Sourdough Bread
- Yogurt
- Buttermilk
- Cheeses
And all kinds of other ones that most people don’t know about anymore, but which used to be traditional foods in ethnic homes across the world.
If you keep conditions right, the good germs will grow, and the bad ones won’t. If you leave it in the wrong conditions, the bad ones will grow and things will get nasty. So certainly, there are rules about keeping those bad ones from taking over.
Recently I made cheese. I left fresh, unpasteurized goat milk out on the counter for about three days, until it was nicely curdled and separated, and smelled about like cottage cheese (at this point, it was safe to drink – it is just buttermilk – that is how buttermilk is traditionally made). Then I dumped it into a pot, heated it up to a certain point (which, incidentally, killed all the good germs in it). I added some lemon juice, stirred it until it curded up, and then strained it. The lemon juice went out in the whey, leaving me with cheese that tastes a lot like very expensive chevre.
When I recounted this on FaceBook, someone expressed surprise. “Won’t leaving the milk out make it get sour?” Yes, it does. But…. If you leave out raw milk, you get buttermilk because of the natural bacteria – those natural bacteria grow faster than the opportunistic bacteria floating around in the air. If you leave out pasteurized milk, you get nasty sour milk, because all it has are those opportunistic bacteria. Raw milk naturally contains a lot of GOOD bacteria, so even if it is left out, it is still very healthy because it just means you get more good bacteria in it. Beyond a certain point it will get nasty – when the good bacteria use up all the available food for themselves, the bad bacteria will move in and feed on the good bacteria and what is left.
Outside the body, germs do some pretty cool things, besides just making interesting patterns on things you leave too long in the fridge (please don’t eat those things, they are NOT the good kind of germs). But INSIDE the body, they do even cooler things.
Inside your body, there are all kinds of germs that help your body function better. Most of them live in your intestines, and aid in the process of digestion, but they also function there as the first line defense against foodborne illness. That’s important, because a lot of the things that hurt bacteria OUTSIDE the body are also things that hurt it INSIDE.
Preservatives, chlorine, detergents, pesticides, herbicides, and all those things that are designed to kill life outside your body can also kill it inside – first the intestinal bacteria, then the cells that line your intestinal walls.
If you have a healthy colony of bacteria in there, it serves to protect your body a little against occasional exposures to such contaminants. On regular exposure though, not only are the friendly bacteria killed off, your intestines sustain damage as well.
Those bacteria do a lot of things. They help keep your intestines healthy and your immune system healthy. Good bacteria is responsible for a portion of the digestive process – it helps to break down food into the nutrients that are absorbed by the intestines. If you become deficient in intestinal bacteria, you also become nutritionally deficient.
Good bacteria also help maintain a balance in the fungus in your body. You have various yeast strains (candida is common) in your body. They are always there. Too little bacteria means they get out of control, and you’ll get painful fungal infections on your hands, armpits, legs, etc. It can create a weepy, swollen red and painful rash, or it can cause dry cracking on the ends of fingers and toes. Fungal infections usually show an outward set of symptoms, and a few cartons of yogurt or a bottle of kefir can often clear them right up – eat the yogurt, it works just fine from the inside out.
So… what about those neutral bacteria, and even the bad ones?
Regular exposure to them, in small amounts, helps to strengthen the immune system. You are expose to salmonella, e coli, shigella, and other bacteria on a daily basis. Farm kids are exposed to even more of them. Most strains are not even harmful, but even when they are, it is in such low concentrations that it doesn’t make you sick. What it does do, is give your body practice in recognizing and destroying that kind of invader.
So why do people get sick with those illnesses? There are several reasons:
1. Usually it is from a fairly high exposure. Modern food handling means that if food is contaminated, a LOT of it is contaminated in a large facility, and then it will spend a significant amount of time in transit – time enough for it to incubate and grow.
2. Often, it is a superbug. More aggressive, and nastier than normal. Those bugs were created in mass farming and processing facilities where chlorine and other disinfectants are used on a daily basis (so pathogens become immune), and where the bugs come from animals that have been treated regularly with antibiotics so the disease is also antibiotic resistant.
3. If you are eating foods with preservatives and drinking chlorinated water on a regular basis, your own intestinal bacteria may be depleted, giving you no front line defense.
4. If your immune system has not been exposed to small amounts of normal germs on a regular basis, you won’t have much strength with which to fight a heavy exposure.
5. Antibiotics from either a prescription or passed to you through meats or dairy foods, can upset the bacterial balance in your intestines.
Now, I’m not at all suggesting that we never wash our hands. But I am suggesting that most of the time, water is all we need. Food should be washed in water, not detergents – those detergents are harmful to you in more ways than one. And homes should be kept clean, but do not need to be kept sterilized – that ends up backfiring on the entire household. The use of anti-bacterial soaps should be avoided except when you have a need to sterilize your hands, for instance, when you need to bandage up a child, or if you’ve just helped a goat give birth (sorry, I couldn’t resist…).
Certainly there are times when disinfectants are required. After handling things that are specifically high risk, absolutely. But for day to day living, most of the time we aren’t doing that. Peeling a potato is not a high risk behavior. Handling meat that has spent a few too many days in the fridge, is because it has become a pool of concentrated harmful bacteria. Use some judgment and clean up with water, unless you feel there is a reason to believe there is a high concentration of germs all in one place – like washing the dishes.
There’s no such thing as perfectly sterile anyway, and if you are bent on killing every germ in your path, you are going to kill more good ones than bad ones, and it will come back to bite you.
So get some good germs into your life. Not only will it help you, but it will make those unplanned encounters with the bad ones much less risky!
Researchers Announce Birth Control Breakthrough
Two researchers in an obscure town in the US have released a report in support of the only known 100% safe and effective method of contraception. This method is completely safe, has no uncontrollable side effects, is extremely affordable, and has been used successfully throughout every culture, society and historical period on record.
The method is known historically as “abstinence”. When used correctly, it is the only birth control method which provides 100% effectiveness. No other method, including sterilization, can make that claim, as all other methods can, and do fail, a certain percentage of the time. This method is also 100% effective in preventing STDs, and completely stops the sexual transmission of AIDS in all users – again, something that no other method of birth control can even come close to claiming.
Largely ignored by medical professionals, and pharmaceutical companies, this method has been actively ridiculed by pro-abortion factions. Their ridicule has been somewhat puzzling to researchers who have compared safety statistics, effectiveness rates, and mental stability statistics between groups who use abstinence, other forms of birth control, or who have chosen abortion. Abstinence is far safer for women, no woman has ever died due to overdose, or due to malpractice on the part of a careless professional. It cannot spread infection, is never practiced in unsanitary back alleys, and does not have risks of mechanical failure. Indeed, the use of abstinence, especially outside of marriage, has been shown to provide a wide range of health benefits. It can be understood by any person who is old enough to be able to define the parts of their body, and the vocabulary required to safely practice it is so simple even a two year old can master it. One simple word, “No” is all that is required.
This method is simple enough that any parent can teach it to their child. It can be taught in schools in a matter of a few minutes. Since there is no health risk attached to this method, training materials do not have to be cumbered down with lengthy and costly legal disclaimers. Training materials are simple, in-depth anatomical diagrams are not necessary to effective teaching. It can easily be taught without embarrassment in a co-ed teaching environment.
Abstinence is the most cost effective form of contraception. It is the only method of birth control which can be used absolutely free to the user and the public, and is able to be used effectively even among the poorest populations. Teens can use it without permission from their parents, since no prescription is required – given this easy access by every sexually mature individual, one would think that “pro-choice” advocates would be promoting this as a means for individuals to control their own reproductive health, but strangely, they prefer to press for public funding of prescriptions and abortions instead, both of which present significant risks and costs to individual users.
Abstinence is usually effective without any form of professional or mechanical assistance. For people who have difficulty properly implementing it, there are various assistive devices which may help, but which are in no way required. One can even use ordinary duct tape (a single wrap, around the knees) to help individuals who are having difficulty with proper implementation.
The single fault found by the researchers was the lack of major corporate profit potential. Because abstinence does not require a prescription, pharmaceutical companies do not stand to make money from promoting it. It does not require a medical procedure, so doctors are usually not enthusiastic about promoting abstinence either. The risk of damage from using is non-existent, as is the risk of contracting a disease or infection through the use of abstinence, so all secondary income streams which could potentially result from such “accidents” have been similarly removed as motive for pharmaceutical and medical professionals to promote abstinence. Since mental illness never results from the use of abstinence, and since individuals who practice it have higher than average self-esteem, the mental health industry has found little motive to promote abstinence as a desirable choice, and indeed, most mental health professionals are largely uneducated about abstinence, due to limited professional contact with indivuals using this method of birth control and reproductive health enhancement.
The findings of the researchers show conclusively that widespread implementation of this birth control method would increase both female and male reproductive and mental health, and eliminate all risks from dangerous drugs and surgical procedures related to unwanted pregnancies and STDs. It is the hope of the researchers that attention may be brought to this safe, healthy, effective, and affordable method of avoiding unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease.
A Nasty Bout of E Coli
I don’t get sick easily. This one hit me like a Mack truck. Lasted almost a week, and left me completely wiped out.
Since we are now raising some animals, you may raise your brows and say, “Well, what do you expect? Eating raw eggs fresh from the chicken, and raw milk without even pasteurizing it!” But I didn’t get it from the eggs, or the milk, or the home butchered duck or rabbit, or the homegrown veggies (fertilized in real manure). Nope… not one of those things gave me anything so debilitating. Even though my sometimes less than hygienic teens are now doing the washing and processing of our milk and eggs, they still didn’t make me sick.
I got it from a pasteurized, USDA scrutinized, nationally branded, and nationally distributed dairy product.
The fact is, on your average small farm, the risk just isn’t what people think it is.
And the risks on the supposedly sterile certified farms are not what people think they are either!
If you do not use unnecessary antibiotics with your animals, you do not grow superbugs. The greatest danger for foodborne illness comes from superbugs – those that have become really nasty because they are growing in animals with constant, or frequent exposure to antibiotics.
If you are exposed on a regular basis to normal foodborne bacteria, such as those normally present in healthy raw milk, and farm fresh eggs (you know, eggs that are only a few days old, not eggs that have set in warehouses, and distribution centers and trucks, and then on grocery store shelves for months before you get them – with any bacteria in them growing the whole time), the few harmful germs that are there are not plentiful enough to sicken you, and they serve only to strengthen your immune system, and they are accompanied by many healthy bacteria that do the same. The majority of bacteria in raw milk and raw eggs is healthy bacteria – on the grocery store shelves, they’d call them Probiotics and charge you a premium for them, but they are simply more effective where nature put them in the first place. (Kind of amusing that commercial yogurt consists of taking perfectly good milk, killing all the good stuff in it, putting a little bit back and letting that little bit grow – would have been best to just leave the good stuff there to start with.)
If a facility produces a small amount of fresh food, and some is contaminated, a few people get sick, and usually not very badly because the contamination does not have time to grow.
If a large facility, which produces massive quantities of food has a contamination issue, it usually affects large portions of the product. The product then goes into distribution channels and is fairly well aged by the time it reaches the customer – so the contamination is compounded by the extra time the bacteria has to incubate and multiply. Not only are more people affected, but they are affected more severely.
So while it may seem odd that daily life that is steeped in manure does not make me sick, and that a supposedly “safe” commercial dairy product did, it isn’t odd at all. In fact, that’s how it normally works.
There simply is no safer way to stay healthy than growing your own. The barnyard isn’t the real minefield, the grocery store is!
I Don’t Want a Brand New Luxury Home with a Pool
We’ve been house hunting. And hunting. And hunting. You’d think there would be a lot of old homes out there that have NOT been recently remodeled. But it seems not.
My eyes and brain are weary from reading enthusiastic descriptions of high priced properties, all describing the luxurious new features that will keep me from having to lift a finger prior to move in.
That’s fine, if that is what you want. We don’t. We NEED a fixer upper – and not just a ramshackle run down mobile home (we’ve got one of those, we don’t need another!). We need an old home – 100 years old or so. Built before things like OSB and composite materials were commonplace. One that has been neglected for a while, but not abused. One that the owner did NOT renovate by tearing out the old solid wood cabinets and replacing them with cheap (but lovely) new kitchen cabinets with particle board where you can’t see it.
We need a house that has character. That has a few cracks in the old plaster walls, that haven’t been ripped out and replaced with drywall. Wood floors that are not laminate, and which probably haven’t been sanded and refinished recently. A sink that is enamel, with a few chips in it, that got that way from a century of use, not from carelessness. Windows that are wood framed, not vinyl. Old wood siding, in need of scraping and a new coat of paint.
Realistically, this is what we can afford. Medically, this is what I require.
Homes, it seems, are now disposable. Old farmhouses are abandoned, left to rot, while a cheap mobile is pulled up on the property to live in. When the mobile gets old, it is towed off and a new one brought in. An old farmhouse left to rot for 20 years is no longer repairable – it doesn’t have enough of the good structure left, and repairing it with safe materials is prohibitively expensive.
Somewhere, in the middle, is the house we need. And it seems to not exist. Well, I can find a HOUSE, but it is usually in the middle of downtown Dallas or something. Not on the acreage we need.
And then there are “gated communities”, “ranchettes”, and “covenant communties with a great HOA”. You can have ’em. They are designed for people who want to pretend that they live in the country, while taking the city with them. Home Owners Associations are about controlling the actions of your neighbors, not about preserving property values (have you compared the prices between those neighborhoods and the unrestricted ones lately?). Horses are sometimes “allowed”, but anything practical is promptly squashed.
So all those enthusiastic claims of how wonderful this house is, and why it is worth way more than we can afford just don’t impress me. I just want a simple old house that hasn’t been messed with, on a few acres of land that allow chickens and goats, so that I can grow livestock and crops.
It shouldn’t be so hard to find.
More than a Web Developer
I’ve been deeply immersed in web design and technology, and the small business arena for the last 10 years. I’ve loved every minute of it (ok, so not so much some of the hair pulling technical puzzles, but most of it!). I’ve loved the creative side, the puzzle element, and the associations with absolutely wonderful people. But I think I’m near the end of a season in my life. I can feel it coming apart – my interest is declining, the desire to go to the next level with it is fading. Other interests are reasserting themselves into my life again. I’m ready to be more than a web developer again.
I don’t know if it is the farm stuff that is piquing this interest or whether it is partly the poor economy and the effect it has on our business right now. Whatever it is, I find that I am pulled by things I have had no time for the last 5 years. I want to crochet again. I want to bake and make things for my family. I want to be a part time web developer, and have a life around it again.
It was necessary for me to be completely immersed in it for the time that I was – we would not have been able to build a business for our family if I had not been there first. So it was good and needed at the time. It was the season for it. I don’t have any regrets about it. And I don’t want to completely abandon it. But I’m ready for it to no longer dominate my life – for it to be a rewarding part of my life, but not the whole of it.
I used to read a lot (not just novels), I cooked a lot, made craft items, built some of our own furniture, and did a lot of home do it yourself stuff. I painted, drew, and designed things. In the thick of business, every creative effort I had was channeled into that – there was no time or thought left over. I read technical books. I created site designs. I “painted” custom graphics. I designed site structures.
I find myself longing for something else now. Not absent of what I have, but balanced with what I have. I’m finding that the “simple” life as described in the bucolic ramblings of the nostalgic is not really simple at all. And it is in no way unintelligent. It is complex, difficult, and involves a lot more than just drudging hard work. There is a highly academic side to it – you learn, or it fails miserably. A good farmer is an artist, a scientist, a veterinarian, a creator. He must be. Less than that does not succeed.
But the farming is only part of it. I miss parts of me that got set aside to develop the business. Again, it was the right and necessary choice at the time. But it may just be time now to bring them back.
I’m ready to be more again.
Regulatory Constipation
So apparently, the purpose of regulations by the government, is not to achieve a specific definable goal, but rather, to simply regulate and require – facilitating adherence to those regulations does not seem to be part of the perceived purpose of the government of the State of Wyoming.
First of all, we started researching what it took to raise quail, for the purpose of food production (eggs and meat). It all seemed pretty simple – apply for a permit, and away you go, at least, that is what people from other states were saying.
Wyoming seems to want to go out of their way to make it more difficult than it needs to be. First of all, the state claims ownership of all gamebirds in the state – including those that you buy and have shipped in from out of state, and including those that are non-native to the state, and which could not really survive in the wild here. They do not care, you are merely a steward over “their” birds, and you must account for each one, track breeding, disposal or destruction of the birds, ensure that the birds you produce are marked to distinguish them from “wild” birds, allow on-site inspections whenever they ask, etc.
There are two types of permits – the free one, that allows you to have up to 100 birds, not for commercial use. And the one that costs $130, for a “Gamebird Farm” which does allow you to sell them. It sort of assumes you are raising them for hunting purposes, on a substantial property. Ok, we can deal with that, short and long term.
Then we found a rather buried reference to a health inspection certification – attached to another section of regulation. This is what it states:
“A certificate of veterinary inspection completed by an accredited veterinarian from the state of origin within ten (10) days prior to importation of game birds and/ or game bird eggs into the State shall be required. In addition, a statement signed by the supplier of the game birds shall be submitted to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Attention: Permitting Officer, 3030 Energy Lane, Casper, Wyoming 82604 on a form prescribed by the Department attesting that the game birds and/ or game bird eggs and premises of origin are free of infectious, contagious and communicable diseases. Diseases include, but shall not be limited to, Newcastle disease, Salmonella, pullorum, avian cholera, duck viral enteritis, Mycoplasma gallisepticum, and avian influenza. The statement shall also indicate that no game bird within the flock of origin is known to be infected with or to be exposed to avian tuberculosis. Game birds and premises of origin shall have been free of said diseases for at least one (1) year immediately preceding the date of shipment into the State and the premises shall not have experienced an undiagnosed mortality of more than ten percent (10%) of the game birds during the same one (1) year period.”
Failure to comply can result in at least, the state destroying your flock, and most, fines and imprisonment.
So we started asking questions to find out just what the two prescribed forms WERE, and how to get them – our game warden is clueless, he’s never dealt with this, so he doesn’t know (good guy, no insult to him).
We called the State Veterinarian (because another regulatory document said we had to send a form to them), and they had no clue what we were talking about. They referred us to Fish and Game. You’d think someone in their office would know what we were talking about? Nope!
They suggested we talk to the permitting officer. Her secretary didn’t know what we were talking about either. Then we talked to the permitting officer – she explained that really, all we needed was a completely different form, provided by the state of origin, which didn’t really even specify the things that the regulation stipulated! Only the form she said IS required, is NOT the form that any of the hatcheries supplies as a rule. But she did not have an official form. It did not exist.
So we have a regulation, calling for something that does not exist, created by people who do not care whether it is enforced or not, and which is enforced by someone who isn’t even sure what it is that is required to meet the standard.
Wow. Compliance is a headache, and when it comes down to it, completely voluntary.
Here’s the thing…
I don’t have to do ANY of this if I buy in state. Of course, what I need is not AVAILABLE in state, but oh well… I could still buy diseased birds in state and never have to comply.
Furthermore, I could start doing this in my back room, where nobody sees it, order out of state, and not tell, and no one would be the wiser. The regulations are COMPLETELY unenforceable… even if the state appointed overseers DID know precisely what the regulation meant!
I’m sure that the state could be just a little more organized and helpful in encouraging compliance. This is enough to make someone give up!
This doesn’t seem to be an issue with a single department either. One would think that your state would want to encourage people to survive there – especially in a state that is so hard to live in as Wyoming. You’d think they’d want to encourage enterprise. You’d think that if they had a law, they’d want to help people to obey that law.
This seems to be an increasing issue with government where business is concerned. The creation of completely unenforceable laws that punish those who try to comply, while ignoring those who don’t.
Something is wrong with this picture.
Who’d figure it could be so hard to get a chicken?
We started trying to get quail. Wyoming goes out of its way to make it particularly hard for someone to raise a few quail in their garage. Quail, you see, are gamebirds, and gamebirds are “owned” and managed by the state, even if YOU buy them from OUT of state, and they are regulated by the state. Even if they are essentially domesticated Quail that are non-native to the area, the state manages them.
So, quail take time. Lots of time. File for the permit, find a company that will comply with Wyoming’s certification requirements, wait for them to ship, hatch them (wait for that too), brood them, grow them, and finally they start laying. And then you can only have 100 of them. The eggs are so tiny that that is just about enough to keep a family in eggs (about 80 females, 20 males, for fertile eggs).
Quail would not meet our needs completely, for meat and eggs (they could, if we wanted to get a Game Farm License – $130 per year… maybe someday so we can sell quail eggs, but not now). So we were going to need something else. Keeping in mind our requirements:
- Has to be able to be cage raised, in a small space.
- Has to be productive for both eggs, and meat.
- Has to produce small eggs (easier to digest than big ones).
- Needs to be domesticated, not considered wild game (leaves out pheasant and some other options).
So we were left with Bantams. The do ok in cages, produce small eggs, and some breeds are good layers.
But it is very hard to find them this time of year. We can’t order chicks (several companies have them available), because they’ll die in the box before they get to the Wilds of Wyoming. So we have to order eggs, or find live animals near enough to go pick up. Both have proven difficult.
Getting chickens is easy. Getting a specific breed, is not so easy. Getting them when you want them, out of season, can be hard too.
I’m getting an education. But I’m also very persistent, so I’ll eventually get it done, in spite of the obstacles.
Because I’m now reacting to one of the ingredients in the B-12 supplements… so I need eggs that I can actually digest. It is causing enough problems to be a daily reminder that we need chickens. Soon.
Why the Heck are We Doing This Anyway?
First homeschool. Then owning our own business. Now bits of farming being thrown in (which is something I swore I’d never want to do, and Kevin was in no way prepared for!).
Well, each choice has just seemed right at the time. Independence is a good thing. The buck stops with us – if we do it right, then we reap the reward. If we screw it up, that’s our accountability too. But we really weren’t sure that we wanted to farm in any way at all, even in the back yard.
As Latter-Day Saints, we are counseled to grow a garden, and to be self-reliant. We are also counseled to have a food storage, savings account, etc. Now, this is counsel, not a commandment. But following counsel usually results in blessings, so we try to do so as much as we can.
We always had a food storage. And whenever we lived where we had a yard, we tried to garden, until we got to Wyoming. Here, it just seemed so much harder. And more expensive. For less return.
Gradually, we were able to store less and less. Mostly because we could eat fewer stored foods. This time last year, we had no food storage at all. The dietary requirement for fresh organic foods meant that we had to live from week to week on the groceries. A hard thing out in Wyoming. It also meant that our food budget skyrocketed. I hated being extorted by whatever price was being charged that week for the things we had to have. I also hated being an hour from the nearest supplies, on unpredictable roads.
The only way we’d be able to get our food costs lowered, to know we’d have what we need, and to have a food storage, was to grow it ourselves. We’d have to have the food storage on the hoof and in the ground. But we live in town, on a small lot. No space for a big garden, no space for a big greenhouse, no space for barnyard animals.
So we tried hydroponics (in the diningroom). That worked some, until I could no longer eat the things I could grow there, and nobody else ate much of them. Too costly and time consuming to do for a few heads of lettuce.
This year we didn’t even plant a garden, because we went to camp instead. Gone during the two best growing months of the year. No point. But when we came back, life was different – a little. I could eat a few more things than what I could when we left for camp, and we were making headway on reversing the Crohn’s Disease in myself and the two kids that have it. We’d still have to eat organic, and lots of fresh foods, for the rest of our lives though. So while we could now eat more of what we could grow, we still needed to grow it.
Before we left for camp, we talked about rabbits. So we did that. Then ducks occurred to us. We studied it out and got the ones we felt inspired to get. We’re still discovering just how inspired that choice was, as we learn how much that one choice is affecting our costs and health.
We had a desire to be more self-sufficient, and Kevin and I have talked about land and raising animals for some time. But I didn’t really want to raise the animals. He halfheartedly agreed (turns out he loves caring for the animals). We bought the rabbits when we did because we knew we would not have the choices we wanted in Wyoming, and David was traveling to Utah – right then. We got the ducks when we did because it felt like we needed to – turns out we really did need to.
So a series of needs have sort of pushed us where we might not have gone otherwise. I think we might have talked about it, but not really lived it.
Even now, we did not expect to do this in Wyoming, while still living on a small city lot. We expected to plan and prepare and move somewhere warmer first. A common thing for people to do as they get older, but this isn’t exactly retirement we are talking about.
So now, we divide our time between business and taking care of the animals and greenhouse. Hard to balance sometimes. Takes the cooperation of the kids to make it work too. But both the business and the farm stuff yields a profit. More than we thought it would.
One little Muscovy duck. Gave us 4 lbs of meat. Kevin and I had a meal of duck steak. Our family had duck soup for dinner. We gave 1 meal worth to my mother. Had enough left for seven meals for me (I was having pretty severe protein malabsorption so I had first claim on the Muscovy specifically, while the rest of the family continues to have hamburger). So let’s see…
Each duck cost about $10, and we’d put about $2 of food into that one. 4 lbs of high quality nearly organic meat (no medications in it) is worth about $5 per lb or more. So $20 worth of value from a $12 expense. So a profit of $8 on that duck… or so we figured ahead of time (we did the cost analysis ahead to make sure it would be worth it).
Except that I digest Muscovy so well, I now only needed two servings of meat a day instead of 3. Make that a profit of $20.
Oh… and then my vegetable needs dropped from 9 servings a day to 6. Make that a profit of $30.
Plus… my milk consumption dropped from 6 servings (milk and cheese) per day, to 4 (people with Crohn’s have higher dietary requirements than the average person). Make that a profit of $37.
And then… my need for dietary supplements dropped. By about a third. I have to take a LOT of individual supplements (B-12, B-6, Folic Acid, Magnesium, Potassium, Niacin, Calcium, etc). Make that a profit of about $50 total.
For one little 4 lb duck.
What a blessing! The ducks will make a bigger difference to our food bill than we could have possibly imagined. We thought we should wait and do it later. Doing it now has ended up being the best choice, even though it was hard to come up with the funds to get the ducks (when your food bill is high, it is hard to purchase something that will reduce it later – the double whammy is hard to afford).
We knew we were in a trap though. Food costs were high enough that they were sucking the life out of our ability to be self-sufficient in other ways. You can’t save money if you have to pay $6 per lb for organic meat, and $2 per lb for organic potatoes, and when your grocery budget quadruples in a period of about 2 years.
The greenhouse is now producing also. I was using dill (as a healing herb and to help control clotting problems in my legs). A lot of dill. It needed to be fresh to have the right properties. Fresh dill is costly – one $2 package lasted me 1-2 days. So when I got the greenhouse ready, I planted dill seed – I didn’t have any seed packets for dill, could not find it anywhere here this time of year, and did not have time to wait for it to be ordered by mail. So I went to my spice rack. Found an old jar of dill seed – those seeds had to be 10 years old at least! I figured at least a few might sprout, so I just planted the entire bottle. About 2 TBSP of seed. I think about half of them sprouted. I am drowning in dill! But that is actually good, because I was able to start using it within a few weeks, by taking the tops off the thinnings, and using them. One less thing to buy.
That is why we decided to do it. One more step in a series that may take us somewhere we didn’t plan on going. But it will put us in a position where we have the only kind of food storage we can have, and where we can have more control over the costs of the food that we require.
But I still wake in the morning and wonder how we got here, and where it is going to take us. I marvel that I am actually enjoying what I never thought I would. I am amazed at the number of miracles we have been blessed with in it, in finding ways to do what we thought we could not.
Now… I just need to figure out how pay tithing on a duck.
Rabbits, Ducks, and Worms, Oh My
Sometime before we left for camp this year, we started talking about getting Rabbits. For meat. Yeah, people eat those cute fuzzy things – many rabbits are bred specifically for meat production, the same as chickens. Rabbits are easier to raise though, produce a bit more meat in a little less time, eat less food to do it, and are easier to process. Butchering chickens is a messy, stinky endeavor. Rabbits are easier and less smelly.
Kevin and I talked about it a bit, decided it would probably be a good thing – Kevin is willing to do the butchering, I can process the meat after that (we’ve processed a lot of wild game over the years, so we know what we are getting in for). We need organic meat, and it is very expensive. Turns out rabbit meat has proteins that are a bit easier to digest than chicken, which I haven’t been able to have for a long time, because I can’t break it down (along with soy, and all other beans).
So this fall, after returning to camp, we located some breeder rabbits. We’ll be doing some selective breeding to see if we can come up with a good strain that meets our needs better than the current meat rabbit breeds. I rather dislike the red eyed white breeds – they are a bit ugly, and I dislike those red eyes! We also want a larger breed that is still an efficient producer.
We now have five rabbits, which are each housed in their own cage (after a week of frantic cage building accompanied by a series of small miracles). We have a lovely sandy Flemish doe, a Californian buck, a pure black Satin/Flemish/Silver Marten cross buck, and two Chinchilla gray Satin/Flemish/Silver Marten cross does. We have named our breeders – we won’t name the offspring unless we reserve them out for breeding. We’ll eventually add New Zealand to the mix as well.
The Flemish has already bred, but the two gray does are having a bit of trouble getting the idea. We think they are Feminists, they stomp and threaten the males any time we put the does in the buck cage for breeding. Like Feminists though, the militant is often subdued by mothering instinct, and they do seem to be mellowing gradually.
Then came the idea of ducks… Duck meat is actually a good substitute for red meat (if you get nutritionally deficient, red meat is best for recovery, and this is an issue with Crohn’s disease), but most duck meat is a tad harder to digest than beef. Except one…. Muscovy is easier to digest. Good for someone with certain kinds of protein malabsorption.
Turns out Muscovy is perfect for us in other ways too. They aren’t noisy like other ducks (so you can often keep them in city limits), and they produce more meat (can grow twice as big as other ducks). They are also better foragers, and require a little less poultry food. Between the rabbits, and the ducks, we should eventually be able to meet 100% of our meat needs, and for a fraction of what it is costing us now.
Hard to find Muscovies to buy though. We finally did, in Wyoming even (a miracle, since most places that sell ducklings won’t ship to rural Wyoming). Saturday, we spend the morning building a pen in the garage to house them temporarily – on the other end from the rabbits (our garage now smells like the poultry building at the fair…). Then we went to get the ducks – a three hour drive each way.They were so big they would not fit into the containers we brought, but the farmer kindly provided an additional cage for us, and straw to line it.
Monday, we fenced part of the yard, and Tuesday, after a mighty wrestle with each one (tough little buggers), we clipped their flight feathers (required to do so by law), and turned them loose in the back yard pen. We have 16 ducks feeding on weeds and grasshoppers.
We had intended to get ducklings – grown ducks are simply too costly. So when we found the ducks in Wyoming for the same price we’d seen ducklings for, we assumed they were small. NOT! They were nearly full grown! Some are mature enough to breed already! We got better than we had expected. We also suspect he slipped in more females than we paid for. A few of the breeders have been named – The Count (a large mature drake), Snowflake (a large female with white markings), and Cleopatra (a small duck with a black head, and white eyeliner markings extending back from the corners of her eyes). Some of the drakes will go to the table in the next few weeks.
So if you have rabbits, and a garden, the association of fertilizer and compost is a natural. Which leads the prudent to…
Worms.
That’s right. And if you have ducks, it is even more logical.
Worms are added to the rabbit waste – it just takes some litter material (sawdust, straw, paper pulp, etc), the rabbit droppings, and worms. This reduces the waste volume, and turns it into nice compost which is perfect for a garden. Those worms end up a tasty treat for the ducks too (they’ll multiply vigorously), and provide extra protein for the table birds. A nice cycle of efficiency. The worms have been ordered, and should be on the way.
Eventually, we’ll try other things – but not where we are now. You can only do so much on a city lot where you have to keep the noise and smells to a minimum.
This isn’t where we intended to go. But it seems to be where we need to go. Spiraling grocery costs dictate that you either produce your own food, or be held hostage by rising prices that consume an ever larger portion of your funds. Currently food takes more than half of what we make – and we are not frivolous (we buy things like wheat, rice, fresh vegetables, fresh fruits, almost no processed food). We just require a lot of organic food, and it is very costly. It costs the same amount per WEEK that it used to cost per MONTH to feed the family, and we had more kids home then. Not a sustainable trend.
Ducks, rabbits, worms, and a greenhouse and garden are a sustainable thing. They are a lot of work, but will give more than they take if we manage them wisely.
The Perils of Software Development
I’ve been in the computer industry for more than a decade. I’ve heard all the complaints about software support, all the bug reports, and all the grumbles about the evils of the big bad software companies. Some of it I understood – but some I did not, until we began developing our own software. It has certainly been an education, and has deepened my appreciation for those who donate their software freely to the open source community.
First of all, software development is difficult. Only a fraction of the coders who start out to create a moderately complex piece of software actually finish it. Because it is often hard to figure out the best way to accomplish complex tasks. It is usually easy to write the first part, but like publishing a novel, all the final editing, testing, bug fixing, etc, to even get it reasonably stable, is a very time consuming, tedious work. The fun wore off LONG ago!
Of those that finish an application, even fewer choose to release it to the public. See, you can write a little piece of software for yourself, and get it working in your environment pretty easily. But once you release it and let other people use it, three things happen:
1. It now has to work in THEIR environment. That means on their operating system with their browser, or with their server configuration, etc. And individual settings, other applications running alongside, etc, can change the stability of the software. This is why software goes through beta testing, multiple release candidate stages, and why version 1.0 is invariably buggy. It just takes time, and actual use, for bugs to show up under a wide variety of usage environments. Bug fixing takes a tremendous amount of resources.
2. As soon as people get their hot little hands on a simple little app that was designed to just do one simple little thing, they want it to do MORE! And MORE, and MORE! They are simply never satisfied. Feature requests POUR in. Every person who uses it wants to use it in just a little different way. So you make an attempt to meet the reasonable requests, which sends your development costs through the roof – you not only now have bug fixing going on, you also have new features to write and test, and then bug fixing on THOSE.
3. Then, you have SUPPORT. You write a manual, that explains everything, and figure people will read the manual, follow the instructions, and things will work, right? Wrong. A good many people simply won’t read. A good many people who WILL read, won’t get it. And a good many people who do follow the instructions will make simple errors as they do so – typos, mixing the up order of tasks, or other simple mistakes that cause problems. And they’ll call YOU when it doesn’t work. You HAVE to help them – because you nor they really know whether it is human error or a software bug causing the problem until AFTER you’ve helped them. Support tends to be very high with new software – it can take more time than the actual coding. You have the choice of either NOT including support (or making it a paid extra), or of pricing your software to include a reasonable amount of average support time (and hoping that reality does not exceed that average). We would love to sell our auto-installer for less, but find that we cannot, because it just requires too much support, and if we priced it lower, we’d go broke.
It is simple for a project to positively explode with new coding and troubleshooting demands, to the extent that a coder, or even a coding team, can end up overwhelmed.
We like to think of the software companies as the “bad guys” for making it so hard to get support. We like to think they don’t listen to bug reports, or feature requests. Actually they do – but in order to contain costs, they’ve simply turned a deaf ear to certain classes of complaints or requests, and they’ve put up barriers to calls from people who simply don’t want to read the manual. Support time is costly, and it shaves off the profit margins if not controlled, and can put a company in the red pretty fast.
We’ve released three pieces of software in the last year, and are in the process of improving one of them, after which we will be releasing three more pieces. It took six months after releasing the first to reach critical mass – we could no longer go forward with bug fixing, improvements, AND support on one piece, and have any time left for new development. So we took steps to contain support, we finished off some bug fixing and put a feature freeze on one major piece. Then we focused on getting to that point with the other pieces. Without doing that, we’d never have time to develop anything else.
We found that each piece of software goes through some phases that affect costs.
1. New release. The bug fix requests and feature requests pour in. You have to determine in this stage what IS a bug, and what is not, which situations you’ll support, and which you won’t. You also have to determine which feature requests are reasonable (enough people will want it), and which are not.
2. Stable. Bug fixes and feature requests decline, but support continues to slowly grow, in spite of containment, due to increasing numbers of customers.
3. Compatibility Changes. Just about the time that your software is stable and predictable, part of the operating environment changes. The computer operating system, browser, or other dependent applications will upgrade, throwing your software into another series of malfunctions, and bugs. New features in dependent applications may make new possibilities available for you, resulting in new feature possibilities. Long term, this can be a huge drain on resources, and is a primary reason why most companies charge for new versions, or offer support for only a limited time after purchase.
It is not easy. And you find that when you are trying to be the good guy, many people will be angry with you anyway. If you do your best to offer good support, people will complain anyway. If you price fairly, there are those who still want it free. If you lower the price and lower support, people will complain about the lower support. If you release a lower priced version with fewer features, they’ll complain about not getting all the features for the lower price. Most users simply never consider how much time development, support, and improvement actually cost.
I think the Open Source community has influenced some people to think that they OUGHT to be entitled to receive everything they want free. Sensible people know better, but a lot of people think that anyone who charges for software is evil. We found that with our auto-installer. And then on the forums, we saw a rash of people promising to deliver an equivalent free. They’d promise and promise, say it was just about done, then they’d disappear. They found it was much harder than they’d anticipated to even accomplish the first step in the process, let alone deliver a fully functioning, feature rich piece of software capable of doing what ours does. But the prospective users still clamor for it anyway.
I don’t regret our foray into it. Indeed, this is a large part of the future of our business, and holds the promise of providing a significant percentage of our income. But it does require that we adapt to the reality, and that we be committed to a customer base in spite of some very real difficulties.
It isn’t as easy as it looks!
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Life from the Garden: Grow Your Own Food Anywhere Practical and low cost options for container gardening, sprouting, small yards, edible landscaping, winter gardening, shady yards, and help for people who are getting started too late. Plenty of tips to simplify, save on work and expense.
