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Archive for July, 2014

Best Way to Succeed as a Solopreneur: Go For Fewer Customers

Posted by Bob Warfield on July 29, 2014

I’m reading with interest some posts that are hot on Techmeme at the moment from Jared Sinclair and Marco Arment about succeeding with iOS apps and as a Solopreneur.  Jared’s blog post is a cautionary tale for those who would like to bootstrap a small venture well enough to quit their day jobs.

Many weigh in with various comments and based on his latest post, it looks like Jared was inundated with a bunch of notes from people who thought he just didn’t market the app enough.

I’ve been a solopreneur with some part-time helpers trying to make the gig into a multi-person bootstrap for some years now.  I’ve managed to create a business that now throws off more cash than I’ve gotten at any Day Job I ever had short of being an exec at a public company.  It’s been an extremely happy experience and I thank my lucky stars and my awesome customers every day for making it possible.  I want to talk through what Jared has bravely reported about his venture and compare it to what’s different about my own CNCCookbook and talk about how I think those differences matter to a successful solopreneur.

First the Results of Both Companies

Jared starts out presenting his financial results from his iOS app, Unread:

FirstYearSalesUnread

Unread Cumulative Sales in the First Year…

It’s pretty easy to see why Jared is unhappy–most of the action happens shortly after he shipped the initial application.  Yes, there’s steady growth afterward, but the actual sales per week or month (remember, the graph is cumulative) had to be pretty disappointing if you want to live off that income.  The app only costs $4.99, so Unread has actually been extremely successful in terms of the number of customers it has attracted–looks like somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000.

I wanted a way to provide some similar insight into CNCCookbook’s apps, but I’m not as interested in Jared in giving away my exact finances (sorry folks, you’ll just have to do some back of envelope calculating to figure it out).  Here is the cumulative graph of software license years sold for CNCCookbook’s software:

CNCCookbookCumLicYearsSold

CNCCookbook Cumulative License Years Sold…

I’ve been at it for a few years now, and the growth has been steady, almost hockey-stick-like–this is a very happy business!  The big bump between 10/22/12 and 10/22/13 reflects the launch of our second product.  I’m hoping to get another bump like that in the next 6-12 months as I launch our 3rd product.

With all that said, I want to make some suggestions about what I think has made CNCCookbook successful.

Suggestion #1:  Lead With Subscription Pricing for Recurring Revenue

First, what is a “software license year sold?”  CNCCookbook sells both subscriptions and perpetual (you buy the software for life with one payment).  Recurring revenue is essential for Solopreneurs because it means they’re getting new revenue without much new work other than keeping the software vibrant and useful.  Getting new customers is hard work.  In a minute I’ll discuss how CNCCookbook goes about it, but suffice it to say I have created a business where my biggest problem is having enough software to sell my customers moreso than getting the new customers.  Part of that is due to the recurring revenue stream.  If you’re a fan of the SaaS/subscription model as I am, you’ll realize that once one of these revenue engines gets up sufficient momentum, they’re almost unstoppable.

So, my graph shows how many years of subscription were cumulatively sold for both products over time.  I plugged in a figure of “6” for any lifetime sale because that’s more or less how I think about my lifetime pricing.

Suggestion #2:  You’ll Want Perpetual Pricing Too, and the Subscription Helps Justify a High Price For It

 FWIW, I mostly wind up selling the lifetime version during sales, but that’s okay too because having a fairly expensive lifetime version does a couple of things.  One, it addresses the needs of customers who just don’t like getting tied to a stream of payments.  This is a very real audience, and if you don’t give them an out, you’re not going to reach them.  Why not choose a perpetual price where they’d have to keep resubscribing for so many years before you come out ahead that everyone can see it as a win-win situation?  Why leave the perpetual hole open for a competitor to come in and take over?  Once you have both pricing models, it gives your customers options.  Do they prefer to preserve cash flow?  My subscriptions do that, just like the lease vs buy decision on a car.

Suggestion #3:  Find the Sweet Spot on Price and Insist On It.  You Probably Want Fewer Customers Willing to Pay More.

My first product offering was $69 for one year.  It seemed like a lot to me at the time, but it wasn’t.  It was actually less than the product was worth–I raised that to $79 with no impact on the units whatsoever.  More importantly, it was and is too low for a business you want to have be your sole occupation.  This gets me to the point of my headline–figure out a business model that requires as few customers as you can easily sell to achieve your financial goals.  Jared’s Unread sells for $4.99–pretty typical for an iOS app.  But it took him almost a year of very hard work to produce it and it isn’t paying the bills.  It’s not really a matter of promotion–he has a ton of customers.  It’s a matter of the customers not paying him enough cash for each sale.

A solopreneur can only touch so many people.  You can only get the word out so far.  There is an upper limit on how many people you will have a chance to sell to when you launch, and on how fast you can grow that audience over time.  You need to be cognizant of that fact and find a product opportunity that can be priced accordingly.  Be brutally honest about how many customers you can close.  Forget models that require too many.

Advertising?  Fuhgeddabout it.  No hope in heck.  I’ve estimated that charging for your product is about 2000 times more effective than giving it away free and relying on advertising revenue.  Why make your job 2000 times harder?  It’s so attractive to sell Free until you realize the sheer magnitude of scale you must achieve.  Those are VC-only deals, folks.

Cheap Phone Apps.  Based on the information I’ve seen, Jared’s information, the problems with finding apps in the app store, and the platform owner’s huge tax of 30% on sales, I am strongly thinking phone apps are not a good target for bootstrapping or solopreneurs.  It’s too hard to market the apps, the platform owner has too much control over the walled garden, they get too big a share of your revenues (30% is huge if they’re not driving huge demand your way, and they’re not), and you aren’t able to charge nearly enough in most cases.

Phone apps have been a dilemma for me in my own business.  My audience would love one.  I have done the work to actually keep one code line running on PC, Mac, iOS, and Android, and there has even been a prototype run on iOS.  But the thought of the work involved finishing the app and questions of whether I’ll be cannibalizing my existing sales with sales that have a 30% tax to Apple or some other big guy has given me pause.  The project has been on indefinite hold while I look at other more promising ways to invest my time.

To get an idea of what you need to charge, look at some successful bootstrappers.  Take Basecamp–it’s $150 a month.  There are cheaper plans, but they limit the number of projects.  Eventually you will be likely to upgrade.  At $150 a month, you only need about 140 customers to be making $250K a year.  I see all these Solopreneurs talking about their $60K a year businesses and wonder why they aren’t aiming higher.

Or, if you have something with more mass market appeal, say like Smugmug, you an charge $40-300 a year.  It’s going to take a lot more customers than Basecamp, but if their average sale is say $60 a year, that’s about 4200 customers to do the $250K a year.  Given how many love photography, that again seems like manageable adoption to be able to succeed.  Either number is a lot fewer than Jared has already sold.

I mention that I thought my pricing was too low and I mean it.  $79 a year requires me to find 3200 customers to get to $250K per year.  It can be done, but I surely didn’t get there in 1 year or even 2 years.

If I had my druthers, I’d be looking for a niche that needs circa 1000 to 2000 customers to get to that $250K.  Hence, we are charging $125 to $250 a year or at least $99 a month.  Look around.  There are quite a few SaaS businesses at $99 a month.  I use a bunch of them to help me with CNCCookbook marketing–Wordpress hosting service Page.ly, SurveyMonkey, MailChimp, my shopping cart provider, etc., etc..

Things are priced where they are for a reason, and not simply because it’s what the market will bear.  It is not only what the market will bear, but it is also what can support a happy healthy growing business.

Suggestion #4:  Debug the Marketing and the Market Before You Ever Write A Product

Many solopreneurs are software developers.  I tell my non-developer friends about my business and they are envious, but can’t see how a marketer can get a product written without paying an engineer, at which point they’re no longer solo.  Engineers, OTOH, seem to think they can bump along and do a decent job of marketing.  As my marketer friends are fond of saying–everyone consumes marketing so everyone thinks they are an expert on it.

Here’s the thing: as a software developer, you know you can get the product built.  That’s pretty low risk.  It’s fun to dive in and start slinging code and pretty soon the demo starts showing some life.  But so what?  As I said, you know you can get the product out.  What you don’t know are two very important things:

1.  Are you solving a problem anyone cares about?

2.  Can you successful reach that audience to sell them your product?

Now here is the truly amazing thing:  you can answer both questions with very high confidence as a solopreneur in a relatively short time.  You can even do it fairly comfortably while holding down your Day Job–even better.

There’s a short list of tools and skills you’ll need to master that I’ll get to shortly, but in order to solve those two big marketing problems, you need one critical talent:

You’ve got to be able to tell a story people want to listen to, and you have to be able to do it in writing.

If you can’t tell a story people want to listen to, I think your future as a solopreneur is probably not going to go well because you’re going to be left either needing someone else to tell your story or just buying advertising.  I keep playing with advertising every six months or so.  I am very analytical and well versed in how to do it.  I have conversion hacked landing pages with great results and done tons of A/B ad testing to try to improve the results.  My conclusion each time I try the experiment is that it just isn’t very profitable.  It costs me so much to sell a customer using AdWords that it is hardly worth it.  I’ve talked to a slew of bootstrappers, and their mileage varies.  Many report something similar.  Many do not keep good enough analytics to even know, they just budget for it and spend the money, hoping it will work.  I guess if you want to depend on ads, this is also something you can know up front.  You can try ads that lead to a page and see what it costs you to get people to that page.  The trick is in what they do when they get there.  In my case, they sign up for a free trial.  That’s one conversion event.

The next thing is to convert them from the free trial to a paying customer.  That’s a second conversion event.  I do very well on the latter–about 20% of free trials become paying customers, which is very decent.  Where I fail is getting enough ad click throughs converted to the free trial relative to what the ad costs.  You can do the math:

1.  The ad costs $1.50 per click through, for example.

2.  The page converts 27% to click through to the trial signup.  Conversions for me are better if they don’t sign up on the landing page–that’s being too pushy for my audience.

3.  Once on the trial page, 25% successfully register for the trial.

4.  As mentioned, 20% of the trials convert to paying.

So if I get $79 for the sale, I can afford to pay $79 * 20% * 25% * 27% = about $1 to break even.  $1.50 is very unprofitable.  Even if I can buy ads for 50 cents, which I very seldom can, it still seems like I am giving Google the Lion’s Share of my hard work.   OTOH, if I am Basecamp, all that changes because I am looking at an annual value of $150 * 12 = $1800.  I can afford to pay quite a lot for advertising in that case.

Working through those numbers is how you debug advertising as a marketing possibility.  There’s still one other big advertising drawback even if you can afford it: it doesn’t create a sustainable marketing asset.  Once the ad has run, you quit getting value from it and you must spend more money on ads.  That’s one reason why I much prefer inbound or content marketing.  If you create great Evergreen content, and own the searches for those subjects, you own a marketing asset that keeps on giving without your having to do much.  You can spend time adding even more Evergreen content.  That model scales well for the solopreneur and small resource-limited bootstrap.

With that model, you’re relying on giving away great free information to attract people via referrals and search engine traffic.  This is the one you can really debug well without even starting a product.  This is the one where you need to be able to tell a story.  The reason is that you can start a blog aimed at your audience with an email mailing list for that blog and find out what works.  Do they care about a problem you want to solve with a product?  Write articles about the problem and see if anyone comes to the party.  Can you reach this market?  Go forth, read the relevant blogs, visit the relevant social sites, and find out what they’re talking about.  Find out what they’re interested in.  Start talking about that on your blog.  If they show up, start building your readership.  Collect their emails and start a weekly blog digest newsletter. Track your progress.

Now do some more back of envelope.  How many do you need in your fold?  I’ve typically been able to sell 4 or 5% of the folks on my email newsletter a new product.  So if I must sell 1000 to reach my financial goal, I had better have 20,000 folks reading my email newsletter.  I recommend you spend 6 months to a year building up your online content (blog) and building your newsletter before you even start writing your product.  Get a sense of how long at your current growth rates it will take you to have enough that you can meet your financial goals and plan it so that by the time you finish the product, the audience are already there, eating popcorn in their seats, and waiting to see what you can offer them.

This is what I mean by debugging the Market and Marketing before you start a product.  Nothing could be more frustrating than to turn in a ton of cubic hours building a sweet product only to have it fall far short of your financial goals for it.  You need to discover whether you can tell stories well (or write ad copy or whatever) enough to attract an audience without a product.  If you can do that and give them a sweet product,  you’re much more likely to succeed.

What about those skills and tools I mentioned?  Yeah, there’s time to figure all that out too during that 6 months to a year when you start creating content.  You have to figure out how to run a blog, (I have 4 or 5 kicking around here somewhere).  Just go get WordPress, don’t even mess with anything else.  Figure out how to use plugins.  Don’t write custom code, that’s a distraction.  You need to figure out how to collect the emails.  That’s a WordPress plugin plus an email service.  I use AppSumo’s List Builder (not here, on the CNCCookbook blog) and MailChimp.  Then there’s all the techniques of creating landing pages that convert and SEO and all that jazz.  It’s not that hard.  Seriously.  I have a clipping blog I call Firehose Press.  Every single great marketing how-to article I have ever read is there.  Read it and digest it and you will know nearly everything I know about marketing.  Go back over the articles in this Smoothspan blog.  There’s plenty of posts that chronicle various epiphany’s I’ve had about marketing along the way.

Conclusion

I didn’t write this article to knock Jared’s efforts–he’s done well by getting so many customers.  He obviously built a sweet app.  If I were to suggest differences, it would be in two areas.  Jared had wanted to succeed with his launch and with blog and social media mention.  In my mind, that’s too passive.  You have to create an engine that you can control with a throttle you can push when you need to.  My throttle is to write more and better content.  I suspect that the lack of controller marketing that could be invested in is what made Jared’s sales graph so flat, while a price that was too low is what made it so hard to live on the revenue from the product.

I didn’t write it to beat my chest about what I’m doing.  It doesn’t matter, it isn’t that big a thing, and I don’t believe it will help CNCCookbook in any way despite what some marketing folk say about such things.

I wrote it because I love being a solopreneur and bootstrapper.  I think it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.  I’d really like to see as many people as possible get a shot at it, so I’m trying to pass along what I’ve learned along the way.

As always, there are many strategies that work.  I certainly don’t have the One True Path.  But if I’ve helped clarify things even a little bit, then I will have accomplished what I wanted and I thank you for your patience reading through the post.

Posted in bootstrapping, business, Marketing, strategy | 5 Comments »

Microsoft: World’s Worst Customer Service? (Walmart, Amazon, GE, BestBuy, MacMall, and Paypal Not Far Behind)

Posted by Bob Warfield on July 28, 2014

microsoft-surface-pro-3I recently tried and failed for the fifth time to buy a Microsoft Surface Pro 3.  It’s been a real comedy of errors, but the latest attempt has been by far the most spectacular failure.

Let me start out by saying I really like the Microsoft Surface Pro 3.  I am a perfect candidate for it as I would like to replace the combination of my Macbook Air and iPad with just one device for travel and for demos of my software away from the office.  The business I’m in is software for the CNC Manufacturing world, and while my own software runs on both Mac and PC, most from that world is PC-only.  Hence a device about the size of an iPad that can run desktop Windows software would be a real boon.  The Surface reviews I’ve read have been largely positive, and I played with one at a Microsoft store for long enough to feel like I would be very productive on it.  The keyboard was great and I had little trouble dealing with the Win 8 differences everyone is complaining so much about.  So I resolved to get one.

In fairness, all of my problems have stemmed from one little wrinkle in how I wanted to buy the device.  I’m looking at about $1500 all in, and I wanted an interest free for 12 months deal–the same kind of deal I used to purchase my Macbook Air.  My business is steadily growing and I like the idea of charging most of the cost to the larger version of the business that will exist down the road.  These offers all involve signing up for a credit card, with my Apple Macbook Air it was really no big deal.  I recently had paid off the Macbook Air and so time to get another device.

Here’s what happened.

Fail #1:  Best Buy

Despite haunting the Microsoft Store since the Surface launched in hopes of their offering a deal, no joy.  So I started Googling and wound up at Best Buy.  Looked great, so I attempted to make the purchase.  The online credit card app simply froze up the browser and would neither confirm nor deny I would be able to do the transaction.  Geez, how can a company the size of Best Buy have IT producing forms like this that flat don’t work?  Seems like they’re wasting a lot of opportunity if it happens to very many.

Fail #2:  Walmart

A little more Googling and I discover that Walmart has the same deal.  Great.  Except, oh oh, same problem–the credit card app just fails.  Takes all the info, hit the button to go for it, and nothing happens.  I’m now starting to wonder if the problem isn’t some common third party?  It doesn’t really matter, both these two retail behemoths have lost a $1500 transaction for a stupid reason–their web site didn’t work.

Fail #3:  Amazon

At this point I am thinking it can’t be that hard, SOMEBODY must do this.  So I tried Amazon.  Aha!  They’re offering the no interest deal I want!

I filled out all the information to apply, the application worked (I guess Amazon knows a lot more about software than Best Buy or Walmart), but it turned out to be bait and switch.  Buried in the fine print is a notice that GE Capital would only finance $500 of my $1500 purchase.  Now I have a GE Credit card that will get shredded and never used.  That has to be sub-optimal for both GE and Amazon–they went to all the trouble and cost but are getting no revenue from me.  Not to mention a $500 limit is insulting.  Amazon knows I spend a fortune with them on all sorts of things including Amazon Web Services and have never missed a payment.  Come on guys, do your computers talk at all?  Why offer this stupid $500 credit card on a $1500 purchase?

Fail #4:  PayPal + BillMeLater + MacMall

I went back to the PayPal site to process some orders for my business, and noticed BillMeLater being advertised.  Wow!  I had seen the ads come up every time I had paid for something with PayPal, but I generally just pay cash and had more or less ignored them.  They have a product search that will plug you into a BillMeLater transaction with some merchant that has what you want.  I promptly searched for “Microsoft Surface Pro 3” and got vectored onto MacMall.  Hmmm, that’s kind of odd to buy a PC from a company that sounds like a Mac company, but why not?  I was getting pretty tired of the chase by now.  I started down the path and promptly noticed I was only going to get 6 months interest free, but again, I was beaten down and ready to do a transaction, so I went ahead.  Filled out all the forms, yada, yada, and BOOM!  I was back to Fail #1 and Fail#2:  PayPal reported that they couldn’t complete the transaction for unspecified reasons (like those other credit card apps just freezing up) and I should try again later.  WTF?!??

Fail #5:  Microsoft + PayPal

Is this becoming Epic Fail, or what?  It’s almost comical by this point.  But, the best is the final episode (so far) and involves Microsoft and Paypal.  I was still focused on the idea of using BillMeLater and it was a new day.  So I had the idea of just seeing who would sell me a Surface Pro 3 and let me pay with PayPal.  I tried Microsoft first, and sure enough.  Excellent!

So I hopped on, performed the transaction, got to the part where you pay PayPal, and for the first time ever (I have made hundreds of PayPal purchases) I saw almost nothing of PayPal and never got the opportunity to use BillMeLater.  Bloody Hell!

I immediately went to PayPal and cancelled the transaction.  There’s a button right there and they accepted and confirmed the cancellation.  Then I went back to the Microsoft Store.  Not so easy to cancel there, I had to call  the dreaded 800 number and wait.  But eventually I got a Service Agent and after answering many strange questions, she assured me that the transaction was cancelled, and that she couldn’t really help me in any way to purchase a Surface with 12 month no interest financing or even to use BillMeLater to make the purchase.  Gee thanks, Microsoft.

So I’m thinking this is pretty silly.  Microsoft must want to be moving these stupid devices and should be making it easier, right?  Maybe I would just go lob a suggestion in to them and maybe someone would get back in touch with me with the right stuff.  I searched in vain both the Microsoft site and the Microsoft Store site for some place I could make the suggestion.  Apparently they are not at all interest in hearing from customers.  I guess I should’ve expected that after getting this far.

Fail #6:  Microsoft + PayPal, Again

This morning I logged into my computer to find 3 email message from Microsoft–a return authorization, a notice that the cancellation had failed, and another notice telling me I should just refuse deliver on the shipment.  Oh boy.  You would think Microsoft could manage to process a cancellation that happened within minutes of an order to avoid needlessly shipping physical goods to a customer who doesn’t want them.  No joy.  So then I bopped over to PayPal to confirm that my cancellation of the prior day was still in place.  The report had been updated to say they were going ahead and paying Microsoft.  WTF?!??  Really?  After both organizations had confirmed the cancellation the prior day?  Are you kidding me?

Now I’m angry.  Both these behemoths had clear instructions from me and had accepted and confirmed.  So, I called PayPal Customer Service.  A nice lady eventually picked up (yeah, lots of voice menus for THEIR convenience) and she confirmed from her screen that I had indeed cancelled payment.  Why then, does my report show this as a transaction that will be paid and why is the cancellation no longer showing?  Well, it looks like the transaction went through before the cancellation could take effect was the response.  OK, why does my balance still not reflect a deduction for the payment then if it’s too late to cancel 24 hours after the cancellation went in and was accepted?  “I’m sorry sir, but it is too late to cancel.  You’ll have to wait 48 hours to see if the seller has refunded your money and if they haven’t, you could file a dispute at that point.”

 

Conclusion

I was really pretty excited about getting a Surface Pro 3 when I started this trek.  I’m shocked at just how many organizations screwed up their Customer Experience along the way and at just how low the bar is set for that Customer Experience to be acceptable to them.  It can’t possibly be a good thing for sales of the Surface for there to be this much friction in the process.  I am hopeful that some one of the organizations involved will read this and contact me with a solution I’d like, but at the same time, I don’t think I’ll hold my breath.

Macbook Air and iPad?  You’ve got a solid year ahead of you still.  Maybe I’ll just wait until the Surface Pro 4.

Posted in amazon, apple, business, customer service, gadgets, Marketing, microsoft surface, mobile, strategy | Leave a Comment »

Authentication as a Service: Slow Progress, But Are We There Yet?

Posted by Bob Warfield on July 11, 2014

BankVaultSmallAuthentication as a Service solves a problem every Cloud Developer, mobile or desktop, has to solve.  As one player in the space, AuthRocket, puts it:

Do you really want to write code for users, forgotten passwords, permissions, and admin panels again?

To that I would add, “Do you really want to have to be a world class expert on that stuff to make sure you don’t leave some gaping security hole out of ignorance?”  I think the answer is a resounding, “NO!” to both questions.  Why do it in this world of Agile Development, Lean Startups, and Minimum Viable Products?  It’s one of those things everyone does (and should do) pretty much the same way from a user’s perspective, so there is no opportunity for differentiation.  You have to do it right because the downside of security problems is huge.  You have to do it right up front to protect your customer’s data and your investment (so nobody gets to use your products for free).  There’s basically very little upside to rolling your own (it’ll only slow you down) and tremendous downside.  Hence, you’d like to buy a service.

I keep going around this block for my own company’s (CNCCookbook) products, and I surely would like to get off that merry g0-round.  I wanted to buy this some time ago, and have written about it for quite a while.  For example, in an article I wrote 4 years ago on PaaS Strategy (Platform as a Service), I suggested login would be an ideal service for a pass to offer with these world:

Stuff like your login and authentication subsystem.  You’re not really going to try to build a better login and authentication system, are you?

I sound just like AuthRocket there, don’t I?  I’m sure that’s not the earliest mention I’ve made, because I’ve been looking for this stuff for a long time now.  As I say, I had to roll my own because I couldn’t find a good solution.  I would still like to replace the solution that CNCCookbook uses with a nice Third-Party service.  I only have few very generic requirements:

–  It has to offer what I need.  Basically that’s Email + Password login with all the account and forgotten password management interactions handled for me.  It would be very nice if they do Federated Login using the other popular web services like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google, or whatever.  It would also be very nice if it could do 2 factor login.  The latter two are optional.

–  It has to work well.  I judge this by who has adopted it and how it is reviewed.

–  It has to be here for the long haul.  I’ll judge this by size of customer base and quality of backers.  AuthRocket, for example, is still at the invitation-only Beta stage.  That’s too early for me.  I have mature products and don’t want to have to change out this service too often.

–  It has to be easy for me to access the API’s.  I prefer a nice RESTful API, but I will take a platform-specific API for my chosen development platform: Adobe Flex.  And no, I don’t want to debate that platform, it has worked fabulously well for me, the products are mature, and I am not looking to switch.

–  It has to be easy to tie it back to securing my data in the Amazon Web Services Cloud.

–  Optional Bonus:  It helps me solve the problem of disconnected data access.  My apps are Adobe AIR apps.  You download and can run without a web connection for a period of time.  This is important to my audience, but means I’ve got to use data models that keep local copies and sync with the Cloud when they get connected.

While my apps are not yet available on iOS or Android, all of those things are almost exactly the same problems any Mobile App developer faces.  Therefore, this ought to be a hotbed of activity, and I guess it is, but so far, I still can never seem to find the right solution for me, and I don’t think I’m asking for anything all that crazy.  But, I have yet to find a solution.  Let me tell you a little bit about my 2 most recent near misses.

Amazon Cognito

I was very excited to read about Amazon’s new Cognito service.  At CNCCookbook we’re big Amazon believers, and use all sorts of their services.  Unfortunately, at least until Cognito, they didn’t really have a good service for solving CNCCookbook’s authentication problems.  They had IAM, which is a very complicated, very heavy-weight, very Big Corporate IT kind of solution.  It looked kind of like maybe you could do it if you had to, but you’d still wind up writing all the darned password management stuff and it looked like it was going to be a real ordeal.  Mostly, I think of IAM, as the tool used to define roles for how broad classes of users can access the various other Amazon offerings.  I wanted another service of some kind to be the sort of simpler, friendlier, front end to IAM.  Enter Cognito, and it sure sounded good:

Amazon Cognito lets you securely store, manage, and sync user identities and app data in the AWS Cloud, and manage and sync this data across multiple devices and OS platforms. You can do this with just a few lines of code, and your app can work the same, regardless of whether a user’s devices are online or offline.

You can use Amazon Cognito directly from your mobile app without building or maintaining any backend infrastructure. Amazon Cognito handles secure app data storage and sync, enabling you to focus on your app experiences, instead of the heavy lifting of creating and managing a user data sync solution.

A guy like me loves the part about, “You can do this with just a few lines of code” followed by “without building or maintaining any backend infrastructure.”  Now that’s what I’m talking about, I gotta get me some of this!

It’s nearly all there:

–  Amazon is an outfit that can be trusted for the long haul.

–  REST API’s are no problem, that’s how Amazon prefers to operate.

–  Tie back to other Amazon Web Services?  Puh-lease, who do you think you’re talking to, of course one Amazon Service talks to the others!

–  Sync?  Yeah, baby, that’s what Cognito is all about.  More potential time savings for yours truly.

Oops, just one little shortcoming:  it only does Federated Login via Amazon, Facebook, or Google.  That’s cool and all, but wheres my Email + Password login so I can seamlessly move customers over to it?  Maybe I missed it, maybe it’s coming, or maybe Amazon just doesn’t think it’s important.  Can I live with forcing my users to make sure they have either an Amazon, Facebook, or Google account?  Yeah, I guess maybe, but we sell a B2B app and it sure seems kind of unprofessional somehow.

Amazon, can you please fill this hole ASAP?

Firebase

I hear fabulous things about Firebase, I really do.  People seem to love it.  It’s chock full of great functionality, and on the surface of it, Firebase should fit my needs.  Yet, when I dig in deep, I find that the login piece is kind of a red-headed stepchild.  Yeah, they advertise Email + Password Login, and they even tell you how to do it.  But there’s no RESTful API available for it.  They list all the right operations:

–  Login, and returns a token
–  Create a new user account
–  Changing passwords
–  Password reset emails
–  Deleting accounts
etc.
However, it appears that those things are handled by a client library which is in a very dev platform specific format.  If you use one of their chosen platforms, it’s ok.  If not, you can only use their rest API’s for the Cloud Database–no login functionality.  That’s going nowhere for me.  It would’ve been so much nicer had they packaged what’s in the client library in their Cloud and provided RESTful API’s for the functions I’ve listed.  As I told them when I made the suggestion, that makes their offering accessible to virtually every language and platform with the least effort for them instead of just the few they support.
Conclusion:  Crowd Sourcing?
Hey, I’m open to suggestions and the Wisdom of the Crowd.  Maybe someone out there knows of a service that meets my requirements.  They seem pretty generic and I’m frankly surprised I still can’t find such a thing after all these years of building almost anything you can imagine as a service.  We’re not very far away from it.  Either Amazon or Firebase could add the functionality pretty easily.  I’m hoping maybe I’ll get lucky in the next 6 months or so.  If anyone knows the right people in those organizations (or their competition), pass this post along to them.

 

 

Posted in bootstrapping, business, cloud, mobile, platforms, saas, service, software development | 3 Comments »

 
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