Now I walk through Derry everyday and look at the amount of commercial property that lies empty. I’m not the only one either, Mark Nagurski did an excellent post on the very same subject. I’m looking from another angle.

Commercial landlords desperately and urgently need to rethink their strategies on how they lease out their property.  The idea right now is not to give big long leases but attractive short ones.  Micro shops and pop up shops are the perfect way to occupy empty space.  The idea of pop up shops aren’t new but if you want to have a go at starting up in retail now is a good time to start planning for the Christmas, ahem, rush.

If I were a landlord I’d rather have a place occupied for a shorter period of time than lying empty.  So how about shorter lease times.

6 months?

3 months?

2 months?

4 weeks?

1 week?

2 days?

1 day?

All doable in my eyes.

With a good dollop of marketing (announce the sale to your user base on Facebook, Twitter and uVoucher to increase awareness).  Nothing beats being out on the street and mixing with potential customers.

1. Pick something you can sell

The last thing you want is stock at the end of the sale so you want to pick items that you’ve got a good chance of shifting.  Sounds simple but I’ve seen this sink some companies over the years.

2. Creative thinking on the rent.

Easier with some landlords than others I’m sure (I’ve never tried).  Can you negotiate for free?  Offer a percentage of the revenue you make in your venture.  Free free free, whatever you can get for the least amount.  And only have the premises for the time you really need it.  November through to December 24th, don’t forget an online presence if you can (e-commerce would be better but only if you can really complete the orders).

3. Your brand is everything

Just because it’s a short lease shop doesn’t mean that your brand should suffer.  Without going mad with the money try and get some creative design thing going.  You can find some really cheap printing deals (or even Vistaprint for the ubercheap) to get flyers and all that stuff done.

4. Know your costs

Rent and staff are the big numbers.  The minimum wage is rising to £5.93 (£237.20 a week) in October this year. Goes without saying really but it’s so easy to end up running at a loss.  A better strategy would be not to pay anyone and run it yourself.

There’s a large amount of #JFDI in there I know and it will require some creative thinking from a few parties.  At the end of the day it’s all attainable we just need some creative minds to embrace it.  Who’s first?

• 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.

The basic design from Interface Builder

So what’s the big idea?

A few months ago Matt Johnston organised a small event called Code4Pizza.  The idea being to get the bus stop data for the province and trying to get it out into the community so the community could do something useful with it.

As with all things in Belfast I very rarely get to them.  All my business is really in the north west, the idea is not to get into a pity party about how nothing goes on over here.  It does, we had Barcamp Derry in October and nothing stopped the Belfast folk coming over…. so……..

For those kind folk who heard me talk at Barcamp Derry I did mention a few things about “just doing it” and how I don’t mind how the code is in the first release as long as it works.  Something that some of my collegues at Learning Pool are now making sure I won’t forget

I love the idea of Code4Pizza but I can’t really do anything from where I’m sitting, or can I?  In getting myself back in line with iPhone development and getting my head around Interface Builder’s little ways I wanted to do the following:

• Create an open source project that other members of the Code4Pizza community could work on if they wanted.
• With the app use it to provide Open Data NI, Translink and Code4Pizza more data on where the bus stops for other parts of the province are (Belfast is well documented but it seems from conversations with folk that some parts of the province aren’t great).  Instead of whining about how Translink don’t do anything why not help out instead?
• It means that I can learn some new stuff.  I’m not up on my git and github repository skills so it’s good excuse to polish those up too.
• I get to know the iPhone SDK a lot better by doing something useful than just another bunch of little demos.

All good reasons as far as I’m concerned.

So how does it work?

My commute to Pooly Towers is on the bus every morning. Now I’ve been on the same route many times over the last couple of months so I know where the stops are.  All I need is a method to track them and store them.  That’s where the app comes in.

All I want to store is the latitude and longitude when I pass the stop and what route I was on.  The idea is that developers all over the province can download the source code from github and install it themselves and collate more data if they are on the bus.  If we can crowd source the other data outside of Belfast then I think that will benefit everyone in the province at the end of the day.

So, where is it?

The source code will be hosted on github.  I haven’t put the initial core release of code up but I’ll announce on Twitter when I do.

So, what stage is the code at?

So far the application can pickup the location via GPS.  The button actions work it’s just the SQLite3 database that needs sorting out and the mechanism to upload the data.  There’s a field for the route of the bus number as well but I have left the alphabetic characters in the keyboard as I know there are some route numbers like “FY8″ in the Derry area.

There’s only three buttons: one to get the location, one to store the location and one to upload the stored locations to an online place (like a website/db etc).

The icon is done…. it’s a pizza.

There were a few things that happened that did help it along.

Open Coffee and other network meetings do work

You can’t beat face to face networking.  There was a time when I didn’t have to do this, the work was streaming in during the boom times.  Skills are plentiful and it’s a case of being able to sell yourself.  From Open Coffee I’ve managed to show my face once at XCake as well.  On the online side I keep up with Digital Circle and the usual stream of info on Twitter.

Speaking

I don’t think it does anyone any harm to publicly speak once in a while.  I loved doing Barcamp Derry last October.  Prospective customers, investors, employers and collaborators can instantly see what you are like and what drives you.  From the Barcamp experience I would really like to do some more speaking in 2010.

You’re friends

Considering that I moved to Northern Ireland in 2004 it’s taken a good five years to find my networking feet.  There’s a couple of factors in that, partially to do with the existence of technology like Twitter.  I always had a LinkedIn account but I did my searches by sector, not location.

Through the likes of Open Coffee I’ve met some great people.  Even better that most have them have become good friends and are on speed dial if I really need them.  The help, advice and provision that these people are willing to give is also available to you, all you have to do is to make yourself available and willing to show your face.

Write

I have an “articles” section on this site.  These aren’t articles that I just wrote for the fun of it, they are important networking tools to prove your knowledge.  The likes of Java Developer’s Journal, IBM developerWorks and the Belfast Telegraph have given me the opening to write articles on a wide range of technology subjects over the last nine years.

So, to summarise, with this mix of activities I’m just starting to shape and form what 2010 is going to look like, I’m really excited for 2010.  There’s some big things to happen.

The Aerleasing story, a few people have asked so perhaps it’s now time to tell the story.  In 2004 on moving back to Northern Ireland we found ourselves in the Belfast International Airport more times that I can remember, for two reasons: firstly the bookshop was better than all the others at the time and secondly Junction One was the only place with a Starbucks.  True.

I bought a copy of the story of RyanAir and all it’s trimmings and nestled within the first couple of chapters is the fact that Tony Ryan started leasing out Aer Lingus 747′s during the quiet periods.  Brainwave hit almost immediately…. 

A quick look on the internet and there was a few sites full of listings but nothing like I was thinking which was realtime brokerage between lessors and lessees.  Plus the thought of all those brand new planes in the desert doing nothing, it would be good to get those in the air.

Before I did anything I found the trade magazines: Airline Business, Air Transport World, Airline Fleet Network and Planning and Air Finance Journal.  I put calls out out to Airline Business and got a subscription based on the fact I was looking to advertise.  Turned out to be my goldmine, the listings of the top 50 leasing companies was staring me in the face two days later.  

I spoke at Barcamp October past about not being a wallflower, I was one of them and it was really my wife that challenged me to phone one of them up and ask for advice.  I phoned the first one listed and to my astonishment the chap happily spoke to me.  Over three weeks I got the low down on the leasing business and by the end of it I “knew more than the banks do”.  All the time I was coding the system up and actually paid a good graphic designer friend to come up with the branding.

When I got to a point of testing I was invited down to Dublin to have a look around a few things and got into meetings with various folk about the product.  I came back with a ton of feedback and then set about improving the system.  

As a bootstrapping startup you are your own PR company, market research company, sales team and IT department.  The press releases were good but not great looking back, the Start A Business Programme was good but by no means relevant to what I was doing.

Airline Business ran the press release and before I knew it people were signing up and the company names were flashing before me.  Air Transport World wanted to do a small interview and this was pretty important as it was with their main editor in the US.  He speaks and the industry takes note.  

So from my little admin console I saw people adding aeroplanes and then one day someone actually put a sealed bid in.  Then the cracks started to appear, people were just treating it like another listing site desperate to get their phone number out there.  Brokers hated it for the fact that the chain of brokerage was essentially broken by an upstart programmer.  You live and you learn.

About 18 months later I worked on an add on to Aerleasing called the Digital Broker, it could fire out a message to 350+ aviation dealers, end users and airlines with requirements from other airlines.  This would save the end user a good couple of weeks emailing and phoning around.  It was a lead generation tool and the airlines liked it.  The major coup was when Air Finance Journal offered to do a feature on the Digital Broker as the next step forward for the sector.  I was expecting a couple of column inches in the news section.  What I got was a full page, with screen shots…. the user base shot up.  From initial phone calls to getting the editorial took two years to secure, a lot of phone calls, talking to editors and generally having to sell the idea to them.  Once they got it, they wrote about it.

All the time there was interest but not adoption.  There was talk of selling it to Boeing for $2m and there was various other talk by well groomed talkers.  It means nothing until the mandate is signed and the money is in your account.  Deals fall through, some salesmen talk rubbish, it’s all part of the rich tapestry know as startup.  I’m a lot more guarded now.

So where is it all now?  Well Aerleasing just curled up and died really, users lost interest for the simple fact deals weren’t being done so people stopped logging in.  The real issue is what I’d call the “old boys network”, most of this stuff is done on the phone to the folk you know and trust.  Until the new wave come in then it will be hard to change the broker mentality.

It taught me a lot, a heck of a lot about product, people, testing, beta customers etc.  And it’s something that I’ve carried forward for the next wave of madness.

The story continues…. tomorrow night is Go For It programme night.

A few things to keep in mind for anyone putting that sort of site together in WordPress, from a geeky dev perspective.

1. Have a clear vision of how you want your code to work before you try and weave it into WordPress. For me I had the attending/speaker thing written when Mark first talked about the Barcamp site. I knew it would be in WordPress so PHP was the obvious choice.

2. The route of least resistance is the best. I used the ExecPHP with WordPress, it has advantages and disadvantages. Main disadvantage is that any errors or warnings don’t show up, it’s got to be some pretty bad for it to do so.

3. Make sure you have decent PHP code ready in advance. Mainly because trying to edit in WordPress editor is like painting art through a letterbox.

4. Ensure that all the team know what the score is. WordPress WYSIWYG editor is disable with ExecPHP installed otherwise the html prettying screws up the code. So don’t expect to make too many friends on the team if you don’t tell them not to use it.