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BatchblueAbout Me
I am the VP of Technology at the Barrington based startup, Batchblue. We do web apps with a focus on helping out micro businesses and trying to get them to not use IE6.
In my previous life I spent 9 years at another startup, amazon.com.
If the hours do not let up soon I will be survived by my lovely wife Michelle (who also works at batchblue) and my kids Sadie and Cole.
Recent Content
Sean Ransom is the VP of Technology at BatchBlue Software, maker of software for small businesses and entrepreneurs. An advocate of open source software, he can be found sourcing stripers around local waters when not thinking about, writing or pushing code. BatchBlue Software will be presenting at the next Providence Geeks Dinner - Wednesday, June 18th. RSVP and Details Here
It's been a few months since BatchBlue Software opened our virtual doors and started to accept actual money for our online contact organizer, BatchBook. I was never really comfortable with the "beta" tag and was eager to move beyond beta and get out there in the world. Beta to me in some ways implies that you are not serious or confident with what you are offering. It can be a good thing (if a little terrifying) to look at your product and realize it's never going to be perfect but what the hell, let's go with it. The beauty of a software-as-service (SAS) offering for both us and the consumer is that the app is constantly improving. When you buy into BatchBook, you are not getting a static offering but something that is constantly getting upgrades tweaks and refinements. With BatchBook, like other SAS offerings coming out, it's a great time to be a consumer because you can get directly involved in shaping the product.
Customer feedback has been crucial to BatchBook's evolution. Through careful monitoring of our support email, forums and in-person user studies, almost everything we do is based on customer feedback. The Rhode Island community has been great in this regard, as we've received crucial feedback from our local beta users, hooked up with some helpful Providence Geeks, and been allowed a peek into the places where people do their work to see our product in action.
I've never been much into the bravado and the "we know better than the customer" attitude that some software makers employ. Customers are the ones using the software that's hopefully is making their lives easier, and they are also what keeps the light on. I mean, if it was up to me BatchBook would have a terminal interface and I would use UNIX command line tools to access it; however that would be a hard sell to small business owners like my Mom who still think the Internet is magic.
Unfortunately, customer service is often viewed as what happens when something goes wrong. I've been lucky that in my previous jobs, this was never the philosophy. While I did have direct contact with the customer, I was not in a position to help them directly by changing the software, workflow, etc. I could refund or otherwise throw money at them as a temporary fix, but a lot of times that never resolved their core issue. Now that we have a small, nimble team and a dynamic application, listening and acting on customer feedback has never been easier or more fun.
An eye-opening realization has been that our customers have been, and continue to be, right. All of the features coming up in the next three months are being driven by customer feedback. Every single one of them. It's quite amazing but they have been so on the mark it's a little spooky. It feels great to give them features and fixes they ask for, and it also builds a certain amount of mutual trust that's refreshing and makes you happy to go to work every day.
So listen to your customers. I mean, really listen to them. Visit where they work and watch them use your product, look online where they are talking about their businesses, solicit feedback at every opportunity. Even when they are telling you your software is crap and to please cancel my account, take a deep breathe and listen. There is always something you can find to improve upon. Always.
Editor's Update: Web Worker Daily, a major blog, just today published a glowing review of BatchBook. Thanks for alerting us to it, Matt G.
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Maybe I am not seeing it but a people directory would be cool to have. For those of us who are looking to hire (or looking for work) it would be nice to have access to people as well as companies.
A look at the people who make up the rhode island work force as opposed to the ones doing the hiring would rock,
-sean
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All sorts are needed to build a strong tech community. From designers, programmers to communication specialists who have very little technical knowledge. Smart, engaged folks are needed in all areas.
I feel RI's problem is infrastructure and not a branding one. I moved here about 3 years ago from Seattle and RI (providence specifically) is just not where it needs to be to attract young folks out of college. Public transportation is weak and parking is the worst. Unless you are in school there is no advantage to choose Prov over Boston or NYC.
Case in point one of my developers moved to NYC after staying in Prov for barely a year. The other visits from Seattle and spends all his time in NYC when he comes out east except to take a train up to come to a team meeting here.
I think instead of spending money on branding we should be spending it building out places like the space above the RIEDC into a tech hub and reworking the expenses small business must pay to do business in RI. You look at the taxes one must pay to do business in RI as opposed to MA and no wonder they are getting most of the young startups. A reworking of the tax structure would also encourage the 'service' industry because you need bars, eateries , etc to attract young people.
I desperately need young talented engineers and they are just not to be found right now which has forced us to look nationally to find folks. I would much rather have them local but Providence is unfortunately a tough sell.
I do not want to sound doom and gloom because I feel this can be fixed. Look at what Portland , OR has done in the past 5-10 years to attract new business and they are doing it right. They have/are building out incredible public transportation as well as encouraging communities like the pearl district which is where lots of startups are relocating to. Lots of folks I know are now choosing portland over seattle which is big deal.
The tearing down of 195 has got me really excited as it is a great chance to build out something worthwhile which I hope happens and the city does not succumb to real estate condo speculators. That area needs to become a destination and not just another blah condo wasteland.
We have super talented folks going to great colleges in RI. We just need to figure out how to keep them. That is the key, keep/attract the young folks and the entrepreneurs will follow. Right now we just do not have the infrastructure to support the next amazon. I hope in 5-10 years I will be singing a different tune because I like RI and want to stay.
-sean
I think SOA definitely makes sense when scale becomes a concern. I worked at amazon from 97-05 and got to experience the move from monolithic 2 tiered to the distributed system it is now.
Really what they have done is make it logical for many small teams to be productive and work together at the same time. Each team is in charge of a service with a published API that others program to if they need to interact with it. For amazon it makes a lot of sense where you literally have 3-5K developers. It just gets to be too much having them all try to work on one system. SOA to me is more distributing your work force than anything.
For batchblue it has not made sense yet since we have 2 developers. Distributing things up would probably be more of a headache than it is worth right now. The work has not required us to distribute things much but as we hopefully grow that could change. I am looking at rolling a separate 'service' to handle data syncing and it would very much be in the style of amazon. Basically an internal webservice that our main application can interact with but the biz logic is maintained by the sync service. Doing this would greatly decouple a sync service which does not need an http interface to work so there is no need to cram it into our existing application.
As far as data integrity it can become compromised at times but I think you got to live with that in some cases. A great example of these was amazon's shopping cart. Back in the earlier system you were looking at numbers as high as 50% drop rate of customers shopping cart information. Just completely gone which is not a great customer experience, especially if you spent all day adding xmas presents to your cart. A great deal of time was spent to get that number to 100% but it never changed. Perfection in this case was a red herring.
In came a distributed model using Werner's whisper client protocol where distributed servers would replicate messages out across the system. Each server would then pass the message along to the next until everyone on the system eventually became notified of a change in the customers cart. So now with the distributed model you were pretty much guaranteed a server in the system had at least had some of the customers cart information if not in most cases all of it. The dropped cart number went down to 2%. Not perfect but probably close enough. Obviously you need to be better when it comes to handling money and such but it is not such a bad thing to look at your serve and see where you can handle some failure. I know a lot of folks wish twitter failed with a little degradation of service rather than the whole thing always shutting down...
Jack is also right on to think about the network. Amazons network and system engineers deserve as much credit as the developers for amazon speed and ability to scale. A lot of innovation has/is happened with how amazon packages data and leverages the network to keep things fast. Amazon makes good use of router technology and every packet matters. This is the part where it gets hard for small companies to compete and why google and amazon are so ahead of the pack. They are leveraging every conceivable part of the system.
Anyway I babble and it is late...
Rocking, good stuff guys. Let the RI tech domination begin :)
-sean
We are moving in that direction as well. Actually we do not plan on buying any more application servers and will scale on demand with ec2. Would not trust my any real hard data to live there but it does seem perfect for application and even webservers. Probably another month or 2 away before we really start on the dev work though.
This project whch I am sure you have seen will make monitoring and such much easier:
http://amazon-ec2.rubyforge.org/
are friends run this y-combinator startup all on the amazon platform (ec2 and s3) and things seem to be working out well for them so far.
http://www.anywhere.fm/player/
-sean