“Day 37: It’s been over a month since I’ve embarked on this masochistic lifestyle.  My eyes are bloodshot, burned deep by my laptop’s searing glow. The floor is littered  with streaked coffee cups and half-smoked cigarettes. A late rent notice is buried somewhere under the mess, along with other forgotten responsibilities. My hoodie and jeans uniform has grown roots to my skin, and I have completely abandoned proper hygiene.

Let me explain how I’ve transformed into such a creature. I was fired a few weeks ago from my IT job. I worked at a law firm, helping inept attorneys open their e-mails and print documents. My spotty attendance was the problem – apparently you have to show up every day when you’re working with people who wear suits. Honestly, I was quite relieved by the axe. It was an opportunity to do what every unemployed programmer does: burrow in a dark corner and build an iPhone app.”

The rest of this story can be read at the website http://theanorexicstartup.com. Mike asked me to share this story and while I don’t typically accept random offers such as this, I felt that it was well written and certainly somewhat educational, if not entertaining. If you’re in the software startup scene, or even if you just want to be there, definitely take the time to give it a chance.

You might have heard about my little podcast called Startups for the Rest of Us. You might have also heard about MicroConf, which is the conference that Rob Walling and myself put on for self-funded startups and single founder companies.

If you haven’t been listening, don’t worry about it. We’re hosting this little conference again this year. This week, we’re finalizing all of the contracts and will probably start selling tickets by the end of the month. Yes, that’s within the next two weeks. Based on feedback we got last year from people who attended, we learned that they really liked the fact that it was a small, intimate conference where everyone really got to chat with everyone else. So we have decided to limit the number of tickets this year to make sure we keep it small. With the overwhelmingly positive response from last year and the number of people who said they’d come back, I don’t think I’d be entirely surprised if we sold this year.

Don’t worry though. If you want to have the first crack at tickets before that happens, go to the website and sign up for the launch notification. You can also see all of last years’ speakers and download a free E-Book. It’s a great event to meet fellow entrepreneurs where you’ll get good and energized for your next entrepreneurial push forward.

Back in August, I was doing some work in a hotel room on my laptop and things started going “weird”. The system would appear to freeze up a bit, or the colors would go all trippy, or windows wouldn’t refresh. After five or ten seconds, I would see the following error message: “Display driver has stopped responding and has recovered”

*Gulp* That’s not good I thought.

After doing some digging, I found that apparently there’s a known issue that the Lenovo T61p was commonly installed with a faulty video card when it was first manufactured. It turns out that up until January of 2011, Lenovo was offering free replacements. Isn’t it just like a piece of equipment to go on the fritz just after the warranty period ends?

After some more research, I realized that there’s no way to replace it because the video card is soldered onto the motherboard. To fix the laptop would require a new motherboard, which for a four year old laptop is probably not worth the trouble. As a long shot, I checked eBay and there are a bunch of them there… starting at $200+ each. I might be able to get one for a bit less, but it would have taken some time, which wasn’t something I had. The Lenovo could die at any moment and I need a working laptop while I’m on the road.

I’d been on the look out for a new laptop the past several months, so the fact that I needed to buy a new one wasn’t the worst news in the world, but the timing wasn’t exactly the greatest either. Most of the laptops on the market come up a bit short on my list of requirements, which are unfortunately quite lengthy. I’m looking for something that has the following specs:

• 15″ monitor
• 1920×1200 resolution
• Core i7 processor (quad-core would be nice)
• 8GB RAM
• SSD drive
• Is lightweight (under 4 lbs would be great)
• USB 3.0 ports

And the order of those “requests”? Hmmm… all of them are a top priority. Ugh. Basically I want it all in a really tight package and with laptops, you always need to make some tradeoffs. The underlying issue is that I travel a lot so I want something that’s super lightweight. On the other hand, it needs to have some power to it as well. I’m doing a lot of development using Visual Studio 2010, SQL Server, the Azure toolset, etc. So I need something with some oomph under the hood. That’s the technical term for it anyway.

I’ve looked at just about everything including Acer, Asus, Lenovo, Apple, Sony, Toshiba, Dell, HP, and even Gateway. The research I did showed me that the screen was going to be the biggest problem. As the screen size goes up, so does the resolution, but the weight does too. Most laptop manufacturers stopped making 15″ laptops with 1600×1200 resolution several years ago. My Lenovo T61p had 1920×1200 but these days, that screen resolution is typically reserved for 17″ laptops, which tend to be far too heavy for my tastes.

Laptops with 8GB of RAM are becoming more common, but aren’t so common that they are offered everywhere. Nearly every laptop can be retrofitted with an SSD drive, so that was the simplest challenge to overcome. But it seemed as though everywhere I looked for a new laptop, there were always too many things to give up for any laptop I looked at.

However when your laptop is about to die, you need to make a decision as to whether even having a working laptop is more important than not having one at all. I knew that the local Best Buy was probably my best bet for a decent laptop, but I also knew that they never carry anything really top of the line. If I bought something there, it was going to be something to throw away and I wasn’t terribly thrilled with that prospect. So I decided to hit the Apple store to see if the new MacBook Air’s lived up to what I thought it might be for me.

I hit the Apple store in Paramus, NJ and spoke with a business specialist named Bobby. I explained to him what I did, what I was generally looking for, and what my concerns were with the 13″ MacBook Air with the Core i7 processor. The screen resolution was only 1440×900, but after my laptop video card on the Lenovo started to go haywire, I set the screen resolution to 1440×900 to help reduce the stress on the video card. This seemed to work well enough that I could use the laptop. The video card would still reset the driver and hang the system for a short time on occasion, but it was far less frequent.

What I found was that the screen resolution of 1440×900 was surprisingly tolerable. Of course, I had to set some of the toolbars in Visual Studio to auto-hide (which I hate to do), but I could see all of the code that I really needed to see and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I remembered from 2006. Perhaps I’m just getting old and more tolerant of widescreen. Actually no. I still don’t like it, but I can live with it now.

With the screen resolution issues, the SSD, and the weight behind me, I knew that I’d be compromising on the USB 3.0 ports. But I also knew that USB 3.0 on laptops was surprisingly rare, so that was the most likely casualty in any laptop compromise. The last hurdles to overcome were the processor and RAM. These weren’t strict requirements, rather they were general guidelines that needed to be there to maintain the performance of the machine for the work I would be doing. This was especially concerning on a Mac if I wanted to use VMWare Fusion or Parallels. I could have chosen to use Bootcamp again, but in the past I had some driver issues which caused my Macbook Pro to overheat to the point that it would burn my lap. Not much of a laptop at that point.

I voiced my concerns to Bobby, but pointed out that my current laptop was nearly 4 years old, so it was possible that with a processor that was two generations newer than the old one, I might not even notice the slowdown. I already had an SSD, so that was a non-factor. He said “Well, I don’t know anyone who has used it to the level that you have, but you could give it a shot and if it doesn’t work, you can bring it back and you’re not out a dime.”

Hmmm, that sounds interesting… wait. What? Isn’t there a restocking fee or something like that?

“Nope. We got rid of that a little while ago. Apple is so confident that you’ll like it and decide to keep it that if you don’t, you get a full refund. Just take it back to any Apple store.”

Really?

Bobby: “Yep. You’ve got two full weeks and if you don’t like it, no harm no foul. Just bring it back.”

I excused myself to go get dinner at the California Pizza Kitchen to think it over, then returned and bought it. Including the Applecare, it was just over $2,000, which all things considered isn’t a terrible price to pay for a top of the line, super lightweight laptop. That evening, I downloaded the VMWare Fusion trial to the MacBook Air. I used another VMWare tool to do a physical to virtual migration of my Windows 7 x64 laptop to a virtual machine on a USB drive, and then copied the entire Windows computer onto the laptop. It took a couple of hours to finish. Then I ran into a few minor problems with the VMWare image because it had six network cards for some reason. SIX!

One was the gigabit card on the T61p. Two were from VMWare Workstation that I had installed. The other three, I can’t be certain, but I think they were the two wireless cards and maybe the Bluetooth card. I ended up deleting all of the network devices from the VMWare machine and then adding one back in. After that, it worked fine but seemed sluggish. I thought it might be the RAM, so I dropped the amount of RAM allocated to Windows from 3GB to 2.5GB and that seemed to help quite a bit. I think that maybe OSX was choking on being able to effectively run VMWare with only 1GB left for OSX.

It took a few hours to get used to some of the key remappings. I ended up disabling the built-in Mac function keys so that on the Windows side, I don’t need to hold down the Fn key to hit F5. This means that Ctrl+Shift+B will do a full build for me, and Ctrl+F5 will launch the application so I can do some testing. I don’t use the Mac preset functions nearly as often, so I prefer simply using the Fn key instead. As for Windows, I have a second desktop set up that I can switch to by swiping three fingers across the trackpad. It’s kind of amazing to get that kind of flexibility that quickly. People I show it to are usually quite jealous of the power, flexibility, and speed at which it all runs.

And the performance? Well, so far my suspicions have been largely correct. The faster processor really makes a difference in that it has two cores and four pipelines, which is twice as many as my old laptop. The clock speed is slightly slower, but the processor architecture seems to make up for that. In VMWare, I have two CPU’s allocated to Windows 7, so it holds up pretty well. There’s a bit of a delay when opening Visual Studio, but it’s difficult to tell if anything is really wrong. It takes a lot longer than I think it should to open on my desktop too so I don’t think that’s a Macbook Air problem. A full rebuild takes under 10 seconds so I really can’t complain about it. Starting all the Azure related stuff doesn’t seem to perform any better, but I don’t think it’s any worse either.

The one major issue I ran into was when I first took the laptop home from the store. I booted it up and… nothing. I got a grey screen, some music, and a bunch of horizontal and vertical lines through the middle of the screen. I took it back to the Apple store and they immediately replaced it. The new one has worked just fine, so it was discomforting at first, but the ease at which they simply gave me a new one is something I never would have gotten with Dell or any other manufacturer. I know they would have been a real pain in the neck about it. For some reason, you have to be Dell Certified to know anything about how to troubleshoot a computer. In a word… LAME.

With all that said, what’s my final conclusion?

The Macbook Air is a winner, even for hardcore Windows development which needs a lot of system resources. I’m very happy with the performance of the machine, both on the Mac and on the Windows side. The battery life is pretty lengthy, even given the amount of work that I’m throwing at it. I’m just finishing up this article and I’ve been running the laptop for nearly six hours. The battery is close to the end of it’s rope, but given that I have Windows 7 x64 running at the same time, that’s not too shabby. The power adapter is rated for 45 Watts, which is about half of what my T61p was. This means that when I got on overseas flights, my power adapter will actually work to charge the battery, as opposed to simply preventing it from losing battery life. The Lenovo used a 90W power supply and most airplane power ports are only rated for 75 Watts. Somehow, tripping circuit breakers on a plane seems like a bad idea.

The light weight of the machine absolutely rocks. Coming from the Lenovo T61p which weighs close to 10 lbs with the power adapter to a laptop that barely breaks 3 lbs with the adapter, it’s a world of difference. Especially for someone like me who has a bad back.

The other thing that I really like is the screen itself. It’s very bright and crisp. Adjusting the brightness on the Macbook Air seems a lot better than on my T61p, not to mention the backlit keyboard, which is nice when you’re hunting for a key that’s in a different place on a Mac than on a PC, or in a slightly darkened room.

So far, the second best part of this setup is that it’s extremely light weight, has a great looking screen, adequate screen resolution, and runs Visual Studio 2010 with as much oomph as I need it to. And yes, that’s the technical term. Oomph.

Some other awesome stuff?

• Three finger swipe moves me between operating systems as fast as all heck.
• Two finger scrolling works in Windows. Honestly, what’s not to love there? It makes me hate working with other laptops now.

Ok, now for the bad stuff. You knew it was coming.

1. You have to be careful what your power settings are in VMWare Fusion. If Windows and OSX are ever fighting over who gets to use a screensaver or shut down the system when it’s on batteries, you might get the Grey Screen of Death. Basically, the computer will light up when you turn it on, but neither OS is in control. You have to do a hard reset to fix it. I was able to get around this by telling Windows to go to sleep after 10 minutes, but OSX will wait 15 minutes. Also, I always manually suspend Windows when I am using batteries and close the lid. If it’s plugged in and I shut the lid, I get no problems. But if I then open it, then close it, it will go weird on me.
2. The laptop is so thin that it can be slightly difficult to lift the lid. This is for three reasons. First, the lid is really thin and the depth of the indent to lift the lid is really shallow. Second, the laptop has some sort of a magnet mechanism in place that helps hold it shut when you close the lid. It’s not very strong, but it’s strong enough. And finally, the laptop itself is so light that it is just barely heavy enough to counter the mechanism on the lid. Usually, you have to open it a little bit and then pry it open. Now granted, this is minor but some might find it very irritating. However, it’s the tradeoff that needs to be made to make a laptop that’s this light.
3. To run Windows, you have to buy a license for VMWare Fusion (or Parallels, if you prefer). It’s not terribly expensive, but you will need to budget another $50-$100 or so for it, depending on where you buy it from. I would advise against waiting until the lat minute to buy a license. I had a really hard time ordering a license from VMWare’s website around the time my trial expired. It took me a few days to get it resolved. Personally I spent around $110. Then VMWare started running sales and I’ve seen it as low as $50.
4. With all the heavy lifting that I do during my Windows development using Visual Studio, the system does seem to get just a bit bogged down at times. I wish it had USB 3, so I could put my Windows OS onto a USB hard drive and separate the disk I/O from the SSD in the machine to see if that helps at all. I’m not convinced that it would fix the issue, but I’d like to try it to find out and right now, it’s not really an option.

Overall, I’d highly recommend a MacBook Air to anyone, even for Windows developers. I can’t begin to describe how jealous Windows users are when I show them that I get the best of both worlds in a package that’s usually half as heavy as anything they’ve got.

I’m doing a bit of an informal survey here, but I’m curious to know whether any of my readers use WordPress. If you do and have a few minutes to take a simple 6 question survey, I’d appreciate it. It shouldn’t take you more than 3-5 minutes to finish.

Take the Survey

As you can see from the date of this post and the date of the previous post (about 5.5 months between them), my goal of getting AuditShark to alpha status at the end of July was, needless to say, a bit late. In fact, I wasn’t particularly thrilled by the sound of that self-imposed deadline whooshing by. Looking back at it now, I realize that it was inherently unrealistic to even attempt the end of July to get to Alpha.

The thing is, I’ve only ever been able to dedicate about 5-10 hours/week to the software. I’ve taken a couple of weeks off here and there which really helps with productivity, but it takes a lot longer when you’re only squeezing 5 hours of coding each week into a product. But extrapolating that back to July, that means that I likely did around 110 hours of coding. That would be 5.5 months * 5 hours/week =110 hours. There were two weeks I think where I spent about 40 hours because I took time off from consulting, so it was closer to 190-200 hours total. Had I been working on it full time, then I would have met my goals rather handily.

But I wasn’t. And I knew I wasn’t working on it full time. Perhaps I felt I would get more time into it, but with all of the other things I’ve been doing, such as the Micropreneur Academy, working on MicroConf 2012, my podcast, other products I’ve been putting maintenance time into, various work and family obligations it just wasn’t going to happen. Again, I should have known better, but I was trying to push the envelope of time and that was just unrealistic… or dumb, depending on your point of view. I’ve discussed this to a large extent on my podcast, Startups for the Rest of Us and have provided some sporadic updates via Twitter so it’s not a big secret or anything. I haven’t blogged about it because blogging takes time. It’s a lot more time consuming to write a blog article than it is to just talk about it on a podcast for 45 minutes. There’s one problem with this.

However you look at it, the result is the same. Developer Fail.

But there is a bright side of things.

As of last week, I finally reached my goal. AuditShark is far enough along that it has reached an Alpha stage, or MVP (Minimum Viable Product) as I referenced via my Twitter feed. In fact, I’ve got it running in my lab environment full time and piping data back out into the cloud so that I can do reporting. I also have a volunteer who has offered to put it in his lab environment as just as soon as he gets back from vacation, which I expect to be January 2, 2012.

No income yet, nor do I intend to try charging people until after I get through some sort of alpha testing. In fact, I will be relying on manual billing for the time being until I get enough customers where automating it is necessary. The current problem I’m wrestling with is that I haven’t reached a solid conclusion about what I consider to be the success criteria for a successful Alpha testing phase. Probably just that nothing really major breaks. I need to get some feedback from my Alpha tester to establish what they view as necessary for them to make full use of the product. But I think this is a problem that every software entrepreneur must address.

The question becomes: when should you convert from alpha to beta, and from beta to paying customers?

I have some ideas in my head, but if you have any thoughts, please leave them in the comments.

Well, I made no secret of the fact that I wanted to launch AuditShark by the end of June. The end of June was a few days ago, so you might think I’ve failed to meet my goal pretty miserably. Except that in May I stated on my podcast that I was pushing back the deadline by about a month due to all of the work involved with getting MicroConf off the ground. In addition, I quantified it a bit better by stating that I was intending to get to Alpha. So I missed it, but I also knew that was going to happen so it’s hard to say how that should be classified. I predicted my failure accurately I guess? Not sure how to score that one.

I think my initial goal of getting it completely launched was probably unrealistic. But the fact remains that I still want to get to Alpha by the end of this month. and the end of July is bearing down on me fast. I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me if I intend to get AuditShark into some Alpha testers hands before the end of the month. After it hits Alpha, I’ll be focusing a lot more efforts on the marketing behind the product too. That way I can work on bug fixes in parallel with the marketing efforts. Part of the reason for doing that is that it’s so difficult to know how much longer it’s going to take to get finished because some of the features just haven’t been scoped out yet.

Since programmers are notoriously terrible at estimating how long things will take… don’t say we’re not because we suck at it. How many times have you said something should only take 10-15 minutes and it takes three hours because there are all these other dependencies that you hadn’t considered before you got started? Yea, that’s what I thought…. and since we’re terrible at estimating how long things will take, it’s a lot easier to make those judgments as you start working on things. And if there are better ways to do something which will take a lot longer to complete, I’ve been taking shortcuts to hit my deadline and then logging the additional functionality as a bug or feature request. It’s been working out pretty well so far, but my list of things to implement has grown to well over 100 items. At this rate, I’ll be done in 2038 which is just in time for the Unix Millenium Bug.

Another reason this product has been in development for a long time is because there are soooo many moving parts. My Visual Studio solution has ten separate project files in it. TEN! That’s a ridiculous undertaking for a one person product. But it’s gonna rock like a rockstar when it’s done!

I’d write more about what’s going on, but hey… I’ve got work to do.

Well, I decided to change things up a bit on my Blog and the new look that you see today is a result of that effort. It took me a couple of hours of tweaking last night to get it to where it’s at right now. I’m sure there’s a few odds and ends that I might have missed, but I’m not too worried about it. I would imagine that people are going to point out the things that aren’t working via the spiffy new “Contact Me” form that I added. Now that the new theme and the Contact Me forms are out of the way, I’m going to start blogging a bit more.

The delays have been due in part to MicroConf, AuditShark, goings-on with the Micropreneur Academy, not to mention a bit of self-induced guilt due to not having dedicated the time to actually get back to blogging. But suffice it to say that I think that’s all behind me now and I’ll be making a concerted effort through the rest of the year to start blogging more… a LOT more in fact if I’m ever going to meet my year-end blogging goal.

About three months ago, Rob Walling and I announced that MicroConf was coming to the Riviera in Las Vegas. Two weeks ago, it happened. And more than 100 people descended on the hotel for a conference we put together from beginning to end in a mere three months. If I saw you there, then I want to say “Hello, and thanks again for coming”. If you weren’t able to make it, I think you missed a great conference.

Rob and I kicked around the idea of having a conference for nearly a year before we decided to do it. Several people asked us to put it on but it never seemed like a good time. But I suppose it’s like having a child. There’s never a good time and if it’s something you want to do, you have to just do it.

But why have this conference in the first place? What made it so important? Justin Vincent from the TechZing podcast asked me if we were going to make a lot of money on it and I explained that the economics were such that we would most likely break even, but it would be close. On his podcast with Jason the next day, he called it a “labor of love”, which is a pretty accurate assessment.

But that doesn’t quite answer the question. Why bother putting on the conference if we weren’t going to make money? What made this conference so important to us?

After seeing how everything went down, this was exactly the type of conference that I would have wanted to attend more than five years ago when I was first starting out with my business. More than 100 people came to the conference with exactly the same goal in mind: to learn about how to build a software business from other people who were doing it and how to go about it without external funding. Virtually everyone there had a product they were building or a product idea that they wanted to launch but most needed a bit of help in figuring out how to do it.

Ideas flowed like free drinks at the casino. It wasn’t the type of atmosphere where people were afraid to talk about their ideas for fear that someone might steal them. Everyone was too busy working on their own products to take an interest in someone else’s, so everyone talked quite openly about their problems, their fears and more importantly, were willing and able to help each other solve those problems.

During the evenings, speakers mixed freely and at great length with the attendees. We got a lot of compliments on that. I got the distinct impression that many of the other conferences people have attended, speakers show up for their speech, give their talk and are out the door shortly thereafter. That didn’t happen at MicroConf and it was, in a word, awesome. Every speaker hung around to listen to all of the other speakers. Some of the speakers asked some of the harder questions during the Q&A sessions. There was genuine interest in what everyone else was saying and in learning from the experiences of others.

Lunch on both days was a highly intimate affair with about a dozen entrepreneurs sitting at every table and we made sure that the tables were packed together in a really tiny room. Everyone just sat there talking about whatever came to mind with people commenting left and right on a variety of topics and sharing their experiences. Speakers were mixed among those tables, handing out advice and even cannibalizing their upcoming talks to help people. I felt like I spoke with nearly everyone there, although I know I likely missed a few people. Minutes before I had to catch my flight, I ran into the three guys from Ninja Otter and thanked them for coming. I’m sure they weren’t the only ones I didn’t quite catch up with.

Sunday night at the pub I was told: “This conference has already paid for itself and it hasn’t even started yet.”

One attendee came up to me between sessions and said “I think Patrick McKenzie just saved me $5,000 on AdWords.”

And yet another introduced himself to me and said: “You probably don’t remember, but I’m here because of the very long explanation you sent to me about why I should come to this conference. I wanted to say thanks. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for that email and I’m really glad I came.”

For days afterwards, blog posts about the conference appeared. On Sunday, I listened to the Techzing podcast discussing the conference, and read through hundreds of tweets about the conference. We set up an online group for conference attendees and more than 30 people joined it within 72 hours. Another couple days and the membership was over 50. Between the times my speech started and ended, my Twitter following increased by more than 60 people. By the end of the conference it was up by more than 80 and today is more than 100. I imagine other speakers got the same treatment.

It feels good to get that kind of a response and I can’t begin to express my thanks to the speakers for giving up their time, the attendees for taking a chance on the conference, and to all of the people who helped out with all the random things that came up, like Dave Rodenbaugh taking photos and Ruben Gamez recording video.

Not to mention the sponsors. Whew! We had Microsoft, Red Gate, Balsamiq, bvsoftware, Bidsketch, UserVoice, Pluralsight and Appsumo. Rob and I also contributed on our own with sponsorships from our podcast Startups For the Rest of Us and our online startup school called the Micropreneur Academy. There were loads of giveaways and it was hard to squeeze them all in, but we managed it. Special congratulations go out to the Xbox with Kinect winner. I bet he’s a happy camper!

But there was one question that burned in my mind the entire conference and I took every opportunity to ask people the same question: “Would you pay to come back next year.” I asked that question not because I was looking to make more money next year, but to make sure that we delivered value to people and they were able to justify attending it again. If they said they wouldn’t come back, then we didn’t get it right. But you know what?

Not one person said they wouldn’t come back. And I realize that most people are going to be nicer in person than they would be in an anonymous survey, but the responses I heard were over the top and overwhelmingly positive. I would expect that there were a couple of people for whom the conference probably wasn’t a good fit, but the networking opportunities abounded.

In short, the overwhelming answer was always “Yes”. Several people said we didn’t charge enough and most said they couldn’t wait for the next MicroConf. One attendee even commented that he’d pay any amount of money to come back next year.

If that’s not a testament to what we were able to put together, then I don’t know what is.

I’m looking forward to reading the surveys that are going out this week. Thanks again to everyone who attended, helped out, or sponsored the event. We really appreciate your support.

And one more thing. If you’re interested in coming to MicroConf next year, be sure to sign up for Early Notification.

It was just two short months ago that I announced on my blog that I’m co-hosting a conference called MicroConf. Well, we’ve gone through the pre-sales process, and gone through the regular sales process. Now it’s time for the final push. If you’re interested in going to MicroConf, you still have time to get there. Go to http://www.microconf.com and register.

So far, the conference has really started to come together. We’ve got a great lineup of a dozen speakers who are generally well regarded in the startup community. We’ve got a solid set of sponsors who I can’t possibly thank enough for their generous support. They are, in the order listed on the website:

• Microsoft
• AppSumo
• EditMe
• Bidsketch
• The Micropreneur Academy
• Red Gate Software
• Balsamiq
• bvSoftware

Most of these sponsors are giving away stuff, and in some cases that stuff reaches into the thousands of dollars of stuff. The conference is relatively small (as conferences go) so you stand a reasonably decent chance at winning something. Don’t expect a TV or anything like that though. We’re giving away stuff that’s going to help your business to either launch a product, or to become better situated to find more customers or serve the existing ones better. Some of them are giving away developer tools *woot*

So register today and we can have a few drinks at the Queen Victoria Pub in the Riviera.

Wait, you don’t want to pay for it? Hmmm, well I do have a couple of tickets that I can give away. So I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. Send me an email to mike at micropreneur dot com and tell me your story. Tell me who you are, what you do, and why you should get a free ticket to come to MicroConf . I’ll read all of the submissions and award the tickets I have based on those submissions. I’m not looking for sob stories. What I’m looking for is genuine interest in either launching a product or furthering your business, why you need to attend this conference, what you expect to get out of it, and whether you’ve already registered or not.

In a nutshell, that’s it. And for those of you who want to go but are afraid to register in the hopes that you might win, go ahead and register. If you win and are already registered, I’ll refund your money. I haven’t decided yet, but I may look more favorably on people who have already registered, since I’ll know that you’re serious about going.

That’s about it. Good luck everyone!

Over the past several months, I’ve been diligently working on my new product called AuditShark. If you are new or haven’t been following my blog lately, the basic concept goes something like this. There are dozens of industry regulations which dictate specific settings that should be configured on computer in specific ways. They include things like network share access defaults, permissions on certain files, whether specific services are allowed or disallowed, etc. All of these system settings fall under an umbrella that is designed to help make computers more secure.

Implementing an auditing product is often extremely challenging for a small company because of a lack of funds and more importantly, a lack of technical expertise. AuditShark solves both of those problems by offering a cost effective solution that’s not only easy to use, but helps you measure exactly how you stand in ways that I’ll discuss in more detail in another blog article.

Building this product is not much different than any other product I’ve ever worked on, but recently I’ve come to a revelation. When faced with a choice of two methodologies for implementing a feature or fixing a bug, I’ve often struggled to make a decision. Often, it’s because the two have different trade-offs associated with them, but the scope and severity of those trade-offs tends to be similar. At the heart of this, I find myself spending a lot of time trying to make the best choice when the reality is that it’s an arbitrary choice. Thus I spend more time trying to make a decision than it would have taken to simply flip a coin and then do the work.

When you’re trying to make decisions, keep in mind that instead of making the optimal choice, you should simply aim to make a decent choice. If all of the options before you are what you would consider “decent”, then it’s an arbitrary choice and no amount of analysis or discussion is going to change that. This little tidbit is key to maintaining forward momentum and maintaining progress on whatever product you are trying to build.

If you’re not maintaining forward progress, then you’re either spinning your wheels or moving in the wrong direction. Either way, you’re not getting any closer to launch. So make a decision and go with it. You can always fix the code. You can’t get back that lost time.