Bummer. Here’s a quick refresher on some things to make sure you audit on your own site.

• Use a unique account for your web-originating database access. This means a unique account with its own password and credentials as limited as possible. Making your DB access credentials the same as anything SSH-capable is asking for trouble. You don’t use your ATM access code to login to your email account, do you? (You’d better not!)
• Lockout all but the necessary functions (usually just insert, select, and update) at the database level for your new database access account. If you need to give this user “delete” access, too, maybe you need to re-think your application’s logic. (Deleted should be handled via a flag in most applications, not by actual removal of the data.)
• Place all of your common core server-side includes outside of your root web context. So if your web server’s root is “public_html”, put all of your shared libraries, especially your core database connection library, above public_html in your directory structure. If you can’t do this on your web host and you give two craps about the security of your site, get a new host. In English, this means that no one on the web should be able to surf to any of your core libraries. Requiring authentication to get to these files might feel just as good, but it isn’t.
• Chmod 777 is a Very Bad Idea.

This is by no means definitive, nor should it take the place of a professional audit by a skilled professional. However, if your development staff consists of your left brain, your pooch, and white board, this is a decent place to start.

After about 20 seconds of discussion, someone said, “so they have a whole lot of servers then, huh?”

I retorted that it’s probably the single biggest application on the planet in terms of computing power. Of course, I followed this up by silently asking said google cache about this question. Interestingly, after a half dozen tries (”largest server farms”, “largest application”, “largest global applications”, etc), I couldn’t find a definitive list. Heck, I really couldn’t find any list.

So I thought I’d put one out there for public consumption. Please debate and correct me. It’s all guesswork.

(This is based on total flops devoted to a single application infrastructure, not based on other trivialities, like number of CPUs, number of racks, or raw storage capacity. There’s also probably a distinction between different branches of government, but I’m way out of my league there.)

1. Google. The www cache, youtube, picasa, and all the rest.
2. The DoD. You know, those guys that invented the internet?
3. Amazon. S3, alexa, the wayback machine, and of course their tiny product database.
4. Microsoft. Hotmail, Live, windowsupdate, msdn.
5. Yahoo. Their tombstone aside, they’ve got a web cache and tons of services. All of that info has to be stored somewhere.
6. China’s IT Infrastructure. Suppressing all of that free speech has to take some computing power, right?

Let the debate ensue…

I wasn’t sweating it a whole heck of a lot since, well, if there’s no new content, there isn’t much point, now is there?

Well, I went ahead and tried to login to my feedburner account today, and I was rudely informed that my feeds are screwed. Check out the screenshot:

To fix it, I went ahead and disabled my feedburner extension for now. http://fuery.com/feed lives again!

With that in mind, would you rather see one good article a month, or articles of moderate quality 2-3 times a week?

This means wearing a lot of hats and getting your hands dirty on product design, user interface design, software architecture, development, project management, quality assurance, and support. This doesn’t mean you’re expected to know all of these, but it does mean you should be excited (instead of intimidated) by new challenges every day.

Professional Qualifications:

• A BA/BS or equivalent experience. A CS degree is advantageous, but not a prerequisite. You will be tested during the interview process.
• IT support experience in networks, troubleshooting, and repair.
• LAMP + JavaScript. (Translation for the search engines: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, JavaScript)
• Familiar with typical web application architectures.
• Pre-development technical research and documentation (ie. Wireframes, specs, and workflow. Wiki + Visio + lots of dry erase markers)
• Strong system integration skills. (bring it all together, even if using only chewing gum and shoelaces)
• Ability to role play as various actors (client, consumer, end user, engineer, etc) to improve/critique software interfaces.

Personal Qualifications:

• Ability to work and solve problems independently with the ability to adapt and take on new tasks
• Flexible with the ability to take on several projects at one time if necessary
• Prepared to take on increasing responsibilities over time
• Excellent writing skills
• Good communication skills
• Creativity
• Logical reasoning skills
• Must be organized and able to commit and deliver to project plans and timelines
• High levels of drive, determination and enthusiasm
• Ability to work in a team environment, meet tight deadlines and work on several projects simultaneously

Knowledge and experience in everything listed above is not necessary, however, we would like someone with as little training needed. We will coach you on new tasks that we assign to you and we are always open to answer questions, however, someone who will take the initiative and try to work independently first is highly valued. If you fit the description listed above, please email your resume to kaitlynne (at) fuery (dot) com.

]]> http://fuery.com/2008/07/09/help-wanted-engineer-advertisment/feed/ http://fuery.com/2008/07/09/help-wanted-office-manageradministration-advertisment/ http://fuery.com/2008/07/09/help-wanted-office-manageradministration-advertisment/#comments Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:35:50 +0000 Fuery Inc. Recruiting http://fuery.com/?p=552 About the Company:

We’re a small up-and-coming Technology Consulting firm that does software, support, and documentation. Our small team is young, hardworking, and brilliant. We’re looking for some fresh talent to round out our service offerings, provide administrative support, and help us make sure we get everything done. Ideally, you’ll grow with us, actively learning new skills as we expand the business.

The position requires “wearing all the hats”. If you function best in an environment with a lot of structure and you do the same sort of work consistently, then this probably isn’t a good fit. If, however, you thrive on task juggling, get excited about figuring out solutions to interesting problems, learning how to use new tools, and occasionally find yourself reading Wikipedia for fun, then you’ll love working with us.

In other words, we’ll ask a lot of you, but you’ll learn more, faster, than anywhere else. If you like filing TPS Reports, then this is not the place for you!

Here’s what we need right now (if you’re comfortable with any three of these, we’d like to talk to you):

• Project coordination. We juggle 8-10 active projects (and growing) at any one time, and with dozens of tasks each, it’s a serious amount of pressure to make sure nothing gets lost. Your job is to take the hassle of task management on and allow our geeks to focus on what they do best. We don’t care how you do it – handwritten lists, a case of post-it notes, your email inbox, specialized software, or your amazing photographic memory. There will literally be 100 things on the collective task list at any one time, and we’ll throw more at you using every means possible (shoulder tap, paper note, email, voice mail, text message). If you can also work backwards from client-facing deadlines to intelligently organize tasks, we’ll buy you a pony. This is probably 60-90 minutes of upkeep every day.
• The paper-pushing of small business management. Bookkeeping, payroll, expenses, invoicing, collections, etc. The owner has been doing this for quite some time, but it’d be much better for the business if he was out schmoozing with clients rather than trying to decipher tax forms. If you can take this off of his plate and actually get our payroll checks cut on time (ahem), the entire office will cater to your every whim. This is probably 4-8 hours a week; more at first while you reconcile the boss’ mess, then down to half a day weekly for upkeep.
• Document creation. Half our business is synthesizing technical concepts into readable form for non-techies. You will be expected to help out with this. Yes, even office staff has a billable target. This means your grammar has to be top-notch and you’ll be resizing images in Photoshop, drawing simple diagrams in Visio, and creating tables using Wiki markup. We’ll show you plenty of tips and tricks, but if you’re afraid to get your hands dirty, you’ll end up feeling more like a gopher and less like a contributor. And that just sucks for everyone.
• Vendor Liaison. Collection companies. Web Hosting companies. Dell. AT&T. The parking lot across the street. Office Depot. Costco. Handle the relationships, make sure we’re getting the best price, make sure they get paid on time, and make sure all of us as employees (including the boss) aren’t using resources foolishly.
• Recruiting. Could you write an ad like this?
• You’ll have your choice on which area you’d like to focus as we grow and add more staff. So if you imagine yourself making a career in the fields of accounting, management, or project planning, this is a good sandbox to work in, because you’ll get the chance to experiment in a coached environment while learning peripheral aspects of running a business. On the other hand, if you simply enjoy supporting smart people, that’s fine too.
• Leadership & Analytical Skills: Establishing policies & procedures. You will be challenged on them by our engineers, so you need to have the analysis handled and be quick on the draw.
• Documentation Skills: Geeks are smart. They’ll notice errors when you dictate policies and procedures. And if you don’t make rational sense, they won’t respect you.
• Technical Skills: Understand the language of the business. This includes jargon related to software development, project management, and various science fiction references. If you can talk geek, we’ll forgive you for the occasional run-on. Our clients will notice, too, and it will incur trust. 
• Bookkeeping Skills: Depreciation on buildings? Net 15? Adjustable rates? Quickbooks? 1040s? 1099s? W-2s? You don’t have to be a CPA, but you should have a general impression on what this all means and have the ability to fill in the blanks where needed through research and/or reference materials.
• Research Skills: See subtleties in the bookkeeping requirements.
• Attention to detail: We can forgive our geeks for occasionally forgetting to get back to a customer. It’s your job to hound them until they do. Oh, and if you screw up the books, none of us get to eat, so there’s that, too.

I just migrated to a new web host. It’ll be this way for a few days. Hey, at least I got around to writing about it!

As for where I’ve been, well, no one’s heard from me in a long time… just busy. I’m hiring, though. Got LAMP and PHP skills? Or small business management? Product Marketing?

Hit me up…

I probed a little further on this, and he proposed the idea that giving back is part of success, that the incoming opportunities will be reduced or otherwise tend to stagnate if one hordes their resources. He quoted the metric of 10%, citing that his four hours was based on the assumption that he should be working a 40 hour work week. (Like all entrepreneurs I know, including myself, he’s a workaholic, and works day and night.) Donating money or the resources of your business are both alternate paths to reach this state of cosmic balance.

While I tend to agree, I found myself thinking about how I lead my life, run my business, treat my employees, and serve my customers. I proposed that I give back every day by pushing employees to grow, going beyond the call of duty for customers, and coaching strangers in bettering themselves.

My friend proposed that the act of demarcating the 10% was important. “The act of ‘being cool’ is something you should do anyway. That’s just a function of life. It isn’t charity.”

I’m not sure about that. I think that, actually, my business would do better and that I’d have significantly less stress if I was, well, more of an a$$4ole. Just yesterday (on a Friday night when I was supposed to be sipping a cocktail), I took on the duty of considering a biweekly payment plan for a tenant. I give up late fees all the time. I’ve loaned money interest-free more times than I can count. The people around me who I have led by example, inspired by my confidence, and pushed by my faith (in them) have earned literally millions of dollars just by having known me.

Furthermore, I’ve turned my charity inward, employing friends and family in jobs for which they are not qualified (in hope, sometimes not misplaced, that they would step up to the plate). I spend time with folks from my youth who lack the ability to move themselves forward in achievement or socioeconomics, even though that means, often, that the extent of our conversation is limited to the nuances of Star Wars. I often hold my tongue in those situations, in fact, refusing the urge to correct the misconceptions about everything from basic economics to race relations. You can’t help someone if you’re just contrary. You have to teach them how to think critically and push them to embrace objectivity.

But I digress. On this point, you see, I’m torn. I want to give back, but I believe it would come at the cost of these other charitable practices I engage in every day. Most entrepreneurs insulate themselves in gated communities, elite clubs, and stay (or make) friends only with peers within their socioeconomic and education strata. They trade in the YMCA for the Country Club and embrace the close-mindedness that comes with it.

I don’t. Every tenant I have lives in a bigger and better house than I do. Every client I have works less. And every friend I have likes me in spite of whatever financial success I happen to enjoy, not because of it.

Most of all, I feel torn because I feel that in order to participate in charity more traditionally/officially, I’d have to be that much more harsh in my daily life.

(pause)

In writing this, I’ve come to a conclusion. However, before I share it, what do you think? Is it either/or? If it is not, and doing official charity work requires giving up my daily give-back routine, is it worth it?

Do you give back? How?

And finally, what would you do?

Screenshots from my two accounts, both personal gmail and google apps (click through for the full size version):

Using Google for shared calendar, address book, and email is the avenue I’ve been exploring. I also considered installing Kolab, an open source groupware solution, but that seemed to me analogous to installing my own Exchange server on a hosted Windows box. The only benefit there would be the presumption that an open source solution like this would have support for a wide variety of products, including my Thunderbird and Blackberry requirements.

Here’s what I’ve found works in favor of the big G.

Pros of Using Google as a Groupware Platform

• Calendar Sync to Blackberry is solid. I can only sync on calendar at a time, so I still have the problem of merging my personal gmail account with my newer google apps account (hereafter referred to as “corporate”), but that strikes me as a relatively small problem since my schedule planning is typically only a few weeks out at the most. I can also display my own personal calendar by “sharing” it with my corporate self and then sync it down that way. I now have both calendars on my Blackberry happily syncing both ways. I do wonder if there’s a limit to the number of calendars I can share…
• Mail is a no-brainer. Imap support means that, aside from the 5-10 minute lag, thunderbird and blackberry work just fine with both the personal and the corporate account. On the merging side of the equation, I’m still waiting for the corporate account to finish fetching my 50K messages from the personal account via POP (it’s google fetching from google, so it’s obviously throttled heavily), but I can continue to work from both accounts for the next few days.

Cons of Using Google as a GroupWare Platform

• They claim ownership to you data. Sure, “do no evil” is a great edict, and sure, they’ve done nothing major (although I suppose the “caving” to China’s censorship demands is arguable) to violate the public trust, but the details in the Terms of Use are pretty alarming if you’re developing any sort of intellectual property, which I happen to do every day.
• Contacts are a mess. Aside from my earlier complaints, I’ve been trying out Zindus for Thunderbird-to-Google sync, and while I’m very impressed on their development speed (the Google Contacts API was only published 45 days ago or so), the plugin still needs some work. I attempted to move my contacts from plaxo over to my corporate gmail account, since the plaxo data set should contain all the data from my legacy personal mail account plus data from plaxo itself, linkedin, and my mobile phone contact list (via blackberry –> outlook –> plaxo manually). However, I ran into a number of issues with the Zindus merge:
  • The Plaxo export to Thunderbird felt a little off. I did it at about 4am last night, so I can’t recall what was wrong with it, but I ended up tossing the Thunderbird LDIF from plaxo and merging with Outlook 2007 instead. Then I imported from there from within Thunderbird. That’s fine, but it’s worth mentioning.
  • The Thunderbird-Google sync halts when google denies a contact. So my plaxo data, which contains duplicates all over the place (a single contact might be represented as a record from the old gmail account, linkedin, and plaxo, and all contain the identical primary email, which google denies and Zindus pushes back on the user. So, basically, I’ll need to manually clean up my contact list in thunderbird before pushing it upstream. Good thing I have administrative help now.
  • Zindus does not “match up” contacts from my mobile phone. These contacts are generally an abbreviated name (i.e., a nickname, like “johnnyf” instead of “Johnny Fuery”) and a single number. The location of the number varies with regard to specific field (mobile, business, home, etc.), largely because I’ve migrated phone contacts several times over the years. Only 1% contain an email address at all. It would seem that Zindus relies on that email address for keying, becaues after attempting a dozen or so syncs, which all halted at various points in the process because of Google denying the contact add based on a duplicate primary email, the contacts that originated in my Blackberry are now duplicated a dozen times over.
  • Google won’t let me delete more than 20 contacts at a time. So starting over is going to be a major pain in the you-know-where. I now have 3500 contacts in my corporate gmail account when I started with 1900 or so in plaxo.
• The Google Apps “shared address book” is actually only intra-domain, so I can’t share my “personal” contacts. In other words, it ain’t a shared address book. I know the 8 people with accounts on my domain already and they’re IN my personal address book.
• The workaround would be to sync multiple Thunderbird installations via Zindus against the same “personal” address book. One could conceivably setup a Google account solely for contacts, configure Thunderbird + Zindus to sync against this single account, and voila — group contacts. The scalability of this model is cause for concern, however. I’ve yet to try it on more than two desks with my personal account. Zindus does authenticate against both my personal and corporate accounts, by the way.

At this point, I need quite a few utilities to make this work.

Market Opportunities

Please let me know (via the now-working Contact Form or a comment below) if you’re interested in these. Most of these I foresee being donationware and/or ad supported, but I’d also be interested in the economic value to you.

• Google “Delete all contacts” script. Go to a web page, enter you gmail login data, click a button, and flush your account. Google probably has some throttling on it, so it would probably be a “we’ll email you a confirmation in a few minutes” type of experience.
• Google contact migrator. Move contacts from an old account into a new one. See previous item for proposed interface.
• Improvements on the Zindus tool. I’d rather not write my own, but minimally, it should key against more than just the email address (the FAQ says it does, but my experience indicates otherwise) and provide a preference for skipping past problematic records. Problematic records should be outputted in a summary or log of some kind so they can be handled manually. A re-sync should not create still more duplicates (keying against more than just an email address would satisfy this).
• Thunderbird (Lightning)-Google Sync remains unanswered. GCalDaemon can do it, but it’s an awful lot of code sitting on clients for that one feature, and I’ve yet to be able to get it to work with a non-personal (Google Apps based) calendar.

Everyone clear on that? btw, I could use a full time LAMP developer if anyone is interested… must not think Ajax is a cleanser. Email me at… aw crap. The contact page is down.

Turns out you get a bounty for referrals. Not that it’s a new model — recruiters have been giving out kick backs for as long as I can remember. But the network/multi-level marketing (think Amway) aspect of this company was noteworthy. Here’s a screen cap of the page diagramming their model. You get it after you register:

Interested in spamming all your friends in hopes of earning a bounty? Here, use my referral code. 

(And no, I didn’t spam any of my friends. I want to keep the brilliant folks in my network to myself, dammit!)

What I Want

• Shared “global” address book across 1-20 users. Some sort of consolidation tools would be a nice value-add.
• The address book needs to have some sort of categorization capability. In my case, for instance, I’d probably start with “Tenants”, “Clients”, “Vendors”, “Friends & Family”, “Everyone Else” and possibly “Women”. Maybe a “People I Keep in My Contact List so I Recognize the Caller ID and Don’t Pick Up the Phone” category, too.
• Shared”global”calendaring. I want to see my calendar, my vendors/contractor’s calendars, and my assistant’s calendar. Yes, all at once. Yes, on my Blackberry in real time.
• Versatility in supported clients. Supported clients list should minimally include Thunderbird with the Lightening plugin, my Blackberry via over the air (OTA) automatic synchronization, the web via a desktop browser, and Outlook. Blackberry via the Handheld Web Browser, as cool as it has become (hey, whatever happened to AvantGo?) is not acceptable. I want integration with the Blackberry calendar, or no-go. You can alternatively have me install a custom client, but it has to be worth it. The GMail client, for instance, is almost “worth it”. I still use the native Blackberry mail application more often. Integrated Mailbox + Hardware Integration (yes, that often-annoying blinking red light) readily trumps the Gmail email threading excellence (think of Gmail’s conversation-centric view, which was the original Outlook killer for me).
• Support of the iCalendar standard so that the rest of the world can interact with event invitations.
• Hosted so I don’t have to worry about data integrity or location. I move a lot, the management of a server just for this limited set of features isn’t worth the cost, and… it’s just the way of the future. If I had enough clients who needed it, I might host the server myself, but that’s productization and entrepreneurship, not a solution to my needs. That is, that’s me building this because I can’t find a viable alternative.
• Cheap. For somewhere around $100 a month, I can throw up an Exchange server on a dedicated Windows box with all the fixin’s. I’m not going to do that, but it’s a worthwhile metric for deciding what to pay.
• Nice to have bonus: Integration of a specific group of contacts (Clients and Vendors, in this case) with QuickBooks. I don’t think QuickBooks has the hook for this, however, so I realize this is a pipe dream.

Possible Solutions for Consideration

Google.  (google.com/apps)

If you sign-on for the full-fledged, take-over-your-domain version of Google Apps (this isn’t just a shared spreadsheet, they want you to use gmail as your corporate email client), you can share an address book and your calendar. In fact, I already share my calendar, and as long as my vendors and contractors use (or sync with) Google Calendar and give me permission to see their schedules, I’m all set. Blackberry support is there, and despite having to reinstall the Google Sync application every time I reset my gmail password, I’m overall impressed with the features and dependability of the software.

The only problem is the address book. Contact management is miserable in Gmail. I’ve gotten stuck clicking randomly every time I’ve desired to add detail to a contact. It’s not intuitive, it adds everyone who I ever email to my contact list (hmm, unsubscribe-me-for-godsakes@viagra-for-you-cheap.com is a contact of mine? who knew?), it lacks the categorization features, and it doesn’t OTA sync with my Blackberry. Four strikes and your out.

Highrise. (highrisehq.com)

Task management, contact management, and calendaring in a nice new Web 2.0 interface? Cool.

Shared all around with lots of permissions preferences? Groovy.

Send an email to add a task? Nice.

Integration with…? Uh oh. Sure, you can import and export using all kinds of midway techniques, but you can’t even install a Thunderbird plugin for synchronizing, let alone do OTA Blackberry access.

Those two are showstoppers. Sorry, backbase. I might still use your email-to-task system for some fringe case uses (my assistant seems to like it, for instance), but you aren’t getting my dollars or my contact list. Highrise charges a sliding-scale monthly fee once you surpass a relatively minimal number of contacts.

Heck, if all I needed was the Thunderbird Plugin, I might write it myself. But the lack of any synchronization tools whatsoever is pretty disappointing. C’mon, guys.

Plaxo. (plaxo.com)

Plaxo has done an amazing job of integrating with everyone and everything. This blog entry will probably get posted on “Plaxo Pulse” to some significant subset of the 1800 contacts in my address book. Take that, blog spammers!

Seriously, now, Plaxo has sync’d with Facebook, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Outlook, and a million other sites and services I’ll never use. The integration is pretty solid, although I had to use Outlook as a go-between to get my contacts on my Blackberry. And the beauty of Plaxo is that the social networking aspects of it mean that I’ll never have to update someone’s contact info again. As long as they’re a member, of course. And yes, it’s free.

There is trouble in paradise, however. First of all, Plaxo has no tools for removing duplicates. So it sync’d against a half dozen different services (including my mobile phone handset, which doesn’t have any meta data at all) and except where there was an exact email address match, I have multiple entries galore. And while I really do have 15 Laura/Laurens in my phone, I definitely don’t know 14 Kevins. So those 1800 contacts are probably more like 600. Dammit. I thought I was popular.

I also cannot share contacts with anyone else.

That’s enough of a drag to cross it off the list. I haven’t even looked at the more recently released Calendar features, because the inability to share my address book is a deal-breaker. Next.

–

Does the product I’m looking for really not exist? Am I left to consider building it myself or living without?

I’ve used their FVS318 Router/Firewall product for years, more or less standardizing on it as the platform of choice for all of my client’s offices. That backfired for me this week.

On Monday, I got a call from a brand new client from an office I’d never visited before. It was an emergency. Their internet was offline. Great, an opportunity to be a hero, right?

Well, I diagnosed pretty quickly that their existing gateway was dead. No worries; that’s what Best Buy is for — overpriced networking gear in a hurry. After getting a little lost first, of course.

Everything worked fine for two days. Then, today, the Firewall would intermittently drop it’s connection to the internet. A reboot fixed it every time… for 5 minutes. I troubleshooted my happy little arse off for 90 minutes on it, then decided to take it back and exchange it. What the heck?

In the meantime, naturally, I grab a spare Linksys Wireless Router WRT54G device and get it working in… oh, six minutes.

I get the second Netgear Firewall unit in, configure it identically, it works for about fifteen minutes, then ceases to route. Heck, it doesn’t even respond to a ping from the internal network any longer, let alone show me it’s own built-in web utility. Or, you know, work.

Screw it. My $35 old school Linksys device wins. I am never buying a Netgear device again.

I’ve been scratching my head trying to think of what went wrong with the device, and the only difference I can think of in terms of configuration is the fact that it’s using a static IP instead of PPPoE like the other dozen I’ve installed in the past few years.

So, sell your NetGear stock. Ditto on whomever manufactures D-Link products for the same reason. Buy Cisco.

P.S., Yes I’m still alive. Just been busy.

Why is it that the quantity and frequency of “No U-Turn” signs is always the highest right around highway on-ramps? You know, where one wrong turn can send you in the wrong direction for miles and a legal U-Turn would be the most helpful?

In the future, will education and intellect be judged based on how much information one can recall, or how good one is at formulating Google search queries?

Why does it take 5 days for my local Baby Bell to install internet services when no technician visit is required and I already have my equipment?

Usually, alas, the pitches I hear are from folks without a great deal of any of these. My typical response is “write a business plan and get back to me”.

Well, someone did. Here’s my review (with sensitive items removed, of course) of it. You don’t need to read the business plan to understand my criticisms. For what it’s worth, I’m looking forward to seeing the revision of this one.

–

Seeing this for the first time, I have the following questions:

How do you make your money? I get the basic premise — (proprietary items removed) – but where is the value?

The only place I can guess on value is… (proprietary items removed)

But you never say that.

The “how does your company make money” question needs to be answered right up front, before any graphs, projections, etc. I’m also skeptical that the value of [your customer's purchase is what you imply]. I’m not saying it isn’t — I don’t know what I’m talking about — but if I’m wondering, so will another investor.

This is business. Ultimately, despite the fact that you’re currently selling to investors, you’ll need to sell to the people that will pay for your service. The investor needs to understand not only who these people are (you say that), but why they care. “Care” meaning want your service, that is. This is a new product, something you say many times, so you’re going to need to educate your consumers on the product — how are you going to do that? A good start to answering that question is communicating the new product and why its compelling very concisely and quickly to an investor.

Basically, you need an elevator pitch, which then is presented at the beginning of your business plan as an “at a glance” i.e., “Executive Summary” It’s not so very different from hitting on a hot chick: it takes practice, it takes confidence, and it damn well takes you having a clear vision of what exactly is going to appeal to her. For an investor, that means your business model. (She already knows what you want, and even if she’s wrong, you can’t change those assumptions in 30 seconds.)

Everything else is secondary, but while I’m thinking about it:

• I wouldn’t go into such detail on sales projections and such unless you have individual investors asking for it. Venture Capitalists don’t care, because it’s all smoke anyway. The time-to-profitability graph is what matters here, not the results of the dart throw you took at 3am the night before your pitch. If they even get to that part, they’ve been sold on the model — now they just want to know the execution details.
• Everyone knows you need to spend some money on office space, computers and a fax machine, so I wouldn’t bother. Include a figure for “office expenses”, yes, but use a nice round number and call it a day. The technology infrastructure required to run a digital sales system that can handle XX million transactions a day? Yeah, include that. Your phone lines, not so much.
• Don’t include specific salary figures. Your rich uncle doesn’t want to pay you that much (”greedy bastard!”) and a VC will wonder why you’re so cheap (”first time entrepreneur with no experience”). Either way, it doesn’t add a whole lot of value and it might detract a lot.

From a tech perspective, as a software architect, I’ll need to be able to draw some basic conclusions about what the Information Technology application is supposed to do from your business plan. Software development starts with Business Requirements, which in turn correspond to Functional Requirements that dictate Technical Requirements and finally a Technical Specification. You can skip certain aspects of this process (you kinda have to in a startup), but the basic logic flow is the same. If we skip the BRD (biz req doc), it’s gonna be because the Business Plan and related collateral is so friggin’ good that your software architect can extrapolate what is needed from it. The other shortcuts in the process are going to be because I rock and hire IT staff that rocks — stuff that also costs additional money, because rock stars are more expensive.

Lastly, without a prototype, you need mock-ups. That should be included as a cost in your initial angel pitch. It costs some of that angel investment to build and support the sales process for the next step — getting a VC round. On this point, don’t kid yourself –100% of your time for the next 3-5 years is going to be wrapped up in trying to get your next round of funding. The other 100% of your time is going to be actually getting your business moving. And yes, you’re minimum workweek is going to be 80+ hours for the foreseeable future.

One last peripheral question… do you know who your competitors are? I don’t think that a detailed answer belongs in your business plan, but you should be prepared to answer those questions, especially regarding how you’re different and why you’re going to make more money.