Luis’s Corner of (non) Wisdom

Yesterday I finally finished setting up a wiki for my company’s intranet. It is live now and only waiting for us to start writing articles. I think one of the first will be about wiki’s guidelines, talking about how to name files, the use of headers and other rules to keep a more or less uniform look.

I finally decided for Dario Solera’s excellent ScrewTurn wiki. It has all the features I was looking for, it’s very customizable, and better of all, very easy to setup. As I said in my previous post, we were looking into MediaWiki, but I found out that installing mySql and PHP on our server wasn’t worth the trouble (one of my co-workers actually tried, and he had some problems configuring it). ScrewTurn works beautifully; my hat’s off to Dario!!

I have decided to install a Wiki in my company’s intranet in order to keep project documentation, such as specs, requirements, deployment instructions, and so on.

We used to do all that in Word documents, but it was a bit tedious having the latest version available to everyone, and in different parts (some checked in in Subversion, others in my own computer.) I think a wiki is great for this type of usage, since everyone can view or edit or add new pages, and all revisions are kept.

Currently we are looking at MediaWiki which powers Wikipedia. I would rather have one that uses ASP.NET and SQL Server (since that is what we have on our sever), but I have found nothing that looks good enough and is free. So if someone has suggestions, please let me know.

In the mean time, I’ll keep you posted on how things evolve.

A couple of days ago I was talking to a friend who started a business with a cousin. He told me he was a little disappointed because of slow sales, and that most of his prospects seemed interested but would never return calls or close the deal.

I asked him if he had any references to show to his potential customers, someone saying “yes, I bought this and obtained this benefits.” He said he had a few letters from companies in other cities but not any local references. Precisely last week I was reading My Start-Up Life by Ben Casnocha, and he wrote a full chapter on getting your first customers to build credibility.

In my friend’s case, I suggested trying to get early customers by offering to let them try the product for a few months, and only pay if they were completely satisfied. In exchange, they would let him tell other prospects they were happy customers, and thus improve on his chances of completing more sales.

Selling to companies is a little bit harder than selling to individual people. Most of the time they want to see someone has already benefited before taking the risk. But getting those first customers can become a chicken-and-egg problem. In this case, you need to focus first on signing a few customers before you can focus on making money.

I have just started this blog to write about whatever comes to my mind. I hope you will find this interesting, and come visit regularly to see updates.

For those of you who don’t know me, I am currently the CEO of Intelectix (sorry, website is only in Spanish at the time, but we are already working on an English-version), a custom software development firm in Mexico, and that currently is morphing into a product company with the development of our first product: a POS system designed specifically for carwash businesses.

Aside from work, I have a passion for golf, which I have played since I was 8. During high-school and college I used to play at a very competitive level (at one point I was a +2 handicap) but the last few years I have found what I feared: work actually takes a lot of time.

I also like cars very much (mainly current European sports cars like Porsche, Ferrari, Audi…) and I am a big fan of Formula 1 races.

Well, I guess that’s it. I hope that you enjoy this place and that I am able to offer some piece of advice in the coming posts. Although most probably, it is going to be me who will be learning the most.

– Luis

P.S. Friday 13th, nice day to start a blog