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This is my digital garden. Notes from twenty-odd years of running a small software company, pulled out of old notebooks and tidied up. Some are finished, most are still growing, and all of them change.
They're mostly about the unglamorous side: finding work, keeping it, and looking after applications other people built. Open a link and it opens beside this one, so you can follow a thread without losing your place.
Positioning and selling
- Choosing an audience before building anything
- Pick a niche in three steps
- A positioning statement you can actually fill in
- Anatomy of a service-offering page
- Lead magnets that work
- Don't spend a penny on ads until you can track them
- Retainers: sell a monthly product, not discounted hours
Running the agency
- Stop worrying, start winning: three worry removers
- Plan a month on one printed page
- Running a solo annual retreat
- Run a mastermind that stays useful
- Deploy rules for a small agency
Legacy apps and ops
- Inherited a web app? A due-diligence checklist
- Maintenance is a market you have to make
- Upgrade or rewrite?
- Interviewing a sysadmin: questions and good answers
- Payments are a distributed system: the 28-second void