Trail of Light

So previously I have talked about embarking on my way to become a micropreneur and try to make a living for myself without the need for employment. So today I want to bring people up to speed on my situation and unveil my first real attempt at producing a product for a niche market.

Let me start by some of the lessons learned from my first month as a micropreneur.

1. The most important is it can be LONELY. Yes you read that right, going the micropreneur way can be a lonely endeavor and more so if you are not mentally prepared for it. I have mentioned before that I am a member of the Micropreneur Academy and let me tell you it is important that you have a group of people who are willing to listen and talk to you. I am still thinking how to add a bit more human interaction into my daily routine but suffice to say it is important.
2. You should worry about expenses but not too much. My experience so far has been that you can pay the bills by consulting. Sure it will cut into your product time but not as much as your day job if you have decided to leave that like I did. And consultancy is also a disguised blessing if you are looking for some ideas, since you get exposed to all sorts of problems. Also a good friend pointed out that you get to meet some interesting and smart people when you consult.
3. The hardest part in building a new product is not the building part. Let me tell you this is a horrible one that I am still wrapping my head around. If you are a programmer, the biggest obstacle in your new idea that will help everyone is in letting people know it exists. Building your idea is easy in comparison. GO FIGURE.

So with the above done let me tell you a bit about my niche product. This idea has been banging on my head for some time and I have done a couple of half hearted attempts before but this time I am trying to take it all the way. The idea is to give businesses that are based on appointments a simple and easy web-service that would followup on their clients to remind them of the appointment. Also I wanted the tool to be able to inform the business in all sorts of ways like phone call or email as well as the website of the product itself. Cuevox is the implementation of that idea. Cuevox gives businesses an easy way to do followup but without all the hassle and best of all I plan to offer it to as many countries as I can. The truth is that Cuevox still requires some code in the background to bring it all the way through but I wanted to bring it to as many eyes as possible as soon as I can to hear your feedback on it. I believe the idea has market and little competition, although by biggest fear is that one very successful micropreneur (Patrick McKenzie) is working on the same idea. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds and if I can get enough traffic to turn this into a good product.

As always I shall keep you posted. Until next time have fun and be happy.

So this a series that I am going to try and keep up that show cases some of the conclusions we can come up when we make basic common sense deductions. But first let me start by the first law in any scientific study that should guide anyone observing common sense situations A hypothesis can only be proven WRONG by a test. That means that NO hypothesis can be proven correct by a test. Okay enough for the academics.

The first series is going to deal with cell phones and airplanes. Anyone who has flown a plane has heard the customary warning to keep cellphones off cause they may effect the behavior of the plane. Now I am no aviation engineer (although I am a telecommunications one) so I can not conclusively state one way or the other, but I am willing to accept the situation as a rule (as in you want to change the rules get your own plane ). My problem starts with the dozens of people who propagate the hypothesis: Any cellphone operating will cause a plane to malfunction. I am sure you have heard those especially from people you have shared flights with. So let us analyze.

I do not have any hard numbers about the number of daily commercial flights around the world but given that in the US alone is 30,000 (according to NATCA) I think it is fair to assume that daily around the world we would have 10 times that number. So let us say that there are 300,000 daily commercial flights around the world. Now assuming an average flight size of 50 passengers (my guess I am being very lax but okay) that makes a total of 1.5 million flight passengers every day. Now we are going to assume 65% of those have cellphones (4.6 billion out of the world population of 7 billion have cell phones according to Wikipedia). That means so far we have 975,000 people with cell phones that are flying each day. Some of these people do not listen to the rules, others are just forgetful and some just pack their cellphones in the baggage that they checked in and simply did not turn it off. For the case of our study I am going to be very lax with my assumption and say that only 0.1% of all those people have forgotten to turn off their cellphones for one reason or the other. That gives us 975 cellphones that are operating everyday on commercial flights. I will go one step further and say that of those only 1% happen to receive calls while within cellphone reception. The conclusion to all those assumptions would be that each day we would have to hear about at least 9 planes being in some trouble due to cell phones only. And the reality I have yet to hear one conclusive plane incident due to a cell phone .

So in conclusion let me say the following points:

1. In regards to cells and airplanes, the rules are to keep your phones off so keep your phones off. If you have a problem with that rule take it up with the airline or the government or start your own airline. But in no case should you start stories that defies logic in order to try and convince yourself that you are doing it because you want to.
2. The analysis above only tells us that the stories that we hear from our friendly passengers are just logic defying however it is not conclusive on what is the effect of cellphones on planes (they can possibly degrade radio quality). The only thing we can infer is that planes do not come crashing done on a daily basis because you forgot to turn off your cellphone.
3. When someone tells you a story and it just does not add to your sense of logic, question it and you too might find a case of the common sense .

Until next time keep questioning.

I got a few comments on my previous article asking on whether I am a micropreneur and how I am finding the Micropreneur Academy in general. So below is some background on each.

First off, let me start by saying that I have actively been a full time micropreneur for almost a month now. I had been working on several ideas for some time before July but few have taking any holding. But when July came, I decided it was time for me to try and make entrepreneurship work (and if need be supplement it with consulting). I am currently working on two products I have built Cuevox, which offers an appointment reminder for businesses, and SmsTheTeam, which allows you to send mass text messages to anyone and collect replies easily. So far I have had a few trial sign-ups but no sale so far and still poor traffic on both.

Second, let me tell you about the slight hassles of entrepreneurship. If you are like me living in a country where PayPal, Google Checkout and every other major payment processing system (and helper such as Chargify) do not offer their service, then you are in for some very heavy lifting. For one thing you need to get yourself a proper company standing (an offshore) in a country where those services are available or you are left reinventing the wheel (the hassle of recurring payments is large). That setup and getting the bank to work with you on the things you need is well hectic. If people would like I might write a post about that too later on.

Third and lastly, let me talk about the Micropreneur Academy and to a small extent StartupToDo. I am a member of both communities but have been spending alot more time in the Academy so I will focus on this post on it (but know that StartupToDo is well worth too). Few will get to see the original version of Cuevox,  but I will be the first to admit that if it was not for all the comments and discussions that I got from the Academy regarding my first attempt as well as my other product then the site could not have reached the stage it is in today. The best thing about the Academy is that you always have someone talking to you and answering you in the forums. If you ask me it is well worth its price (not to mention that they do offer a few things inside that make the Academy repay for itself at least through recovered expenses ).

So as a conclusion, I am not sure where this path will lead but I am excited to find out and cant wait to build some great stuff. And in case you are thinking of following in the micropreneur path I suggest you give the Academy (and StartupToDo) a try, I doubt you will regret it.

Anyone who is following the Google world can see that the Google APIs are taking quite a chunk of the talk (maybe right after Android). The idea behind the API themselves are very good and the fact that you can do a great many mushups using the Google Platform is just very cool. Unfortunately, in my experience, that is where the slippery slope from coolness starts.

About a month ago I started working on a little product idea called SMSTheTeam which would leverage Google’s Contact, Document and Spreadsheet API all while running on Google’s AppEngine. The start was quick and easy with AppEngine’s SDK and the Google API Documentation. I was able to come up with a proof of concept in a couple of days and then things went haywire.

Now as a disclaimer I am not sure if this is an issue in just Google’s setup or in the python Google API library, but I suspect the former plays a large role since it seems that Google endorses the python library by using it in their examples. Let me start with a case point which is the simple authentication sequence. Now almost all the examples show the using of authentication for a single Google service when using a session token, but what about if you want to use two services. In one place the documentation states that they should be separated by a blank in another it states they should be a list. Trying both did not work even though the forum discussion supported the second.

The solution amazingly is that you do need to use a list but what is not mentioned is that after you upgrade your token you get a new token from Google and that is the token that you need to manage and keep. Now to be fair it is easy to deduce that is the logic behind the process but with a detailed documentation I should not be making assumptions should I? More importantly the documentation does not mention that you need to use the variable auto_set_current_token and set it to True for you to be able to use the token later on.

And the worst part some things are just not documented in some versions. Like for example the insertRow function in the Spreadsheets does not appear in v1.0 even though the python library does support it and the fact that the list given to the function should be all small letters is barely mentioned (which causes some frustration let me tell you)

I do not know if others have found the same disappointments in Google’s API documentation but it is a shame to see that the guys behind the API are doing so much work (they are in version 3) when so many things are left undocumented or requiring too much work to turn into proper robust code. I wonder how many mushup opportunities were lost to that. So in conclusion Google’s API…great, but their documentation…merely good.

So it has been quite a while since I have written but things have been kind of hectic. Not really much of an excuse but at least now you know. So today I want to discuss something new to the blog which is basically the Micropreneur Academy. Now I am not sure if you have heard about it so let me start with a little introduction. The Micropreneur Academy is an on-line community that teaches and helps micropreneur to understands the hassles and insides of the world they are venturing into. To be clear a micropreneur is someone who is running a one-man startup company and is not interested in growing it into an employee house. Now this does not mean you should work alone but that is a lesson I will leave to the academy to teach. What I want to say is that the academy has loads of information that I am finding very useful and the founder, Rob, really goes out of his way to help people see the inside of his academy by offering money back guarantee even though you can see the material (well a very good part of it). I also want to point out that Rob is one of the few people in the on-line business world he is not married to the technology he is using and maybe that is what makes him successful. When I wanted to join, I found myself unable due to PayPal refusing cards from my country. Unlike every other on-line experience I have had, Rob was willing to try other means of payment such as Amazon payment services if I was willing to try. Needless to say I took up Rob on his offer and boy am I glad I did it. So until next time hopefully much sooner.