I've got a handful of free tickets to hand out for this year's Business of Software conference. It should be great – Seth Godin, Joel Spolsky, Dharmesh Shah and Eric Sink are just a handful of the many speakers who'll be speaking about building long term, profitable and sustainable businesses.

Plenty of people have written to me and said they'd love to come but can't afford it because they're start-ups, charities or because the people they work for won't foot the bill.

If you’d like a free ticket, here’s what you have to do.

You have to commit to using your skills – as a hacker, a marketeer, an entrepreneur, a product manager, or whatever – to help somebody who otherwise wouldn't get your help. Maybe you'll design the web site for a charity, or spend a couple of days doing SEO for your local pub. You'll have better ideas. It absolutely must not involve promoting the conference: I want you to do something to help somebody else, not me.

Post your commitment to this thread on hacker news. The more specific, the better. You should say why can't afford to pay for your ticket too.

In a week or so I'll look over the thread and pick somewhere between 1 and 5 people who'll get free tickets.

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Every year I hand out a number of free / heavily discounted tickets to Business of Software. I run the conference because it's a Good Thing to Do, and helping a few people who wouldn't otherwise be able to make it is part of this. But I've never been happy with how to allocate these tickets, so I'm asking for ideas.

I've started a thread on Hacker News about this:

I run the annual Business of Software conference
(https://www.businessofsoftware.org). I figure that some of the folk here
would (a) benefit enormously from going but (b) can't afford to go. I'm
thinking about making a handful of free tickets available, but I'd like
to make sure they go to people who'll appreciate it, actually turn up,
can't afford to go otherwise and who'll get something from it. Any
ideas? (I'll give a free ticket to whoever has the best one).

If you've got any ideas, then post them on the thread. If you want to up vote it then I'd appreciate that too. As I say, the person with the best idea will get a free ticket.

In April, I wrote:

Right now, we’re running a “Ten geeks in five weeks” project. The major thing that’s holding back Red Gate’s growth is our struggle to hire great people. So Alice, Mark and Nick are going to hire ten people over the next five (now four) weeks. I’m not entirely sure how they’re going to do it. I know that iPads are involved. I think they’re handing them out to people who come for interview

The weeks have passed. The geeks have been hired. The video has been made. Enjoy.

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Are you a micro ISV or do you have a software product you want to sell? We’re setting aside a million dollars to buy the right desktop and web apps. Here’s why, and what you have to do if you want to sell.

When I kicked off the first Red Gate million dollar challenge last April with those same three sentences, I wasn’t sure what to expect. It seemed like a cool thing to do, and my gut instinct said that it might lead to interesting things. It did: we ended up buying {smartassembly} from Jean-Sébastien Lange.

It turns out that this was a great thing for Jean-Sébastien (he got some cash, he got out after the fun part of building a product, and {smartassembly} has continued to thrive), and it was a great thing for Red Gate (we’ve been able to take the product to a wider audience, and are continuing to develop it).

We’ve had similar successes with other products we’ve bought. SQLServerCentral.com, .net Reflector, SQL Prompt, SQL Backup and SQL Hyperbac have all thrived under our ownership. In all these cases we’ve tried to do the same thing: introduce the products to a wider audience, and help them fulfil their potential beyond the means or ambition of their original creators.

We’d like to do this some more, and now seems like a good time. So we’re going to run another million dollar challenge.

We’re setting aside a million dollars to purchase third party technologies. We might buy a single thing for a million dollars, or ten for a hundred thousand, or any other variation. We might decide to spend more, or less, but a million dollars is our target.

Interested? Here’s what we’re looking for:

• You’ve got to have a product. We’re not interested in prototypes. You must have customers. Happy customers, who – ideally – are happy to give you money for what you’ve built.
• If you’re giving away, not selling, your product then we’re looking for high numbers (10,000+) of users.
• We’re most interested in software aimed at .net developers, SQL Server developers and DBAs, Oracle developers and DBAs and Microsoft sysadmins. We’ll consider software outside of this area, but those are our sweet spots.
• The product might be a desktop app or a web-based app. We don’t mind.
• if you’re selling your product then it must have at least a 10% conversion rate. In other words, if ten people download it, or trial it, then, on average, one person should buy it. For us, this is a sign that you’ve got a product that works. We don’t care how many customers you’ve got – the fewer the better, in fact. It’s the ratio of trials to purchases that counts. If you’re not charging for it then we’ll look for a sign that a significant proportion of your users are actually using it regularly.
• Now is a good time for you to sell. Maybe you’re struggling with marketing your product, or maybe you’re worried about the recession we’re in. Or maybe you just need the cash, or are bored.

If you’re interested, here’s what you have to do:

• Send me an e-mail at neil.davidson@red-gate.com explaining what your product is and why it fits what we’re looking for.

The closing dates for entries is August 16th 2010.

Here are some questions you might have:

Will Red Gate invest in my company?

No. We’re interested either in buying your company, or buying the product you’ve built. We won’t take a stake in your business.

Why should I sell?

You might have a number of reasons. The emotional ones might involve fear, boredom and excitement. Maybe you’ve taken the product as far as you can, or want, to and would like somebody else to continue to make it succeed.

If your product is worth more to us than to you, then you should at least consider selling it.

Why should I sell to Red Gate?

We’ve got a track record of buying products and, frankly, not screwing up.

Who is Red Gate?

Here’s Red Gate’s web site

What’s the process?

Send me an e-mail at neil.davidson@red-gate.com explaining what your product is and why it fits what we’re looking for. The closing date for entries is August 16th 2010. We’ll get back to you shortly after, either to let you know we’re not interested or to ask for more information. At some point, we’ll meet up with you, make a yes or no decision, and sort out the details. It will probably take a month or two to go through the process.

Will you sign an NDA?

Not at this stage. If we decide to take things further, and start asking for sensitive information, then we might do.

Will I be able to carry on working on my product?

Maybe, maybe not. It depends a lot on you – why you’re selling, and what you want to do long term. Sometimes we’ve bought technologies and people have carried on working on them, but sometimes they prefer not to.

Why is Red Gate doing this?

We’re always looking for new ideas. We get e-mailed them occasionally, and stumble across them sometimes, but we figured it’s better to be systematic. If buying technologies is a good thing to do, then let’s do it well.

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From the Wikipedia entry on Guignol (the French equivalent of Punch and Judy). My emphasis:

“When hard times fell on the silk trade during the French Revolution, he [Laurent Mourghet, Guignol’s creator] became a peddler, and in 1797 started to practice dentistry, which in those days was simply the pulling of teeth. The service was free; the money was made from the medicines sold afterward to ease the pain. To attract patients, he started setting up a puppet show in front of his dentist’s chair.”

According to Mark Stephens, a BoS regular:

“The most important reason to go there, however, is that you will find 300 of the brightest people in the Software industry are also going to be there. It is your chance to meet up with lots of other people who might be potential clients or customers, but who will definitely have lots of valuable experience to share with you, even if it is only to reassure you that times are tough.”

And the penguins.

You can read more on Mark’s blog.

When we kicked off our SQL Response 2 project last June, we decided to rewrite the product from scratch. Early on, the team decided that it would be web based. It would be easier, they claimed, to write cleaner code and create a more modular user interface. They talked about ASP.NET MVC, jQuery and separation of concerns. I think they mentioned that the flux capacitors would run faster that way too.*

Oh, and you’d be able to monitor your SQL Servers from your mobile phone.

Like anybody would want to do that. What a dumb idea, monitoring your servers from your Blackberry.

And then, six months ago, Apple launched the iPad. Monitoring servers from a mobile device suddenly doesn’t seem so dumb. But we didn’t realise that until Tech Ed a couple of weeks ago when Ben and Gareth showed SQL Response 2 running on an iPad to a bunch of DBAs:

They loved it.

If you’re a sysadmin, you need to be able to keep an eye on your servers wherever you are. You might be at your desk, wandering among your boxes in the labyrinths of your server room, or eating a sandwich on a park bench.

This is an argument you can easily, and justifiably, make to your boss. To make it simple for you, I asked Gareth, who used to run our IT at Red Gate, to put together an e-mail you can use. Just copy and paste this text, personalise it and send it to your boss:

“

Dear [put your boss’s name here],

Now we’ve deployed SQL Response, we can start to use the access-anywhere benefits of the web application. It needs to work just as well from the park or the co-lo facility server as from my desk.  

To do that, we’ll need some kind of portable device with a rich web browsing experience to get the best of our investment. The selection criteria should be:

– standards-compliant web browser

– long battery life

– zero boot-up time

– wifi and 3G connectivity with VPN support

– touch-screen interface so we can re-patch network connections with one hand

Having done a full survey of the alternatives, it seems that the Apple iPad might fit the bill. Please can I borrow your company card to purchase one to evaluate?

Yours sincerely,

[put your name here]

“

SQL Response 2 could be the killer app for the sysadmin’s iPad. The early access program is now open to the public. You can find out more and download it from here.

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*Of course, what they really meant was that it would be cooler and more fun to build if they used some shiny new technologies they hadn’t used before.

Design for how your customers really are, not how you hope they are. Don Norman, author, The Design of Everyday Things, speaks at Business of Software Conference 2009.

http://businessofsoftware.wistia.com/medias/brlh34x37e?embedType=async&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=640

Derek Sivers has a great blog post on his fantastic blog illustrating how talent is overrated, and why it’s grit that really counts:

“After 15 years of practice, and about 1000 live shows, I was finally a very good singer, at least by my own standards.

[…]

I’m really trying to be a great computer programmer, and so in awe of the people who seem to do it naturally. I’m just such a beginner.

It may take me another 15 years, but I’m determined.”

I used to think that the ability to program was something you were either born with or you weren’t. Now I’m only half sure.

We all love stories of the genius with the god-given gift, and creative people are never more creative than when telling their own stories (Michelangelo destroyed his early work and harangued his first biographer because he mentioned that he once studied under a master, all to perpetuate the myth that he was born perfect), but, as Derek eloquently demonstrates, the truth is often more complicated.

Derek is speaking at Business of Software 2010. The early bird discount expires soon, so if you want to hear him then book soon.

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The Business of Software conference scratches a deeply personal itch.

I set it up because I care about building a profitable, sustainable and enduring software business. I wanted to hear from the most eloquent, most experienced and most thought provoking people in the world, and meet people in the same boat as me, struggling with the practicalities of creating a software business.

I wanted to create a conference where the speakers are guaranteed to be great, and have something to say and not something to sell. A conference which has no sponsorship, no clutter, and where the right to speak has to be earned and cannot be bought.

That makes finding speakers hard. Plenty of people e-mail me and ask to speak, and I almost always say no. I only invite people to speak who I've heard speak before (I've heard Seth Godin speak 3 times), who I've met and who I think will rock the audience (I met Peldi over pizza and a beer last year), or who have been recommended by somebody I trust (three people I know recommended Eric Ries).

But the best things in life are often the unexpected. Serendipity and randomness create more remarkable moments than planning ever can. That's why, every year, there are a handful of short slots available for people who I don't know; people who are not guaranteed to rock. But often, they do.

If you'd like a chance at one of these short slots, then go here.

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Paul Kenny spends most of his time trying to persuade sales people to be more entrepreneurial. But most people in the business of software have the opposite problem. We’re entrepreneurial, but we need to more salesy.

“In the old days, getting customers was easy. You could just outspend. You could use brute force to get the word out. Now, thanks to social media, you don’t have to outspend. There is a much better technique. It is to out friend. If you can just be friendly enough and get your users to party with you, the rest is really easy. If you don’t want to take the time to develop – building like 20,000 to 200,000 close, intimate friends can take a few weeks – then we have the viral model so you can do this really quickly.”

Just before Easter everybody involved at product development at Red Gate stopped working for a week. The only thing we expected was the unexpected. And we weren’t disappointed.

Rather than write up the results, here’s a video that Anthony put together.

You can see other videos (including what happened when we locked four people in barn by the seaside) about what we get up to at Red Gate here.

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A few months ago, I was stuck in the meeting from hell. Red Gate’s got a moderately complicated web site. Everybody wants to be able to update it how they like, but we need to keep it consistent. Of course, everybody says, consistency is good but only if it’s my way. At the end of this hour of circular arguments and evidence-free discussion, Richard stroked his chin and said:

“You know, what we need is a Book of Red Gate.”

We all stared at him.

“Huh?”  I asked.

“Well, you know. A book. Of Red Gate”, Richard explained.

“Ah. Whatever,” I said as I shuffled my papers together and pretended there was somewhere else I urgently needed to be.

Over the next few weeks, I heard rumours about the Book of Red Gate. Vague, unsubstantiated rumours. People were being interviewed. The coffee machine was being photographed. Code was being written. Jokes were being constructed. I learned, third hand, that Richard had roped in Dom, Alice, Brian and Mat to work on it. People who had other, very important things they should be working on instead of wasting their time on some dumb-ass side project.

In short, I heard enough to know it was a very stupid idea, and that it shouldn’t be allowed to continue.

I asked to see a draft of the book.

My request was politely refused.

I asked again.

I never heard back.

The day before Valentine’s day, I bumped into Alice outside a shop in the Grand Arcade in Cambridge. “I’m going into work tomorrow,” she said. “To tie balloons to all the books of Red Gate we’re giving everybody. Have you seen the book yet?”

When I got into work on Monday, everybody’s desk had a book of Red Gate with a red balloon attached on it.

Actually, I had two Books of Red Gate. One was inside a brown envelope marked ‘Top secret – preview copy’.

I read it.

It was work of genius. Crazy, oddball and inspired genius. You can get a flavour of what I mean from a typical page from the book (click on it to see it larger). This is the poster for a six page comic strip about the meeting pig, a silver piggy bank that travels the rooms at Red Gate:

The lesson is that smart people do smart things. But you need to give them the freedom to do it. Sometimes the best thing I, as one of the CEOs of Red Gate, can do is to get out the way. To ignore my instincts and just let people try things out they care about. Sometimes it will go wrong, but sometimes you get astonishing works of brilliance.

Right now, we’re running a “Ten geeks in five weeks” project. The major thing that’s holding back Red Gate’s growth is our struggle to hire great people. So Alice, Mark and Nick are going to hire ten people over the next five (now four) weeks. I’m not entirely sure how they’re going to do it. I know that iPads are involved. I think they’re handing them out to people who come for interview (wow, what a dumb idea).

I know that it could go badly wrong. But I also know that it could go remarkably, unpredictably well.

Would you like a Book of Red Gate? E-mail me at neil.davidson@red-gate.com with your postal address and I’ll send one out to you. I recommend you get a physical copy, but if you’d prefer the eBook you can download it here.

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Summary

Dan’s DNA is embedded in software across the world and across the decades. What has Dan learned about software along the way? Think about the ‘job’ that people will hire the software to do. Software is being used as an alternative to employees.

Are you worried about how your software business will cope with the impending end of the world? What? You didn’t know that the world was about to end? You should definitely listen to Mark Stephen’s fantastic talk from 2009’s Business of Software conference. It’s witty, it’s insightful and it’s short (under seven minutes long).

Rob’s strict adherence to “release early, release often” in all areas of his life was starting to irritate his colleagues

My second attempt at a cartoon. I have no idea whether it’s any good or not. If you like it, retweet it …

Nigel’s decision to break with tradition and *not* sacrifice a cat at today’s daily stand-up meeting was a brave one.

I’m feeling a bit stuck for material for my blog, so I thought I’d break things up with a cartoon or two. If you like it, let me know (or retweet it). I’ll keep an eye out for the tumbleweed.

Here’s the first one. You’ll need to click on it see it properly.

“Richard’s 20% project didn’t go entirely to plan”

Last week, Seth Godin wrote this in reply to Harvard Business School students seeking advice on how to find a job:

“Go to a small company, work for the CEO, get a job where you actually get to make mistakes and do something”

Brilliant advice.

But what’s the next step?

Well, I’m one of the CEOs (we have two) of Red Gate Software. We’re the 14th best small company to work for in the UK. We were featured in this month’s Wired UK magazine as one of twenty businesses worldwide reinventing the way people work.

I’m looking for somebody smart and hardworking to work with me for the next twelve months. You’ll take on a number of projects, but the first two will be:

• Making Springboard, our incubator program, a success in 2010
• Setting up and running a million dollar challenge

Interested? Get in touch with me and persuade me that we should chat. You need to be able to work in the UK, and be willing to relocate to Cambridge.