Siebenschläfer

Just managed to get to the corner store and back between rainshowers. Good.

Today is grey, cold, windy and rainy. Today is also Siebenschläfertag. Folk wisdom states (and the weather statistics confirm) that the weather on this day determines the weather for the coming seven weeks. Bad.

Chaos reigns in the database. It seems that the Mac version of the Hobbyist setup is ambiguously worded and appears to tell the user to do foolish things, and a user has just caused herself trouble by carrying out these apparent instructions. Damn and blast. Is it in my job description to be the person who understands the finer points of the German language? Why do you, dear Georgette, imagine that I give you these things to read over, if not that you should think about them? There is—at least in English, at least in my Weltanschauung—a difference between "reading" and "moving one's eyes across printed material," and that difference has to do with a little thing that we call thought. Dear gods.

And we pressed five hundred copies of the CD.

[Updated seven hours later] Well, I am uncertain what to make of the weather today. As I wrote it was (and had been) raining steadily, but the last five hours or so have been mostly sunny. At present the sky is nearly clear. So I guess that's the prediction: seven weeks of meteorological mixed blessings.

In which a milestone is reached

Georgette sends me an e-mail message. Not in itself unusual, we often exchange a half-dozen mails per day; but the tone of this one was different: exultant, triumphant.

Sixteen months to the day after the initial meeting with the Hobbyists, they have sold the very first copy of the cut-down database to a real live customer! (A woman, no surprise: I've remarked before that over ninety percent of the database users are women.)

Woo-hoo.

I would go out and get roaring drunk on my approximately 8.25 Euro share of the profits, but for two facts: 8 Euros only buys two-and-a-half beers, and I'm suffering from a sick headache that is about to send me back to bed for a while.

[Updated] it occurs to me that neither Partner nor any of his assistants informed me that they had actually sold licenses wholesale to the Hobbyists. Until I asked Georgette what the retail price was just now, out of curiosity, nobody had told me that they'd purchased a block of 200 licenses. How interesting. I shall have to have a little talk with Partner in the very near future. And send him an invoice for a few thousand Euros.

Today's Friday Favourite is a jaunty little tune from this CD. Enjoy.

On sales and trade shows

Not that you'd know it from yesterday's post, but I was in Munich all day teaching my colleagues the finer points of the database system that they have allegedly been selling for six months / two years respectively, in preparation for our appearance at the Art Cologne trade show next month.

It's odd, I have this image of myself as a non-salesperson, could not and should not do sales, not my thing at all; however I must say in all modesty that I am a far better demonstrator and salesperson than either of them. It's clear that neither Georgette nor Biff has ever worked a trade show before, which is not surprising because it is a pretty unnatural thing to do; what does surprise me is that equally clearly neither of them has ever been to a trade show as a visitor.

How can this be? Tell me, if you wanted to open a restaurant, would you not go eat in a few restaurants first?

I learned to do trade shows by being a visitor at trade shows, it was part of Great Big Computer Company's policy that everyone on the stand had a day off-duty during the week, in which they would turn up in dirty jeans and walk around and look at the show - not the other stands, but the show itself: what kind of things do visitors do, what is it that makes them stay somewhere rather than walking on. It was a great training, watching and learning from those interactions was what made us such a successful team.

Well, Georgette and Biff haven't had that experience, so they simply don't know how trade shows work. They hadn't even understood that they must give the visitor a reason to bestow her time and attention on them, must show her something - look look, a piece of data! - within seconds of her arriving on the stand. They weren't even planning to take copies of the sales brochure to give away! Ye gods, it is to despair. And my income depends on them.

I changed the plan after half an hour of listening to the sort of questions they were anticipating being asked - none of which would ever occur at a trade show, with its walk-by casual visitors - and instead taught them how to do trade shows, with the database as the example. It's an uphill battle, what I wrote this summer is still true:

You have to find out what the (possible) customer wants.

People don't buy features, they buy solutions. They buy "make my problem go away."

Sounds obvious, doesn't it? But I cannot persuade my partner or his assistants to do this. They seem to believe that the customer has to be driven to the sale with pointèd sticks like a sacrificial lamb to the altar.

What I had to say is just basic commonsense, but it is counterintuitive to people who haven't worked a trade show before. A trade show is not at all like giving a demonstration to a possible customer, it is a specific environment which enforces a specific kind of behaviour on exhibitors and public alike. A customer getting a demo in her own office has made time for you, there are no distractions, no interruptions and no competition for her attention. She wants to know every detail of the product, because she is there for a reason: to decide whether or not to buy.

Trade show visitors are not "customers." They did not go to the show to look at your product! Unless you prove otherwise, you are just one more irrelevant distraction among the hundreds of stands. The visitors stream past at a steady pace, and you may consider yourself lucky if they even slow down at your booth. They are surrounded by distractions and interruptions, and the second they leave your stand they will encounter something even more shiny and exciting. (This is why they MUST take a brochure home.)

You cannot spend a minute explaining how the data is structured, while nothing changes on screen! They'll walk away. You MUST show them the three most important parts of the database, and demonstrate how these link together (look, I click here and this opens up there) within sixty seconds, else you've lost them. If the visitor stays with you for more than two minutes, and most of them won't, then you can go back to the beginning and talk about the details and the structure. But you have to earn their attention first.

Most important of all: it's not a lecture hall, you must engage the visitors! Ask them questions, listen to the answers, show them how the product solves their problem. In my experience, if you can get a visitor to talk for say forty seconds (in total) during the first two minutes, she'll stay as long as you want. People love interaction, we want to be listened to, we want our questions to be answered and our needs to be addressed. If you, salesperson, can do that, then you might turn this visitor into a customer.

Damn, I should be giving courses.

So anyway I was indeed in Munich yesterday. I spent today rather gently, trying not to have a headache, walking on the Blauer Weg as far as the greenhouses. It was a fine day, sunny and warmish, with a gentle breeze which made me think of the South of France. Holiday is a state of mind, not a place: I was on holiday this afternoon.

In related news I forgot to mention the most significant aspect of the visit to Munich (and what would Papa Sigmund say about that?) According to my partner, the Hobbyists are dragging their feet: rather than putting copies of the database into every shop, they now want to fit out "one to four stores" as a test. Well, that's just absurd. What is the point of putting us into their catalogue (which was part of the agreement) if Hobbyist's customers cannot then buy the advertised product? I infer that they intend to reneg on the catalogue too. [Updated: they did.]

On the other hand, the Hobbyists still expect to be granted an 80% markup.

Our development and production costs are basically fixed, it costs nearly as much to print up 25 copies for these four stores, as it would to print a thousand copies. Were they to stock all stores at once, as originally stated, that would cover our production costs plus leaving us reserves for the next production run. If they order only a handful, then we still need to pay all of the development costs right now, plus the dilemma of how many copies to produce. It's a huge amount of money.

We pay all the costs and take all the risks, and they expect to earn the same profit as though they too were taking a risk.

I think I would be ashamed to make such a proposal. That's probably why Hobbyist is rich and I am not.

Partner stated that he would "have to reconsider his involvement" if the Hobbyists back down.

Fuck fuck fuck.

Halftimes

... in two quite real senses, but also in a way that I cannot really put my finger on. I have the sense of being at the cusp of something or other, of standing silent upon a peak in Darien - but I have no idea what this might be. It really does feel as though something came to an end in the last weeks of June, and something else as yet unknown is unfolding. I feel like a sail filling in the wind; the ropes are creaking and the boat will presently begin to move, though I'm damned if I can tell where it's heading.

It's a good feeling.

I finished the second draft of the revised Hobbyist project this afternoon and sent it off for user testing. It looks pretty good; not as ravishingly beautiful as the new user interface would have been, but on the other hand it is consistent, simply upgradeable and it Actually Does Work Properly which is apparently something that users prefer.

The second half of the Hobbyist game will be to write up the user reference material, and to process the inevitable bug-discoveries and change requests that this will bring. I am considering changing over from a single thick PDF document which nobody reads, to a page-based HTML help system linked to the user interface, so that each screen, each user action, could present a relevant page or two of advice and assistance. The great disadvantage of the HTML help system is that I would have to write it, whereas Georgette will write at least the first draft of the PDF version. (I am also considering podcasting a Useful Tip Of The Week, step-by-step instructions for common actions.)

Halftime also in the world cup (as I started writing), Germany versus Italy currently stands at 0-0. I infer that it has been a cautious game on both sides, there was only one yellow card in the first half. I went for a walk around the Feuersee during the break, enjoying the relative cool of the evening: it is still 29° and very muggy, and I shall have to take a shower before bed.

[22:47 in the 92nd minute of the game] Well, the allotted time is nearly up and it's still 0-0. If Germany survives the overtime, they will win in the penalty shots. Either way, there will be no sleeping before 1am here.

[23:26 in the 121st minute of the game] Italy have just hammered in two goals in three minutes. Ah well. I shall let my predictions stand, feel free to make mock of them. There is an astounding amount of cheering going on outside, surely there are not that many Italians in Stuttgart, it must be "rest of world" celebrating vicariously (interesting word, that; I shall have to look up its etymology). The fireworks have already started, the corso will not be long behind.

Forward to the past

It's been a busy week. The first user tests of the Hobbyist project were (shall we say) not rave reviews. The user interface was felt to be too different from the professional version, and that too many of its most useful features were missing from Hobbyist. Many testers liked being able to see an overview of all records in the list (or a thematic selection thereof) while editing a single record, but all testers preferred the pro version's inclusion of a thumbnail image in the list of records; this is not possible in Hobbyist, one of the many consequences of the way I implemented the new system.

I've spent the last two days making a new/old UI for Hobbyist, basically by duplicating the pro version and then hiding the bits that they don't need.

I am disappointed, because I personally found the new UI very pretty; but I would be the first to admit that it forced my hand in many ways; some of the consequences of the UI look like errors. A hard decision, but a good one: I'm sad to see the UI go, but Hobbyist will be the better for it.

In other news the weather has broken, if only for a short respite. It's currently 23°C and partly cloudy, with a gentle breeze. Nice.

Reality

The meeting went very well indeed, but then again I've said that before. The reason to believe that it might be different this time, that something might genuinely come of the expressions of interest, is that Hobbyist (our new partner) stands to earn a buttload of money from the project; our previous would-be partners wished to make existing customers happy, which is a pretty weak motivation given that they are already customers and not visibly unhappy.

The two Hobbyists we met (not the boss, of course) were delighted by the database and very excited about the project. As so often happens, we all had very different ideas of what we wanted to achieve and how it should look. There will probably be six to nine months of work, not just two. I had been worried about the timeframe, that waiting six to nine months might put them off, but that too was just right in their books: they immediately said "Oh, just in time for the 2006 winter catalogue."

Mister Hobbyist is an intuitive boss, he gets gut feelings about what will be hot in two years' time and goes charging off into obvious dead-ends which turn out to be multilane highways; and although he has never actually used a computer himself, he has a gut feeling that this software will be hot. I can handle that. Nobody mentioned actual figures, but both Hobbyists think that there might well be thousands of sales.

Watch this space. (But first, a short and very well deserved holiday.)

On changing markets

Off to the frozen north (actually, warmer than here according to the weather frogs (as the Germans call them)) tomorrow morning to meet a major distributor of hobbyists' supplies. He thinks that were we to make a really simple, cut-down version of our database for 29.99 Euros, he could sell ten thousand copies. Ridiculously cheap as this is, it still represents around 60,000 Euros for each of us (after subtracting production costs and his share of the profits). I would have to invest around two months' fulltime work in making this new mini-version.

The thought of earning 60 thousand Euros for two months' work does have a certain appeal. I have so far earned a tenth of that for four years' work on the database.

On the other hand, I find his estimate of 10 thousand sales to be extremely optimistic. On the third hand, he knows his customers and has lived very well from them for many years now, so his confidence may be justified.

It's all very exciting.

The sleeping pill has been swallowed, the alarm is set for 4:15am, the computer will be packed into the briefcase just as soon as I finish posting. Let us hope that I don't sleep through the change of trains in Essen!