Month: October 2014

A few weeks ago there was some discussion online about hiring virtual personal assistants to help offload non-essential business tasks. Around that same time a Twitter user messaged me (and quite a few other indie devs) asking what sort of business tasks we would consider outsourcing. I’m pretty sure this industrious @replier was just looking for job leads, but it did cause me to stop and consider what parts of my business would I be comfortable delegating to an assistant.

The short answer is, not much.

For developers of a consumer-oriented product I think there might be a strong possibility of being able to hand off documentation writing and lightweight customer support. It would be great if I had someone answering emails that only required a link to an FAQ article, leaving the truly in-depth questions for me to answer.

But for a technically niche product like VirtualHostX, I worry my non-specialized assistant wouldn’t have the technical chops to answer anything but the most basic support questions. Writing documentation would likely also be a problem. However, if they’ve used the software proficiently in the past, the thought of them editing together some instructional screencasts is very appealing – as that’s something I never find the time to do myself. I’d love to build a list of topics and then have them go off and come back with screencasts ready-to-go. I’d easily pay a few hundred dollars a-piece for that service.

So while I’m not comfortable outsourcing my core business tasks, I have begun delegating personal tasks to free up more time for the business. A few months ago I signed up for Fancy Hands. For a few bucks a month I have access to a network of virtual assistants that I can send odd jobs to. Basically, anything non-confidential that can be completed electronically and/or remotely is fair game. I’ve used my assistant to schedule appointments, cancel hotel reservations, price shop, and do online research. I’ve been very pleased so far.

At first I found it difficult to come up with tasks to delegate to the service. A week or two would pass and I’d suddenly think “Oh, crap. I haven’t tasked them with anything lately” and worry about not getting my money’s worth.

So, I created an “on hold” context in OmniFocus called “Fancy Hands” just like I would create for any other person I assign tasks to. Then, during my weekly review or when I’m flagging tasks for the day, I’ll consciously keep an eye out for anything I can assign to them. This helps with remembering to delegate tasks as the possibility of doing so is forefront in my mind.

I don’t have any big conclusion or take-away. These are just my thoughts after actively trying to learn how to delegate tasks while running a one-person company.

I often find that constraints, real or artificial, can be a huge motivation and productivity boost when I find myself stalled on a project or piece of work. Forcing yourself to work within a specific limitation can cause you to find a creative solution in a direction you might otherwise never consider.

In my own work, I find time constraints the most useful. When I don’t know where to start developing or writing, I’ll often force myself to do something – no matter how small or tangential – to move the work along for thirty minutes or an hour. The artificial time limit frees my mind to attempt starting points I might not typically choose because I know that even in a worst case scenario, I’ll only lose an hour worth of work if my chosen path is unsuccessful. Similarly, when I find myself lacking motivation and energy to work, I’ll use the pomodoro technique. That gives me the kick in the pants I need to break the ice and get moving, which can often turn into real energy and sometimes even that magical “flow” state.

A few weeks ago on a Friday night I found myself burnt out from my day job. It had been weeks since I had done any recreational programming or development on my side projects. I desperately wanted to move them forward, but simply couldn’t find the energy.

So I tried an experiment.

I decided to give myself thirty minutes to brainstorm and come up with a product idea that I could then build to a shippable state within the next two hours. Further constraining myself, I decided to forgo my two 27″ monitors and do everything exclusively on my 11″ MacBook Air.

I knew the easiest way to come up with a new product idea was to examine my typical day and find a small pain point that I could solve with software. After mentally going through my usual day in my head, I began to focus on my calendar. I realized that I was often checking multiple times throughout the day to see how much time I had until my next appointment, which would influence which task I could take on before I have to be somewhere. (As many developers will know, a programming assignment that will take an hour, often takes longer as there’s a definite lead-up time before you really begin coding where you work to get yourself into the zone.)

I thought “Wouldn’t it be easier if I could just glance up and see how much time I had remaining?”

With that insight, I had my product idea.

Over the next ninety minutes I built a simple Mac menubar app that looks at your calendar and simply displays how long you have until your next appointment. I call it Up Next. I’ve been using it as part of my daily routine for the last few weeks and have found it works great. Without losing place in my current work, I can glance at my menu bar and see “Oh, I’ve got two hours until I need to be somewhere” or “Crap, I’ve only got twenty minutes to wrap this up”.

That little bit of awareness doesn’t distract me from getting in the flow, yet keeps me persistently time boxed and motivated.

If you find yourself similarly lacking motivation throughout the day, I encourage you to try placing a constraint on your work. And if you think Up Next might be useful to you, you can give the app a try.

I want to give a big thumbs up and a hug to everything in this fabulous post by Paul Kim. I missed it back in August when this discussion was initially happening but came across it on Gus’s blog this morning. Paul writes about his expectations starting out with Hazel and what he’s discovered looking back on his success. This portion specifically speaks to my (moderate) success and what I’ve learned:

But it wasn’t easy and it wasn’t overnight. A common sentiment I see among a lot of new devs is that if they aren’t living full-time off their app in the first year, it’s a failure. I know when starting out there is the hope that your app will be an immediate success. It’s fine to hope that; after all, its our dreams that drive us to succeed. But you shouldn’t expect it. I would say it took about three years before I could be comfortable living off of it full-time.

That’s exactly one of the points I was trying to make when I wrote about my own journey. My initial expectations for VirtualHostX were very tempered – I just wanted to earn enough money over the lifetime of the app to install hardwood floors in our tiny house. But, as the app and my audience grew, I would occasionally readjust my expectations – eventually to the point where I could financially sustain myself by my app revenue alone.

Jalkut says the same thing in a tweet from July:

If you release your 1.0 with awareness that you may not succeed until 5.0, you’re in good shape.

Paul’s other point about luck is also worth keeping in mind:

One thing that I did learn is to have a healthy respect for randomness. Luck plays a huge role and you can’t always attribute one’s success or failure solely on their decisions and actions….That doesn’t mean you sit back and just let fate decide; you still need to work to improve your chances. Just realize that there’s a big chunk you can’t control and that on some level, you need to be ok with that.

While I’ve poured a lot of time, energy, and work into my apps, I’m very much aware that a lot of their success is just dumb luck. Case in point: I was extremely fortunate that of all the apps I could have built, I happened to pick a niche market without any serious competitors. Not only did that make me the only game in town, but it also allowed me time to breathe and let my app grow organically to meet my ever growing list feature requests from my customers. Sure, picking a niche in an underserved market is business school 101, but for the dumb twenty-four year-old that I was, that was a supremely lucky break.

In any case, if you have any interest in a successful indie journey, give Paul’s post a read.