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personal anecdotes.

27 posts tagged personal anecdotes, newest first.

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27 posts

9 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before My First Zoho CRM Implementation.

When we first started customizing Zoho CRM for serious business operations, I had the same thought most reasonably technical people probably have: this should be pretty straightforward. Create a few modules, add some fields, build a pipeline, automate some tasks, and maybe connect Writer, Sign, WorkDrive, and email. What could possibly go wrong? That sentence, by the way, should be printed on a warning label and stapled to the forehead of anyone starting a CRM customization project. Over the...

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How a Zoho Fix Became a CRM for Commercial Real Estate Brokers.

There are certain phrases in software that sound harmless until you’ve been around long enough to know better. “Can we just customize Zoho CRM a little?” is one of them. It sounds like a small request, maybe a few custom fields, a workflow or two, and a nice Zoho Sign integration so documents stop disappearing into the Bermuda Triangle of someone’s inbox. But as anyone who has ever sat at a hotel bar during a Zoho conference can tell you, “just customize Zoho CRM a little” is usually where...

Frustrated commercial real estate broker

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We Tried to Build a Better CRM for Business Brokers. Then We Realized the CRM Wasn’t the Problem.

I’ll admit something that probably won’t make me sound like a genius. When we first started thinking about software for business brokers and commercial real estate brokers, I thought we were building a better CRM. A CRM for business brokers seemed logical enough. Brokers have contacts, sellers, buyers, listings, deals, notes, tasks, and follow-ups. That sounds like CRM territory, right? Well, yes and no. A CRM is part of the answer, but it is not the whole answer. The deeper we got into how...

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Have I Turned Into Bob? Leadership Lessons from a Founder.

In my first job out of college, I was a cost accountant at a chemical plant. Part of my job was to lead brainstorming meetings on cost savings with the workers. In the back of every meeting, chewing on a toothpick, was a grizzled old Vietnam War veteran named Bob. Bob was universally respected because he had the most seniority of anyone in the plant. But Bob wasn’t too happy about being in a meeting led by a 22-year-old kid. Whenever I, or anyone else, would make a suggestion, Bob would...

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Our No Jerks Policy: How We Keep Toxic Work Culture Out.

Last week, we discussed how we keep our promises, which differentiates us from most of the competition. We mentioned that we offer free “discovery” to our prospective clients, and that one benefit of this offer is the opportunity to evaluate clients before we agree to work with them. Internally, we call this our “No Jerk Policy” (we actually call it the “No A**hole Policy but this is a PG-rated blog, so we’ll censor ourselves). This policy of ours, put in other words, means that we won’t...

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The 7 Most Common Business Scams and Scammers in Start-Ups.

This week’s This American Life episode really got me thinking. It’s a story about a guy named Ken who unknowingly stumbled into the NFT gold rush. Ken was working a regular job at Amazon, and in his spare time, he created a site called Pixelmap. He built it to practice a new programming language. Ken forgot about it until he was contacted by an online influencer named Adam McBride, who informed him that Ken had created one of the first NFT sites in history. Consequently, he was sitting on...

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Why Fake It Till You Make It Is Bad Advice in Business.

Hollywood seems to be obsessed lately with famous start-up scammers. Browse through your Netflix, and you’ll see that Billy McFarland, Bernie Madoff, Elizabeth Holmes, and Anna Delvey have documentaries or TV series about how they defrauded investors out of millions and even billions of dollars. I admit it, I’ve seen them all. At first, I thought it was just a guilty pleasure. But upon reflection, I think these shows teach the wrong lessons and draw the wrong conclusions. In each case, the...

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Is AI Generated Code Safe? Ethical Concerns From a Developer's Chair.

I. Why Ethics in Code Generation Matters More Than EverThere was a time when writing code felt like craftsmanship. Every line was a decision, every structure a compromise between beauty and utility. But the rise of AI-assisted development has profoundly changed that dynamic. Today, I can type a vague prompt and receive fully functional code in seconds. Convenient? Absolutely. But with convenience comes complacency - and that’s where ethics quietly begins to erode. Ethics in programming isn’t...

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Lessons Learned from a Failed Software Development Project.

It is well known that custom software development projects are often complex undertakings. Even with extreme care, the project's results may still be inadequate due to miscommunication, failure to meet the objectives, or problems with the technology used. In this article, I will discuss a particular example of unsuccessful software development and its post-mortem analysis to explain the process in detail. In this case, the objective does not revolve around the failure but rather what is...

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Creativity in Programming: The Developer's Journey Outside the Box.

I remember the first time I saw a developer break the rules in the best way possible. It was during a hackathon at a software company I worked with. While most teams were focused on refining existing features, one group decided to approach the problem from a completely different angle. Instead of optimizing the codebase, they built an entirely new solution using an unconventional technology stack. At first, their idea seemed too risky - why fix what wasn’t broken? But by the end of the event,...

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Reflections on The Dip Seth Godin Wrote, and Other Business Books.

I’ve read lots of business advice books, most of them in my MBA program but I continue to read one or two a year. For the most part, they have the same advice: be assertive, take calculated risks, take control of your own destiny, find your passion, etc., etc. However, there was one book I read over a decade ago that I still think about often – Seth Godin’s “The Dip”. This book has several messages, all of which resonate with me to this day. The first is that in order to succeed, you have to...

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How We Guarantee On Time Delivery on Software Projects.

As a former software company founder I can tell you that a founder’s biggest fear is not being able to get a product launched before you run out of money. When this happens, a founder loses all credibility with investors and, oftentimes, with themselves. Consequently, when we started CodeStringers we wanted to offer a commitment that the competition doesn’t make– a guarantee that we’ll hit your budget and timeline. This ensures that your product sees the light of day and the market can...

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