Our surprise guest was Jason Fried of 37signals.com via video chat. Jason talks about the business philosophies of 37signals and other insights into his work day and inspirations.

Allan and I have a friend who is a talented designer. Over the past few years his freelance business has done well. He’s made a solid living even though he hasn’t marketed himself. By “marketed himself” I mean his potential clients have no way to find him and even in the design community hasn’t heard of him. During the past years’ economic bubble this wasn’t a problem because somehow the design projects always found their way to him. Now that the economy has tightened it’s belt his workload has all but dried up, leaving him scrambling for full time or freelance work.

Last week he came to Allan and asked for some work. Unfortunately we currently do not have any projects in the design phase. So Allan suggested using his down time and going into a few popular open source projects and making them beautiful. He argued that he doesn’t have time because he’s spending all his time “trying to get paid”.

This is highly flawed thinking. If you have no work then you have plenty of time. At the very least you should be able to find 2-3 hours a day to contribute to an open source project. Most new business comes from referrals, so becoming the hero of a bunch of developers will likely lead to those developers mentioning your name when they have the chance. This is a great way to get some fairly easy exposure.

Side Note: I might argue that once you have no work that marketing yourself is a bit late and we should all be taking time everyday to network ourselves in some form or fashion.

David Hauser of Grasshopper.com speaks on "How to build a company beyond the start-up stage". Grasshopper.com is a virtual phone system designed for entrepreneurs. Follow David on Twitter at @DH. Also Grasshopper labs just released Chargify, which simplifies recurring billing for Web 2.0 and SaaS companies.

Here's the video David shows at the beginning of his presentation.

Recently I had a conversation with a friend who runs a small web consultancy and is looking for some consulting work. A great website design can help your consulting. But if no one is coming to your site then no one will notice the new design. If your current site is good enough your time is better off networking, blogging, talking to people and helping on open source projects.

My wife has a friend that sells MonaVie, it's a health juice. The company signs up independent distributors. In turn these distributors can setup other independent distributors "under" them, it's a bit of a pyramid scheme/multi-level marketing. These distributors will give you a "free" bottle of the juice, hoping you buy more, if you don't buy more juice they try to charge you for the "free" bottle ($40).

Does a good product really need a sales "scheme" behind it? Yes it does. If your product is just "good" you'll need some clever way to get the word out. However if your product is "great", you do not need a scheme. When was the last time you talked about how awesome Amway products are? Customer, users and clients talk about great experiences and bad experiences. Employ no scheme, just deliver a great product and experience they'll talk about.

My friend Tim Chilcott just moved to New York City and yesterday morning lost his iPhone on the subway. So he tweeted that he lost it, as iPhone users and friends, we all felt his pain. Later that afternoon he tweeted...


...within a few hours his friends on Twitter had donated the money for a new iPhone.

As silly as it sounds, yesterday Tim started a movement; not everyone can start a movement but here's how he did it.

1. Feeling Connected: Possible supporters must feel the victim's pain to be emotionally moved to contribute. Anyone with a cell phone knows, or can imagine how crappy it feels to lose one. Everyone that donated money to Tim's movement feels like they know him, so he's not some stranger asking for money.
2. Make It Easy: You must arm your supporters with the proper tools so they can help. Tim linked us to his paypal account.
3. Empower Supporters: To join your movement people must feel they can directly make a difference. Tim's goal of a new iPhone was seemingly reachable, he wasn't asking for a new car and he doesn't ask for help very often.
4. Show Progress: For your supporters to evangelize to their peers they must feel their contribution is helping the movement reach the goal. Tim tweeted how much money he needed left after each donation. You could track the progress. No one wants a movement they've helped to die before succeeding.
5. Say Thank You: Your supporters are buying on emotion and need to feel appreciated. Tim tweeted a thank you to everyone that supported him.

Tim's movement was successful both because the goal was met, but also because last night I went to bed feeling good that I helped. A successful movement will make the supporters feel great after helping the cause. If you create the right movement your supporters will give you something and feel good about themselves for contributing.

You'd think a health club's best form of advertising would be thin, healthy members but they really don't care about their members' health. In reality if their whole member roster showed up, they wouldn't be able to fit everyone inside the building. Their business model is betting that you don't show up and utilize what you're paying for.

My Dad's friend owns an Outback steakhouse, in the months leading up to Christmas they make 10% of their annual gross revenue by selling gift cards. Even more surprising is that only 35% of these cards are ever used by the recipients. Obviously, the profit margin on gift card sales are huge.

Credit card companies sign you up for a $35.99 per year "credit/id fraud alert" plan and hope you forget about it. You might notice an odd charge on your statement, but you'll probably forget to call and cancel, so they charge you for another year.

These type of businesses get you signed up and then try to keep their billings under your radar. But why? Why can't a gym call if your attendance is lacking and invite you back? Maybe even offer a free trainer for a week. A restaurant should call the recipient of an unused gift card and offer them a free dessert if they use their gift. Why you ask? Showing your customers that they're appreciated and loved is long tail. Keeping them locked in a few more months is a fleeting way to make money.

Every coffee shop I've been to has good coffee. What makes me choose that one place I return to over and over? It's not the coffee.

The direct exchange of coffee for money is how they profit. But their customers aren't choosing them for the coffee, it's something else: Maybe it's the light music or the silence. Maybe the chairs, tables or sofas. Maybe the barrista makes them feel they care or maybe it's just the convenience of your location. Your profit comes from coffee but your selling point isn't the coffee, most coffee shop have good coffee.

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We need your votes to speak at SXSW

Steve and I are hoping to speak SouthbySouthwest (SXSW) 2010. If you haven't heard of this conference you've been living in a cave and let me welcome you to the world outside.

If we're not speaking at SXSW I will blame you personally. :)

Johnny Depp, playing infamous bank robber John Dillinger, delivers the line John Dillinger knows one day he'll be caught, the fun will stop the good times will stop rolling. But he's not looking to get out right now, he's enjoying the ride. Nothing is broke, so why fix it? In this economy everyone is struggling and I know plenty of talented people searching for work. Why? They didn't market themselves 6-24 months ago. These people got comfortable grinding out work and making money. For these people today was good, today they were making money and who doesn't love making money? It's easy to get caught up in the cycle. The grind will cause you to forget. You should never stop marketing yourself.

But Allan, you handsome bastard, I don't know how to market myself.

You should be blogging, contributing to open source projects, tweeting, talking to others and attending conferences. These actions have a long tail marketing effect. Do you think Steve and I write these tasty blog posts for fun? No I write them cause you monsters love them and retweet the link which brings new people to our apps. Going forward spend 20% of your week marketing yourself. One day you'll lose those clients, the tide will change, you will be left high and dry. Put yourself out there, being awesome is long tail.

Now go tweet the link to this article and follow me on twitter.

Two weeks ago we launched LessCabinFever.com, start to finish it took less than 40 total man hours. In this blog post I'm going to tell you how we did it and why we consider this a successful product launch.

What is LessCabinFever?

LessCabinFever is a directory of laptop workers that are interested in exchanging homes for a short period of time. We call them work-vacations, a vacation from working in the same place. Basically, do you work from home? Would you like to work from another city for a week?

Why we did it.

We built this app for two reasons. (1) I want to work from somewhere else about four times a year. Some place nice, some place new. (2) It's so easy to write a blog about launching early and waiting on building that feature that seems so important. We wanted to practice what we preach.

Here's how we did it

Budgeted time, stuck to it.

We estimated 40 total man hours to launch this project. We knew it would be tight but we wanted to push the comfort zone of the constraint. We wanted something that could be built in a weekend.

Code Base

The code base is LovdbyLess.com. With some minor tweaks, adds and mods we were able to get the app to the current state in 27 hours. LovdbyLess gave us a lot of the core features we needed. Are there other features that could have been added? Yes. Would they have made the app something more to talk about? Probably not.

Design

I purchased the logo illustration from istockphoto.com for $10. The logo took 15 minutes to create. The overall app design took 12 hours total, including writing the markup for the app. I believe "design" is hard to bid for a consultancy, many clients want collaboration and collaboration costs money because it makes the process longer. Would it have been worth it for me to create the logo by hand, taking a few more hours? I don't believe so, this logo is good enough.

Overall

We spent another couple hours testing the app and talking about the next set of features. Overall we're pleased with the app. It's not perfect, it's not bug free, but we stuck to our budget and launched something. We're excited, so far has been well received, users are talking and people are tweeting about it.

Going Forward

The app isn't on the front page of digg and we're not worried about the whole world seeing this app. A few people per day are adding their homes and we're excited. Once a few hundred listings are in the app we'll spend some more time making the app better and easier to use.

Launch is the Starting Line

We always caution our clients that launching an app is the starting line, not the finish line. We know all too well that for this app to reach people and be useful it will take time, marketing, attention and love.

Consider this a success?

I call this a success for many reasons. Working on a project with a looming deadline and then launching it on schedule is exciting. Building an app and forcing yourself to make tough decisions is a great process. Going from paper to launch in an extremely fast time is a great way for a consultancy to flex their muscles.

• Build something people need and love. People will talk about it.
• Release, release and release. Release it before you think it's ready, you're wrong, you don't need that feature.
• Your app will probably fail, most of them do.
• Be ballsy, don't follow the herd, make a courageous moves.
• Build something you want to use. Continue to use it, feel the user's pain.
• Google AdSense isn't a revenue model.
• Find the cheapest, fastest way to 500 paid users. People will pay for your app, if it's good.
• Design is an iterative process, not just development. And you won't get it right the first time, so don't sweat so much.
• Don't scale until you actually need to. (The front page of Digg does not count as need.)
• Don't spend any money.

The Face Off Show (Podcast) recently gave us two very nice plugs on their show. The first one was just a brief mention of LessAccounting. The second they talked about our apps for a few minutes. They even uncovered that Steve and I are secretly brothers. Shhhhhh don't tell anyone but we're totally brothers! :)

About FaceOffShow

Faceoff is your face-to-face web technology podcast. In this podcast Jade Robbins and Mark Sanborn talk about various aspects of web technology such as web development, social media, and web entrepreneurship.

Links to Episodes
Episode 16 and Episode 20

Today you will have to make one, if not many decisions. Do me a favor, be ballsy. Make a decision that people will question. Turn heads.