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RETROSPECTIVE (June 22, 2001) Once upon a time, I suckered LadyB into completing the Triple Triple Triple. Goodness yes she put in all the work, and went through a LOT to get it complete. A number of people kept her from giving up... but it was *she* who was the first to complete the Triples Project, as assigned. Still, I do take credit for promoting the project to her, without her even yet knowing what the project was going to be. Ah, the pain.... The thing is, LadyB *did* complete the project. And, once completed, she did a rather long retrospective post, talking about the project and its completion. What you're reading now, is a post of a similar nature. Almost precisely a year ago, in June of 2000, Voltar quietly gave me an assignment. The assignment was to build a Triple Triple - in a week. Build a second Triple Triple the second week, and a third the third week. This, then, was the prototype Triple Triple Triple. Towards the end of that same month, Voltar purchased a $300 script from PerlCoders, saying it was something he'd been watching for, for quite some time. He also said he didn't know squat about installing scripts (and proceeded to prove it), and wondered if I were willing to help. I dunno... you tell *me*. Do you think someone whom Voltar has been helping, might appreciate the chance to return the favor? Have you thought about what a *privilege* it might be, to be able to do *Voltar* a favor? Needless to say, I dropped everything. Remember, though, this is a year ago - in fact, a year ago this week. The Newbie Community has changed a lot since then. Do others do Voltar favors these days? Absolutely. Everyone who is changing our world, is doing Voltar a direct favor. Everyone who is part of *us*, is doing Voltar a favor. Several are quietly working behind the scenes... webmaster-friendly toplists, for example. Others are doing joint projects, to prototype or prove one concept or another. But a year ago, I saw the chance to do Voltar a favor as a very big deal. And, now that so many of you know Voltar's ways, you'll be completely unsurprised to learn that I was doing *myself* the favor. Not only did I install the script, but I completely redesigned it to do things according to how Voltar teaches. The result was a quantum leap beyond the original - and various reviewers and imitators have confirmed this fact. At Voltar's request, the product remained secret. (By the way, I did explicitly gain permission from perlcoders, to rewrite their code.) We had ourselves a competitive advantage. (Oh, I forgot a step: I purchased my own copy.) Voltar assured me we had a product that *nobody* else had. Please bear with me; this really is coming to a point! Eventually... Perhaps six weeks later, I asked Voltar if Jojasa and I could meet him for dinner. I *know* the value of having a mentor, and I *know* the value of doing things at *his* convenience. So, I drove 500+ miles, met him for dinner, and drove 500+ miles home. What we talked about, turned into the "create 30 clean tgp galleries" Newbie Project of the Week. Did I make any money from that idea? Nope. However, on the drive home, something "clicked." Yes, some of you have seen this part of the story before, but today I'm including details that have been private until now. Remember that script I'd purchased from perlcoders? Its sale was limited to 50 copies, and I already knew two of those sales were myself and Voltar. What if I could gain permission from PerlCoders to sell my enhanced version, to existing purchasers? Remember, my enhancement was based on *their* code. I had license to hack it up for my own use; I did *not* have license to turn around and sell it as my own. All PerlCoders had to do was say No, and that would be the end of the story. Which might not be a bad thing... Voltar and I retained our competitive advantage. We had something unique, which we were continuing to use for our *own* benefit. So... how to make this an attractive deal for PerlCoders? The original script sold for $300. I proposed selling mine for $1000, limiting sales to people who'd already purchased the original script. And, I offered to pay a 25% royalty to PerlCoders. You do the math... this was a darn good deal for PerlCoders. They make more money from doing nothing, letting me sell my enhanced version, than they'd already made from the original sale. Meanwhile, I was hoping for five or six sales, and counted that as darn good money. Remember, Jojasa and I had been doing a steady $500 per month up through last June, in web income. In June, our revenue dropped by 80%, and *stayed* down. Going from two-figure months to four figures looked darn good to me. A dozen sales later, I decided to arbitrarily raise the price by 30%. We immediately made *another* dozen sales. Go figure. The thing is, there's a catch. That is, there *was* a catch. A big one. What I'm about to type, is worth five figures to any scriptwriter out there, and quite possibly worth six figures. You see, for the eight or nine months following that first sale, I worked 100% full time installing, fixing, and enhancing, that script. I have a number of people *still* disappointed in me, because it took me so long to get to them. I was held hostage to other peoples' web sites. If AdultCheck changed something, I had no advance notice. All I could do was drop everything and react. If somebody had a special request, I took care of it. There was one guy, who PerlCoders referred to me. He said, I want such and such. I asked PerlCoders, and they said they didn't have such a thing, and should talk to Old Tom. He said he'd pay any price, if I could write him a custom script. I said never mind; it's already written; just send me the standard price and I'll install it for you, and write the small change that you need. I can assure you that this guy remains a happy customer! Five-figure lesson #1 is this. Different servers have different problems. Installing something complicated takes a lot of time, *every* time. Unix is unix is unix, right? Wrong. If your stuff needs fancy features like a mysql database or a certain Perl module, you're screwed. You will be spending a LOT of time getting things installed and running. Can you count on every webmaster having php? No. A c or c++ compiler? No. A version of unix that supports ip sockets to localhost? No. Knowing when to upload in ascii and when to upload in binary? Not only no, but Hell No. Capable of figuring out the path to perl, or the path to anything else? No. Or, correctly telling *me* the path to whatever? Again, no. LadyB reported that she learned things while completing the Triple Triple Triple. Because of that learning, among many other things, she has become strong. In the same way, *I* learned things. In doing complicated script installations across thirty different platforms, I learned things. In helping various people with htaccess, I learned things. So, five-figure lesson #1 is to keep things as simple as possible. It takes a whole lot of experience to find it, but *find* that lowest common denominator. Voltar doesn't teach style sheets - there's a reason for that. Stay away from FrontPage - there's a reason for that. The reason is that it will take so much time to clean things up later. In May of 2000 I volunteered for the Newbie Project of the Week, and was assigned a personal project. Immediately thereafter, I was assigned the Triple Triple Triple. Three weeks into that project, I dropped everything to rewrite and install avsmaker for Voltar. I paid him a visit, and on the way home decided to package up my product for sale. From that point on, every available minute went into installing and supporting AVSMaker Enhanced. June a year ago, I was building the Triple Triple Triple entirely by hand. 'The Bawdyhouse' may well be the only site I have built since - which I built in a single day last February. Did you catch that? In twelve months, I only built one site. I've been telling people how to do this and how to do that, explaining about traffic flow, handing out advice and encouragement... and I've only built one site? Well, I did build and submit something around 6000 avs sites last summer... last time I counted, I had somewhere around 75,000 html pages. What I *did* do, you see, was install, fix, and upgrade AVSMaker Enhanced. Some of you know that I actually can do a big chunk of work in a small amount of time. I've been doing those big chunks of work, *continuously*, since I began that Newbie Project of the Week and then the Triple Triple Triple, thirteen and twelve months ago. Did I continue to learn things? Yes, most certainly! If you've been here a while, you know I *can* make knowledgeable posts. What I do, is explain what Voltar teaches. And now, finally, we can turn to the point of this post. With completing the Triple Triple Triple, LadyB paid her dues. With supporting 20+ copies of AVSMaker Enhanced, *I* paid *my* dues. LadyB now operates at a higher level, because she knows more and understands more. Like I said, she paid her dues. She *knows*. Finally, we come to March 9, 2001. That's when Jojasa and I took another drive to Indiana. While driving, I came up with a major extension to the Triple Triple Triple design. This became what is now known as The High End Triple. We spent that weekend discussing that design, and what to do with it. We came to this conclusion: The 'High End' market is where *I* want to be. It's where my background is. I can do *far* better selling a single copy of a $1000 script, than selling ten copies of a $100 script. We discussed that concept at length, and decided to go that route. This also solved our 'conflict of interest' problem. If we were pricing our product at triple-three-figures (get it?) and above, the newbie board is NOT our primary target. We can't be accused of feeding off of our own newbies. As it turns out, there is a flaw in that logic: Too many of Voltar's Newbies are approaching the point where they *do* have that kind of money! And, since the products are Voltar designs, it's our Newbie Community that best understands the value beneath the covers. So... I have spent the last 3+ months working scriptwriting, creating something deceptively simple. It's not just a Voltar design; it's a Voltar *and* Old Tom design. I finally did it... I did my Triple Triple Triple. However, I did such an advanced version of it, that we are seriously requiring a Non Disclosure Agreement to even see it. We're working under the Trade Secrets Act, rather than under Patent or Copyright law. (With a patent or copyright, your competitors get to see your design. Not so with a Trade Secret.) You see, the thing is that I'm not really a newbie. Not in *this* arena. I've been around long enough, you see, to be considered a pioneer in Supercomputing. I do remember replacing vacuum tubes in computers that were still being used in production. I have been fixing supercomputer operating systems for more than twenty years. I have written the technical manuals for one of those operating systems, and for a few years it was me who taught the software developers, how their own operating system worked. I was the one who taught them how to write it, how to build it, how to boot it, how to debug it, and how to fix it. I was the one who didn't allow calculators of any kind in *my* class. My students did everything by hand, the hard way. When they left *my* class, they *knew* they could do it. Sound familiar? When you're selling computers for eight figures apiece, your customers can be demanding. Funny thing... they expect you to get it right the first time. When you fix something, they expect it to *stay* fixed. After 20+ years of keeping *those* computer customers happy, I'm not really a newbie. But what about being an adult webmaster? Well... after building a Triple Triple Triple by hand a year ago, perhaps I'm not a newbie there either. You'll notice that building by hand came *before* building the script. Again, that might show that I'm not really a newbie. On March 9, 2001, Voltar and I agreed that it was time for me to tap into that background. We came up with a design to meet a market need. We came up with a design that *we* are using first, for ourselves; darn right. The killer for me, is *time*. After I'd made each sale of AVSMaker Enhanced, I lost *all* of my time, installing and maintaining the beast. The High End Triple, on the other hand, should need *none* of my time after the sale. That is five-figure lesson #2. Have you ever seen someone make something look easy? And what you're really seeing, is the touch of the master? In that same way, the High End Triple is deceptively simple. Any time I could find a way to make things simpler, I rewrote it. Simple is more reliable: five-figure lesson #3. This, then, is my project report. What I accomplished over the last three months, is to form a close partnership with Voltar. Yes, there are more Voltar designs to come... and the implementations come from *my* expertise. Voltar hangs out with us Newbies by choice - and as a result, people mistake him for being one. Voltar ain't no newbie - and neither am I. On the other hand, Voltar feels being with the newbies is the place to be - and so do I. Has anyone had trouble trying to keep track of stuff as they're building their Triple or Triple Triple? What links to what; keeping content and sponsors organized; what mirrors get submitted where; and so on. Does the right full page ad have the right linking codes. Is stuff getting pulled from your C: drive. Since you've *done* it, you understand the problem - and so do I. That's been the bulk of my work the last three months... making it easy for *anyone* to do a Triple Triple Triple. Eight mirror pages per site, blind links where they belong, everything. Check and cross check and recheck again, to make sure that webmaster didn't forget something, or screw something up. Ever gotten some of the links wrong, trying to tie together 27 sites? Pulled the banners from the wrong domain? Sticking in onclick="exit=false" because the webmaster forgot? So how does this affect you who are reading this? In a couple of ways. First, I can teach with better understanding. Do you recall my search engine posts from a couple of weeks ago? I could explain all that because of studying - and *doing* - the High End Triple. Second... well... let me point something out. Things were different for LadyB, after she'd completed her Triple Triple Triple. Now that Voltar and I have completed the High End Triple... things will be interesting. Not to mention different. :-) Message # 6240 136.162.6.189 Mon Aug 13 18:03:26 2001 |