Standard (and not-so-standard) text snippets with TextExpander

I use TextExpander on my Mac to avoid typing standard phrases. For example: at the end of an e-mail, if I type "#br", TextExpander replaces that with a friendly greeting:

best regards 
Philippe 

I have tons of different snippets, for e-mail addresses, street addresses, phone numbers and more. This means I have to type a lot less. But, if each of your e-mails ends with the same polite sentence, people will figure you out. If each e-mail contains the same phrase offering help, it stops sounding helpful after a while.

  "If you have any questions, just let me know."

There is way to fix this. You can have TextExpander call a script instead of just filling out the same text each time. In the TextExpander window, for "Content" select "Script".

Here is a sample script for being helpful:

#!/usr/bin/python
import random

lines=[
"If there is anything else you need, please, let me know.",
"If I can be of any further assistance, please, let me know.",
"If there is anything else I can do for you, please, don't hesitate to let me know.",
"Please, feel free to let me know if you require any further information.",
"If I can be of any further help, please, call or send an email.",
"If I may be of any further assistance, please, let me know.",
"If you require additional information, please, let me know.",
"If you have any additional questions or require further clarification, please, do not hesitate to call me or send me an email.",
"Please, let me know if you require additional information or further clarification regarding this matter.",
"If you have any other questions or would like me to clarify anything else, please, let me know. I am always glad to help in any way I can.",
"Let me know if you need anything else.",
"If you need any other information, just let me know.",
"If you have any questions, just let me know.",
"If I can do anything else for you, just let me know.",
"Call or send an email anytime if you need anything else.",
"If there's anything else you need, just let me know.",
]

size=len(lines)
index=random.randint(0,size-1)
print lines[index]

If you have any experience writing scripts, the options are endless. For instance, could change your automatic template depending on the day or time (Good morning, have a nice weekend, seasons greetings,...). How do you manage standard phrases? Do you have a tool for this? Do you have a way to dynamically change or rotate phrases? Any crazy ideas or applications for improved dynamic phrases?

English pronunciation for native dutch speakers

A long time a go, german was the language of technology and science. Even before that it was latin. Today it is english. Where I live, everybody speaks a bit of english, and some courses and presentations are made in english, even if the majority of the audience is flemish. Problem is, there are some words that many people pronounce incorrectly all the time. Very bad. Your audience will have a hard time understanding you and you make a fool of yourself. Here is a short list of the most annoying mispronounced words. Some of these words have an audio file in the Wiktionary, but for some, you need to rely on phonetic writing.

• locale /loʊˈkæl/
• alias /ˈeɪ.li.əs/
• integer (sounds like intimate)
• interpreter as opposed to intermediate
• executive as opposed to execution
• finite as opposed to inifinite

So please, please, pretty please: don't mispronounce these words any more. If you're not sure about other words, look them up.

You should always insist

I have a few friends that are looking for jobs right now. I've told them when they send out their resume, they should always follow up. And so should you.
If you shoot out an e-mail and you get no response, you should always send a follow-up mail. If the other person did not think your e-mail was urgent when they first saw it, they may have archived your message without answering you. Maybe they have six thousand unread messages in their inbox. Maybe they thought they'd answer you later. As Seth Godin describes in his book The Dip, I consider this behavior to be a natural form of selection: people that don't persist and insist won't get through.
I default to sending a follow-up mail one week after the original, and then one mail each week until I get a response. Sometimes, I send out five or six mails before I get what I want. I keep my messages polite, but short. I don't want to waste people's time. If they are not interested, all they have to do is send me a note with one sentence: "I'm not interested right now." My secret weapon for keeping track of this is Boomerang for Gmail (they have a version for Outlook too).
It doesn't matter if you are looking for a job, selling or buying or setting up a new partnership. It is always OK to follow up on unanswered e-mails.

Us versus Them versus John Lennon

We live in a world of polarization, where everything seems to be an Us versus Them situation. Corporations vs Mom and Pop Stores, West vs East, Employers vs Unions, Liberals vs Conservatives... All these conflicts don't make you happy, and they really don't serve anyone's interest.

I've learned the hard way to use less superlatives and to include the words maybe and perhaps in my vocabulary. (You can get started by reading Dale Carnegie's "How to win friends and influence people")

Instead of preaching, I just want to point out one terrific example of a company that broke through the Us-versus-Them-mentality. The company Milliken has an activity in the center of Gent. While this causes some inconveniences (think: large trucks passing through your street), Milliken wanted to involve the neighborhood. With the help of the city, they decided to open up one of their warehouses for use as sports hall. Normally, the warehouse is used as a parking garage, but on Wednesday afternoon and in weekends, the warehouse is used by the local kids, for sports activities.

Isn't that fantastic? Instead of alienating from each other, this company and the neighborhood have found a common ground. I bet John Lennon would have loved this.

Networking organizations

Entrepreneurs are invited to join dozens of networking organisations, which have hundreds of meetings throughout the year. If you want to get any work done, you should choose carefully which meetings to attend, and perhaps more importantly importantly: which networks to join.

Networks or Gross works?

On a recent the invitations for a New Years reception, the Chamber of Commerce (Voka) bragged about the number of local entrepreneurs that would show up. A lot of new people to meet! But does an entrepreneur want mingle with 700 people and exchange business cards? Do I want to spend two or three hours of my valuable time talking to people from unrelated sectors, that I will undoubtedly never meet again? What is the value of undiscriminated local networking for a global business owner?

VMA lists some high profile members and has networking events in famous companies. These events are announced as "In the boardroom with ". Yes, it is nice to talk to somebody who has achieved something in life, but it is not nice to have to fight through a few dozen groupies in order to shake hands.

There is a fundamental problem with organizations like Voka and VMA. Voka attracts new members by explaining how many of the local companies are Voka members. Will this attract new visionary members that try to find their own way of building a business? Or does this attract bookkeepers and management consultants that want to sell their services to all those companies? I am a member of both Voka and VMA, but I feel increasingly like I don't belong. Oversimplifying things, Voka focuses on quantity, VMA gets its quality from a select elite.

Curator

So which networking organizations are more useful? The answer is blindingly simple. You want to join an network who's value comes from the combined value of its members. That is why it is called a network. Ideally, this network organization would have a good curator. Curator is the word used by TED's lead Chris Anderson. It is a bit unconventional, but very to the point. Wikipedia teaches us that a curator (from Latin cura, care) is the overseer of a cultural heritage institution. And a network is very much about building and preserving a culture.

Let me give some examples of a few clubs and their curators. I've mentioned TED, and I have had the privilege of participating in two TEDx events. I know this is not the real thing, but it gets close. It gets close in the same sense as eating the best paella in Gent gets close to Spanish cuisine. TED events consist of a series of talks by world experts, with lots of long breaks. These breaks are really opportunities to meet with people and discuss what has been said in the talks. There is lots of emphasis on the audience. Take away the speakers and you'd still have a crew that will change the world. Take away the audience and TED would be degraded to a National Geographic recording studio.

Another high quality project is Bryo. I have had the honor of joining the Bryo pilot project back in 2007. Like TED, Bryo events include some high profile guests. These guests give a short talk about their experiences in entrepreneurship. More importantly, the Bryo participants get a lot of face time with these guests. (Focus on people and on networking!) After a while we noticed that much of the value of the Bryo network comes from the Bryo members. The members are a small group BRight YOung entrepreneurs, carefully selected by curator Eric Kenis. He has nurtured the group an built a tight network. Another thing: what happens in Bryo, stays in Bryo. Because we have committed to keep things confidential, we can talk openly about our challenges and successes.

Third, SO Kwadraat. SO Kwadraat is a non-profit organization that helps high-tech starters launch their business. The three curators are successful entrepreneurs. Successful in the sense that they have sold their business and made a good buck out of it. They meet with future entrepreneurs and help them in building an entrepreneurial team and in writing a business plan. After starting a business, founders are invited to become members of the SO Kwadraat Business Club. The only people at business club are three curators and entrepreneurs that have consulted with SO Kwadraat in their startup phase. You have a very select audience, with the same level of thrust and confidentiality as in Bryo.

So, lets summarize some common traits of good networks:

• there is a certain filter that keeps uninteresting people out,
  
• there is a trust, people can speak openly,
  
• there is a certain bond, a common trait that the networking members share.
  

We all know that TEDsters are of nobel price quality. But I am convinced that within the next decade, people from the Bryo and SO Kwadraat network will kick some serious ass too.

Colleagues and Competitors

Last month, Sigasi co-founder Hendrik Eechkaut and I visited the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Anaheim, California.

We decided not to get a booth at the exhibit, but wear polo shirts with our twitter names and the company name instead. This saved us a lot of money, but it also allowed us to move around freely and meet with many interesting people. (perhaps I should talk about some of those people in another post)

The most interesting experience perhaps, was meeting with two people that have a product that is very similar to our own product. The easy way to label these people is as competitors. However, that label is not entirely correct. If you compete, that means there is one resource (in this case, customers or market share) that will be won by one competitor. The other competitors lose. The term competition is also (and more correctly) used with regards to sports and games.

In my native language, we use the word concurrent instead. This word comes from Latin and means to run together. This suggests that both concurrents (forgive my English neologism) are facing the same direction and headed towards a common goal. In fact this is true for me and Cristian and Andy. All of us would much rather grow the market than win market share from each other.

Sadly, the connotation of the word in the Dutch language has become the same as it has in English: that of two competitors facing each other in combat. People have wanted to use a term that has some of the original meaning of having common goals. They use the word "concullega", a portmanteau of concurrent and colleague. As it happens, even this word is used pejoratively. I'm sure we will need to find a new word soon to preserve the original meaning.

Nice philosophical and philological aside, there is always a feeling of adversity when you are fishing in the same pond. I'm sure that one concullega will sooner or later do things that bother the other. Some customers will move from one provider to the other. There is certainly information that cannot be shared with competing software providers.

Still, I'm happy to have met with Andy and with Cristian. In the spirit of Sigasi, which lets information freely flow on its website, I have been open with them. I hope to continue growing mutual trust in the coming years. We can collaborate on certain projects and compete on others.

VAT regulations and how to avoid them

In the previous millennium, there was a clear line between goods and services. Goods consist of atoms and anything else that can be sold are services. Companies started out by selling their goods or services close to where they were based. Japanese companies sold in Japan, American companies sold in the US and Belgian companies sold in Belgium. Only as your company started to grow, you might want to think of international business. The fact that selling abroad causes so much paperwork was fine, since only "big" companies bothered with international trade.

Fast forward to 2010. The world is a village. High-tech start-ups want to sell to as many villagers as possible. My company sells a very specific niche product: our software helps electrical engineers make digital chips. If we'd have 100% market penetration in our own country (Belgium) we would go out of business. We need to tap in to the global market from day one. Which we did.

But we are still stuck with value added taxes, a system that was introduced in the early seventies. For those of you lucky enough not to know VAT, let me explain. For (almost) all services and goods that a company sells, it has to charge VAT. The question if you should charge VAT and the VAT rate depend on a lot of factors:

• if you sell goods or services,
• the exact type of goods or services,
• your turnover for the customer's country,
• the type of customer (business customer or consumer),
• the fact that your customer has a valid VAT number (which you should check)
• the destination of the goods,
• the country in which the customer is located,
• and the phase of the moon.

(Sadly enough, only that last bullet was a joke.)

We did not find a nicely packaged web service that offers us on-line payments, taking all VAT rules into account. Again, when the world was younger and the animals talked, only big companies would think of selling abroad. Big companies can afford to do this right and pay a consultant to build an online sales platform.

PayPal is really nice, but is built with American-style sales taxes in mind. You only need to know where your customer lives and then you know the tax rate.

I do not understand why the government does not provide such a PayPal-like platform, with full VAT support, for all companies to use. It would allow all of us to increase sales without upfront investment in an online VAT module. This way more customers would buy our cool stuff, we'd make more money and the government would raise more taxes. Everybody happy.

Enough complaining. Here is how we have solved the problem: we ignore VAT.

All of our customers get to see the same PayPal "pay now" button, and all customers pay the same amount of money (€499). Putting a "pay now" button on your website is trivial, thanks to PayPal. After we receive the money, we email a new license key to the customer so that our software will continue working.

After that, we go through the whole VAT mumbo-jumbo, in a mechanical Turk way (that is: by hand). If it turns out that the customer did not need to pay VAT, we're happy. The full €499 is revenue for us. If it turns out we did in fact need to charge VAT, we're still happy. We give the customer a €86.60 discount: €499 - discount + 21% VAT = €499.

It turns out that in our business very few customers will ever have to pay VAT: only Belgian customers (small market) and consumers (we have a B2B product). If ever we decide that we lose too much money on these discounts, we can always pay somebody to build a system that charges VAT the proper way.

By all means, feel free to try our purchase form and payment mechanism. I'll send you an invoice and a software license key!