I wish I could sell table saws
Computers are great. Heck, if they weren’t around it seems I would either be driving a bus or playing shortstop for the Cardinals. But here they are, and I get to work from home in my PJs most of the time.
Even better, the bar to enter the field of being a full-time nerd is pretty low. Nerdiness is purely relative. If you are a little nerdier than the person next to you, they think you are a wizard. Soon, they are asking you things like “Hey, can you build a website?”. You think to yourself “I don’t have the first clue how to do that”. As you are about to tell them you aren’t quite qualified in that discipline they up the ante a bit. “I’ll pay you”, they say.
I’m in.
That’s about how it always starts, and that is how it started with me some years ago now. I started building web sites for cheap, not really knowing what I was doing. I did one thing (and only one thing) right: I never took on more than I could handle. It wasn’t something that was a conscious decision, in fact it is something I am realizing for the first time as I type this.
There is a show on HGTV here in Canada called Holmes on Homes. An experienced renovation contractor spends an hour long program helping a family who has been taken to the cleaners by some dirty or unqualified (usually both) contractor, leaving them with huge bills and horribly unfinished projects. You sit there watching the show shaking your head, wondering how these people get away with it and still sleep at night.
Funny thing is this happens all the time in the web development world. Someone talks a good game, gets in over their head and then either delivers a poor product or delivers nothing at all and vanishes into cyberspace. In their struggle to complete the project, these people often buy our products.
And that’s where I come in. Some days I wish (as the title says) that I could sell table saws. I’d be pretty good at it too, I used to be a woodworker (cabinetmaker to be exact) of sorts, and I loved Delta table saws. I bet I’d sell ‘em like crazy. What’s so great about selling table saws? If you are buying an industrial table saw, you better know what you are getting yourself into. If you take it home and saw your arms off, you have no one to blame but yourself.
And so I’ve come to this realization: You don’t build software for everyone, it just isn’t possible. I imagine Delta could build a saw that sensed an object (say a hand) getting too close and it would immediately bind the saw and cut the power. Why don’t they? It would be prohibitively expensive, would significantly cut the life of the product and most of all sometimes you have to get your hands close to the saw. It is in those times that you are either glad you know what you are doing, or terrified because there is a sharp blade spinning only a few inches from your fingers. Using software is a similar experience.
The minute you try and build software for everyone, mark the time as the exact moment your application began to creep toward crapware. Find a target audience, stake out the boundaries of that audience’s skill-set and build inside them. Your audience will be glad you did and become your most vocal advocates, and those outside the audience shouldn’t have really purchased it in the first place.
As a fellow developer, I couldn’t agree more. But I did read an article the other day on the exact idea you mentioned about the table saw.
Time’s Best Inventions of 2006 lists the SawStop table saw. From the description:
While this might not be the saw for professionals, as you mention, the best example of that I could come up with was in schools and woodshop classrooms where you have novices learning how to use tools that can be quite dangerous. Either way - pretty cool.
Comment left on January 11th, 2007 at 7:31 pm LinkExcellent business principles that actually could be applied to several business sectors. If you try to be everything to everybody you usually end up being nothing to nobody. Focus on the bullseye, not the whole target!
Comment left on January 12th, 2007 at 9:05 am LinkDad