In March, I wrote about the UK’s Global Talent Visa and how, as a coder, it probably meant you could get long-term residence in the UK even working for yourself.
Recently Geoffrey Robichaux asked me great questions about it. He even agreed I could post them here! I’ll share his questions and my answers...
Do you sell an online product? Or do you want to?
Have you considered some sort of an online presence for the buyers, to let them talk to each other? It seems like a really good idea. If a lot of people are trying to learn the same thing, letting them talk to each other could be amazing. I know I get some wonderful buyers of Rebuilding Rails and Mastering Software Technique. And I’m an old-fashioned geek. I always want to throw a party to get all my friends into the same room so they can meet each other.
My idol on this one is Nate Berkopec. In addition to being a great conversationalist, he sells the definitive ebook on Rails performance and runs multi-day workshops about it too. But if you buy the ebook, you get an invitation to the Slack workspace. And the Slack alone is worth the price of the book, because anybody who is anybody in Ruby performance hangs out there. They’re not all talking, but they’re available for questions.
His book is good. But it still pales in comparison to having everybody who’s interested in the topic centered in one place. There’s simply no way Nate could give you as much value as everybody else put together… So he doesn’t. He invites you to a group of everybody else put together. It’s a really good idea.
So I’ve sold you on it, right? It’s simple. Make a Slack workspace, all the cool people will hang out there, everybody will buy your product to get access and you can retire to Bermuda.
Not quite that easy, no.
I recently purchased a Canon EOS 250d (also sold as the Canon Rebel SL3.) I thought, “hey, the 200d has been around forever, it probably won’t be hard to get it working for video streaming and recording my talks.”
I was naive. If you own one, you may have the same problem. (NOTE: I HAVE A SOLUTION...
(This visa used to be called the Tier 1 Exceptional Talent visa and is now called the Global Talent visa. Same thing.)
People ask me why I moved to Inverness. Lots of reasons, of course. But one thing that seriously helped was a flexible visa to get me and my family into the United Kingdom. One reason...
After about 3.5 years of writing and researching about Ruby performance on AppFolio’s company blog, I’m going out on my own, to work for myself.
My hope is that having moved to the Scottish Highlands, I can make a living selling my books Rebuilding Rails and Mastering Software...
Have a horrible revelation, from an appreciator of less sugar with my caffeine.
You can buy a brick of caffeine in pure powdered form for about $30. That’s for 500g – about a pound. Several years’ supply, easily. Weightlifters use it, so it’s going to be readily available for a long time. I got mine...
I might be a touch late, writing my 2015 end-of-year post in February.
It’s been a pretty good year in some ways, not a great one in others. First off, let’s hit some numbers:
These are net of refunds, Stripe and Gumroad fees and so on.
That’s pretty decent Rebuilding Rails revenue, very much in line with the last two years. I also finally made the switch to Gumroad, so I’m not doing my own invoicing any more. The remaining chunk of time I spend on it week-to-week is debugging problems people hit with the software, and that shouldn’t go down much – the whole point is helping new people learn Rails. If they’re doing it right, they’re debugging. And talking programming with me isn’t something I can foist off on a remote assistant.
Some of you may remember Rails Deploy In An Hour, a Ruby deployment class I tried selling last year. More of you probably remember Ruby Mad Science, the open-source software that went with it.
I’m not selling the class any more, though I haven’t taken down Ruby Mad Science, and I don’t intend to. But it won’t be getting the maintenance it would want… now that I understand just how much that is.
I wondered, “why aren’t there more good Ruby deployment products out there?” And “why don’t people know more about the books there already are?” And as I learned more I started to wonder, “why aren’t there more Heroku competitors?” And “why did Ninefold stop supporting Rails?”
These are interesting questions. I know the answers better now, and I’m happy to share them. Perhaps they’ll help the next person fix the problem better than I did.
It turns out that programmers hate doing deployment. The programmers I’m targeting (hobbyists, early developers, small startup guys) extra-specially hate doing deployment. They just want it done and working with minimal work.
My favorite article on salary negotiation of all time talks about “fully-loaded costs” of an employee. The idea is that when figuring what it costs a company to employ an engineer (or whoever) it’s short-sighted to just take their salary and multiply by time. Patrick suggests that “a reasonable guesstimate is between 150% and 200% of their salary” and that the “extra” tends upward as salary does. Of course it depends on benefits and whatnot.
Many people think that’s complete baloney. Specifically, they tend to think that the “extra” is fixed (e.g. $30k extra,) rather than a large and increasing percent of salary.
But when you’re negotiating salary, or otherwise asking, “what does an employee’s time cost a company?” he’s right. Let me explain why.
Occasionally, you’ll see people put up a “why you should hire me” page, such as the one that got Jason Zimdars a gig at 37signals. These pages are effectively sales pages for people, though they read a little differently from a sales page for a book.
(If you don’t believe that a “hire me” page is a sales page, I recommend reading a bit more Patrick McKenzie.)
Most frequently you see pages for less-established entry-level people — people who try using a sales page because they have to, not because they want to.
And I thought, “hey, what if I tried that?” As a great fictitious man once said, “we try things. Occasionally they even work.”
So when my last company went out of business, I put a “hire me” page together. I had a little breathing room before missing a paycheck and reasonable savings. Why not try it?
If your startup does certain things, you wind up with the same business model as Yelp. It turns out you really, really don’t want the same business model as Yelp.
Let’s tell the story of the fictitious Emma Goldfarb founding a seed-stage startup called Review.ly (unrelated to the URL shortener.) Review.ly is going to be a site where people leave reviews of some kind of business. Emma isn’t quite sure about the details. She’s working on it.
Spoiler: she’s in an ugly situation because her startup wants to be like Yelp… And she really doesn’t want it to be.
Where does Emma’s money come from? Advertising doesn’t pay much, unless you have people who are about to buy something online in a trackable way. Emma doesn’t. Most of her reviewers have already bought their thing. Users looking for reviews are (in her case) not going to buy through her, so she doesn’t get paid that way. Some sites can avoid that, but Emma can’t.
Hey, tech companies. Hey, engineers working at tech companies.
There’s a great post by Chad Fowler going around with a job description for an engineer we’d all love to work with.
He says he can’t find any of those engineers to hire. Spoiler: neither can your company. I’m going to tell you why not, and what it would take to fix it.
