Kalzumeus Podcast Episode 7: Launching New Products

Kalzumeus Software

Keith and I recorded a new episode of the podcast last year, but we didn’t get around to releasing it.

[Patrick notes: The transcript below has my commentary inserted like this, as usual.]

What you’ll learn in this podcast:

• How to pick a small, self-contained product, which is good to cut your teeth on as a dev-turned-entrepreneur.
• How Keith extracted Summit Evergreen out of his consulting work (improving infoproduct businesses).
• How to use concierge onboarding to increase conversions and decrease churn of SaaS businesses.
• That it is possible to build a very successful consultancy without being quote-unquote Internet famous.
• How to use Standard Operating Procedures documents to have employees do repetitive tasks without needing to actually automate them, while you’re still exploring for the best procedure for completing those repetitive tasks.

If You Want To Listen To It

MP3 Download (~115 minutes, ~85MB) : Right-click here and click Save As.

Podcast format: either subscribe to https://www.kalzumeus.com/category/podcasts/feed in your podcast reader of choice or you can search for Kalzumeus Podcast in the iTunes Store.

[powerpress]

Transcript: Launching New Products

Keith Perhac: We’re started.

Patrick McKenzie: Hello everybody and welcome to…What is this? The eighth episode of the Kalzumeus Podcast. [Patrick notes: There was an episode #7 in recording sequence, but due to some issues, we haven’t gotten it ready yet. It will retroactively become the 8th episode.]

Keith: Indeed it is.

Patrick: I’m Patrick McKenzie here again with my co?host, Keith Perhac.

Keith: Hello, again.

CreditCard.js: A Nice Product, Both For Customers And The Founder

Patrick: Let’s see, we’ve got a fun day planned ahead of us. First thing we’re going to be talking about is Creditcard.js and that’s in eponymous creditcardjs.com.

Keith: That’s because that came out today, I believe, on Hacker News, which will be about two weeks from when we actually get this up. [laughs] [Patrick notes: Actually recorded 8+ months ago. Sorry — life happened.]

Patrick: Predictably, just to give you folks an idea of what it is, it’s well executed CSS, JavaScript and HTML which does the standard static credit card form. But it does it well, such that when you start typing in a credit card number with a four, it knows that it’s a VISA and it does error correction and does the Luhn checking in real-time without having to submit it to your servers.

This is like every credit card form that you’ve ever coded in the last five years, except it’s done well without you having to work at it for three hours. It makes a very good self?contained product, I feel. Something that can be built over the course of a few weeks, tuned to within an inch of its life, and then sold to people.

Because it’s sitting in the critical path on taking money from every website ever, it’s worth quite a bit of money relative to the amount of time I feel it would take to build, and can be sold to many people in parallel.

Keith: If...

For the full transcript see here.