jason_pomerleau

I’ve found that the larger the company, the less this is a problem. At smaller orgs, it’s common for the owner or leader to have their personal identity tied up in the brand, sometimes a bit too much, which leads to hyper-involvement.

As you move up the food chain, the distance between the people you answer to and the source of the money they are spending grows, personal attachment to the outcome diminishes, and you get a lot less meddling. It’s one of the main reasons our team turns away very small customers.

A man paced in front of the advertisement, chanting to himself. “This . . . is . . . necessary! This . . . is . . . necessary!” On each “necessary” he swung his arms up in exaltation.

Tangential, but this sounds an awful lot like Disgustipated (‘The Cries of the Carrots’) a ‘hidden’ song on the Tool album Undertow, including the exaltation part: the narrator of the song is a preacher.

This was a deeply moving comment, and has changed my perspective in a way that I will never forget. Thank you.

What is it like to read fiction? Tolkien’s writing comes to mind as a good example: many passages of Lord of the Rings are detailed descriptions of the surrounding landscape. Are these types of works just not enjoyable?

If they could, Disney would scan your brain to charge you a nickel every time you thought of Mickey Mouse.

This reminds me of Tom Scott’s “Welcome to Life: The Singularity, Ruined by Lawyers” [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E

Yes, though they have other types too. We’ve been thrilled with ours. I’ve never done Christmas lights because I don’t do ladders, so having a permanent fixture is attractive. Plus we can use them on big holidays too.

I have big reservations about ‘smart home’ stuff, and it’s only the second such device in our house. But I’m clearly losing that battle, and will be looking into some ways to mitigate the privacy concerns. But gosh, it sure is nice to pick from a gazillion light patterns.

Genuine question from someone on the outside watching all of this: then who are these things for? Apparently not me, nor GP, nor my mum and dad. Are we waiting until the Smart People sort out all of these complex details to make this stuff accessible for regular people?

When I was 16 years old I took a job at a travelling carnival that was in town for a long weekend. My job was to run a helicopter ride for little kids. The green button started the ride, the red button stopped it. And if it didn’t start, I was instructed to give the control unit a moderate smack. It worked.

This was in Canada, ~1990. Awhile ago admittedly, but I haven’t looked at travelling fair rides the same way since.

Funny side story about this publication. I worked at a company that sold a network monitoring appliance that was ‘reviewed’ by them. We found the review… surprising, prompting us to inspect the demo appliance that they’d sent back to us.

They hadn’t even fired it up. The review was, as far as we could tell, entirely fabricated. We brought this to the editorial team’s attention. They responded by adding a few points to our scores.

Some people will respond well to this - I'm one of them - but many (most?) won't.

tact is simply a form of dishonesty

Maybe it is, but our primate brains tend to get very attached to our ideas and opinions. People aren't rational. Tactfulness is one way to get the other side to see your argument without making them feel threatened. Is it manipulative? Sure. But in many cases it's the only path that will get results.

This sounds like an instance of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. At the end of the day, it’s still journalism.

I didn't know about this, thanks. I wonder if the origins of this version of the site go back to 9/11 - I remember specifically that CNN had to switch to a text-only website because they were getting hammered with traffic that day. Maybe they kept this around in case another similar event takes place.

I’ve often used this phenomenon to illustrate that activity is not the same as accomplishment. Movement doesn’t necessarily mean achievement.

BMI of 19 with severe sleep apnea checking in. Never woke up gasping, never struggled staying awake, but I did feel like I enjoyed the occasional afternoon nap, and my partner reported snoring.

It’s worth getting checked out. I ended up going the dental appliance route because CPAP machines feel like a torture device to me. Anecdotally it’s made a noticeable difference. Haven’t had a nap in ages.

Sell something that sells. Sell what other people sell because that is what sells.

Agreed. I tried for ~3 years to sell ‘general development services’. Got tangled up in mobile apps, SharePoint, web development, basically anything that I didn’t consider to be “IT”.

It was a financial and professional disaster. The solutions all sucked, because I didn’t have deep expertise in anything and there was never enough budget to “do things right”. There was no opportunity to develop any kind of reputation for anything. It is insanely hard to sell “well, I can build things”.

As soon as I started focusing on a single, well-understood, boring business problem (“we need a good website”) everything changed. I started getting good at it, margins became healthy, referrals started to happen. Try getting a referral when the problems you solve are too vague to describe.

There probably is someone who might buy that. You are unlikely to find that person because there are not enough days in the world for you to meet them and close the sale.

If there’s a market for CTO-as-a-service, or anything really, you need to be able to reach it. A hyper niche service can be OK if you can reach the people that need it. Broad markets can be just as hard because you tend to need to reach lots of people (think advertising). For me, the sweet spot turned out to be “small to mid-size regional companies” because you can identify them and sell to them as a freelancer.

As selfish as this sounds, because then it’s harder to make a clean break, because I’m still a WordPress guy and I can still help, right? I’ve learned that working with super small businesses it can be quite difficult to make money, because my fees are coming out of someone’s household income, which brings with it entirely different working dynamics. A simple example: having to take 5 minutes to explain a 30 minute invoice. Doesn’t sound completely unreasonable until you try to scale it up, at which point you find yourself bleeding to death.

Vacations haven’t been quite the same since I went solo. I have to be connected. That said, virtually all my clients are willing to wait for non-emergency stuff until I get back, so in most cases I don’t have to work a lot while I am away - maybe a couple hours over a week in total. I’ve never taken a 2 week vacation (I’m 44) and wouldn’t know what that even feels like.

I desire freedom and autonomy above all else. You don’t generally get that at BigCo.

Insurance brokers, container shippers, various industrial markets, trucking companies, university faculties, law firms, economic development organizations, non-profits, small municipalities, biotech firms, marketing/ad agencies, construction companies, architects - I could go on and on. The one thing they have in common is that they’re big enough to have a budget for my services.

Depends - it ranges from 90/hr to several hundred or more. Some things aren’t priced hourly, instead I charge competitive market rates and focus on workflow/efficiency improvements for additional margin.

1) Businesses in my markets like to deal with humans. They’re not hiring a company (well, they are - I have a numbered company that is generally only of concern to the financial and legal departments) - they want to work with me. There’s no need for me to be memorable in any other way. Plus I really suck at naming things. :)

2) See 1). By the time a prospect reaches me, there’s already been a warm introduction of some kind. The big photo is the human you’re going to end up working with. I’m not super handsome but nevertheless i think it communicates that human component rather well. I do get teased occasionally about my “Steve Jobs” headshot but it doesn’t seem to have impacted sales.

If I was trying to grow and build out a team I would have taken a very different approach.

My growth strategy is oriented around productivity and workflow improvements, not adding heads. I’ve managed to become very fast and quite efficient, such that I usually blow my competitors completely out of the water. I’m only one semi-ugly dude, and thus every component of what I do has to be ruthlessly focused on what matters most.

I do both, and I’m not actually super awesome at either. It turns out to be less important than many think. My design work is professional, but isn’t going to win any awards. My dev skills are pretty good within the context of WordPress - there isn’t much I haven’t done on that platform. But I’m pretty sure I’d be laughed out of the room at a Google or FB. I was a senior engineer at a BigCo but my role there was more leadership and PM than coding.

1. Windsor, Ontario, Canada is where I am based and most of my clients are, though I do have customers here and there all over North America. One is based in Nunavut, Northwest Territories, Canada. Now THAT is far north.

2. Several years. First couple were tough. I took a 66% pay cut on Year 1 from my role as a senior developer at a Fortune 50 company.

I should add - I’ve never met about 30% of my customers in person, and interact with them strictly by phone. I’m presently sitting in Mexico on vacation, and met one of my clients for the first time in the airport in the way here.

Unfortunately no. I’m a solo operator for many reasons, and have decided that being responsible for the work of others just isn’t for me. Any referrals I do make tend to be ones where there’s a clean break, and the referral is local.

100% referrals from happy clients, or people I’ve worked with in various contexts over the years. If you do great work and manage clients properly, word gets around. A client with 20 staff - in a year, 2 or 3 of those people will be working for another company. If you’ve left a good impression, over time the network effects take hold. The trick is to survive long enough to reach that point :) the first couple of years were tough.

Depends on the opportunity. Sometimes I’ll refer them my competitors, or an agency if I think their needs are beyond what a solo operator can deliver.

Agency work is less profitable and higher hassle. They tend to want to “manage the project” and many of them do it rather poorly.

My sales cycle is very short. I usually close the sale in the first meeting - or walk away knowing that a PO is imminent. Or I finish that meeting knowing that there’s no real opportunity there. Over many years I’ve developed a pretty good instinct of what is an opportunity and what isn’t, and where there’s a good fit and isn’t. Wish I could be more prescriptive, but it seems to be one of my magic powers.

Yes, if you search my comment history (not much there, I don’t generally have much to say here), you’ll find me lamenting that lack of predictability compared to my consulting friends with 1 or 2 anchor clients. But, I believe I have a more resilient business - not one of my clients represents more than ~12% of my revenue.

There is lots of opportunity out there, but it depends on what you mean by ‘small business’. Super small companies (under 10 to 15 people in this context) are usually best off with SquareSpace or Wix. Companies slightly larger than this invariably end up wanting/needing things that these platforms can’t offer, and have the kind of budgets that can support a solo operator or small team.

At this level, you are competing with advertising agencies and marketing firms. Or you can turn those ad agencies into your clients - many don’t do the kinds of volume to support an in-house team.

I did well over 200k last year building, fixing and maintaining WordPress websites, working from home in a region with a relatively low cost of living. I expect to do even better this year, though I have resisted the urge to grow via hiring - I prefer to pick and choose my projects and be exclusive. My clients are a mix of agencies and “mid-size businesses”. I turned away another 50k of opportunities that didn’t feel like a good fit.

Beware though: success depends on more than just being able to build nice websites. You have to know how to sell yourself, manage customer expectations and a whole slew of soft skills to position yourself as a trusted advisor and expert. You need to understand your customers business, their challenges and pain points, how their customers think and behave, etc. Etc.

I believe 6 nines allows for just 30 seconds or so of downtime per year.