Archive for August, 2009
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!
Entrepreneurship…The First 60 Days
Posted by Mike Gromer in BG Alert, Entrepreneurship on August 2, 2009
At the end of May this year, I quit a well paying job, to move myself and my two boys back to Austin, TX, to work full time for myself. Not only that, we left my wife behind while she finished her final year in school.
Let me give anyone considering doing this some advice…do not do this unless you have a rock solid support network (family, friends and family). Doing this would not have been possible for me without my family and friends. Finding a local support network is helpful too. I’m lucky to live in one of the best cities for startups in the nation, one of the cities that will help bring the country out of this recession. Local groups like Tech Ranch Austin help keep me inspired and going. Tech Ranch is full of good people. Their first question when meeting you is usually, “How can we help you?” Their goal in life is to spark small business growth, and help entrepreneurs succeed. I am actually in the process of completing their Employee 2 Entrepreneur program, which helps jumping over a lot of the initial hurdles small business owners encounter in the early stages. Not only do you learn a lot of important concepts, you network and find others who are more than happy to help out. Everyone in the class wants the others to succeed and will do anything they can to help with that.
So what am I actually doing you ask? I am currently splitting my time between working on my diabetes management company, BG Alert, and starting up a software development company with two friends and my wife. I plan on launching the first version of BG Alert at the end of the month, just in time for the upcoming school year. Version two will hopefully be released 2-3 months later. Tech Ranch has been a great help getting me in contact with members of the community that can help me advance this service. So, if you know anyone with children with type 1 diabetes, have them contact me, I’d love to get their input and hopefully get them testing BG Alert.
Currently, I’m not 100% sure of the direction I’m going to take with this blog. If you have suggestions, please comment.
