Turning a new page

Wanted to write again, and let everyone know what I’ve been up to. I ended up taking a break through most of 2021 and 2022 simply resting, recovering, and doing light work from home.

2023 resumed with a big bang, I found motivation and drive to dive back into the many projects I’ve temporarily shelved in the last two years. I’ve also became pretty handy with a bunch of home DIY projects. It was a big change to the old me that only knew how to do digital projects but not physical projects. Perhaps more on that in a future post.

Flow Studio

We’ve had several Flow Studio fixes in the last two months

• there was an API pagination fix since the API no longer accepts 250 records at once and restricts us to only 50. (That means more pages and API call takes longer)

• API auth fix relating to Power Apps is in-progress.

• There’s a second API skip/continuation token fix.

• We’ve also tweaked the way trail is applied when anyone wants to try Flow Studio pro - you can sign up and trial will be available for two weeks - you can cancel the subscription before the trial end date to avoid being charged, if Flow Studio isn’t suitable for you.

Clarity / Flow Studio for Teams and Enterprise

We’ve had renewed interest in Flow Studio for Teams and Enterprise (Clarity) through the last few years.

• Flow Studio for Teams will be tweaked to focus on monitoring critical flows and alerting users when their business critical flows fail. This will be priced simply and does not offer governance capabilities.

• Flow Studio for Enterprise will be focused on the turnkey Power Platform Governance story, adding new features to scan more areas of the Power Platform, and integrate with CoE starter kit.

• So far this year, we’ve added BYO Azure Storage. There’s been a lot of fixes to API breakages in Power Apps area this year.

Contract Work

I started a regular part time contract work in Sydney CBD, so if you are local, hit me up for a coffee.

• I’m working with a lot of Power BI reports

• There’s a lot of Power Automate doing the heavy lifting as well.

• We are also talking about adding some Power Apps visuals to allow executive comments to be collected during a report presentation.

Community

Several of the meetups, conferences and events that I used to participate in are becoming active again. I hope to see more of the community not just virtually, but physically as well. I hope to be able to grab a coffee with you soon.

The Flow Studio journey - first lesson - seed money and salary

I wanted to write a blog post because I don’t know, I guess you are a technical person that reads my blog, and you might be interested in my journey from a two decade consultant into a sole business owner building a product company.

It’s pretty exciting. Everyone should try this.

This blog post

I was talking to Elaine as she’s visiting Sydney and I was explaining a very critical lesson I’m in the middle of learning, now that my company “Flow Studio Solutions” is 3 months old.

I was also recently talking to Brett and Sandy who gave me a lot of insights into an early day of a founder. Brett asked me several questions and boy he’s a wizard how does he know that’s exactly what I have been doing the whole time.

And there is FIRST LESSON I’m rapidly learning.

When you decided to take part time or taking some time off and start doing your business, you have this tendency to think Oh, the business isn’t taking in enough income, so I’ll just not take a salary for this month. I’ll live off my savings in my personal account.

This is Brent’s wise words to me. Paraphrased

I modified those words into this trick - with the bank details added in.
Please do over. It’s a most simple trick.

1. Make your business bank account. You should have this anyway, otherwise people can’t pay you.

2. Transfer money from your savings that you intend to live on, into your business

3. Give yourself a salary and sent that back to your personal savings every month (to pay your bills)

Now suddenly, you can claim expenses, tax deductions and have a clear idea how much money the business needs to continue paying you that salary.

Also, when you want to seek funding or grants - it is very clear to proof how much does the business need to operate, and how much existing seed money had already been injected into this business.

You can’t proof “oh here’s my savings account I need about $5000 a month” that isn’t your business, that’s your lavish/hermit lifestyle, nobody cares about that but you. But if you had your business sending you a $5000 salary, you can easily provide that as clear proof that’s the cost of the business, every month.

So, that is the first lesson.

Move your savings into your business, pay yourself a living salary, and work on your business, not in your business.

I’m grateful for Brent and Elaine for these conversations.

History

For the details which might make sense why there are different dates in the Flow Studio journey. He’s a rough timeline.

2018 April - Flow Studio the product started as a side project
2018 November - Started accepting Stripe subscriptions
2019 June - Until June, Flow Studio operated under a sole trader business registration in Australia
2019 July - incorporated Flow Studio Solutions - a product company that does a side consulting to build the product.
2019 October - first quarter. This update.

Flow Studio subscription discount finishes very soon

Photo by Fabian Blank on Unsplash

This will very brief.

At the end of this weekend - Most of the Flow Studio customer’s accounts will flip from Trial to Free status. There is a current discount that will expire in less than two days.

Going forward, I intend to build out more and more features but they will all be behind the subscription. Aside from general UX changes the free tier is unlikely to receive additional features.

Subscriptions

As part of this initial roll over, I wanted to do a special discount to thank my current customers and encourage everyone to move to subscription. This discount is set at $70 / first year.

View fullsize

Future Discounts?

Since I believe Flow Studio to be excellent value at $10/month (or $100/year), I’m unlikely to offer any future discounts. I’m more interested in building compelling features that Makers, partners and businesses needs to be extra-successful.

I didn’t make this a big marketing fanfare, as I’m a learning startup founder and selling things is something I’m learning.

Currently status: I’m still better at making things than actually selling them.

Partnerships

Many of the current subscriptions are sold and tied to the Service User account that enterprise Flows are running under. Essentially this is a “prod” license.

We see a lot of conversations in the months ahead with Makers directly for their business, or with the consultancies that are implementing Microsoft Flow across tenants, to make sure the Flow Studio subscription is a great product both for creating better Flows as well as monitoring your running Flows.

Talk to us about these partnerships. Whether it is bulk licensing, or multiple tenant scenarios. We are very early in this stage so you get to get in the door first.

Some upcoming plans over the next two months:

• Two major features still under development - if you are interested let me know we can talk privately about feature priorities.

• A series of short YouTube videos that explains the hundreds of use cases that you need Flow Studio.

• Probably a FlowStudio main site make over for users visiting and not logged in.

• May be look for a co-founder?

Thank you

Thank you so much for your time, energy, support over the last 6 months since I pushed Flow Studio out the door. It’s a journey I’m very much enjoying, and I loved talking to you all about how to use it and why you would need it.

P.S sorry I said brief and then posted a wall of text again!