Communicating With Your Distributed Team

May 9, 2011 by · 2 Comments

Plastic Toy Soldiers Experiment: Communication and a Machine Gun

The MediaLeaf team is a great example of a distributed team; we’re located in Florida, South Carolina, Texas, and Georgia. None of us live close to any other team member. With these geographical barriers it’s easy to run into communication issues. Here are a few things that we’ve done over the years to help ease the pains and keep an open line of communication.

1. Instant messaging is the primary means of communication. Most of our communication is through IM, whichever particular client/platform team members choose doesn’t matter to me. (I use and recommend Adium, by the way).  IM is great for keeping conversations short and to the point. Plus, a good client will keep a history for you. Those chat transcripts are invaluable to me and I reference them often for links, questions I’ve already asked, and more. Note: We tried using Campfire from 37signals for a while but found that it didn’t offer any major improvements over what we were already doing, plus it required another app or browser window to remain open.

2. Email for long-form questions. I believe that email is the ultimate communication tool. I tend to send emails to team members when they are away or aren’t signed into IM. I also tend to send emails when I request new features or ask for research to be done. It gives me the space/time to write out the entire request without being interrupted.

3. Scheduled team calls for major events. We’ve had scheduled phone calls when major development projects are under or to have brainstorming sessions. Sometimes we’ll include screen sharing if it’s warranted. Note: We experimented with Webex and determined that we didn’t need it. We typically just do Mac screen-sharing now.

4. Phone calls are a last resort. Phone calls are always secondary to IM. Phone calls take all of your attention, so they should only be used for conversations that require 100% attention. The beauty of IM is that conversations there can take place while you’re actively working on something else. IM also lets you have multiple conversations at one time, which can’t be done over a phone.

What are your tips for keeping in touch with team members? Comments welcome!

Filed Under: Tips and Tools · Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Why I Dislike The Term “Lifestyle Business”

May 6, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Shower Time

I have a hard time with the term “lifestyle business”. There are many definitions of what exactly a lifestyle business is, but I think the prevailing definition is any business which doesn’t have a sale  as an exit strategy or where the owner of the business puts personal motivations ahead of the success of the business.

Let’s take my company MediaLeaf as an example. I have no plans to ever sell my company, or any part of my company. This is where a VC would write me off as owning a “lifestyle business”. However, I don’t see MediaLeaf in that way at all. I believe it is as valid a business as any in Silicon Valley. What about butchers, salons, grocery stores, etc.? I highly doubt that most of those kind of businesses are built with an eventual buyout in mind, but that doesn’t invalidate them.

Instead of “lifestyle business”, let’s simply call them businesses. They all have the same basic goals, which are to make money for the principles of the company.

What are your thoughts on lifestyle businesses? Do you like/dislike the term?

Filed Under: Bootstrapping, Misc · Tagged With: ,

Is Mobile 2.0 The Next Great Technology?

May 4, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Lunchtime networking

The internet has already went through a few sea changes in it’s brief lifetime. First there was Web 1.0, the birth of the major e-commerce sites like Amazon and eBay. Then, with Web 2.0, highly dynamic sites like Digg pushed the ideas of what a web app can do. Then came the social media craze (I really think social is Web 3.0). Next came the mobile explosion, bringing an entirely new way to think about how data is consumed.

What’s next? What technology will take us even further? Will it be Mobile 2.0? Will it be Web 4.0? Something new entirely?

The Evolution of Internet-Related Technologies

Think about the evolution in terms of ease of access to data and availability of data. With Web 1.0 the web was pretty static. Search engines were really the only way that you could find things, save for emails from friends and family. You had to really stumble across interesting things.

Web 2.0 made that simpler by giving you a few centralized sites to visit to find lots of information that interests you. News/link aggregators like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc. became the default location for internet users who wanted to know what was going on. These sites work on the principle that one user will post something for others to see, kind of like giant bulletin boards with lots of nice organization and user customization.

The rise of social media took the ideas of Web 2.0 to the next level by making information sharing nearly instant. Twitter and Facebook allow users to send content that their friends will see instantly.

Mobile is an interesting branch in the evolutionary tree. Mobile technologies currently take the best information for social media and Web 2.0 and translate it into mobile-friendly packages for consumption. The biggest unique attribute for mobile currently is location based services like Foursquare, but I expect that to change.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Based on where we’ve come so far the evolution is clearly trending toward making data more accessible, and, to me, that means that mobile 2.0 is where we’re heading. I don’t know what mobile 2.0 is going to be , but I do believe that it will move mobile beyond simple location based services and into the realm of everyday activities for the existing web. More social, more news, more real-time data that you can carry with you. Maybe it’s  a new breed of mobile games, ones that let you connect with other players as you move about in the real world. It’s too early to tell, but I’m excited to see what’s next.

Filed Under: Features, Social · Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Don’t Let Up – Work Harder

April 25, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Never underestimate the value of hard work as a critical component in the success of your organization. Having great ideas and being efficient is also important, but hard work is often the determining factor between success and failure.

If something isn’t going your way… work harder.

Working harder means putting in more hours, watching less television, eating quicker meals, having fewer meeting, putting work ahead of leisure, and much more. Working harder is as much a state of mind as it is a physical act. You have to decide for yourself that you are going to make the sacrifices necessary to overcome your obstacles.

Here’s the key… once you’ve put in the hard work and you’ve successfully overcome your obstacles you should continue the hard work. Don’t let up! Hard work is a habit, so you shouldn’t be so quick to let it go once it’s not absolutely essential to your survival. Use your hard work habit to become even more successful.

I saw this video on Dan Martell’s blog a while back and it inspired me to the point that I’ve watched everything I can find from Eric Thomas. If you can watch this video and not be inspired to work as hard as you possibly can then there’s nothing that I or anyone else can do to help you.

Filed Under: Misc · Tagged With: , , ,

Learning To Be A Salesman

April 22, 2011 by · 1 Comment

Fruits for sale

Some people are natural salesmen (or saleswomen). I am not one of them. I don’t have a single fiber in my body that wants to be a salesman. However, that’s not an option when you run a company. Running a successful company requires you to understand sales and even be pretty good at it. The ability to make money is absolutely necessary for any small business owner. If you don’t make money then you won’t be in business long; pretty straightforward and unavoidable. You have to be able to make money, and a large part of that is figuring out what makes customers want to buy and learning how to lead them to a buying decision.

For me, the ability to make money has been a learning process. I’m pretty good at a lot of things naturally, but making money didn’t come naturally. I’ve learned a lot over the last few years about marketing and how customers think. That experience has been invaluable in helping me to hone my abilities.

My Key Learnings Over The Years

  1. Consumers tend to be skeptical, especially of online companies. You have to really make yourself appear trustworthy to gain any consideration. Potential customers will read reviews about your site and any other information they can learn about your service before deciding whether or not to buy. This is the rule, not the exception, so be prepared.
  2. Marketing and advertising is an iterative process. Much like A/B testing on your website, you have to continually test and improve your sales, marketing, and advertising strategies.
  3. Sales strategies will evolve over time. Markets change quickly, so you have to constantly be looking at long-term trends to determine where 1) your industry is going over the next few years and 2) where your site is going relative to your industry. Just because a particular strategy or market segment is profitable for you today doesn’t guarantee its future success or viability.
  4. Try several different approaches. Depending on what you need to sell you should try as many different ways as possible to reach your potential customers. Try cold calls, cold emails, handwritten letters, anything you can think of.

Links

I started a question on Quora – What Are The Top 5 Must-Read Sales Books?

Jason Fried’s Inc. article about How to Get Good At Making Money

 

Filed Under: Features, Marketing, Tips and Tools · Tagged With: , , , ,

More Shameless Self-Promotion

April 21, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Occasionally I just come out and ask you to subscribe to this blog. Having subscribers to my RSS and newsletter feeds are one of the key ways that I can tell if I’m making an impact and reaching anyone. If you enjoy what I’ve been doing here then I ask you to subscribe to my feeds, get on the newsletter list, follow me on Twitter and Facebook, whatever you want to do. I always need comments and conversation right here on the blog, so please interact when you have something to say. We’ve had a lot of positive growth over the last few weeks; let’s keep it up.

Thanks for your time… now back to the regularly scheduling programming.

 

Filed Under: Misc · Tagged With:

Why Aren’t There Generic Web Apps?

April 18, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Generic

I was walking through Target a few days ago when something struck me. Why are there no “generic” apps or “store brand” apps out there? I have never seen a generic Basecamp or Mailchimp. Physical products created by a brand almost aways have a store brand competitor on the shelf, so why is that not the case in the web industry? A well-made product that offers almost the same functionality as a more expensive standard can have a nice market niche.

The barriers to entry for creating web apps have never been lower. Cloud hosting and computer make infrastructure costs ridiculously low compared to even 2 years ago. There is a ton of development talent in India, China, and elsewhere that can be had for much cheaper than in the US. This low cost to entry is another reason that generic apps should be common.

I have a few ideas as to why you DON’T see generic versions of popular apps:

  • Technological – While the cost barriers are lower than ever there are still significant technical hurdles, such as scaling, to overcome for almost all of the popular apps.
  • Intellectual Property – I’m sure many of the most profitable web apps out there have significant intellectual property protection
  • Onward and Upward – tech companies are unique in that they are always looking for the next thing, not rehashing or remaking what is already available.

What do you think? Can you recall seeing any generic web apps?

Filed Under: Marketing · Tagged With: , , ,

Impact of Having a Front Page Article at Hacker News

April 15, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

My Analytics

I was lucky enough to have my Decline of Facebook article make the front page at Hacker News on April 4, 2011, the day the article was published. I wanted to drop some numbers here and show the results of having that much traffic hit my site. These things interest me, so I’m sure many of you will be interested as well.

Here are some details to put the numbers into context. The article reached a max position (as far as I know) of about #14 on the front page and averaged around position #18. It was listed on the front page for about 1.5 hours. Not a huge amount of time or a super high ranking, but it still provided a tremendous amount of traffic.

Basic Analytics

The article received about 2755 visits on April 4 and around 343 on April 5. So let’s say just 3100 total pageviews in 2 days. According to my analytics about 95% of the pageviews can be attributed to Hacker News, either directly or indirectly.

  • Of those 3100 pageviews, only 186 readers actually looked at other articles on the blog (1.06 pageviews per visitor, 95.87% bounce rate).
  • Average time on the site was 4 minutes 10 seconds, plenty of time to read the entire article.
  • Nearly half of the traffic coming from HN shows up in Google Analytics as “direct” traffic. For whatever reason GA isn’t able to properly identify that traffic as being from HN, but I know that’s the source.

Server Impact

I use and love ChartBeat, so when I get significant traffic on any site I stay glued to my monitor to “watch” as users move around the site. During the 1.5 hours I was on the front page at HN I consistently had around 200-220 visitors on the site at any given time. I use Rackspace Cloud for my hosting, so I noticed no impact on page load times.

My blog loads a little slowly due to the graphics, lengthy text, etc. It varies between 2 seconds and 3.5 seconds, depending on the page. I realize that I need to implement some more caching on my WordPress install, but I know that server strain wasn’t an issue because user page load times were the same whether there were 2 users on the page or 200. Being able to monitor user load times is a key feature that I use from ChartBeat.

Lasting Impact

I have 21 new subscribers to my RSS feed that I can attribute to the HN article. That equates to about 0.7% subscription rate. It’s harder to tell about how many new Twitter followers I received as a result, but it’s negligible, if any. My last count had about 30 tweets with links to the post.

This was far and away the most popular article that I’ve had in my 2 months of blogging. Thanks to all who read and took the time to make comments or share the story.

 

Filed Under: Case Studies, Social, Tips and Tools · Tagged With: ,

Too Many Irons in the Fire

April 13, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Iron

The biggest day-to-day problem that I’ve had (and I’m assuming many of you can relate to) is having too many different large projects going on at a time. At MediaLeaf we nearly always have one or two new web apps in development as well as the day to day work on our existing businesses. Each of those things is a major time consumer, requiring dedicated attention from both marketing and development.

My current count has MediaLeaf with 6 different businesses, each with a varying degree of work required. The established businesses need less development work and more time spent on marketing and social media. The new businesses need more development work on new features, pivots, bugs, etc. All of the businesses require some amount of customer support. MediaLeaf itself requires a substantial amount of time spent on finance, payroll, taxes, legal, etc. That’s a lot of work that needs to be done on a continual basis, especially for a small team.

A multitude of problems can arise from situations like this. This entire list is from personal experience.

  • Entire projects get neglected due to fire-fighting on existing businesses
  • Development time suffers due to large customer support burdens
  • Marketing and social media marketing suffer because of development on new projects

There are certainly many more combinations or problems and responsibilities that fall by the wayside in busy companies. The most important factors are how you combat these situations and minimize them as much as possible. Any CEO in  a small company has to understand that fire-fighting is going to be a constant. Unless you have a staff of at least 15 people you are always going to have nearly your whole team working on priority issues.

Tips for Handling Excessive Workloads

Here are a few of things that I’ve implemented at MediaLeaf to help us cope with the vast amount of work that we have to accomplish with our small team.

1. Schedule Work In Weekly Chunks

At the beginning of each week you should set a direction for that week. The primary objective that you choose to work on for the week should be the single most important thing that is facing your company. It can be development work on a new startup that you have coming or maybe it’s adding a new feature to an existing business. The point is that you should just choose one theme for the week. This helps everyone on the team understand what the priority is and helps keep attention where it needs to be. If you have smaller projects then it may make sense to schedule work in daily chunks instead of weekly.

2. Customer Support Doesn’t Have to Be Continuous

Customer support has always been a significant proportion of our time spent, so we’ve experimented with various methods of fitting it into the daily routine. We don’t have a dedicated support team, so support duties are spread to everyone in the company. Support is always a priority and takes up time each day, but don’t make it take more time than it needs by constantly checking to see what work is out there.

We’ve went through periods where we did all customer support tickets once per day (we don’t do phone or live chat support) and we’ve had times where we answered tickets consistently as they came in. Here’s what we’ve learned: it doesn’t matter how often you do support, as long as you do it and do it well. Customers don’t really care if they have to wait 24 hours for a response if they get a good response and are satisfied. Our current process is to answer tickets about 3 times per day, and those times vary depending on who has the support duties for the day.  We never have customers tell us that our response times are too slow, so we feel pretty good about our what we’re doing.

3. Push Administrative and Financial Work To Once Per Week

Financial work, such as handling payroll, paying taxes, etc. can all be accomplished in day, probably even in a single morning. You should do the same with administrative work, such as filing, ordering office supplies, and general organization around the office. Pushing these routine, but not time critical, tasks to a regularly scheduled day will let you get them done when they need to be done without letting them affect the more important tasks.

4. Follow Your Favorite Productivity System

A good personal productivity system, such as Getting Things Done (affiliate link), The 4-Hour Workweek (affiliate link), or anything else that works for you is always a good idea. You only have so much time to work, so you have to be sure that you’re getting as much done in that amount of times as possible.

What advice do you have for handling incredibly large workloads? How do you manage multiple companies or large projects?

Filed Under: Bootstrapping, Features · Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Scheduled Blog Hiatus

April 6, 2011 by · 1 Comment

I’m taking a week or so off from blogging for the best of reasons….. my second daughter is going to be born tomorrow morning! My wife and I will be at the hospital for a couple of days before we begin general sleep deprivation.

I thought about scheduling articles to go out anyway, but decided against it because I won’t be as able to respond to comments, social media, and everything else. So I just decided to let the crickets chirp for a week or so.  See you in a week!

Filed Under: Misc ·
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