Interview With Tech Ranch Austin
Posted by Mike Gromer in BG Alert, Development, Entrepreneurship, Small Business on September 1, 2009
Last week, I was asked to be interviewed by Jonas Lamis from Tech Ranch Austin about BG Alert, and the impact that Tech Ranch has had on BG Alert and myself. For those who don’t know what Tech Ranch is, they are an incubator of sorts, helping entrepreneurs get the help they need, as well as provide office space, mentorship and classes to help launch the next big thing. Jonas has an interview with Kevin Koym from Tech Ranch explaining this more in detail.
Unfortunately, I haven’t done much video before, so I look a bit stiff in the interview, but it worked out. Tech Ranch has been a great help to me. It’s nice being around people who just want to help others. Also, make sure you check out the other video entries on Jonas’ site.
BG Alert Update
Posted by Mike Gromer in BG Alert, Development, Entrepreneurship on August 30, 2009
In the last week, I’ve been working constantly on getting BG Alert ready for the public. I have migrated from ASP.Net webforms to ASP.Net MVC, as well as integrated with a beta testing manager, called Prefinery. This is a very exciting time for BG Alert, and we are making a major push in marketing and advertising to get as many people registered to beta test as we can. Our plan is to start the beta test on September 14th. All of the testers will be using it for free during the beta test period, and will recieve 3 months free once the service finishes the beta test.
BG Alert would love to hear any comments or suggestions, as it is still in development. Our goal is to help as many families with children with type 1 diabetes as we can. I have a 12 year old with type 1 diabetes, and this service has helped our family a great deal, and I want others to be able to benefit from this.
An Experiment With Time Management – Part 1
Posted by Mike Gromer in Entrepreneurship, Small Business on August 5, 2009
Since I quit my office job to startup two companies, I have been working from home, while taking care of my 9 and 12 year old boys. For me, working by myself, is a very hard thing to do. It has nothing to do with working at home, or the boys, but everything to do with motivation. This has been a problem with finishing BG Alert, as well as some other projects I’ve been working on. Since the school year is coming up and I want to test BG Alert, I’ve decided to do a New Year’s Resolution halfway through the year. No more procrastination, and stay on task better.
3 hours ago, I decided that I would track all time in my day. Sleep, eating, coding, IMing. Everything. I feel this will help me track the things that are eating away at my time in a negative way. I started this at 10:30PM on Tuesday, August 5th and plan on doing this until I go to bed next Wednesday, August 12. I then plan on doing this every 4 weeks. My goal is to track my weaknesses in my time management, and hopefully eliminate them. Tracking them on an interval of 4 weeks should show me productivity gains over time as well.
In my spare time (is there such thing?), I plan on making a super simple web application that makes tracking and logging this as easy as possible. However, if there is already a site out there that is free and does this in an intuitive manner, please leave the URL in a comment, as I would love to use it.
Has anyone else done something like this? What was learned from it? Am I wasting my time? In the end, I’m hoping this will open my eyes to what is really going on with my time, and help me become a more efficient person.
Update:
I am now using my new iPhone to track my time. The Voice Memos app is awesome. Hit record, say what I’m doing, hit stop. Already records the time on it. Still going strong!
Lessons Learned – Perfectionism
Posted by Mike Gromer in Best Practices, Design Patterns, Development, Entrepreneurship, Small Business on August 4, 2009
As a software developer in the entrepreneur world, one of the biggest quirks I’ve had to overcome is perfectionism in my software, mainly for BG Alert. A key part of launching a successful venture is your speed to the marketplace. This is especially key if you are trying to be first to market, in front of any would be competitors. Who knows what the mobile phone market would be like if Google had launched the Android OS before Apple came out with the iPhone? Could that have given them the edge they needed to dominate the marketplace? We’ll never know. Currently, I REALLY want to make BG Alert with the new ASP.Net MVC Framework, but I have the site almost all the way done with ASP.Net WebForms. Going the MVC route would be a bad decision.
For us entrepreneurs getting close to a launch, make sure you keep this in the back of your mind. The product is not going to be bulletproof in your first version, at least with software. There will be bugs. People will have change requests. You can always take the time to go back and improve a software’s architecture. Don’t take this as an excuse for lazy coding or poor product design. The architectural phase of a project is vital to maintanability of the software and will have a big impact on the overall time it takes to create it. Concentrate on a good design, then implement it as fast as you safely can.
After all, there’s a reason people use the phrase “first to market,” in press releases so much…
Bootstrapping: How Can You Help?
Posted by Mike Gromer in Bootstrapping, Entrepreneurship, Small Business on August 3, 2009
Since this economic downturn has started, many entrepreneurs are having hard times trying to find the money needed to launch their ventures. Enter bootstrapping. I define bootstrapping as the communal effort of many entrepreneurs and people to breath life into other’s ventures. You scratch my back, I scratch your back. One of the big backers of the bootstrapping effort, Bijoy Goswami, has a nice video describing bootstrapping on YouTube. Kevin Koym of Tech Ranch Austin, uses the metaphor of farmers helping build their barns. Farmers would rely on each other to help build their barns and were very willing to help their neighbor.
I am a software developer, with much experience with Microsoft’s .Net Framework (2.0/3.0/3.5). I’ve worked on projects ranging from architecting financial applications using WPF, WCF, Windows services, and an ASP.Net web application, to small websites using the new ASP.Net MVC Framework. If it is something you can program with a Microsoft .Net technology, I can do it. I also have expert experience in database modeling with MS SQL Server and MySQL, including the configuration of the servers, writing stored procedures and triggers, and deployments of these solutions.
I would be more than happy to help a fellow entrepreneur figure out the architecture of an application or help review a database schema and anything in between. I can help you figure out things before you pull the trigger on some $50k piece of software.
So here’s my call to action: What can you do? What do you need? Post it here as a comment, write a blog post, do something to get the word out! The more people involved in this communal effort, the higher chance of success for us all!
