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 ·

The Decline of Facebook

April 4, 2011 by · 41 Comments

Facebook

Facebook really hit the mainstream consciousness about 1-2 years ago, depending on who you ask. That’s about the time that its value as a social network really started plummeting for me. Each day I get bombarded with friend requests, many from people that I don’t know or have never even heard of. Don’t even get me started on fan pages and apps. I realize that everyone has different goals and reasons for using Facebook. Maybe you really do want to see the firehose of constant inane status updates from people you don’t know.

If you’ve been using Facebook since the beginning then you’re more likely see it becoming increasingly meaningless, which is a sad, but predictable, evolution. Back when Facebook was new it was actually exciting to check your stream and see what was happening because the friends that you had were people that you actually wanted to keep in touch with. 20 Facebook friends in 2005 is worth about 250 Facebook friends today.

Personally, it feels like my Facebook stream is becoming an email inbox. I get a lot of messages, a few of them matter to me, and there are lots of business newsletters and promotions. Facebook apps (that I don’t even use) that clutter my stream are just spam. Maybe Facebook is becoming email 2.0?

All of these issues have led me to think about better ways to utilize social networks. Facebook has tried to solve the problem of overfriending with Facebook Groups, but that wasn’t helpful. It’s a lot of work to go through and manually add people to different lists, groups, or whatever the term is at the moment. Other social networks, like Path, are devoted to reinforcing relationships between much smaller groups of people. I think that there is room for a social network that solves these problems and makes social networking fun again.

For the record, I don’t consider Twitter to be part of this conversation. I actually agree with Twitter that they are not a social network.

Do you still find Facebook useful? What would you change to bring it back to form?

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

April 2nd is World Autism Awareness Day

April 2, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Autism affects nearly 1 in every 110 children today, including my nephew. Please take a minute to think about autism today (World Autism Awareness Day) and what you can do to help spread awareness. You can show your support by taking part in Light It Up Blue.

Filed Under: Misc · Tagged With: ,

Making The Jump From Side Project To Full-Time Job

March 31, 2011 by · 3 Comments

Freedom

Are you spending your vacation days working our your side project? Nights and weekends too? Most anyone who has ever started a new business as a side project dreams of the day they can quit their day job and focus on 100% of their time on their entrepreneurial pursuit. I was lucky enough to be able to make that same transition a few years back. Here are a few things to consider when contemplating “the leap”.

Can You Afford It?

This is the most obvious and critical question of all. Money isn’t everything, but it sure is handy for paying the bills. I’m assuming that if you’re getting ready to quit your day job that you either have enough income through the new business to support yourself or that you have enough savings to live comfortably for several months. The most difficult part of leaving a job is seeing that regular paycheck disappear. Having a husband/wife and kids compounds the issue even further. How does your significant other feel about the risks you’re considering? Are they comfortable with the increased amount of uncertainty that you’ll be bringing into your lives?

What About Health Insurance?

If you’re used to having health and dental insurance through your day job you may be in for quite a shock when you see how much it costs when you’re paying for it individually. The cost of health insurance is going to depend on several things: your age, general level of health, location, family situation, and more. You should consider how often you visit the doctor or tend to get sick when thinking about whether or not health insurance is a priority. If you have kids then you’re more likely to need coverage. Before quitting your current job you should inquire about COBRA coverage and costs. COBRA gives you up to 18 months of coverage through your current employer’s plan. You will pay 100% of the cost, but you don’t have to worry about finding insurance right away. You can expect this cost to be at least $500 for individuals and $750 for families monthly. You’ll have the option to choose just health insurance or health and dental coverage.

What About Retirement?

Starting your own retirement plan (Roth IRA is the way to go) is easy enough. I recommend rolling over any amount you have in your employer’s retirement plan into your own account so that you can manage it yourself. Depending on your age you may want to limit the amount of money you put into your IRA, just to give you more cashflow flexibility for a few months after the transition.

Make A List of Pre-Requisites For Quitting

Something I did that I highly recommend for everyone is making a list of all your pre-requisites for quitting your day job. The list should include all of your concerns and requirements. Make the list at least 3-4 months ahead of time to give yourself enough time to thoroughly think everything through. Once you get to the point where no major concerns remain on your pre-requisites list then it may be time to act. Some examples of things to be on the list are:

  • Have $XXXX saved and available for living expenses
  • Have new retirement accounts created
  • Research insurance costs
  • Have new business incorporated
  • Have home office ready (or research new workplace)

DON’T Take a Vacation First

I really hope that you don’t decide you need a vacation before you start working on your new job full-time. The best thing that you can do is to jump in with both feet and hustle as hard as you can right from the start. I remember being so passionate and excited to start working full-time at MediaLeaf that I couldn’t possibly think of doing anything else or delaying it any longer. If you would rather take a vacation or a break than get started with your new venture then you may have the wrong motivations and should reconsider decisions. For those of you that have successfully made the jump, what are your experiences? Any advice for others looking to do the same thing?

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