Article: Online payment is the real pal of business.

My monthly piece for the Belfast Telegraph is in today, you can read it here.

StartVI – The incubator

Oh how I have waited for something like this.  When the huge slow to react monsters can’t deliver what’s actually needed then it gives space for smaller more nimble creatures to evolve and react.  Welcome the small, mobile and beautiful www.startvi.com

VI is:

VI (pronounced ’six’) is a Virtual Incubator for very early stage companies based in Northern Ireland which focuses heavily on mentoring and operational readiness.

And how Northern Ireland needs it. All we have to do is get the Derry branch sorted out….

Bizcamp Newry: That old guy!

I enjoyed Bizcamp Newry yesterday, though it was a long day for me.  One of the main questions I got of the day was about a gentleman who asked two questions during my Q&A.

1. What time does this finish?

2. I’ve learned nothing from your talk, tell me one thing…..

It was a curve ball, a big one at that.  Like Mary McKenna said to me afterwards (to paraphrase), if you put yourself in those positions of public speaking then you are putting yourself in line for these sorts of response.

There’s a bunch of ways of handling it.  First things first, he is entitled to his own opinion, he is also entitled to his free speech and if he wished to make his opinions known I’m happy with that.

The key here is how to deal with it.  First thing I did was apologise that my talk didn’t meet his expectations. We can’t please everyone at the end of the day and I don’t make it my mission in life to please every person that crosses my path. The risk there is that the same person will expect you to jump high the next time.  One thing if it’s your employer a different thing if it’s a stranger. Secondly I rattled through the slides in my head and reassured myself that the slides did their job.

I answered his questions in the best way I could and confirmed that he was accepting of the answers.  At the end of the day I can’t do much more than that.  Once happy I moved on. From there everything seemed easier.

Sometimes these things come to test us, how do we and how should we respond can be two different things. I could have torn his head off but that would have been the wrong thing to do.  There are days a talk will go well and there are days we can stand up there and stumble on our feet in a grand manner.  It’s all part of the learning experience, we can choose to take something from it and move on or let it fester and cause us pain.

“The Stage”, a platform that commands your attention is a strange place to stand.  In Hebrew times it was used as a place of judgement and in Greek times it was a place for entertainment.  Now the stage is both of these things combined.  You can entertain but if you don’t meet the expectations of those you intend to communicate to then expect the judgement to return at a rapid rate of knots.

With 25 years of standing on stages with a bass guitar around my neck I’ve had my fair share of audient responses.  My favourite is still, “I thought you were shit”, which is fine but it looks like the other 4,999 people there thought it was good.

Bizcamp Newry Slides

Bizcamp Newry was a great success. For those who were asking, or are interested, in the slides you can download them now.

Bootstrap diaries: Will work anywhere…..

In the final throws of the launch product being ready it’s been all (my) hands on deck, so here’s today’s schedule.

6.00am – Coffee and fire up the laptop.

8.00 am – Get myself looking presentable (I think there should be a book called, “Dressing Gown Entrepreneurs”)

9.00a m – Car into tyre centre, made some calls to launch customers.

10.00 am – Back to the house, code a little more.

11.25 am – Head over to Portrush.

12.00 pm – Encamp in Ground in Portrush, coffee is excellent and the cinnamon swirly thing is going down a treat.  More work done…

1.20 pm – Head back to Coleraine, sit in the car park and do some more work in the car.

1.40 pm – Sainsbury’s car park, more of the same.

3.00 pm – Back at the house where my daughter and I play Super Mario Bros on the Wii

5.00 pm – Downtime…….

6.00 pm – Family time making dinner.

7.00 pm – My world stops for TV Burp, makes me honk with laughter which I am not ashamed about.  I need this programme…

8.00 pm – An evening of on and off development work, managed to get an awful lot done.

If you have a full time job and am working on a startup then the evening and weekend route is the way you’ll probably go.  It’s not easy, even more so if you do have a family.  The main thing to remember is that it is achievable.  Good luck.

Bootstrap diaries: There are 24 hours in a day.

How you chop your day up is really up to you.  If you are putting your startup together while holding down a job or doing freelance work then your time is a) limited and b) incredibly precious.

My good friend Simon Keen has been trying to get me into the ways of working in the early morning.  The reasons are simple for me. Firstly, I work better in the mornings I’m a morning person and secondly, I do need some family time.  So first things first.

Early bedtime……

As Simon is working on something and I’m working on something it makes sense to encourage each other to get up at 5am.  We will then hold a quick call on Skype at 5:30, gives us time to wipe the sleep from our eyes and get a coffee down our throats.

Two and a half hours clear work, plus I’ve got 40 mins on the bus if I need to do anything urgent.

When I get home from work my brain is foggy…. I need rest and there’s some wallpaper to go up.

Let’s see how this week progresses.

Bootstrap diaries: pre launch feedback

Wednesday night was Open Coffee in Coleraine.  Though I’m now asked many times why I need it now there’s a steady stream of work, I still get a buzz from seeing the good things that businesses are doing.

Better still was I got some good feedback on my own product and my thoughts were aligning quite nicely with what was going through my head as well.  Feedback though leads to new ideas and sometimes you just have to stop yourself doing anymore development before you go to launch.

The main thing is to put your product in front of potential customers and not developers, they are breeds apart sometimes.  I’m not say that all developer feedback is useless, far from it, but you need to get to the people who are going to use your thing/thang/doofer/doobrie on a daily basis.

The one feature I was toying with is a firm requirement so it got put into the main system this morning.  And the product went from being excellent to being a game changer.  Me, for one, I am a happy man.

So to recap:

• Get to open coffee or any other networking event. Networking face to face is where your potential customers are.
• You can explain things is more than sentences of 140 characters.
• Seek out who you want to demo to, be picky with your potentials.  Are they a short term, mid term or long term proposition?
• If the product is work in progress say so but also have a firm roadmap in your head of when you are ready to launch.  Also mention the future roadmap, it shows commitment to your potential customer and the product you own.
• Open Coffee is usually a relaxed place, so you can relax too.

The pros and cons of video conferencing.

Tonight was the night for a code4pizza meeting in Belfast.  Now I’m fairly settled with the idea that I’m in the minority when it comes to location.  So Matt and I tried Skype video from my house to Core Belfast.

The Pros

Well I was certainly there and I could say hello to folk.  I got the majority of the conversations which is the main point of the night.  I didn’t have to stay there all night, I could break off into a group of one if I wanted to but it wouldn’t have been much fun.

The Cons

Laptop microphones are the main issue as they are designed for one to one conversations and not a public forum.  I kept a chat window open just in case I needed to type something.  Luckily the good folk in Belfast gave me space to speak when I needed to.

The only other real drag was that I couldn’t have pizza.  I’ll have to go back to the drawing board on that one.

More talking for February

Following the positive feedback from my talk at BarcampDerry I’ll be doing more talking in February.

• Bizcamp Newry – Saturday 6th February at Southern Regional College, Newry.
• Bizcamp Belfast – Saturday 20th February at the Black Box, Belfast

I’ll be talking on (I think) a few stories about starting up and mobile startup in Northern Ireland, where to go and who to talk to. All good fun as far as I’m concerned.

Code4PizzaCollator: The first outside test.

On my way back from Derry today I gave the Code4Pizza app a whirl to see how it would perform in the realworld.  Better than I had imagined to be honest….

My original concern turned out to be no concern.  When you speed past a stop and get the location I was afraid that the GPS would take time to update.  What actually happens is that the GPS lat/lon data will constantly update as the device is moved.  All you then have to do it tap the “Store Location” button and it’s saved.

As well as Code4PizzaCollator there’s a web based app by Alex McRoberts which does the same sort of thing.  It’s in development at the moment but it will work on iPhone, Andriod and other mobile devices with a connection. You can find it here http://www.koachi.com/mapit/

The reason I didn’t go with a fully connected app was simple.  Connections in the NW of the province are up and down.  You don’t get much 3G coverage apart from Derry and Coleraine at present.  So I wanted to be able to collate data and send in one go to a server when I wanted to.

One unanswered (possibly because it’s unasked) is: at a bus station do I register every stop? I think it’s a good idea for the following reason.  Ultimately I’d like to see an app where a tourist could stand at any bus stop and with GPS pull the info on the different buses that leave and at what times. With near field connectivity (NFC) we should be paying the bus fares with our phones as well, this is already happening in some European countries already.

First we need to complete data and that’s where the crowdsourcing comes in.  With these two apps there’s no reason to say we can’t collect the bus stop data for the whole province.