Quintified

(an email to my wife while she and the kids are spending a month of summer vacation with her parents in Texas)

One of the books I want to use my “reading coupons” for is “Thou Shall Prosper”. It’s by a Jewish Rabbi who discusses why, based on their world view, the Jewish people have historically done well financially.

A main idea in the book is that money made is a natural result of service to others given, in the idea of “I’ll give you my money if you do something for me that makes me better off.” Consequently, someone who isn’t making much money typically isn’t serving others well, in the sense of “value added”.

A metaphor the author uses is, “A dollar in your pocket is a certificate of appreciation that someone has given you for what you have done for them.”

Of course, there are major exceptions, such as missionaries in other parts of the world who are serving God through trying to serve the people there, and there are non-profits here that try to serve poor local populations, and kids’ allowances are given for other reasons, and governmental assistance, but 90% of the time in a free market economy, people make their money through serving others, either directly (e.g. Quintify and other small businesses) or indirectly (e..g. serving your boss while working for a large company that in turn serves a whole lot of people).

So in a sense, saying “I don’t want to make a lot of money” can mean “I don’t want to work harder or smarter and in so doing serve a lot more people.”

For me, for Quintify, this is a very direct thing. Quintify now is serving x people, and it is bringing in y revenue. But if we can get our systems into the hands of 1000x people, who are happily using it and are being blessed by it in a tangible way, Quintify will make 1000y revenue.  There’s no “corporate greed” in that at all — we have a great product, or rather have the potential to soon have a really great product, and we can offer that product at an extremely reasonable price and still make a good profit. If we can do that, money will flow, money which can then be put into use in generous ways or in creating ways to serve even more people.

And Quintify’s product is unique in that it allows its customers to much better serve their own customers, so there’s a multiplying effect.

There are hundreds of thousands of small businesses in this country which are struggling mightily, frustrated men and women who are trying to provide for their families, who are good at some skill or trade, but due to lack of experience and perspective don’t have a good business sense, and their lack of business sense and a business software system is greatly hampering their business, i.e., their ability to serve more people well. A Quintify database can do wonders in such situations, particularly as we develop our library of “how” and “why” to go along with the software and align ourselves with business coaches.

Of course, service to others in the fullest extent needs to have a spiritual component as well, and I need more spiritual ministry as well as increasing Quintify’s “material ministry”.

One small point in all of this: I’m not asking for your help directly with Quintify, but whenever you do work on stuff with me, such as testing Quintify::Business Coach, you are helping me with one of my major ministries, helping me to serve others better, and indirectly helping others serve their clients better.

Another small point in all of this: I have no desire for our kids to “do well in school and get a good job and make a lot of money.” I do though have a strong interest in them being able to serve a lot of people both spiritually and materially, and in them being able to provide for their families well (better than I’ve done for my own so far), and in them having options, e.g. the ability to live wherever they think God wants them to live and to do whatever God wants them to do. Again, it is God who provides as He guides, but He’s put us in a world where by default our financial means is directly correlated to our service to others.

So one of my pressing questions is, how can Quintify serve many more people? How can we get what is now significantly helping a relative few into the hands of the masses?

One of our clients’ database systems feeds content into third-party websites. Our client has recently signed on a very high traffic website, and a five-minute test yesterday revealed that we have some optimizing to do be able to handle that website’s traffic.

I made some code changes, added an index to a database table which should up in the slow query log during the test, and was surprised to realize MySQL query caching wasn’t turned on for that server, so it is now. And for another test this afternoon I’ve put the code on a faster server.

But the most exciting change I made was implementing and incorporating memcached, a “Free & open source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system.” I had known about it for years — Fabrizio Parrella at The Queensboro Shirt Company set it up as one of the first things he did when he got there — but I hadn’t ever messed with it, and our servers’ loads were such that it wasn’t a real need. (Business database applications tend to have much fewer page views than high-profile public websites.)

But last night I had a real need, and found memcached to be an amazing tool.

Here’s how I explained it in an email to my programming teammates this morning:

The basic idea with memcached is that you can store data (text, arrays, etc.) in RAM for quick retrieval instead of having to pull it out of the db each time (which involves hard drive reads among other things), and this cache is session/user/page view independent.

In a nutshell here is the magic:

In the past I just had:

———————–

$offer_info = maj_get_offer_info($offer_id);  // how we get info out of the db into our script

———————–

Now I have:

———————–

$seconds_to_live_in_cache = 120;
$key = "offer_info_{$offer_id}";
$offer_info = memcache_get($memcache_instance, $key);
if (!is_array($offer_info))  {
   $offer_info = maj_get_offer_info($offer_id);
   memcache_add($memcache_instance, $key, $offer_info, false,  $seconds_to_live_in_cache);
}

———————–

The key to appreciating this is that if John Doe loads up a page that uses the database to get $offer_info, with that then getting put into memcache, and then 90 seconds later Susan Smith accesses the same page with the same offer, Susan’s page is going to pull the offer_info from super-fast RAM instead of making a database call (or actually a set of several database calls).

And for higher traffic sites, the memcached server can be a different server than the web or db servers, or you can have multiple memcached servers.

My example puts an array into the cache, but you could also use it for example to put a block of html into it, such as the left nav html content on Port City Deals (featured deals, search by category/location, price ranges). All of that is info that is very rarely changed, so the whole block can be built and then cached for a long period of time, saving MANY database calls with each and every page view.

In posting this online I’m sure some are going to say “so where have you been for the past several years?”, but I’m excited about my newly discovered tool. My next step is to build it into our code generator from the ground level up.

Until now we haven’t ever spent much effort or attention on “the pretty” — the visual aesthetics of our database systems. We’ve intended all along to incorporate a nice design at some point, but until now, ours and our clients’ focus has been on adding great functionality. In the meanwhile, we’ve been told again and again by friends, families, prospects, and ourselves that design is fundamental and “pretty” is going to sell better.

Well, tomorrow we have a big opportunity to demo one of our products to a franchise with many franchisees, and knowing that we have exactly what they need in terms of functionality, we just didn’t want to turn them away from a less-than-positive first visual impression.

So Daniel has been burning the midnight oil and has made some awesome progress on this that we’ll be rolling out into our products soon as well as demoing tomorrow. (Yay Daniel!) I’m quite thrilled at the progress but in some ways it’s like looking in the mirror and not recognizing yourself.

We spent the majority of today working on incorporating the new design into our code generator, and it’s going to be a long night. And come morning we probably won’t yet be at the “luscious eye candy” level. But we’re going to be looking much better, perhaps even respectable!

In addition to some behind-the-scenes programming development and improvement of our internal systems, here are some exciting new features that we at Quintify have rolled out recently into all of our core products:

Global search now looks inside of uploaded PDF files and Microsoft Office documents and includes their contents in search results.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned global search in this blog, but this cool feature allows you to search across all of the “things” in your system in one search box and one set of search results ordered by relevancy. This way you can search client records, notes, orders, products, jots, projects, tasks, and so on from a single search box. (Compared to our “filters” search capability that allows you to drill down with precision, this global search capability allows you to cast a wide net. Both complement each other very well.)

Now, these search results include the contents of the PDF files and MS Office documents you’ve uploaded into your system. I played around with this by creating a one-sentence MS Word document that said “how now brown cow”. Then I uploaded that into our database system and did a global search for “brown cow” and my Word document showed up in the search results. Nice!

Improved lead/client import via a spreadsheet upload

In the past our system was “picky” about the spreadsheets that could be uploaded into them to import data — in particular the columns in the spreadsheet had to be in a certain order, and if you weren’t including information for one of the fields in the database you had to include that column but leave it blank. And you could only include information for a particular set of fields/columns. (Sorry about that!)

Now, the lead/client upload page does not require your spreadsheet’s columns to be in any particular order, and you can also add addition columns  of information that can be added in as client notes.

“Quick jump” links on the “List Clients” and “List Documents” pages that allow you to quickly pull up the status or category that you want.

A client with many different kinds of many documents in their system asked for a quick way to filter to a particular category of documents, e.g. “forms” or “blank contracts”. We had wanted similar functionality for our own system and went ahead and included it in all of our core products as well.

This is particularly helpful on the “List Clients” page, because with it you can immediately jump to your list of “Suspects”, “Prospects”, “Shoppers”, “Customers”, etc. — or whatever set of client statuses you have set up in your system.

Enjoy!

As a computer programmer, I’m a big fan of Stack Overflow — both the website and the podcast, and I was thrilled when Stack Exchange came out so that anyone can have their own Stack-Overflow-like website on their topic of choice. Today I took the time to set up Quintify’s Stack Exchange website.

Quintify::Answers — found at http://answers.quintify.com — provides a forum for Quintify customers and prospects to ask and answer questions about using their Quintify databases. We anticipate a Quintify user community growing around this over time, and Quintify team members will monitor it to provide regular how-to info for those asking questions.

Right now there is only one question on the site — asked and answered by me — but eventually the site will be a large knowledge base easily accessible by all Quintify database users.

We have some exciting news to share with you!  Quintify recently launched several industry-specific database solutions designed to provide small business owners the tools they need to run and grow their business.  The web-based databases, which are geared towards business coaches, virtual assistants, web developers and small and medium sized businesses, include the following features:

• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Project / task management
• Quotes, orders and invoicing
• Services and products
• Email marketing
• Time management and time clocks
• Client portal
• Robust reporting
• And much more!

Each database product is offered for a low monthly fee of $55 per month.  There is no contract to sign, no long-term commitment, and no hidden fees.  Additionally, there are no limits to the number of users who can access the system or the number of records that can be stored. 

To learn more about the products or to sign up for a FREE 30-day trial, please visit the websites below.

Quintify::Complete - an ideal solution for small and medium sized businesses
 
Quintify::Business Coach - perfect for business coaches who need to keep in touch quickly and easily with their clients
 
Quintify::Virtual Assistant - great for virtual assistants who need to keep track of their tasks, perform invoicing or other administrative tasks
 
Quintify::Web Developer - amazing tool for those who design and develop great websites

If you know someone who might benefit from one of our products, please feel free to link to this blog entry!

PS:  Know someone who is looking to start up a business for a very low cost?  Visit http://www.mytowndeals.biz for more information on an excellent home-based business opportunity for budding entrepreneurs!

Quintify has an outdoor (sand) volleyball team that plays Friday nights at Capt’n Bill’s — it’s a lot of fun. This was our first season, although the core of our team played on Queensboro’s team for many years. The team is composed of former Queensboro teammates, clients, friends, spouses, and myself — with several players falling into several of these categories.

Last night we ended the regular season beating Queensboro, putting us at 12-2 and in first place for the season. We’ll get a trophy for this, and will hopefully win another trophy at our end-of-season tournament in two weeks.

Outdoor volleyball is so much fun that one of my hopes for my kids is that they’ll be playing this sport competitively when they are my age. As much as they hang out at Capt’n Bill’s with us, they should be pretty good by then!

On Thursday (11/12) UNCW will be hosting the Wilmington Area Professionals IT Breakfast in the Madeleine Suite from 7:30 AM - 9:15 AM. The topic will be the “Impact/Future of Cloud Computing.”

I’m going to be one of the speakers, and will spend the majority of my time discussing things we and others are doing with Amazon’s Web Services for cloud computing. This is a fascinating topic for me and I’m particularly excited about Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS).

The vast majority of the paying work we do these days involves building, maintaining, and extending very highly customized systems for “small” multi-million dollar companies. Our code generator spits out “single tenant” systems — each client gets their own programming code base. This enables us to customize anything however the client wants to the extreme, since their system has its own programming code, but it makes it a bit of a pain to “back in” new features that we come up into preexisting systems. (Just a bit though.)

In addition to building these types of very highly customized systems for relatively larger companies, my dream and passion has been to provide the power, functionality, and flexibility of the database systems we offer our larger clients to small businesses everywhere. However, to be able to scale well in offering standardized products, our single-tenant model wasn’t ideal — if you have 10,000 customers using your product, you definitely don’t want to have to manage 10,000 copies of identical code, one for each one!

Tonight brought the “aha” that enabled me to enable multi-tenant in our products, and I tied that in to a “free trial signup” form so that people will be able to sign up and get their free trial without us having to do anything. With this automation we can offer our databases to even the smallest of companies at an very affordable price, and soon we’ll be doing just that. And then, for any company using one of our products that wants substantial customization, we’ll be able to do anything they want with their system by “popping it out” to single-tenant status. (Imagine the response you’d get asking Microsoft to customize one of their products just for you! This customization is our bread-and-butter.)

I’m excited!

I’ve often said that I’d be Quintify’s biggest fan - even if I wasn’t working for the company. There are so many ways that a custom database can streamline your business and make it much more efficient. One of those ways is being able to do everything you need to do from one location. So many people I talk to are using excel to store their contacts, then are uploading them to an email sending service to be able to communicate to those clients. And then any time they add to that contact list, they’ve got to re-upload their files, taking more time out of their busy day.

With a Quintify database - you can do all of this from one place. Your client records are updated in real time and you can easily add them to specific segments when setting up the client. When you’re ready to send an email blast - you’re working with up-to-date client segments and you don’t have to re-upload your data. Super easy!

Today I recorded a tutorial on the basics of sending an email blast using a Quintify database. People send all types of emails with our databases - from newsletters and announcements to sales and promotional emails. You can click on the tutorial below to get a 7-minute overview of how to send emails to your clients. Creating, testing and scheduling!

In the very near future, I’m going to create a tutorial on how to uitilize our WYSIWIG (what you see is what you get) editor so you can make amazing emails to send out to your clients. For now, here’s the basic overview. Enjoy!

How to Send Emails to Your Clients: http://www.quintify.com/tutorials/emailbasic/emailbasic.html