Ben Yoskovitz of StartupSpark has posted his interview with me. “Bingo! Patrick McKenzie lays his cards on the table.” What can I say, that title warms me to the core of my bad-pun-loving soul. (You may not know this, but 37 states and the District of Columbia require loving bad puns as a prerequisite for getting a teaching certification.) This interview is largely focused on my experience as a uISV and thoughts on the field in general.
My personal favorite quote:
If I wanted to make a splash, I would say that it is more important that your ordering pathway be flawless than your application be the best in its class. Do you have a design document for your ordering pathway? Why not?
I could certainly do a better job of that myself, incidentally. Getting better, bit by bit and month by month.
There has been a wave of interviewing going around in the uISV community, at least from my distorted perception of it. The recently relaunched MicroISV Show at Microsoft has an interview with Joel Spolsky, of Joel on Software fame. It is worth a listen and even more worth a read (transcript available, thank goodness), since you can probably process the information much faster when reading than while listening. I love oral communication as much as the next guy (in fact, probably more than the next guy, since I did forensics activities for about a decade) but for technically dense material its sub-optimal.
If you’re signed up for Google Sitemaps (aka Webmaster Console) you can now see backlinks to your website. This is useful as backlinks are SEO mana from heaven and you can spy on whether your marketing is having any effect. I took a quick glance at mine and while the overwhelming majority are either download sites or spam blogs (they search for bingo related keywords and link to them with the hope of getting Google to rank their casino site — I hate this), I can see a few mentions from actual customers or people who find my site useful. The Dolch sight word list, for example, got linked to by an elementary school.