Year in Review (2009)

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It was a very very interesting year. In January my long-term contract ended and I have managed to avoid taking another long-term contract. I did take 3 small contracts throughout the year, two around working with Azure and one in Rails. I hope to take even less work this year (although I might be doing a short gig in January, but it sounds pretty fun).

This year a number of big things happened. The first was that I got serious about The Lounge and Ruby Row and spun them off into a separate company called Zerk Media. In January the idea was that I would continue to build new networks, but that didn’t work out so well. (I blogged about that already).

The second big thing was the launch of TekPub. I am thrilled to be a part of this with Rob and it is going excellent so far. It’s great to see an idea be validated and all the hard work pay off quickly rather than months or years down the road.

Some other very exciting things have happened this year, but I am going to talk about those in separate blog posts over the next couple weeks. (both are new ventures)

For 2010 I have some big goals:

1) Continue to grow TekPub, if we can just maintain the momentum of bringing out new series and reaching new customers it will be a great year.

2) Solidify Ruby Row as the best way to reach Ruby developers, the network grew hugely this year but there is still alot of room to grow.

3) Turn The Lounge into the premier independent network to reach Microsoft focused developers, the advertising market took quite a hit in early 2009 but it has recovered nicely and with a new sales team working with me its only going to take off in 2010.

4) I am launching a new venture this month and it is going to be the big one, it’s the culmination of 2 years of being in the advertising business and I think it will take up a large amount of my time in the new year.

6) Lose Weight. This is always a goal isn’t it? But this year I realized that not exercising and eating bad has contributed to more stress and unhappiness, its going to change this year and I hope to be back below 200 by summer.

Oh, I also managed to read 24 books (fiction and business) this year which isn’t too bad, I should be able to top it this year.

-James

TekPub: A belated announcement

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I have reached a new low in neglecting this blog, I launched an entirely new venture and didn’t even get around to blogging it here. As you have probably already heard if you follow Rob’s blog or follow me on Twitter, Rob and I have launched a new service called TekPub. The purpose of TekPub is to provide high quality technical screencasts, we are focusing somewhat on the .NET space at the moment but will definitely branch out in the future.

Rob wrote a great post on his blog and over on the TekPub blog getting more into the details, so I won’t rehash it all here.

I have been trying to put something like TekPub together for a couple of years, but it always got pushed out of the way for work on The Lounge or contracts. Earlier this year I talked to Ayende about finally getting it off the ground since he was interested as well. Around August when Rob decided he was interested in doing the same thing he approached Ayende as well who told Rob to get in touch with me. Thankfully Rob and I found a way to work together on it and it has been going great so far.

To me the most interesting angle of TekPub is that we are independently producing content and giving more power (and a larger revenue share) to the authors than most (if not all) of the conventional publishers out there. Having written a number of books I know how much work goes into writing a book, and how little the direct monetary reward can be. We wanted to provide a way for experts to get content out faster (we can be live in days not months), provide more revenue (standard royalty rates on books can be as low as 8-10% of publisher revenue), and above all provide more up to date content to our viewers/readers.

I look forward to getting my first couple series out the door next week and joining the fray as an author. We also have a number of other authors working on content that I can’t wait to announce.

-James

Heading to San Francisco

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No, I’m not moving there permanently (I love living in Raleigh).

Earlier this year I realized that two conferences I wanted to go to were going to be in San Francisco this year. The Business of Software conference is running from the 9th-11th of November and RubyConf is running from the 19th-21st. So I had the crazy idea of taking my wife and our daughter out to San Francisco and living there for most of November. Then we realized if we went earlier we could have my mother in law come for the first week so we would have time to go enjoy some of the nice restaurants and areas of San Francisco since she could watch our daughter. So this saturday (17th of October) we are heading out to San Francisco and staying until the 22nd of November (thankfully my sister can house sit and watch the cats).

As a bootstrapping startup spending the money to do this might not seem like the smartest idea, but this is also one of those things I could never do if I was working for someone else or even if I was working a long-term contract like I have in the past.

In addition to attending these two conferences I am also going to be going to Startup School on the 24th in Berkeley. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw this announced and I realized I would be in town and got accepted to go. While in town I will also get to meet with both of my board members and a partner in another venture. I hope to make the most of the trip and attend as many events and meet with as many interesting people and companies as possible.

If you live in the area and would like to meet, or if you know of any interesting events (.NET/Mono, Ruby, Erlang, Startup) definitely let me know!

-James

Raleigh Code Camp this Saturday

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It’s that time of year again and Trinug is putting on the annual Raleigh Code Camp. I swore I wouldn’t do a presentation this year but I got talked into it at the last minute. I am going to be doing a tools talk about analyzing the performance of ASP.NET web applications:

Measuring and improving the performance of your ASP.NET applications

This session will be a walkthrough of measuring and improving all aspects of an ASP.NET application. It will consist of coding, testing, monitoring, and making performance improvements using tools like RedGate’s ANTS Profiler and Firebug and maybe even some Ruby or Python. There will be no slides, you have been warned.

I also thought it would be fun to do something other than a straight-forward presentation so I am going to be holding a coding competition. Bring your laptop and stop in to the Library during any session after lunch for a break from staring at bullet points and shiny demos.

Coding Competition

Do you have what it takes? Join us for a fun coding competition where you will implement a simple interface and then have your bot fight against other developer bots. Each round introduces a new challenge and through clever strategies, good code, and some reverse engineering of your opponents great riches will be yours (ok, probably just some books)

-James

True RSS Feed Bankrupcy

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People like to refer to the act of marking all of their feeds as read as declaring RSS bankruptcy. They get to clear out all the items and start fresh. I realized recently that I needed to declare a true RSS feed bankruptcy and delete all of the RSS subscriptions I had collected over time. I had well over 300 subscriptions, many of them were to blogs that weren’t active or on topics I wasn’t particularly interested in anymore. Some of those subscriptions were from back in 2003 or earlier and were moved from Feeddemon to Bloglines to Google Reader.

I did this because I realized two things. The first is that I wasn’t keeping up with the feeds and they had simply become a burden. I used to rely on feeds to keep up with the community, but now I rely much more on twitter to do that. I also realized I was becoming interested in much different things. A large portion of my feeds were .NET related, and while I am still interested in .NET, my focus in the area has become paper thin. I care about ASP.NET MVC and changes to C#. Everything else .NET has just become noise to me.

I have also found Hacker News which I rely on more and more for news and community. It has not only become a great place for startup related news, but chances are any major Ruby, Python, Erlang, Scala, Clojure, or NoSQL announcement will find it’s way there. (and even some .NET topics).

I have realized that there are only two types of blogs I really want to subscribe to. Blogs that consistently deliver valuable technical content or business advice, or blogs of people I consider friends. I look forward slowing re-building a much leaner list of feeds and hopefully returning to getting value out of my blog reader.

-James

Your idea will probably change

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When I took over The Lounge back in December of 2007 I looked at it as a great way to make a little extra money each month, but not a ton more than that. As it grew, and after I launched Ruby Row, I started to see that advertising networks could be a good little business. I liked working with publishers and the advertising sales side wasn’t all that hard. As time passed though I began to realize a couple of things.

I am competent at sales, but not much better than that. I am bad at organization and scheduling and I don’t have the nerves to handle doing things like cold calls. I figured out I am basically good at customer relations and taking orders, but not pushing sales. This is of course a large part of running an advertising network and when I realized I didn’t want to do sales for a living it made me realize that building ad networks might not be the best business for me. I am in talks with a company to actually take over most of the sales for The Lounge which will help that network grow and keep the sales burden off of me, this alleviates the long-term issue but when starting a network it would be tough to outsource the sales from the beginning.

The second thing I realized is that most publishers aren’t that faithful. They will quickly leave your network for the next big thing or the next network that offers them a better rate. I am actually lucky in that most of my publishers feel some allegiance to me, but after a number of them left to a competitor and put the future of the network in jeopardy I learned that I couldn’t rely on allegiance alone and made some compromises that hurt my overall margin. This is something you constantly see with the larger networks, they all fight over large publishers and push their rates lower and lower.

When I decided to go full-time on The Lounge and Ruby Row in January my plan was still to build additional networks to get myself to a sustainable level of income and then see where to go from there. I started to build The Branch, a network focused on advertising to Twitter users. I made a couple of mistakes on The Branch. The first was I did not realize how general the Twitter audience had become by this time, at one point it was a very influential group of people but in the last 18-24 months it has become almost as general an audience as Facebook. My second mistake was that I tried to launch with some of the largest twitter applications out there, which put a huge sales burden on me. Launching an ad network is an interesting problem since you need to get publishers to commit to draw advertisers, but if you don’t draw enough advertisers quickly enough you can’t keep the publishers. Needless to say The Branch didn’t work out and I ended up shuttering it before it even officially launched.

After the failure of The Branch I started to think about why The Lounge and Ruby Row have done so well. The Lounge continues to grow because I know the .NET community, I know the publishers I want and I know what companies to approach about advertising. Ruby Row continues to grow because of my great partner on the project, Geoffrey Grosenbach, and because it is such a great niche market. I am also somewhat involved in the Ruby community so I know who I want in the network and what companies to approach. In both cases I had an inside person in the community which made all the difference.

My next thought was to simply find a good contact in another nich community to try and launch a network, I have tried to do this in a number of other niche markets and have had a hard time finding a reliable, motivated individual to partner with. It turns out I got very lucky with Geoffrey and finding people like him in other markets wasn’t going to be easy.

So my focus has completely shifted away from building new advertising networks. I am not saying that I won’t launch a new network in the future, if the right individual or idea comes up I would definitely do it, but I am not relying on it to float my business anymore. My focus has shifted for the moment to building Ruby Row and The Lounge into the largest and most successful networks they can be to keep my business sustainable while I work on my next big idea… which I am not yet ready to talk about.

The real lesson I have learned is that the idea you start out with probably won’t be the idea you end up with. So don’t hold on to it too tightly and don’t worry about failure, its just the quickest way to learn.

-James

Contact

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Feel free to contact me if you have any questions, opportunities, or would just like to chat.

Name: James Avery

Email: javery@infozerk.com

Phone: (919) 600-0742

Fax: (888) 353-6720

The Perfect Margarita

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I have finally found the perfect margarita recipe and I just had to share it:

1 1/2 oz Patron Silver.

1 1/2 oz Grand Marnier

Combine those in a mixer with ice and then cut a lime in half and squeeze all the juice from half of the lime into the mixer. Put a dash of salt in the mixer. Shake it for about 20 seconds then pour. Delicious.

Sweet and Sour and Sweetened Lime Juice is horrible and don’t let it anywhere near your drink, otherwise you will end up with one of those horrible things they serve at most restaurants.

-James

The Lounge Survey

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To help get a better idea of who visits the sites, blogs, and podcasts that make up The Lounge I have launched a simple survey. To motivate people to take the survey we are going to select two random entries to win all 41 of the Manning In Action books, I know that is a prize I would love (except what to do with the Java books?).

Go take the survey now.

The survey includes some marketing questions as well as technology questions, when the survey is closed I will make the technology answers public.

-James