Yearly Archives: 2013

The Questions No One Thinks To Ask

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Steve Blank wrote an incredibly good post asking three questions that I rarely hear asked. Most people, when starting a business, only think about the positives, about the upsides, and don’t think about what they are really doing and the impact it has on those who start that business. The reality, though, is that the years spent working on any individual business are years spent not doing something else. Yes, there is an opportunity cost, even though we don’t know what the cost is at the time we are making the decision.

The questions Steve asks, in addition to the normal business ones:

1. Do you want to spend the next 3 or 4 years of your life doing this?
2. Is this a scalable business?  And if not, are you ok with something small?
3. If I didn’t make any money after 4 years, did I still have a great time?

These are such critical questions, ones I have been asking myself over the last couple of years. 1 and 3 I have answered definitively. 2 I still struggle with.

Generational Smackdown

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Robert Samuelson wrote an article that I have been thinking about for a while. There is a fight happening in this country that pits the young versus old, worker versus retired, child versus parent:

The elderly’s interests are running roughshod over other national concerns . Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — programs heavily for the retired — dominate the budget, accounting for about 44 percent of spending, and have been largely excluded from deficit-reduction measures.

Almost all the adjustment falls on other programs: defense, courts, research, roads, education. Or higher taxes. The federal government is increasingly a transfer agency: Taxes from the young and middle-aged are spent on the elderly.

And Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are only growing as portion of our government dollars.

It’s uncomfortable but frankly, I’m tired of being pushed around by my parents and grandparents generation. Our school budgets are cut, our roads don’t get repaired, our cities file bankruptcy, all while they give themselves the retirement benefits they promised themselves.

Samuelson’s right: we are beginning to stir.

Intuit Screws Their Customers Again

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UPDATE: See the comment and link from Intuit below. It was very nice of them to respond.

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I received an email from the Quickbooks team last week under the title “Critical Notice – IRS Change to 1099 Form.” It starts out well enough, explaining to me that the IRS had made a change to their forms:

Urgent Service Notice
Dear Elia Freedman,

The IRS has changed the 1099-MISC form for Tax Season 2013. As a result, if you print 1099s from your current version of QuickBooks, the new forms will not be correctly aligned. To solve this issue, two options are available:

Two? Okay. I figured they were going to make sure I updated my 2013 version of Quickbooks so it could be used to pay taxes for the 2013 year. Hmmm. This isn’t going to go well.

OPTION 1: Complete the 1099-MISC forms by hand and submit them to the IRS. The IRS will accept handwritten forms. Please see http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1099gi.pdf, section G for IRS guidelines and details.

Oh, boy. This definitely isn’t going the way I expected, or the way that every other company on the planet would handle this. I should have expected this as Intuit is, well, Intuit. If that’s option 1, what could option 2 be?

OPTION 2: Upgrade to QuickBooks Pro 2014. Upgrading will save you time by allowing you to print the new 1099 forms directly from QuickBooks with no alignment issues. We realize upgrading might require some extra effort. To make things a little easier, we’re offering 20% off QuickBooks Pro 2014 plus free shipping through January 3, 2014.

You are f’ing kidding me? This is what you offer me? Pay to fix a bug in your software? It’s not like I’m using even a two year old product here. I am literally using the version of Quickbooks for the year I wish to pay taxes. Sure, they’ve come out with a new version in the last couple of months, like they do every year that has no changes in it, except, apparently, it now conforms to IRS Form 1099.

I have rarely met a company I hate as much as Intuit. [1] They once told me, 15 years ago, when I was polite enough to call to report a bug, that there were no bugs in Quickbooks. The balls these guys have.

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[1] They have some awesome people working for them, though, which makes this even sadder to me.

Shipping

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In the past year and a half Rick and I have developed and shipped the following:

  • Two projects for Adidas
  • One project for a start-up
  • A project for DEWALT Tools
  • powerOne for Android
  • powerOne for Tizen
  • Two projects for The College Board
  • Updates to DEWALT, powerOne for iOS, and a pro bono product

That’s eight products plus updates and, outside of powerOne for iOS and the pro bono job [1], all of these have generated revenue for us as work-for-hire. DEWALT, powerOne for iOS and powerOne for Android also generate a little bit of on-going revenue.

And what plagues me? The project I can’t get done. I really want to spend all my time on Equals and yet, to stay in business, my time is now spent almost full-time on contract jobs.

We get December, though, and our goal this month is to get the web version of Equals done for its first release. This will be a beta release as we have more features plus iOS we feel are needed for a true 1.0. But at least come January we should start seeing whether anyone cares enough to use it.

It will be a sprint. I hope Rick and I don’t get winded.

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[1] Which was a trade for some bug fixes in the Android version of powerOne.

Don’t Start a Company, Kid

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Incredibly good article from Aaron Hillegass outlining why starting a company is a bad idea even though he did it (and so did I). One of my favorite lines is this one:

I’ve been broke, and being broke sucks balls. Having Enough is awesome. How would I define “Enough”? Enough means that you can take a friend out to a nice lunch and not have to worry about how much it costs. I have hung out with a couple of billionaires—my experiences indicate that being a billionaire is just incrementally better than Enough.

I have never cared about being a billionaire. I’ve only cared about this description that Aaron defines here. I just want Enough, too.

By the way, if you want to learn how to code for iOS and OS X, start at Aaron’s company’s site, Big Nerd Ranch. Their books are incredible.