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The DFN Weekly

Leverage

By

Old Tom

OT Scripts

If you take what you're already doing, and find a way to do more of it, or do it more efficiently, in the same or less time, that's all to the good. Get organized; become efficient; work smarter not harder.

Still... there comes a point when you again run out of time. You'll need to hire it done, use better technology, whatever. You need leverage.

I found the same problem to be true with OT Scripts. I got more efficient, but still hit the wall, and had to find the leverage. Let me share my experience with you, and perhaps you'll see the way to find the leverage of your own.

First, let me point out that OT Scripts is in the leverage business. That's what we do. We know what you're already doing, or need to be doing, and we provide you that technological assist. We give you ways to do things which are flat impossible to do by hand... but our real product is leverage. We want you using, not ignoring, your own hard-won expertise and creativity. You still get to do the work, but with far greater result. You now leverage your effort.

Let me explain, then, the leverage we had to find. Chances are that you'll see the same problems as you grow and expand - perhaps our experience can help you find the way.

Back in August of 2000, I drove 500 miles each way, for Jojasa and I to meet Voltar for the first time. I bought the gas; he bought the dinner. A thousand miles of highway, for three hours of his time. We talked about building some TGP galleries - 30 of them, which Jojasa did over the next couple of weeks.

However, on the drive home, I got an idea. A month earlier, I had purchased a script from PerlCoders, and rewritten it. It suddenly occurred to me that if I could get permission from PerlCoders to package up the rewrite and sell it, I could make a chunk of change.

Five or six sales would mean a couple thousand dollars' profit. This was at the tail end of our Dry Summer, where our web income had dropped 80% and stayed there. A mere couple thousand was cause for serious excitement at the time!

We got the agreement, and I was suddenly in the script business. The first sale paid for our trip to Voltar, and the next three or four were pure profit. When I'd made five or ten sales in the next couple of months, I saw how this could work.

When I made twenty sales, and thirty, I found the flaw in my thinking.

By that point, exactly a year ago as I write this, keeping that piece of software running was taking up 100% of my time. Every new installation took 4-20 hours, and upkeep took the rest. Sure, we kept people very happy... but it got to the point that even one more sale wasn't worth it. With several hundred dollars profit per sale, it wasn't worth it!

With five sales, the leverage was there. With twenty or thirty sales, the leverage was gone. Time for another trip to Voltar.

We designed what became The High End Triple. It sells; it works; there is nothing else like it out there; but most importantly, it requires very little upkeep. It continues to work. On paper, at least, we now have the birth of OT Scripts.

The next few months showed that one script does not make a software house. Or, more to the point, its sales do not provide a reliable fulltime income. The leverage is there, but the limited market means there is not enough leverage.

We chose to prepare for rapid expansion. We brought Barron on board as our script installer. With Barron available, the difference between one sale, or twenty, or two hundred, would make minimal difference to my time. With Barron, our leverage becomes available. Rather than helping each new customer fumble through an installation, Barron can accomplish the task quickly, reliably, expertly.

I invented a little something with The High End Triple, which turns out to be more valuable than any of the individual scripts. I package it with each script sold, and hardly even mention its existence. This little something, however, has proven to be the key to rapid expansion.

It's what I call The Preflight Check. The concept, of course, is nothing new. Everyone knows that airplanes get a Preflight Check before takeoff. Computers get a Power On Self Test (POST). So does every item sold by OT Scripts. This tells the script installer immediately, whether all is well or not, and if not what's wrong. Tremendous amounts of time and frustration are saved; the customer is happy.

Sure, it takes a lot of work on my part to write a test for every significant feature included in a piece of software. The Preflight Check by itself is 500-1000 lines of code - often larger than the whole product it's checking! It's the key to our leverage, however, and is thus priceless. With the Preflight Check, we can install and support a hundred copies as easily as five.

Our third key to rapid expansion, is to create a sales portfolio. We know the webmastering process. We ourselves have been active and profitable webmasters for years. We have observed and helped countless other webmasters through VNWR. We use our own software.

By pricing our stuff at what you're already paying for content, we figured the value would be self evident.

Meanwhile, there seems to be a renewed interest in the AVS business. There could be a lot of reasons, including politics here in the USA. Perhaps it's simply that AVS sites make money.

After abandoning the AVS market for a year, we find AVS sitebuilders are available for $1500-2000. Our own AVS Advantagizer should be strongly competitive at that price. After all, it turbo-boosts the entire process, rather than merely building and submitting the site.

So, we're selling it for less than half the price of our competition. On the one hand, I feel badly in doing so. The AVS Advantagizer prints out as 150 pages of code. That's an entire three-ring binder full of Perl code, for just one product. On the other hand, we feel AVS sites are an important part of your portfolio, and our price comes within reach.

Sure, I like the idea of our competition trying to explain why theirs is worth an extra $800-$1200 cash. That could be an extremely difficult thing to explain. But that's not really the point. The real point is that $1500 on up, is out of too many peoples' reach. We make the AVS market accessible, and do it in such a way that you're far less likely to get blacklisted.

Our fourth key to rapid expansion, then, is to create reliable and useful tools, and make them accessible.

Our concept, is to provide you leverage. We know what you do from day to day, and we provide you our turbo assist. In providing you leverage, we have found our own.

Old Tom