Conversations about the MLS industry, creating software, and employee ownership.

The Notorious R.O.B. has a great post today after hearing Mariana Wagner speak at RE BlogWorld today, and the facts stood out:

Mariana presented some great “real data” from three weeks of her own operations, her own blog, her own website. The numbers are quite amazing. 154 signups, 66 with real email and phone numbers, etc. leading to twelve contracts (8 in contract, 3 closed, and 1 in negotiation).

Here’s what I’m wondering about:

Mariana is co-owner of the #1 Team in Colorado Springs. She has other “team members”. What does she need them for?

Rob goes on to explain why he believes “we are headed towards a ‘web-centric’ model of real estate.”  The post is a must-read.

P.S.  This is my third post today, something must be in the air.

FBS works very hard to support as many browsers as we can. We believe browser choice is key to the web promise of access to your data anytime, anywhere, and on any computer. Sometimes supporting multiple browsers is a real pain. One of our lead web developers, Brandon Medenwald, has written about this before on the FBS Blog in regards to the hoops and hacks we have to jump through for Internet Explorer, which often does things just different enough to cause headaches. Given this, the introduction of a new browser could be seen as just another headache to support. Further, there’s no lack of browsers out there now with IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera, so the release by Google of their new Chrome browser has some scratching their heads.

Regardless of Google’s reasons for entering the browser wars, I think this is great news for the web generally and especially for users of flexmls Web and FBS’s development. My primary cause for celebrating Chrome is speed and the competition Google’s provided with their V8 javascript engine. Our flexmls Web application relies heavily on javascript both in the browser and on the server. A good example of javascript on the client side is in our search results. When you scroll down, the system automatically goes and gets more listings and we use javascript to render the new listings into the list view.

This process works far faster in Chrome than it does in Internet Explorer. Here are some average timings for the rendering time (lower numbers are better; these test are anecdotal as they were run only on my computer; we may do more serious speed tests later):

Now, consider: (1) about 70% of our daily users still use Internet Explorer on our system; and (2) searching is the most commonly used function on flexmls Web. By switching to any of these other browsers, users will see a noticeable difference in performance of search results. In fact, the rendering time in Internet Explorer takes significantly more time than actually going to the server to get the data. 

This leads me back to my mention of javascript on the server. A few years ago, we added SpiderMonkey support to our application server. At the time, running Javascript on the server may have seemed like a wacky idea, because it wasn’t mainstream.  Now, however, with the big investments Google is making in improving Javascript performance with V8 and the speed war being waged with Mozilla and Apple for Javascript speed supremacy, FBS and our customers are going to benefit from being able to leverage these now core technologies. This is the real reason I’m so excited by Google releasing Chrome. They’re putting tons of money and talent into Javascript and, over the long term, that will make flexmls Web faster both on the server and the client.

We’re very excited to start working with some of these new JS engines on the server side and will be back later with a post on what we find. In the meantime, download Chrome (or Firefox) and check it out. We don’t officially support Chrome yet but we’re excited by it and and expect to add official support for both Chrome and Safari in the near future in addition to our current support of IE and Firefox.

I’m taking some time off next week for the first time in quite awhile. The main event of my vacation will be a silent retreat at Demontreville, a Jesuit retreat center just outside of Minneapolis. The location is outstandingly beautiful and, in this age of constant distraction, dedicating time to silence and reflection is often revelatory and certainly rewarding. No phones, no Internet, no talking for three days and nights.

Some may find such a prospect frightening and, indeed, there is an awkwardness to the silence, especially at the beginning. By the second day, though, the routine takes over and the calm begins to set in, which, in years past, has opened many doors for me. The last time I attended was two years ago with my father-in-law and brother-in-law. I so enjoyed spending the silent time with them. I missed last year in part because my father-in-law passed away, leaving us decidedly amiss. I’ll certainly miss Henry this year and yet it will be a great opportunity to remember him as well, as he lived a thankful life for which I also strive.

On a more logistical note, I will only be out of reach for the four days of the retreat (September 25-28), though I’m also taking the first three days of next week off just to bum around the house and spend time with my wife and kids after school. After the retreat, I’ll be staying in Minneapolis to go to a doctor appointment with my mom and then the CMLS conference comes right on the heels of that, so I’ll essentially be out of the office for two weeks. I expect blogging will be light over the next few weeks (not a big change there!), and hopefully some rest followed by the CMLS conference will bring some excitement back to the FBS Blog.

About a year ago, I wrote about my repeated failures at predicting agent declines over the last several years. This afternoon, I was reading a post on Read/Write Web called How Decoupled Is The Innovation Economy From The Rest Of The Economy and it got me to thinking about agent counts again. You might think those sorts of numbers are top of mind for me in running FBS, but the numbers tell why they aren’t. Since January, we’ve only seen a .32% decline in membership in existing accounts. Certainly, some of our 100+ MLSs have had some significant decline but, on average, it’s been completely flat. (We’ve also been fortunate to see lots of growth in new accounts.)

Some of this flatness could be from some MLSs using end of year billing but that isn’t likely to be the case for over 100 different MLSs, many of which are sure to have had billing cycles since January. Rather, my belief is there was a big enough decline in 2007 that left 2008 pretty stable. The big question is what 2009 holds in store. Your thoughts?

I attended the Business of Software conference this last week in Boston and found it very valuable on many fronts. First, the speaker lineup was filled with developers and others I greatly admire, including Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek, Jason Fried of 37signals, Eric Sink of SourceGear, and Seth Godin of Purple Cow fame. It was great to see and hear them in person. Most important, however, was the content. The two days were packed with speakers interweaving all the core topics for the business of software, from development process to finance, ownership and exit strategies.

The conference started with Seth Godin, one of the most engaging presenters I’ve seen. Seth was a great start to the conference because he’s all about idea generation and developing distinctively useful products. My core takeway from Seth’s talk was about developing tribes. An example of this is the tribe Seth set up for his new book, which was limited to just the early adopters willing to commit to buying his book months before it is to be actually released. Seth said during the conference that this tribe is working together at an amazingly high level because those who want to be there are committing themselves, are not anonymous, and they have something at stake (being in the tribe) and so follow the rules of the tribe. Wow, this tribe thing Seth is describing sounds a lot like the MLS to me all the way to the fact that some people don’t like the exclusivity or rules of the tribe and think it should be more open. Sound familiar?

Jason Fried from 37signals was next. Jason provided anecdotes from his success with 37signals about the development process. There really wasn’t much new in his talk that hasn’t already been covered on their blog or in thier book. 37signals builds software they use personally and so they have the enviable position of combining marketing, product management, development, testing and even support into just a few people. Because they use the software themselves, they primarily build what they want and hope that others are happy with it, too, and, indeed, that’s proven to be the case.

As much as I admire the simplicity of the 37signals approach, I’ve found it hard to translate to our company focused on real estate multiple listing software. I haven’t run into any real estate agents who also have the time or inclination to program software while they also practice real estate, so I don’t think having developers who use the product they’re developing is going to change any time in the near future. Given that, we need a bit more process than 37signals suggests is ideal. We need to talk to our customers more to learn their needs so we can communicate that back to the developers. Engaging with customers at that level is hard work and something we’re constantly trying to improve.

Two other speakers were great on this front: Steve Johnson and Steve Krug. Steve Johnson is from Pragmatic Marketing, a consulting firm that advocates and likely defines best practices in product management. My key takeaway from Johnson’s presentation is that product managers cannot get the feedback they need in the office, they must get out in the field and see what users are doing. Steve suggests that feedback inside the company is not very valuable, primarily because it comes from support and sales. In the case of support, the most prominent feedback is either from users needing more training or power users, neither of which are the majority of users. Rather the majority of users are silent or unheard inside the firm and that’s why the product manager needs to get out of the office and find and learn from these users. This is where true improvement is possible and better design decisions can be made that have powerful impacts on the usefulness of the product.

Along these same lines, Steve Krug, author of Don’t Make Me Think, one of the bibles of usability testing, advocated monthly half day sessions of recorded usability sessions so developers can see first hand how users experience the system. Krug said usability testing is like dieting, we all know it is good for us, but we still don’t do it. His core message was to make the usability testing simple enough so it gets done, because, without it, core usability problems will persist in your products. Krug recommends bringing in three to four users for a half hour or so each of testing one morning a month. I was happy to hear him recommend Camtasia Studio and Morae as recording tools, because that’s what we already use, but developing the monthly habit is something we definitely need. I’m hoping this post serves as a constant reminder to us to get usability testing firmly baked into our process.

Back to product management, a couple of the other speakers such as Noam Wasserman, Jessica Livingston and Dharmesh Shah touched on this topic tangentially during their talks about the innovator’s dilemma, CEO succession, and the path to growth for many companies. These talks hit home for me because FBS has been growing steadily over the last decade and that growth raises as many questions as it answers.

Specific to my role as the CEO of FBS, one of my primary functions has been to drive product development by listening to customers and translating their needs into our development process. Having the CEO in this role is common for smaller companies as the CEO usually best understands the business problem being solved by the software, and should be in the best position to articulate the business case to the developers. On the other hand, at some point growth results in the need to consider moving the product management function to others. Several of the speakers at the conference related this to the time when significant venture capital is taken by a firm, because the venture investors often (actually, 50% of the time) require that the founder step down or aside as CEO so growth can be handled by someone more seasoned or focused to that end. Fortunately, FBS is employee-owned and in no need of venture capital, but the core issue still seems applicable, namely whether growth requires more process and management in our firm to continue that growth.

This topic reverberates back to the presentation by Jason Fried, who, in co-founding 37signals, storngly advocates for little or no management and more direct involvement of developers in firm direction. More succinctly, 37signals professes not to develop any long-term or strategic plans at all and they have no product road map. Instead, they simply develop the products hyper-incrementally as they see fit and let the sales be what they may. The approach is as streamlined as it can be, with only one support person to handle about 150 emails per day and no phone support or sales at all. This approach culminates in the conclusion that small is great and certainly good enough. As Jason said, if you’re generating $1 million in revenue, “thats a lot of money.” There’s no need to get biggerer and biggerer. Less is more, right?

Another spin on this topic relates to sales. Contrary to Jason Fried’s advocacy, Paul Kenney’s presentation hammered home the point that building great products is not enough. Rather, good sales people will help find customers who can benefit from the products and demonstrate value where it otherwise would not be apparent. This was a nearly heretical position in the room full of developers, who often believe that the product should sell itself. Mr. Kenny pointed out that this view from developers is cultivated by the fact there are so many bad sales people out there. In other words, many of us think “sales” is a dirty word because there are so many bad sales people. Paul Kenny made clear, however, that great sales people can generate as much value as great products and, when you combine the two, the growth that results is nothing short of phenomenal.

Paul Kenny made another great point about sales — if you have your sales team doing anything else besides sales, they’ll almost always choose that other thing because sales is hard work. This point stuck out for me because we definitely have our sales team doing a lot more than just sales. We define their role as account executives, responsible for the customer experience throughout the contract. This starts with the conversion process, which is short-lived and yet highly intense. In other words, the conversions come and go quickly and so the sales team is integral to the effort. Yet, our conversion/sales cycle has a pretty distinct ebb and flow that would likely balance out better if we didn’t divert the attention of our sales team away from sales. At the same time, we’ve always looked at sales and service as one and I can hardly imagine not having sales involved in the conversion process. Definitely something to think hard about.

Perhaps the best part of the conference was being able to engage with others facing the same challenges. It’s so easy to get mired in your own world and learning that others are in the same boat is invigorating. The business of software is hard and this conference showed me that one of the coolest things about the software industry is that it is filled with brilliant people trying to build great products valued by customers — and they are willing to share their knowledge with others in order to get better themselves. That’s what we’re trying to achieve here at FBS as well, and so it was great to be a part of this conference. We’ll definitely be attending next year as well.

Thanks to Neil and Joel and everyone who put on such a great event!