Booyah!

It’s been a long time coming. Pretty sure it’s been over a year since I told work I was quitting.

They kept sucking me in with less hours, more money, new contracts, whatever. Everyone knew I was only there until I could live from our business, but eventually they stopped believing that I was leaving. That was the big kick.

Now, I am a full time Chimp. You probably thought we were full time already. Technically 40 hours a week working on AkturaTech is still full time. In combo with working 40 hours a week at a “normal” job, that’s what we call “not having a life, at all”. Albeit required for getting a dream off the ground and finally working for yourself.

For those wondering, the old crutch was that of a Control Systems Engineer. In normal speak this would translate to an industrial programmer. Very logical, very nerdy, very bad at writing. But of course that’s all going to change. I fully understand that my writing sucks and you’re going to have to endure it while I get back into the swing of things.

Things are looking pretty good for AkturaTech. We’ve recently launched ChimpRewriter and the relaunch from SpinChimp went incredibly well by our standards. People seem to be loving it. Can’t complain about that!

Where to next?

With SpinChimp, we built the product before we even tested if it would sell. This is a really dumbass thing to do, but we did it anyway (clueless blokes at the time).

In engineer-think, if the product is better, people will buy it. Us engineers research the CRAP out of stuff before we buy it and are turned off by markety stuff. We honestly believed that by having a better product, that’s all we would need to do.

With some research I learned about the differences. Check out <a href=”http://marketingtoday.com/marketing/toengine.htm”>this article</a> about marketing to engineers. The biggest thing that struck me was “Engineers want to know the features and specifications, not just the benefits”. All we would ever do was spruke the features cause that’s what WE wanted. Silly stuff. Benefits are aparrently the bread and butter of normal marketing.

On a related note, this Seth Godin <a href=”http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/11/persuade-vs-convince.html”>post</a> talks about persuasion vs convincing. We did a shitload of “convincing” in our early SpinChimp days and still do to an extent. We’re getting better though.

Two lessons:

• Validate first
• Learn how to market for normal non nerdy people

So the next major thing for us is to take some of the 10+ ideas we have and find out if there is

a) a market, and
b) people will buy it

In other words, will it make money?

There is a ton of info out there on this. This is what coming posts will be about, as this will be a fairly lengthy period of building basic ads or landing pages, generating quick traffic and finding the best means to do both of these.

There’ll be some good info coming for those of you in the same boat as us.

Not only that, there is a new theme as well. Kinda boring at the moment but with a bit of a tweak here and there, eventually it will be pretty.

The move was a lot less painstaking than I thought it would be. Obviously things can go very wrong when changing domain, but in this case the biggest hassle was creating a wildcard redirect on the old domain so that all the old links recirect properly from the .net to the .co equivalent.

The cPanel wildcard rerect simply does not work with WordPress. Probably because of all the URL rewriting etc that Permalinks does – but somewhere buried in the WP forum, I found this golden snippet.

Throw it at the end of the .htaccess on the root of your old domain, and boom…. all done.

redirectPermanent / http://jimmyrose.co/