At first, I thought it was my non-understanding of Business Models. So I did a lot of reading/research. That wasn’t it (although that research will become important eventually).

Then I thought it was my poor time management skills. So I read about and implemented the ‘Getting Things Done’ philosophy. That helped a great deal, but still didn’t move the site ahead that much.

My latest theory is getting much closer to my next milestone in learning how to set up a business…. essentially, I am realising that you cant do anything without proper allocation of resources.

That’s both finances and time. By allocating the occasional half a day, uninterrupted, I am finding I can do a lot of work. I am now extending that to creating a proper, isolated ‘office space’, with regular weekly allocation of time … all to working on Ambisonia.com.

1. At work, I dont read emails (or very few), reading and responding to emails takes a lot of time,
2. at work I dont blog. Blogging takes a lot of time,
3. at work I dont read other people’s blogs.

So I did a test, I removed iGoogle as my home page on my Browser. My productivity went up immediately.

Why?

Because I was no longer constantly side trackedby new emails, reading other people’s RSS feeds, new posts on the Ambisonia Forum. Previously, every time I opened a new browser window, all my emails, blogs, forum posts etc. would be displayed in front of me… and I would get sidetracked for, sometimes, hours.

So that’s my strategy. Separate out communications, research and monitoring from producing. So far so good.

Now, excuse me whilst I go and produce.

I’m starting to realise, understand, that an essential part of running a business is business development. I’m used to functioning in ‘art’ circles, not ‘business’ circles. I see that business development is perhaps the business world’s version of ‘networking’. Establishing connections with other businesses and sharing efforts to further each of our businesses together.

In the past (say last year), my understanding of business was that you had a service or product, and you sell that service or product. Ambisonia is a publishing service. It is a portal that connects home theatre owners with surround audio publishers. Whilst I am having difficulty pinpointing exactly how I can pull income, there is no shortage of other businesses that can benefit from Ambisonia being successful.

I can see now that the right way forward is for me to begin to build conversations with these other businesses.

But this is difficult, because I am now spending most of my time working to pay the bills… and one thing I have learnt is that communication (phone, email or other) can easily chew up the whole day…

Then I  discovered that all the files I had converted and published were wrong. There was an echo in the sounds, and the result (for anyone who downloaded and listened to them) was bogus … mess.

Lesson number 1: too much testing is never enough.

Lesson number 2: insufficient cash flow always has consequences. Unfortunately, I still dont have a surround system setup in my new house … fault of no income from working on Ambisonia full time. But skimping here is hurting Ambisonia, the thing which I am skimping for. It just doesn’t work. There has to be some kind of income to sustain the effort. Ok, so I need to get a decent surround system set up again… I have to bite the bullet and be done.
Lesson number 3: I’m not sure what this lesson is. On Friday last week, I woke up thinking today was the day I would sign off on the DTS milestone … all I needed to do was start pumping all the amabisonic files through the DTS converter script. I checked my email and found several reports of bad DTS conversions on the 4 or 5 files I had done and uploaded…. that really drained me. Being so close to the milestone, then discovering that its all gone pear shaped and there’s still some significant work to be done resulted in a bit of a black hole in my energies. It is now Tuesday and I’m only starting to swing again.

Maybe the lesson is the 80/20 rule … the last 20% takes 80% of  the time. ….or… maybe the lesson is that you should never anticipate the milestone until you are on the other side of it… or maybe the lesson is just that this is difficult and you just have to suffer through the hard times.

I’ve started a few open-source projects in my time … but none have been taken up by others and expanded on. I’ve also used a lot a lot of open-source software, and had many discussions on mailling lists asking for help with bugs etc. There’s something I’ve realised.

The best software will fail if there isn’t significant ‘presence’ in help and support when you need it. I never helped anyone with my open-source projects … I just thought I’ll put the code up there and see if people take it and run. They dont, ofcourse.

I’ve also joined mailing lists hoping to get a bit of help on some piece of software. There’s different kinds of ‘culture’ evident on mailling lists for different open-source projects. Here’s an attempt to categorise them:

1. No response. No one is home.  You post a question, or an issue, and get no response, post again, maybe get one unhelpful comment. Sometimes there is some activity on the list, but for some reason no one is interestd in your problem. I found this to be the case on the aws-s3 ruby list.
2. Lots of responses with some attitude. Mailing lists can sometimes act as peer-group venting environements. Some people can be really helpful, others assume a typical ‘youthful over-confident coder arrogance’ where their answers are short and full of ‘dont waste my time with your newbie mortality status’. RTFM is not a helpful response! I’ve had some of this on the Plone users group. Dont get me wrong,  I depend on the Plone users list heavily and get  some excellent help from many generous people (I’m talking about that occasional ‘attitude’ response). You see this a lot when Googling for help on something, and come across some old conversation on a list.
3. Super vigilant individual. And then there’s the occasional list driven by one passionate and surprisingly helpful individual. I’m talking about Bill Schottstaedt on the SND list. Bill’s support is fast, clear and without attitude. I started using Ecasound (which had a relatively active list) but found that when I reported a bug or an issue, the response was neither here nor there… and as such, I had no way of knowing whether someone had registered the bug or was dealing with it. With Bill’s support, I feel as though I can depend on the software and build on top of it.

The lesson I’ve learned is on the importance of polite, clear, fast and no-attitude ’support’. Its empowering to the user and builds a pleasant community feel.

I try very hard to do this on Ambisonia … and I have to admit it is very difficult! It can be difficult to be trouble-shooting a new issue when there’s so many other things to do. Sometimes I write an email that is just a few words too short.. and it gives the wrong impression. Sometimes I get stressed and it comes through in my communication. I’m learning to keep that to myself.