"No client worth having cares what your work structure looks like if you're capable of producing"
That is very easy to say when you are an established freelancer with work being thrown at you. Just starting out though, there is a fine balance between what's ideal and staying afloat.
If you want to run your business suboptimally in the hopes that it will attract your first clients, that's fine, but you shouldn't do so while pretending that it's the right way to run a business. I have a hard time thinking of clients who are particularly well-served by, say, 3-hour billings. Customers that need sporadic work like this are probably far better served by retainer arrangements. If you find yourself doing lots of 1, 2, and 3-hour projects, you should consider a staff augmentation arrangement instead of project billing.
For the most part, I think all consultants kid themselves about how productive they are juggling multiple projects in a day. It's not as if this is some great insight on my part. I'm a developer; I've read all the same stuff as you. I just paid close attention to the stuff about getting "in flow". Re-read Joel Spolsky's "Fire and Motion" essay.
Hourly billing gives a freelancer a lot more flexibility on their day. What if the number of hours you work for a client on any given day (or week) is highly variable? For example, you work off hours when you can. Or you are splitting time between clients. Or the amount of work a client has on-site wanes and spikes unpredictably. Or you feel like leaving at noon every Thursday and Friday. I am still newish to freelancing, but I do not feel comfortable billing an full 8 hour day for just showing up in any of the above scenarios. And I certainly would not want to give me time away for free if I did not hit some minimum.
What if the number of hours you work for a client is highly variable? Bill them for a full day.
What if the client genuinely just needs a 1-line change every once in awhile? Set up a retainer arrangement that allocates 1-2 billable days to them every month, use-it-or-lose-it.
The clients who will both refuse to arrange a retainer and refuse a minimum increment are almost by definition pathological, and you should not work for them. In reality: virtually everyone you'd ever want to work for is fine with a 1-day minimum. If you are so low on the food chain that your clients aren't, I strongly advise you to climb up the food chain instead of figuring out better ways to extract value from terrible clients.
That variability is precisely why I'm freelancing, so I bill hourly, in quarter-hour increments no less. I worked 13.25 hours yesterday, for 3 different clients, and I'm getting paid for all of them. Last Friday I worked 6 hours, because I slept in a bit, and then it was nice out so I did some yard work. I billed for 6. Sunday I worked 4 hours for a client and 2 hours for my own projects, billed for 4. I've billed as little as 15 hours in a full week (due to time spent on personal projects) and as many as 90.
If I billed daily, how can I justify that schedule? I've worked with hourly freelancers before who said "You're going to pay me for the whole day, and between 9 and 5 I'm all yours", which is fair. I don't make that commitment to my clients and I would not take a client who required it. I commit to specific goals and bill them however long it takes. I tell my clients my goal is to be as replaceable and fireable as possible, because I have plenty of other interesting work to do and I don't need to spend time doing crap work to pad a budget.
Do I run a timer or punch a clock? No. I look at the clock when I start, and when I end. If I'm bouncing between two projects all morning, I just split the time. I don't obsess over minutes spent on quick phone calls or responding to important emails or IMs.
I also don't want someone to "use or lose it", whether that's the last two hours of a slow day where I'm blocked, or a retainer agreement, because then they're going to "use it" on something dumb because it's now a sunk cost.
Perhaps I'm misleading myself, but I don't think this is because I'm low on the food chain, and it's certainly not bending to the wishes of an evil client as these are my own rules. I think it's just a matter of work/lifestyle and I wouldn't have it any other way.
If I am regularly working onsite at a client, and I leave early on my own accord, I am not going to bill a full day. How would that be fair to the client? Sure, billing for a full day is optimal for my business, but I don't see how it's optimal for the client.
I do not use hourly increments because my clients are awful or because I am low on the food chain. I choose hourly because it's the most straightforward way for me to provide my clients a hired hand while retaining flexibility on any given work day.
You've defined it to mean "extracts from the relation, at all feasible cost, the maximum amount of value for the client".
That's not what "fair" means. "Fair" means that both the client and the consultant agree that the terms of the engagement are equitable: that the consultant is being compensated in accordance with the value they're generating.
The clients you want to work with will universally agree that, absent some other arrangement, it is "fair" to establish a minimum billable increment of a full day. That full day increment accounts for the cost to you, the consultant, in terms of lost flexibility and opportunity to serve other clients for the remainder of that day; it also accounts for the amount of time you're inevitably spending "ramping down" from one project before "ramping up" to the next, and for the complexity that client is adding to your schedule. It also acknowledges the fact that virtually anything you could be doing for them is worth at least one billable day.
What I find most amusing about discussions like this is the stridency of opposition to 1-day minimums. Freelancers on HN are, frequently, proud of the fact that they're screwing themselves, and proud that they're leaving money on the table.
> being compensated in accordance with the value they're generating.
I think the above phrase is the key to understanding "per-day" vs "per-hour" billing thinking.
I suspect most developers don't think in terms of value they're generating--partly because they don't know the value they are generating.
It's easier to think that you're billing based on "how long I'm sitting in front of the computer typing" rather than "how much value I'm generating" because then you don't need to think about how much value you are generating.
From a client's point of view, they're never paying for you to sit in front of a computer, they're paying for the value you're providing to them.
I suspect part of the issue is that "per-day" still seems like a measure of time not a measure of value.
Don't be smug and insinuate I am screwing myself. I am also not against daily or weekly rates. I think they are great. But so is hourly.
Working in a development role, the amount of time I put in on a project is highly correlated with the amount of value I add to a project. If I work every day for a year on a project, I will likely provide more value than if I worked a month. If I work every day for a month, I will likely provide more value than if I worked a week. And so on.
The amount of value added for the sake of compensation gets really tricky, but that's why freelancers have a best guess hourly/daily/weekly rate.
Therefore, over a period of time for a given client, I find it silly to assume a day where I show up, change a line of code, and go home is of the same value where I put in a full 8 hours of work. Equally silly would be a client suddenly finding themselves in a tough spot and needing some extra hours put in and me going uncompensated for the extra value added.
A daily rate works great when all days are relatively equal in productivity/time or your necessary threshold for showing up for a client is much higher than an hour or two of work. Mine is not. And it's not because the client is screwing me or I'm accidentally leaving money on the table, but because sometimes I just want to go home and not work a full day. A client should not pay for that.
If it is possible to be smug while telling someone "you're worth more than you're charging clients", guilty as charged.
You're not against weekly billing. Ok. I am against hourly billing. The logic I perceive in your argument is, "the client is paying me for X amount of code". I'm telling you that that's not all they're paying you for.
The client isn't paying me for lines of code added (I would often lose money if that were the case!), but they are clearly looking for me to add some sort of value. Otherwise I could just show up every day, give out some fist bumps, and go home while billing my daily rate.
Since directly measuring value added for the sake of compensation is not so straightforward, freelancers use rates (for better or worse). My argument is, the more <measurement of time> I work, the more likely I will add the value the client is looking for. Since I like a lot of flexibility in my schedule and want to still bill fairly (for both the client and myself), I use hours as my <measurement of time>.
Note that most labor laws require workers be paid for a 3 hour minimum. If you get called in for 10 minutes, you get paid for 3 hours. If you get called in at certain inconvenient times, your wage skyrockets. This applies to unskilled labor jobs. Think about why that is. There is much more to "value" than the total number of minutes you warm a chair.
If you work for 7 hours and 58 minutes, do you give them a two-minute discount out of a sense of fairness? Probably not. patio11 and tptacek's point is that for the kind of clients you probably want, a three-hour discount is not significantly more "optimal" than a two-minute discount. If the client agrees to a minimum billing increment of a day and you are doing the work you're paid to do, then it's fair. If you give them more than that, what you're being isn't fair, it's generous.
Actually, "generous" isn't even the word I would use.
The clients you want are paying for (a) determinism and (b) flexibility. They can't achieve (a) and (b) with full-time hires; they'd either face uncertain expenses in ramping up people (and possibly hiring bad people), or they'd be locked in to paying for a particular basket of skills full-time for a year.
If you are providing determinism and flexibility, real clients don't care whether the number of hours you bill is 1 or 8. For most projects and most values of "hours" below, say, 40, the end result is cost effective compared to full-time hires. The client is happy to have a slot into which they can push dollars and have a predictable amount of working software come out the other end.
So, back to "generous": when you set yourself up for sub-1-day billing, you're doing a bunch of stuff that doesn't generate value for the customer. You're giving them "loose change" invoice amounts that don't impact their budgets. You're forcing them to think about the amount of loose change you're giving them. You're setting yourself and your client up for potential disputes --- any dispute is going to cost the client something commensurate with a billable day anyways. And you're burning yourself out by working harder for less money, which the client doesn't want; they want to know that 2 years from now, the same slot will still be there, accepting dollars and spitting out working software.
This discussion obviously stumbles across some nerdthink neural tripwire. "I worked for an hour, I should bill an hour!" That's perfectly understandable nerd reasoning. If it helps to translate nerdthink into business language, think about the minimum 1-day billing increment as a way of expressing your bill rate properly; you're not "billing for time you didn't work", you're just doing a variable bill rate in which a 1-hour project costs 8 times as much as an 8-hour project. Or something like that.
As written in her books, following her moral can often lead to the unfair perception of being a jerk. Many people briefly exposed or misunderstanding Rand choose to remember (and spread) the jerk self interest part without laying out her moral framework.
Meh, John Galt went out and convinced all the rich people who were allegedly being preyed on by unions and special interests to.. go on strike? And become a special interest? Wow, that's great.
First off, if my boss left to go do that I'd say "Thanks for the promotion" and take the payraise.
Second off -- and much more importantly -- you should live your life for something more than your own crappy temporary luxuries.
1. John Galt convinces the "rich", though quite a few weren't, that continuing their work would lead to their destruction so in order to survive they would need to go on strike. Perhaps the better analogy is the man who invents a new weapon and then is killed by someone else using it.
2. The problem was that as the bosses left others with corrupt ideologies were taking their place.
3. Nothing in the book has to do with the rich needing luxuries, in fact they all move out to Galt's gulch and do manual labor and leave the life of luxury behind. In fact her stories are all about being true to yourself and living your life the way that you want to.
I'm not a fan of everything she's written, but I think you really missed the point of the book.
Well, thanks, but that's just as childish. Oh, they'll be replaced by the impure -- what a silly premise, only these few supermen are worthy of doing high-end industrial jobs, and if they don't do it then it'll be done in an ideologically impure manner... who's pure?
Gimme a break. If anything, the way things work in the corporate world the bosses are some of the least likely people to have consistent morals in the face of expedient solutions.
There's a million people waiting to replace them and, with a little time to get used to a job, there's no fateful reason why the previous person doing it is the only person who possibly could.
The thing about that story is that the adherents claim to be all wise and worldly, oh, you'll get it once you're making money -- I'm making money, I think it's BS and nobody actually succeeds with such a childish, self-gratifying attitude.
If your responding to bullet 2, then the it wasn't a question of "purity" it was the government dictating who was in what position.
Have you read the book?
"Gimme a break. If anything, the way things work in the corporate world the bosses are some of the least likely people to have consistent morals in the face of expedient solutions."
This behavior occurs throughout the novel.
What is the childish self-gratifying attitude? That those who work hard and persevere are successful? That it's wrong to steal from others? That at the end of the day you exist for yourself and what you find important (friends, family, etc) and that no one else has a claim on you?
It seems like you setup straw men and then knock them down.
The childish, self-gratifying attitude is the part where you think because you achieved some success in life, you owe nothing to the society that made it possible for you. People of that sort of moral stature don't tend to have the firmitude to succeed in other ways, in my experience -- it's more typical of college republicans than it is of actual business leaders.
It is completely unfair to dismiss Rand for any one thing she says or believes. Like any philosophy, the good come with the bad, and Rand has some very thought provoking, if not indisputable, good.
And objective reality is not so unintelligent or undebatable to be dismissed at the whim of one sentance.
No, I stopped watching because she was talking about something so obviously wrong. The amount of processing your brains does to fill in details and recreate memories from sparse details is quite amazing and this is enough evidence for me to throw out objective reality. Also, I don't understand how HN influences people's philosophical views or why anyone with an HN account would be pro objective reality.
The flawed human brain and its ability to remember is merely evidence of a flawed observer, and not evidence of a flawed reality.
The processing your brain does to fill in details is irrelevant when there are multiple methods of observation and multiple observers, and all agree with reasonable precision. When multiple observers can measure an object and find that it has volume and mass, we can all agree that the thing exists. We might disagree on what to name it, or what it "means", but it'd be pointless to argue that it might really not be there.
While one could argue that everything, including all the other observers, are a product of my imagination, it isn't productive to do so. Whether it is all in my head (or in a supercomputer and I'm really just a simulation) isn't a useful theory. I can't do anything with that theory. It is untestable, and thus is mere superstition.
In short, objective reality is a good model for...reality. And, so, it makes sense to behave as though jumping off of a cliff will probably end ones existence.
I believe the notion that someone on HN would be "pro objective reality" (whatever that means...I'm not sure there is any way to win against what is, so why fight against it?) comes from the fact that we are all mostly nerdy, science-oriented, and we tend to be more likely to know how things (where "things" can be mechanical, biological, electrical, etc.) work. We know that when you feed voltage into a particular semi-conductor, the same thing happens every time...so, we tend to be less likely to fall into the trap of thinking things happen because of magic or because we imagined they happened or whatever.
In short, I reckon accepting objective reality has a net positive value in my life. I'm not sure how denying reality would do me any good. I'm pretty pragmatic, and I like having some level of control over stuff in my life, so I reckon I'm a believer.
Whoa, nobody said anything about denying that things exist but what I did deny was the fact that it was objective. Objective only makes sense if you know what subjective means and since all I know are subjective states of being it does not make sense for me to say there is something else that I can not make any sense of that is as real as anything I feel. All I can say is that there is a patchwork of things that my brain puts together and that thing is what I call reality but to jump from the patchwork to the existence of a completed whole is in my opinion a mistake.
You said something about denying that things exist. You said that "objective reality" is a myth, and you said it as though people who believe in objective reality are simpletons.
If there is no objective reality, one person can say, "There is a car in my garage." and someone else can say, "There is a dragon in your garage." and both will be equally correct (because there is no objective way to determine otherwise). But, because objective reality does seem to be an accurate model for our universe, other observers can look in the garage, and see that, yes, there is a car (or dragon, as the case may be) in the garage. You can take a picture of the car (or dragon) in the garage, you can measure it, you can hop in (on) and take it for a drive (flight), you can touch it, etc. While your perception and your recollection may have gaps, we have scientific tools to remove the ambiguity of faulty perception and memory. With enough measurements, recordings, and photographic evidence of something, we can know it pretty darned objectively.
My point is that it's simply unproductive to deny that there is an objective reality. The world behaves as though there is objective reality. My house has never turned into a turtle, and my dog seems to be a dog every day no matter how much she might want to be a cat. I may not remember all the details of each of these things, but that doesn't mean they aren't what they are. The "patchwork of things" that my brain puts together about the world can be made to match the patchwork of things that other brains put together by using tools to measure and record those things, even while understanding that no one will ever have a complete grasp of the entirety of reality (it's pretty big, and even one single pebble, is too much for a single human to grasp in its entirety, when you start thinking in terms of atoms and particles and such).
Basically, I think you've decided that "objective reality" means humans can be all-knowing and perfectly observant...but that's not what anyone else means when they use the term.
Oh the frustration, eh? And it gets more annoying every time.
I still don't have a clear idea on how one can reject objective reality, or reject what is real.
There have been some simularities between all my confrontations over the years: the people don't make very much sense; they demand respect for their "opinion;" and, they attribute arrogance to believing in an objective reality.
Somewhere, they learned the wrong thing. And I think I've deduced part of the problem: they take the subjectivity of some definitions as a sort of proof that an objective reality doesn't exist, and at an intuitive level, they don't accept reductionism.
Definitions being a form of reductionism. That is to say, at a very fundamental level, they take issue with you saying "this orange weighs .3kg ." They won't confront you for saying that, but if they happen to like the movie Joe Dirt, and you say "Joe Dirt is a bad movie," watch out. You are now offending their reality and it is now very personal.
And just to further clarify, when I say "the subjectivity of some definitions," I mean the various degrees of allowed interpretation of ideas. There are different degrees of subjectivity to different ideas: people have an amount of leeway to define some things for themselves, such as love, as it is not very well understood anyway. However, some ideas are very close to a real, concrete, one-to-one, definition of reality.
Yet these people have it in their head that they can make up whatever they want with anything, even though they don't normally execute this power to make up whatever they want. But they do get caught up on their right to make up whatever they want, which boils down to rejecting objective reality. I think there's some kind of empowerment high and self-consolation that "opinions" hold merit by merely existing, even for concepts that aren't lenient with subjectivity.
This submission is pretty much dead but I hope you read this comment since I had this Aha! while reading your comment. This is a rough sketch of something I'm going to expand upon, but hopefully I explained it well enough for now.
You're contradicting yourself. If you don't believe in objective reality, you can't use biological arguments involving the brain. If you doubt objective reality, then you have to doubt all those observations about the brain you mention. (Natural) science presupposes the existence of an objective reality you can measure. If you don't believe in that, then you have to doubt all observations you make about that "reality".
Confusing the map and territory needs to be classified as a psychological disorder, where sanity is below a minimum threshold.
This kind of thinking is too easy.
This is basic stuff, and you call it "obviously wrong." That's an indication that you haven't thought about it enough; there is very little which is "obviously" this or that. You must examine an idea and it's surrounding evidences, or established ideas.
If you're going to state something as "obvious" in the sense that it's axiomatic, that's fine if you are treating it as a temporary variable and examining its implications and drawing it out to conclusions.
The mistake at this point is noticing that, after treating objective reality as axiomatic, the world you see is congruent with your internalized map and therefore that is "how it is." This is a functional facade. An illusion, and you've been tricked.
The world is not very colorful in an objective reality.
\/@greenlblue: Sorry, I have a bad habit of submitting comments then editing the rest into it, so I don't know where into my editing you read. Anyway, from my experience, there's no use in carrying a conversation about "objective reality." I just had to say a little bit since I wouldn't feel right not giving some direction.
Making vague analogies with no relevance should be one as well. When you figure out a way of putting my perception, the map, and "reality", the territory, side by side on the screen then you can call me crazy for denying its existence. Until then be a little more courteous and respectful of other people's opinions and don't accuse them of confounding variables.
One word: corroboration. You know reality from hallucination/dream because one survives objective verification, the other does not. Let me turn the question back on you: what use is there in NOT drawing this distinction? (ie. what use is denying that there is a knowable reality, and then our interpreted knowledge. territory/map)
I used to have occasion to read transcripts of first degree murder trials when the convicted murderers appealed their convictions to my states's Supreme Court, where I was a judicial clerk. It is a fact that when people are put on oath to testify at trial, and subject to cross-examination, their memories will be both faulty and internally contradictory. But that doesn't mean that nothing they report happened. The jury's job at trial is to figure out which partial, or biased, or mistaken recollections best correspond to what happened, but something happened.
What do you say is what to hold on to after you "throw out objective reality"?
There is only a Rashomon-like reality and it is getting worse thanks to compressed sensing technology. Just kidding I think. There are generalizations like mathematics that are objective, at least until we try to apply them to the world.
I always find it interesting that she says many of the same things that an anarchist of the left would say yet they would both hate to be identified with the other. It also seems to be impossible to bring about and maintain the systems objectivists, libertarians or anarchists advocate without a widespread shift in morality if not human nature itself.
I suppose that whether reality is objective or subjective is both one of the greatest questions in philosophy, and one of the most useless. But, what you're talking about is the difference between reality, and perception of reality.
I happen to think that reality is pretty objective, various nuances of quantum mechanics aside. I certainly think that reality existed long before we as individuals or as species appeared on the scene, and I think it extends far beyond our relatively meager sphere of perception.
Despite Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead being amongst my favorite books, Ayn Rand always has me so polarized. Her moral philosophies and ability to write characters earns my unmatched admiration. But her blinding hatred for socialism (as conveyed from her very first book) keep her economic views from ever being realistic or even interesting. For the same reason communism fails, her free market would fail, because it only takes one (inevitable) company to ruin the party for everybody. Man is too easily corrupted to live at the economic extremes of communism or completely free markets.
I always like to think Ayn Rand's selfish desires and socialism could work together. Just think of taxes going to reasonable causes (such as infrastructure or health care) as forced self-interest :)
"Her moral philosophies and ability to write characters earns my unmatched admiration."
Rand's characters are cartoon heroes and villains whose distinguishing characteristic is a leaden humorlessness.
Her moral philosophy is as cartoon-like as that of the communists she hated so much. The world consists of a few beleaguered (and attractive!) supermen, and the great mass of sponging inferiors who bleed them dry.
This is heady stuff when you're fourteen, but it bears about as much relationship to reality as the Left Behind novels, which offer the same kind of subtle characterization and philosophical depth.
I have been following Diana Hsieh's exploration of Atlas Shrugged (http://www.exploreaynrand.com/1957/), and I very much disagree with your characterizations of her moral philosophy and her characters.
Here are two questions that serve to show the level of depth that you're not seeing in the book (but very much exists):
"What is Lillian's view of sex? Why does it torture Hank? Is he right or wrong to accept that torture?"
"How has Hank Rearden's attitude toward and treatment of his family changed? How -- and why -- has it remained the same?"
If you can't see it in a fiction book, perhaps Tara Smith's "Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics" might help you to understand the nuance of Rand's moral philosophy. (Tara Smith is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.)
Her characters are certainly often exaggerated and unrealistic, but they are so in her crafted fictional world setup to convey her philosophy while a telling a good story. However, the dialogue and surrounding thoughts of her characters still provide incredible insight (at least to me). Maybe I am an ignorant jerk needing to read more sophisticated philosophy (likely on both accounts), but she introduced to me, through her characters, a compelling way to think and live
And even if you hate her characters and her philosophies, with exchanges like the below, she is a least interesting to dissect and deserves more than dismissing her writings to fourteen year olds.
"Do you believe in God, Andrei?"
"No."
"Neither do I. But that's a favorite question of mine. An
upside-down question, you know."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, if I asked people whether they believed in life,
they'd never understand what I meant. It's a bad question. It means nothing. It can mean so much that it really means nothing. So I ask them if they believe in God. And if they say they do--then, I know they don't believe in life."
"Why?"
"Because, you see, God--whatever anyone chooses to call God--is his highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception over his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It's a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your life and to want the best, the very greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it."
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
Those kinds of condescending and trite dismissals are just not interesting. Rand draws more than her fair share of them and I don't think an honest debate can be held over her (good) philosophies because of their prevalence.
Ayn Rand (and in my experience, most Objectivists) didn't want an honest debate "I am not looking for intelligent disagreement any longer.... What I am looking for is intelligent agreement."[1] (I recommend the whole essay.)
Thanks for the essay. It's unfortunate Rand and Objectivism are so uncompromising. I guess that leaves the debating and exploration of ideas to us laymen, and we all know that won't go anywhere productive or intelligent :)
I can understand her dislike for Soviet-style socialism, but this would only lead me to have more contempt for 21st-century corporations, which combine the worst of both worlds between socialism and capitalism.
She really really did. I have read up to that last long (very long) speach by Atlas, which is plenty to note: most of the worst characters are business men. One of the most disfavorable characters in the entire book is Dagny's brother James, who unlike her grasps at the government for support.
Also, she anchors her book in America. Imagining how America could go wrong, but uses the socialism in Argentina and Mexico as a backdrop. She spends quite a lot of time giving examples of good selfish capitalism and bad selfish "capitalism"
I'm going to have to disagree with your second part. Yes the reason that healthcare is a mess is because the government is involved, but not because they need to be more involved.
1. Tax structure that makes a market place for insurance impossible.
2. Medicare reimbursement system, it's method of calculating costs is seriously flawed.
3. The inability to buy insurance across state lines.
4. The inability to sign a contract with your doctor, i.e. waive/limit liability.
5. Massive amounts of regulation and red tape that must be complied with.
6. The strangle hold the AMA has on the production of doctors, granted by the government.
and those are just a few of the major problems.
What we have today and these future proposals are all forms of regulatory capture -- i.e. influencing and controlling those who make the rules. Every time you see a new standard or regulation it can probably be assumed that it's being proposed to cement the position of vested interests.
Why? Everything available to Facebook, I voluntarily put there. Just as anything I say in a comment in their widget will be voluntarily contributed. As a Facebook consumer, a single identity across all my comments tied to a service I already enjoy makes Facebook that much more useful to me. Let them do with the data I gave them as they please.
Hell, I am far more concerned with how much credit agencies seem to know about me, and I never like giving my information to them =p.
I found the post ridiculously condescending. Insinuating we are idiots and then stating 'For fuck's sake people - get a clue.' and then attacking specific small startups unprovoked does not seem like a very proper way to spread the word for your company or SEO in general. Unfortunately, I'm sure the post has garnered the desired attention by 'dropping the F bomb for the first time'.
I would hope search optimization is really important to SEOmoz given it's their entire concentration as a company. But, I work in a startup as well. Our concentration is not in the field of search optimization. When we have a spare moment or the resources to tackle SEO, I am sure we will. In the meantime, I would refrain from calling me and those in similar positions idiots.
As a founder (and the website maintainer) of one of the startups "attacked", I'm not too bothered by the criticism. It is valid...we aren't showing up in all the right places on Google, and we're currently paying a buck or more per click to occasionally appear in those right places in ads. But, it's also worth noting that while we'd never turn down more traffic we also aren't experiencing significant pain due to that lack. Our site gets 1800 uniques per day, and is growing at a very respectable clip--I remember vividly celebrating our first week of 1000+ visitor days just a few months back and it won't be long before we're celebrating 2000+ visitor days. For a site that sells a product (rather than sells eyeballs), that's a nice stream of potential buyers. Actually, I sometimes chuckle when I read about sites that are selling nothing but eyeballs bragging about 100,000 monthly pageviews (or whatever) when our product site does significantly more than that (and our four sites combined see an order of magnitude more traffic than that).
We consider our biggest website problems to be conversion rather than bringing the eyeballs in...so even though I readily admit that we're weaker in the engines than we'd like to be, my current focus with the website is on getting those people who come to our site excited enough to buy our product (or, even better, ask their hosting provider to buy it for them), and better serving those customers that have bought.
So, I don't know that we're really a good example of a truckload of SEO fail, even if our SEO results are poorly, since we don't actually live or die by search engine traffic. Only recently did the majority of our incoming traffic shift from our Open Source project pages to other sources, for example, and those clicks from Webmin.com are still far more valuable to us than search-related clicks...they are about 10 times more likely to buy from us than natural search result users. Likewise for users of our Open Source Virtualmin version at places like Joyent, who are proving to be extremely likely to upgrade to the commercial version. This tells me that getting more people using and talking about our Open Source products is a better marketing tactic than almost anything else we could do. So, we balance our efforts, and SEO unfortunately gets put on a back-burner. (We do try hard to have good URLs, though, but mainly because I consider URLs a usability issue, and not because I care what a search engine thinks about them. I just wish Joomla didn't suck so bad for stuff like that.)
Im a virtualmin user, I love it, I use the GPL version as it's lighter and I need to squeeze out every cent of my server as memory is the big issue for my app.
The app I have running on it is purely search engine traffic driven by seo. I am top for the main 3 - 4 word terms, (suffering a slight drop with the latest end march google update) that said the next term were going after is the big one and will bring 4 fold the traffic we have now.
My position is this, if your not into seo and your doing a startup then you better have some nice friends, and hope to make the first page of TC etc. Else you will sit there with 50 hits a day and most of them will be from crawlers.
I have no 'nice friends' apart from my seo adviser. I'm lucky he is a good friend and trained me well. Now I have a site that has tremendous growth, targeted traffic that sticks about (and comes back) and absoulty zero effort wasted on pitching for editorial, advertising, other marketing, etc.
I could care less about word of mouth because it is very hit and miss. People only want to talk about you if you have upset them or if you have a real game changer. Competing or slogging it out in established markets, like music for example just doesn't get the masses enthused to enough to chat about (mind everyone will blog about you if TC did so that's a bonus of being T.cked.)
I often check my apps progress with compete and benchmark it against sites that are in the same market that are going for the big bucks, VC backing, big splashes of editorial on TC, advertising and generally hustling their way in, and while I am often behind there initial curves the encouraging thing is my traffic is constantly rising and Im nipping at there ankles as they dip after the sharp rises, while also building a large net to crawl the ocean of organic search traffic.
I also freelance, coding and SEO, and it's really amazing talking to potential clients that are working on startups, they are interested in me helping them with their apps, but when I say, look the best advice I can help you with is not coding but in getting your SEO sorted out - blank faces stare back. Just like all the examples given in this article, they are equally nonchalant.
The biggest laugh for me was a competitor who had made TC because it had been backed with 5 million USD or some other worthless currency and when I did the quick seo scan (10 secs work) the biggest laugh of my life (index=1 page).
Alas I don't expect that the startups I see here will change there focus and concentrate on SEO anytime soon, the general opinion that seems to be prevalent is that SEO is like web1, and social graphs and viral marketing will build the traffic.
That is a huge shame, I feel a huge empathy for the fellow entrepreneur's on this board, sharing many of the same trials and tribulations I feel like I also share some of the same genes, and this is nothing more than a little clan, and I want nothing more than to see my fellow clan members go out and change the world. For better and worse, that is model of creation and one bloody good reason to live.
"Im a virtualmin user, I love it, I use the GPL version as it's lighter and I need to squeeze out every cent of my server as memory is the big issue for my app."
Awesome. Memory usage of GPL and Professional are roughly identical, but if you don't need the features of Professional, we'd encourage you to keep using GPL. Also check out our guide for running Virtualmin on low memory systems:
Most memory usage is actually found in the underlying services, and not Virtualmin/Webmin proper (though Webmin with all of the Virtualmin modules cached is about 110MB...turning off that caching takes it down to 10MB).
"Alas I don't expect that the startups I see here will change there focus and concentrate on SEO anytime soon, the general opinion that seems to be prevalent is that SEO is like web1, and social graphs and viral marketing will build the traffic."
Actually, we thought hard about viral marketing and social graphs and realized that we don't stand a chance marketing via that path. Almost nothing about our product has viral characteristics, though word of mouth has been strong. We've been focusing on increasing the amount of valuable information on our network of websites (Webmin.com, Virtualmin.com, and Doxfer.com), such that searches for all sorts of common server administration problems will result in the user coming to one or more of our sites because the solution can be found there. I don't know how to measure the success of this, and it hasn't resulted in us being front page of Google for any of our keywords...but we do get several hundred visitors a day from natural search results to our forums and wikis. As I mentioned, our traffic is nothing to be ashamed of for a product site, and it's growing rapidly.
All of this discussion has made me think a lot more about the problem. So I'm going to start paying more attention and blog about the results. Starting from our current "zero SEO effort" state, I'll spend the next couple of months tuning for SEO and post a few short articles about the results. It's certainly worth some testing, if we could crank up traffic without spending ad dollars.
My problem with memory was primarily caused by poor indexing on mysql tables, that once I resolved and cleaned up my queries resolved my memory problems completely. Ref Virtualmin pro, it was the claimav that used more memory not PRO per say. However, I don't need the server for email at all, so the GPL version for me is actually a god send. As I said I really do love it and would happily pay for it. I think you should offer it as shareware for 50 usd one time license, its really good (with the install script) and is a great solution for system admins who don't want (or know how to) set up LAMP without a panel.
Im in the latter catagory, having moved over to a linode, (also highly recommended) after the app was OOM the previous server that was really lightweight and over priced, (that had cpanel) and I actually prefer Virtualmin. It's more rustic and I prefer the support from your small team.
As regards SEO traffic, I'm really glade your thinking of getting into it more. Basically you need to talk to a pro if you want to make headways, I assure you it's not just a case of having the right titles and meta tags, though of course that helps.
seekely - I'm the author of the post and am very sorry for being condescending. That wasn't my intent and on re-reading, I can see that it came across that way. I offer my apology.
I was writing a bit more emotionally than I usually do, and, as I said in the post, am much more frustrated with those who provide startup advice ignoring the power of SEO than I am with startups who don't engage in it. Startups have a million things on their plates. Those who make lists recommending marketing practices have just one task, and I think it's negligent to ignore such a valuable marketing tactic for web-based companies.
i think you're wrong about Octopart - they are optmising around individual part terms e.g. http://octopart.com/category--Integrated+Circuits--Semicondu... not for a generic "electronic parts" ranking. Their recent user data indicates this has been pretty successful - basically SEO - adding categories to search.
That is very easy to say when you are an established freelancer with work being thrown at you. Just starting out though, there is a fine balance between what's ideal and staying afloat.