Crunch Mode Blog

New design for d2soft.com and blog!

2012-12-10T13:20:09.443-05:00

With the end of this year, we have updated our corporate look here at D2Soft Technologies. You can now visit our site and you will see that we have updated it to offer a better view of our company.

You can also notice that our blog has moved and is integrated inside our company site. If you are following our RSS feed, make sure to update it to our new feed.

Google Checkout: nowhere near PayPal

2012-07-10T09:10:05.157-04:00

When doing business, we want to offer the most options to our customers. This is also true for payment options. Most customers know PayPal and it is a great service to make purchases safely.

However, other options like Google Checkout must also be considered by any business. That’s why we tried to give it a go.

What seemed to first be an easy process to signup, finally stopped short after only a few minutes. In fact, Google Checkout doesn’t seem to allow any user outside of USA or UK, as the first form you stumble upon only offers those two countries. In our case, being in Canada, we are blocked right away.

This lack of country support would not be as bad as the fact that Google offers no phone support or easy contact information anywhere on the Checkout site. I’m thinking ahead as a business guy here and wondering: what happens when you have an issue with a client that you want to solve in their system? Are you stuck to writing on those horrible Google forums?

In comparison, PayPal’s service is incredible. Not everything is perfect (we saw some customers having issue in completing a payment), but at least every time we called PayPal, we had an answer right away. And most of the time, the PayPal’s personnel is very well trained and offers good answers.

Now, I understand better why Google can’t compete with PayPal. Unless Google starts taking serious their service offering and opens doors to many more countries, I continue to see their service as a marginal way of sending a few bucks to the USA.

Why every startup should borrow from Amazon’s culture

2012-07-08T22:31:33.813-04:00

I never worked at Amazon.com. I never dreamed of working at Amazon. I do not even know anyone linked to Amazon in anyway. But if there is a company's culture that I can relate to, it's Amazon's.

Amazon is a customer-obsessed company. And this, you can feel it in a lot of ways. From the hard-to-beat prices on products, to their great customer service and fast response time. Any complain is taken care of and the customer is always the winner.

What makes Amazon’s culture interesting is that by focusing less on profit and more on making the customers happy, they have built a love connection between the customers, the company and its employees. When employees love their jobs, it reflects everywhere, especially on the customers. How many times did you talk to a customer service representative that didn't show love for his/her job and you thought that you would never buy there again?

Amazon's success is not fortuitous. It is a culture established from the top management (aka Jeff Bezos) and it was successfully implemented everywhere within the company. Although it looks easy to do, this is a hard task that very few companies focus on or even succeed at.

This is especially true to startups. In a way, startups are stuck in between. On one side, they have to build a product quickly and market it. On the other side they have limited resources. If you add investors to the mix, their hands are tied and you can be sure that the happiness of customers won’t be part of the business strategy. Making a successful exit is usually the main focus of investors.

That’s unfortunate and that’s where a lot of startups should take a humility lesson from Amazon. The fact is that building a business should never be about short term strategy. In Amazon’s case, if Jeff Bezos had thought of making a quick buck and exiting, his company would probably have failed extraordinarily in its first few years of existence. Amazon was never about short term vision, and I would say it was and will always be about long-long term vision. By making the customer the core focus of its business, Amazon has built more than a company, it has built a brand recognized everywhere.

In our case, with Nimbb, we have followed a similar culture as Amazon, making sure that customers are our main focus and that each one of them feel right at home with our service and our products. Any user that calls us or contacts us by email gets an almost instant response. We make sure that all questions are answered promptly and that any problem is solved. Our greatest reward is to receive simple comments from people such as "amazing service", "thank you for offering this nice product" or a "you guys rock". Our thinking is that each customer should be taken care of like a friend.

Of course, this strategy does not pay up fast. I would advise that it will take time, lot of it, before seeing a ROI. The first few years will be slow, as you build your reputation. If you are in for a quick buck, this is not the way to achieve it. However, if you are in for the long run, the one that you can be proud of when looking back, then you won’t regret the time you invested in building a customer relationship. Today, Nimbb is growing quickly. And I can say that I’m very proud of what we have achieved over these years. We are in for a long lasting business, and well underway with that target.

If there is one thing that any startup should learn, it’s how to create a great company’s culture. Zappos has one of the best cultures out there, and Amazon didn’t take too much time to notice it. After making sure that their unique culture would stay intact, Zappos agreed to be bought by Amazon. The similarities with the two companies are strong and it represents the incredible long-term vision of Jeff Bezos.

If your startup is lacking a basic set of rules that defines who you are and how you do business, then maybe you should take a pen and write them down now. Knowing who you are will help you find your own unique identity and also help in the decision process as you make your company a real and long lasting business. Now would be a good time to borrow some of Amazon’s culture; I’m sure this will help you in your quest towards success.

Refrain from using "ASAP" in emails, ASAP!

2012-02-09T11:02:51.28-05:00

If you are doing business over the Net, you might have noticed this: some people love the word/expression "ASAP". This means, of course, "As Soon As Possible". In other wording, it would mean "Do this right now, or else". At least in my mind, that’s what it means.

The thing is, a lot of people, even businesses, use this term in their email communications. For many years of doing business myself, I have refrained from using this expression. A long time ago, I learned that using ASAP in emails couldn’t be more arrogant and non-sense. Since then, I banned the use of this term.

When you think about it, using ASAP in an email doesn’t make much sense. First, emails are an asynchronous way of communication, so you never know when the recipient will read it. Second, it doesn’t give any time definition, so "soon" for Joe might not be the same "soon" of John.

Sometimes, our customer support service receives a message that includes the word "ASAP". In the beginning, when I would see this coming from a potential customer, I would be a bit stressed and think "OMG let’s put this in priority, this guy needs that right now". I even answered a support email on Christmas day because of that. The funny thing though: once I did what they wanted and replied "super-fast ASAP", them, in turn, didn’t reply a thing for at least a week, sometimes even never. How ASAP was really the situation, I wondered.

Today, I have a pretty good picture in my mind of the type of person using ASAP. With our customer service, we threat all messages with the same priority level and reply in a timely manner to all, "ASAP" used or not. But you can be sure that if I see a ASAP in the email, I get a little smile on the face.

Now, let’s reverse the situation and ask yourself this question: is your business offering support only when users are putting ASAP in the emails?

We just had this experience recently with a company. We signed up for a marketing campaign with them in November 2011. Out of the sells they would do, we would receive a commission at the end (it was a one week offer). Normally, we would have been paid somewhere in December, but no news from them. So I wrote to the guy that was my contact in the company to see when the payment would be done. No answer. I wrote back two weeks later. Still no answer. I was starting to really wonder, so I gave a call to his phone. Do I need to mention that it was an answering machine? I left a voicemail. Still no returned call after another two weeks. I was getting really upset at the situation and was about to give up on them (they actually didn’t sell much, but still). Then, as one last move, I went on their contact form on their site and wrote: "Guys. Why is it taking so long and no reply from you? Please contact me ASAP." There I was using one last trick that I thought wouldn’t work.

Guess what. It worked! In less than an hour, I received an email and they were suddenly sorry about the delay and they wanted me to send (again) the information to complete the payment. I was surprised that this actually worked and that’s when I had the idea of writing this post.

If you do business like those guys, you’ll fail. Offering good customer service is far more important than anything else in your business (read Doing Business 101: Great Product, Awesome Customer Service). If you wait for ASAP before going into action, you will lose your customers and you will get a very bad reputation.

Next time you think of using ASAP, think twice!

Why Flash has bad press: most developers suck

2012-02-08T14:57:32.343-05:00

This is a quick post about my thoughts on developing for the Flash platform. I’ve been coding with Flex since 2008 to build the Nimbb Player. Over the last few years (and probably many more), there’s been a lot of negative comments regarding Flash development. Actually, in the news, Flash has very bad press.

And this should not be a surprise to anyone: Flash was first targeting artists and designers that have very low programming experience. This caused many badly written applications in Flash, often killing CPU usage when looping through spaghetti code. But we can’t blame those people; after all, Adobe made it easy for anyone to write a Flash application and that’s why Flash became so widely used on the Net.

When Flex was introduced as a way for "real" programmers to build applications running on Flash, my guess is that Adobe thought it would improve the overall quality of Flash applications. After all, programmers should be better at writing code than artists and designers. Unfortunately, it seems that not all programmers are equals: most Flash/Flex programmers suck.

How do I know this (and I’m not even looking at the code here)? For my Flex development, I run the debug versions of Adobe Flash on a computer. The debug version has the particularity of displaying a debug window when something’s wrong in the code (read: crash). Without proper error trapping in your code, you’ll see this window way too often to your liking. The thing is, when surfing online with the debug version of Flash, you will see the debug window, like, all the time.

Even the most popular video players on the biggest websites are full of those crashes. A quick try/catch should fix anything, but it looks like that those programmers are either unaware of basic programming lessons or in a crunch mode that don’t even give them time to think properly. That’s a shame to any programmer.

If you run Adobe Flash debug and run Nimbb, you will not find a single debug window (if you do, something’s completely wrong, let me know!). Yes, it’s possible to write nice code that do not make Flash look like a broken technology.

Startup founders need less pivot, more personality

2012-01-16T11:08:32.483-05:00

It seems like medias love the word "pivot". They over-use it in articles. A startup is not doing good? Don't worry, a pivot is on the way. Pivoting a business not only seems to be a solution if your product doesn't work, it also seems to be an accepted explanation why you would change direction so quickly.

Some defines "pivot" as "the idea of reinventing or refocusing your business on the fly". Personally, I have another definition for pivot: "prototyping without vision". It's like trying to figure out how to use all those disconnected Lego blocks, without having an idea of the model on the box.

What does it take to become an entrepreneur and start your own company? It takes vision. Vision is a primary ingredient to be a successful entrepreneur. An entrepreneur needs to be a visionary, as only he (she) can see the future the way he will build it.

However, an entrepreneur is nothing without a strong personality. By this, I don’t mean that you must be the kind of entrepreneur that speak loudly in events and that wants to be noticed. No. Strong personality is all about being strong in character. You have to be strong at confronting failure. You must be strong when your ideas are being rejected by others. You must hold on when most would give up. This is what a strong personality is about.

When I started Nimbb at the end of 2008, I had a vision. I knew that I wanted to build a product that would allow others to add webcam recording in their websites. I could see how the product would be used by others, how it would make their life easier and better. In my head, I was already building my path to success.

However, success doesn’t come easily. If I was like many entrepreneurs, I would have pivoted my business. Nimbb’s start was very slow. In May of 2009, I was finally starting to sign up my first paying customers. It was a step in the right direction. But just like a baby, each step looked like eternity. In a startup world, this can appear as discouraging to most entrepreneurs.

However, I didn’t give up. Neither did I give up when people around me told me that my idea would probably fail. This seems to a normal reaction from people around any entrepreneur. You need a very strong personality when you see your friends turning you down. I did believe in my product, so I did continue without a second thought.

Things get also hard once you try to get others interested in your startup. In 2010, in a trip to San Francisco, I gave it a shot. I met numerous entrepreneurs, investors and medias. Medias ignored me, as it’s mostly the case for entrepreneurs without contacts in medias. Other entrepreneurs would listen to my speech, then I would listen to theirs, most of the time without new business relationship. As for investors, they are the first to tell you to pivot your business. Your product is never totally what they have in mind. They are very good at judging your product in matter of minutes, without even trying it. In my case, I even drove one hour from San Francisco to Palo Alto to meet some investors, just to be turned down by them quickly without even a "thanks for dropping by".

When rejection is so strong, most entrepreneurs pivot. They lose their vision and they weaken their personality. They let other diminish themselves.

My trip to San Francisco might have looked like a failure. I wasn’t able to get investors interested in Nimbb. But, instead of feeling down, something else happened in me. "I don’t need investors and I don’t need to pivot. I’ll work even harder." That was my reaction.

Sure enough, without a strong personality, you can’t achieve that. Instead of doing a pivot, I actually gave up my 10-year safe job and went full time on my business. I knew that I had what it takes: a great vision, a strong will to succeed and faith. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you need all of these.

Unfortunately, too many startup founders think that pivoting is a way of succeeding. Your product doesn’t take off the way you want? Pivot. Investors tell you that you won’t succeed with your service? Pivot. You can’t take the pressure anymore? Pivot. Surely enough, this can’t feel right.

Some entrepreneurs are even famous for their pivoting personality. Some even use the word in their LinkedIn profiles as a trendy word. If you think that pivot is cool and you are applying it to your own startup, then maybe it’s time you seriously ask yourself if you should be an entrepreneur. Don’t prototype blindly with hope of finding a great product. Instead, try building a strong personality and following your vision. This will be the start of a great adventure.

Make your startup a scalable business

2011-12-22T12:23:49.093-05:00

When creating your new business, ask yourself if your business is scalable. In my mind, there are two main points about scalability: technology and revenues.

Scaling technology means that as your number of users go up, you need to support those with more hardware/technology. It’s very important not to overlook this, of course. Will your product be able to grow well as your number of users increase? Can your service support more users? These are important questions that need an answer from the start. You must have a plan to scale your technology as needs increase.

I think most entrepreneurs make a mistake by thinking of scalability only from a technology side. The second and very important scalability point is business revenues. If your user base increases, will your revenues increase? Is your revenue stream directly linked to your number of users? Is it proportional as the growth increases? These are mandatory questions that any business must ask itself from the start. You must be able to have more revenues if you handle more users.

Why must those two scalability points be directly linked? Simple: more users means more technology requirements, which means more expenses, which means more revenue needed. If the two curves do not increase in a similar pattern, then your business is not scalable. In that case, you will need to search for other revenue streams, like investors.

Having investors only delays your revenue problem. Yes, you get big money injection, but as you start spending it, now what? How will you take care of your revenue problem? Do you have a plan to convert those users into customers? And there’s always a danger of losing users as you ask them to pay for your service.

Twitter is a great example of a business that is not scalable. They have grown their business to hundreds of millions of users, but they have yet to find a revenue model that scales. They have been relying on investors to continue to grow and support their business. This is a very tricky situation that can lead to a dead-end. What happens if they run out of investors’ money before they find a successful revenue model?

They are thousands of startups out there that follow a similar non-scalable business model like Twitter. They only focus on scalability of technology, but they overlook scalability of revenues. They think that they will figure out how to make money as they grow, but unfortunately, that doesn’t work for most startups. If you want your startup to be successful, make sure that you find your scalable model from the start.

Industrial Age vs Information Age: Happening right now

2011-12-14T16:02:51.03-05:00

I’m currently reading two books in parallel (when I take a break from work). The first one is a book, Midas Touch, written by both Donald J. Trump and Robert T. Kiyosaki (two successful entrepreneurs). The second is a magazine, a special edition from Entreprendre: L’avenir du Québec – Sortir de la crise (asking how can Quebec get out of the crisis and interviewing 100 personalities from here).

It’s actually quite interesting that I got my hands on both at the same time. Why? Within a few pages of the Midas Touch, the authors are already talking about the Industrial Age and the Information Age. At the same time, happening now in Quebec (and for sure in a lot of other places around the world), there is a lot of questioning about the future and what actions to take to pass through the crisis.

I’m quite at the beginning of the book, but I can already say that I enjoy reading it. They clearly define the Industrial Age as an old economy. Living in Quebec, I can’t agree more.

What did bring the Industrial Age? Job security for life. Pensions. Benefits. Labor union. Need I say more? If you look at how jobs are in Quebec, you will see that the Industrial Age has roots in half of the Belle Province’s work force. I’m thinking here of all those people working for the government and all those part of some labor union. All in all, it’s more than half the Quebec’s employees.

What about the Information Age? It’s happening now, it’s the new economy. Everything is computer oriented, digital, and has no boundaries. “The Information Age has allowed rapid global communications and networking to shape modern society" as defined on Wikipedia. For sure, this means that the level of competition in all markets has increased dramatically. You can’t now think of your market only as your province or country. You need to see the market as the whole world.

Problem is, the Industrial Age brings ideas (of the past) that slow down what the Information Age is trying to accomplish. Quebec is a perfect example of such a combat. On one side, there are people and groups that are trying to keep things like they are: unfit of the modern economy. Those groups have so much exposure and power that they impose their old ways.

In an economy where everything moves fast, where competition comes from all countries, where the future is based on how we can do sacrifice today, I see that something has to be done. That’s why the Entreprendre magazine is trying to bring new ideas. But the "combat" is just starting. People need to wake up here (and elsewhere). We need to ask more from everyone. Work more, work harder. Bring something to your country. Have a purpose and stop being lazy. Don’t let the old way of thinking get in your way; have your own ideas, build your own stuff.

The Industrial Age was good in the past, when the future seemed so bright. Governments borrowed lots of money, hired people with great salary, promised comfortable pensions and all those incredible benefits. Nothing could stop them. However, the reality is now catching up like a 20% interest rate on your unpaid credit card balance: a total nightmare. If we don’t do collectively something about it, we will fail.

Book review : The innovation secrets of Steve Jobs

2011-12-08T10:36:49.453-05:00

If you are an entrepreneur, chances are that you enjoy entrepreneur-inspiring books. Reading a book about how and what made an entrepreneur successful is always a great learning experience. I enjoy such books.

This last book I just finished reading is The innovation secrets of Steve Jobs from bestselling author Carmine Gallo. I purchased this book in the first place because I was curious about how Steve Jobs managed his approach to innovation. Take note that this is not an official Steve Jobs book (if you need one, you should get the official biography; this book is on my desk, I didn’t read it yet).

What I enjoy the most about entrepreneur books is that when I read them, they make me have sparks in my eyes (and my head) and I feel like I’m able to change the world with my ideas. You know the feeling: it’s like an excitement that wants to get you moving right now and you won’t be able to sleep because of it. In a lot of ways, The innovation secrets of Steve Jobs is such a book.

The book is split in 7 principles. Those principles should be reflecting the principles that Steve Jobs has… had (he unfortunately passed away on October 5th, 2011 – the book was written before his death). Here are the principles:

Principle 1: Do what you love
Principle 2: Put a dent in the universe
Principle 3: Kick-start your brain
Principle 4: Sell dreams, not products
Principle 5: Say no to 1,000 things
Principle 6: Create insanely great experiences
Principle 7: Master the message

For each principle, the author explains how Steve Jobs approached the issue and faced obstacles. What I really like about the book is that the author didn’t just focus on Steve Jobs; the book is full of real-life entrepreneurs and how they succeeded. Learning about new entrepreneurs that made a difference in the world is always inspiring to me. Often, a half page text will give a short overview of an entrepreneur, his challenges and how he successfully mastered the principle to succeed.

I learned about a lot of entrepreneurs that I didn’t know much about (or even didn’t even know). For example, I vaguely knew about the Dyson vacuum cleaners. What I didn’t know is that the inventor behind it, James Dyson, spent 5 years trying to build a successful vacuum, did 5,126 failing attempts, all with only income his wife’s salary (as an art teacher). Such examples make me want to learn more about those entrepreneurs.

In overall, this is a great book that I highly recommend. It’s packed with entrepreneurs’ names, so when reading the book, be sure to have a pen close-by to note what seems interesting. The only drawback of the book is that it’s written in such an example-based way that sometime it can get a little boring when the examples are not of great quality (it happens). You might want to put the book on the side to take a break from it for a week. But then, you continue reading and eventually you get hooked again. There’s no actual end to this book, so don’t get surprised when you see the Index and say "already ended?!".

My rating: 8/10 (if you enjoy entrepreneur stories, then it’s a 9/10)

The challenge of creating User Generated Content Videos

2011-12-05T15:20:29.28-05:00

When it comes to video content, displaying videos to your site’s visitors is no longer an issue. You can use an online service like YouTube to share your videos. If you need something professional, then you can use an online video platform like Brightcove. Both platforms make video hosting easy.

The biggest challenge today is with the creation of user generated content (UGC). That is, how can you convert your visitors from passive observers into content generating users? You might have asked your visitors to upload their videos using an upload-file form and hoped to receive hundreds of new videos per month. The reality, however, is that if the process of creating something takes more than a few clicks, the majority of web users will not participate. That’s true no matter the size of your site or how active your community of visitors is.

Take for example Amazon. They used to have a link on every product page saying "Add your video review". The process was that someone would record a video with his camera, then copy the file to his computer, then upload the file to Amazon and hopefully get all this right before the user gets bored. The problem? Too many steps, non-intuitive solution, no fun to use. The end result? Amazon pulled the video reviews from their site.

Is it that user generated content videos are not possible or not realistic? No. The problem is that the technology must not block the end result.

Now, for your own site, you will want to make it easy for users to submit videos. Most users have webcam on their computers and it no longer makes sense to ask them to "upload a file". What you need to do is to let them record a video with their webcam, directly from your site. It must be a seamlessly experience for the user. It must be instantaneous. It must be easy. It must be done in a few clicks. Technology must be there to help the user in the process.

The solution is the use a webcam video recording service. Nimbb is a unique service that allows adding video recording seamlessly, instantly, easily and all within 3 clicks. It can’t be easier for the user nor the developer. Once you use Nimbb into your site, creating UGC videos is no longer a challenge; it’s now a question of inviting the users to share their feelings.

Where most sites or people have seen UGC videos as something impossible or too hard to do, I see this as an opportunity when you have the right tools. People are no longer shy to share their image on the web, neither to record videos and discuss to a virtual group on the Net. When you have a great tool to let your visitors create their own content, and that they find your site appealing, then they will dedicate their energy into building great content.

To see how you can easily use Nimbb into your site, have a look at this video tutorial:

Then, visit the site at http://nimbb.com/