Why would I join another company rather than sticking with Connection Required? It isn’t because I am unable make it work. I’ve launched several successful projects, made my clients extremely happy and made money in the process. My family was able to move back to Northern Michigan. I’ve been able to spend more time at home than ever before. And I have had to push away as much work as I’ve accepted. All in all, I consider that successful.

However, when I consider what I want Connection Required to become, I pause. I do great work, but that doesn’t mean I want to grow a consultancy and start hiring other developers. Enter Collective Idea. I’ve known these guys for a while. They’re an extremely sharp group and they build great software. At Collective Idea, I can continue to do what I do best: write great software and make clients happy. But instead of being solo, I am able to join a team of developers who share that same goal. For those who have been in my shoes, you’ll know, that’s a big deal.

For those who haven’t been in this situation, at a certain point you realize how few hours you actually have in a day/month/year. Sure I can work more, but then that takes away from my family. I can start hiring, delegating, and leading others, but that requires growing. And I’m pretty confident I’d make an awful boss . There is only so much I can do as an individual, but as part of a great team I can be a part of awesome.

I’m excited about this transition because it’s a step forward on many fronts. You can also read the announcement on Collective Idea’s site.

Feel free to contact me at my new email address zach -at- collectiveidea.com. This site will continue to stay up, but will morph back into a blog over time.

Last night we pushed live a slew of updates and as a result the application is much speedier. The guys were so thrilled with the result that they wanted me to write a geeky technical post about all the changes for their users. You can read the entire article on their blog and also discuss it on Hacker News

In the talk from last month, Gary Vaynerchuk mentioned Zappos and hearing about their rich company culture, we watched an interview by the CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh.

Before we watched the interview, we actually watched Jeff Bezos of Amazon give a short clip when they acquired Zappos:

Tony’s interview on BigThink.com:

Tony speaks a lot differently than Gary, but has a lot of insight on Business and Happiness. He mentioned Good to Great and having read that a few years ago, I heartily recommend it as well. He also mentioned Tribal Leadership which I’ll be picking up soon. And of course there’s Tony’s book Delivering Happiness which I still need to check out.

I really appreciate Tony’s perspective on culture and happiness. I also connected with his comments about the Millennials.

…there are so many people in corporate America where they’re a different person at home on weekends versus on monday when they’re in the office. And they leave a little part of themselves, or a big part of themselves at home … maybe what the millennials are bringing to the forefront [is that] they can be the same person…

Gary has great stage presence, and I really connect with his messages in this talk. It also sounded like the group resonated with the talk and fed off his energy. We discussed items like caring about client relationships, the “Mom and Pop” attitude for tech and business, and hustling products.

I’ve set a date for the next meetup for December 14th. We may be at CityMac in Traverse City again, but I think it may be fun to mix it up and try out the Library. I’ll firm up the location closer to the 14th.

If you’re interested in Web, Mobile, and Business, I encourage you to stop by and hang out!

I had a pretty good time, and received some nice compliments on the format. Talking with the group, we may continue to watch and discuss interviews. I’ve set a date for the next meetup on November 18th. I’m still considering where we should go for the venue. CityMac was accommodating, but a few mentioned the meeting rooms in the Library.

If you’re in the Traverse City area on the 18th, I encourage you to drop by!

It wasn’t the details of the change that caught my eye, it was that prior to the announcement, they sent me an email regarding how the change affected an open source library I maintain.

Here’s the email, posted with permission from Harvest:

Hi Zach

I’m reaching out early, before the official notification about this, to ask a question about your Harvest client: http://simplechatter.com/2010/04/harvested-a-new-ruby-api-wrapper/

In a couple of weeks Harvest will be implementing SSL across the board for all Harvest accounts. Accounts can opt-out of SSL (through Harvest support) but HTTPS will become the default for all Harvest access.

The net effect for accounts currently using non-SSL HTTP will be an HTTP 301 redirect from http://subdomain.harvestapp.com to https://subdomain.harvestapp.com when this change goes into effect for everyone.

Does your client support this 301 redirect, and SSL in general? If not, we’d like to work with you to support this, to avoid any issues for your access, or for anyone using your client.

Please let me know and feel free to contact me for any details, or if I can help in any way.

Thanks!

The fact that the company not only keeps tabs on the current software community around their product, and intentionally reaches out to them for potential issues, and offers to help out to fix those issues speaks volumes. Fostering a community and enabling evangelists around your product is often overlooked and under-prioritized.

Kudos guys, and keep up the good work.

–

Feel free to discuss this here and on Hacker News

1. concern about making a great first impressions
2. the lack of constraints that are normally in place when working on client projects.

Launching and redesigning your own website is mentally tough. It’s rarely a technical problem. Since it’s your own site and no one paying you to build it, it can be very easy to keep adding features and polishing. Both of which delay the launch date.

Although they are often the source of stress, budgets and deadlines are useful. I’ve experienced if you embrace a constraint rather than ignore it, you will quickly re-prioritize the tasks and find innovative work-arounds for the largest tasks. We do this all the time when working on other projects, the trick is keep focused when working on your own projects.

Take this website for example. I went from PSD to Launched in 13 days (17 if you count the weekends). If this was a client project, that would be utterly horrible for this small site. However in the My-Project Timezone, that’s not too shabby. Don’t get me wrong, this site isn’t perfect, instead it’s littered with warts (none of which I’m going to point out). I didn’t focus on building the perfect site, I focused on good enough for launch.

Pick a Deadline

After launching a few projects, I’ve learned a few useful tips. Pick a deadline and keep your feet to the fire. If it doesn’t look like you can launch by that deadline, rip out features. One large wart for this site, is a missing portfolio section. That was a very intentional omission, one I have designs and even HTML/CSS for, but it was cut in favor of launching. If you’re not a fan of deadlines, set a fake budget and track your time against it. That may even provide a more realistic picture on how you much effort you put into the project.

Polish After Launch

Another tip I’ve learned: polish after launch. We can become consumed with polishing and tweaking to the point that it holds us back. One advantage our projects have over client projects, is that there’s nothing stopping constant polish after launch. If it’s the critical eye of peers and competitors forcing you to make it perfect, stop and relax. Making a good first impression can drive us insane. It’s important to remember projects don’t stop at launch, they evolve over time. Get it to “good enough”, launch it, then continue polishing.

Solve Simpler Problems

Finally, there are always going to be implementation issues that will get in our way. Our first reaction to figure them out, and that is great, but don’t get hung up on it. It’s okay to change course, alter the final solution, or even post-pone troubling issues. You’re going to be forced to adapt, and you can either take the timeline-hit in figuring out the original problem, or you can change the problem and solve a simpler one.

I’m not advocating shoddy or half-assed work, I’m pointing out that launching is more important than perfection.