Claus Witt » ideas

29 Steps and Ideas for Freedom and Motivation

Claus Witt — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:00:52 +0000

I really love motivatethyself.com and zenhabits.net and would like to share some of the latest posts from the two blogs.

I really encourage you to read these posts, subscribe to the rss feeds, and visit the sites regularly.

Free Business Ideas

Claus Witt — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 12:00:25 +0000

A while ago I found this list of business ideas, published by Y Combinator. The list is interesting to me, because it gives a glimpse into what venture firms might want to invest in.

Enterprise software, CRM, measuring apps, financial applications and some sort of site builders are some of the things that I have looked into previously.

In the near future I will unveil some of the projects that I have been working on lately. Stay tuned.

Web Application Startup – a howto

Claus Witt — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 06:30:28 +0000

Having business ideas is not enough. As I have previously written I have a lot of them. My ideas have primarily been generated out of what I know, and as such from the needs that I either have had myself, privately or profesionally, or that I have experienced first hand from others. As such I follow the ideas of 37 Signals quite good, which states that you should build software that deals with your own problems.

I am however quite clear that there are many other factors in starting a new web-based application. Many of them are mentioned in Startups in 13 Sentences.

I especially agree with the second sentence on the list. Start up quickly! I believe this to be true, in the sense that from when you begin the project untill the beta is released, and actual users begin to use it, there should be as small an amount of time elapsed as possible. The reason, is listed in the list as well, is that when you do as 37 Signals would want you to, you could end up doing all the wrong things.

It is just like the actual development of software. Test early and test often.

Remote Desktop Access as a Business

Claus Witt — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 09:00:32 +0000

I know that there exists a several solutions for accessing your desktop from anywhere. But I was thinking, would it be possible to create another solution, based on open source software? This off course means that you would have to earn your money on the actual service, instead of on the software. There exists a great VNC server implementation called TightVNC, which we at home use a lot on our windows computers on a local network. And I found a library for creating flash based vnc clients.

The Sales Presentation

Claus Witt — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:30:53 +0000

This morning I wrote about Script for Cold Calls. The follow-up is probably just as interesting. It is about how to make the sales presentation.

The overall model for his method is as follows.

Properly qualify the prospects on the phone
On the first meeting you should determine if you can work together. (And that you actually can make a solution on budget and on time. If so, book the next meeting.
On the second meeting you should do the presentation of your solution. If the previous steps have been done correctly, your chances of landing the client should be about 80%.

Sales is More Important than Marketing

Claus Witt — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 06:30:41 +0000

While reading a post about the marketing trap I got to thinking. I have seen this behaviour before. In 9iA we had this belief, and reinforced ourselves and eachother, that we were not salesmen. As a consequence we relied on marketing instead of sales-activities. Marketing was in our case definitely the wrong way to go. We spend a lot of money on a lot of different things, believing that we were doing sales-work. In stead we were doing – very bad – marketing. Most of our business came from what we refererred to as network sales. In fact most of it was jobs which fell in our laps because of our participation in different “we are all here to sell to eachother”-networks.

We never tried cold calling, not even warm calling. Well, not exactly true. We tried once or twice. A few calls. And then went back to believing that we could not sell.

SSO For Webapplications

Claus Witt — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 06:30:35 +0000

As I have talked about several times, I am planning several saas projects in the future. The amount of ideas vastly surpasses the amount of time available to create these projects, but one of the things I can do until I (and possibly a small team of other people) decide to actually do any concrete work is to collect some methods of doing things that all apps will have to have. One of these are SSO. We would definitely like all our applications to share some kind of login information, and probably other information as well, when the time is right. Applications should in my opinion be as integrated as possible with shared api conventions, shared user-schemes and possibly even shared design and workflow elements. I personally hate it when a company releases several webapplications and I nothing in application A looks/seems/works like anything in application B. It should be – at least in my head – simple to do some kind of shared vision of the app’s.

A long text for post a link. But here goes. I found a post about how to create SSO for webapplications. I have earlier looked at CAS for SSO and that looks like a good implementation. But I guess some experimentation is in order. More on this later…

Is Facebook the Place to Make Money?

Claus Witt — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 16:00:05 +0000

I have previously written about how it might be a business venture for the ones out there with some extra time on their hands to begin producing either flash games, iphone apps or facebook applications. The funny thing about all three types of projects is that it is not needed to be the greatest application/game ever to start making money. Hype is probably more important.

Some Facebook developers have made serious money on creating quite simple applications for the Facebook Platform. A lot of them uses advertising as their main source of income.

The real difference is that iphone apps, through Appstore, and flash games, through Nonoba.com, has the opportunity to make people pay for using the software. Even though there has been rumors that Facebook would provide a payment platform for the website, which could be used by application developers, nothing has materialized yet.

Why is TV Listings Data Not Freely Available?

Claus Witt — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:00:55 +0000

For a long time I have thought about several application/service ideas which needs TV listings data in some parseable dataformat (xml format comes to mind). But for some reason there is no free ressource to get these data, not even from the websites of the channels in question. I have found some listings of UK tv – but since I live in Denmark I would at least like the 8 or 9 danish channels to be included as well.

I have found a provider that allows me to get a personal feed for 89,- DKR pr year, which off course sounds cheap, but their terms says that you cannot redistribute the data. They also sell licenses to the data, but I suspect that this would be an expensive option, and my ideas will not be something that could make a lot of money, I think.

It seems weird to me that the data is not freely available. In my opinion it should be in the interest of the danish media providers (DR, TV2, Viasat, TVDanmark) to make it available, since it can help promote their programs, and thus make money on advertising on their tv-channels. Or maybe I have missed something in the equation??

Recurring Payments with Paypal

Claus Witt — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 13:00:25 +0000

As I have previously written, I have a lot of business ideas which I am working on. At the moment I am working on all the surrounding things to starting a new online business.

I have previously tried to start a web consultancy company called 9iA which existed from 2001 to 2007, but was shut down at the end of ‘07 primarily because we did not make enough money – and as a result I owe quite a substantial amount of money. When we started 9iA we did not have a plan, or anything that even closely resembled it. We just got an office, some computers and started working. This time it is different. Maybe it is a result of my previously failure, maybe it is because I now have a girlfriend and a son, or maybe I’m just getting old.

One of the things that I am pretty sure of is that no mather which one of my ideas I will eventually put online, it has to be a kind of subscription service. Paypal is in my opinion the perfect company to handle the payments, and I have found an article about how to handle recurring payments with paypal.

Also have a look at Paypals manual on Instant Payment Notification.