Mansilla Dev

Whether or not you’re an entrepreneur, someone has probably approached you with a sure fire business opportunity.  An untapped market, or maybe an inside exclusive deal that will guarantee significant profits. These opportunities read like the headlines from the cover of a small business start-up magazine.  While it is sometimes easy to spot the difference between gold and pyrite business opportunities, it is the gold-plated deals that are difficult to spot, and can often cost you the most money and time.

Cutting to the chase: you know you’re in business with the wrong person when he wants to move your Internet technology company into peddling automotive spare tire covers.

The tire cover product isn’t even the worst part of the story.  All of this was going down in the middle of the dot-com bubble.  The perfect time to peddle techno-pyrite (fool’s gold), get rolled up into another tech giant, go public, and get Jay-Z rich.  Right?  No.  Lets take a trip into Bizarro World and sell covers for spare tires on the back of sport utility vehicles.  I earned Uranium Medallion Status for my round-trip flights to Business Bizarro World with my old business partners.

What was the attraction?  Money.  Easy money.  No effort required.  Brand licensing through existing business contacts.  Manufacturing all figured out (yes, we’re even talking about having them made here in the US).  Rehashing this story makes me feel, well, stupid.  But back then, it was such a sure-fire opportunity.. I mean, really — everybody wants their favorite major league team covering their spare tire for $75.  And trademark licensing should be a snap.  Wrong, and wrong.

But rewind — how in the heck did I get sold on this gold-plated opportunity?  There was an Internet component — an e-commerce site needed to be programmed to handle the masses of transactions from customers rushing to claim their tire covers.  There had to be an online presence for all of the dealers/resellers to sign up so that they too could be a part of this tire cover revolution.  This opportunity, of course, is in perfect alignment with building micro and vertical search technology or IP-based geo-location technology, right?  Dead wrong.

If anyone, including a trusted business partner, approaches you with a sure-fire idea or opportunity that will not require time and money resources — tell them to drop off the bags of cash and bricks of platinum on your desk, and then get back to work on your core business.

So, back here on Earth, harmful opportunities aren’t nearly as stark as that train wreck described above.  Most of the time, they’re more subtle, such as ideas that would appear (on the surface) to complement or enhance your business objectives.  A new Web analytic tool, SEO campaign, social media strategy, site redesign, public relations initiative, and so on.  One way to identify a harmful opportunity is to listen closely to the person who is making the pitch.  If it’s an unsolicited pitch coming from the outside, you’re likely to be scrutinous.  If it’s coming from inside the company (such as my foray into tire covers), your knee jerk reaction to give it the nod might be an incredible mistake.

Listen closely to them.  Is this a completely new direction or does it complement your core business?  Is it being pitched with life and death consequences?  Is this idea or direction suddenly being referred to as “our bread and butter”?  Does it sound raw and unrefined, possibly catalyzed from a blog article or from a competitor’s feature list?  Does the idea sound neat but not really about your core business?  Has the idea really been fully researched and developed, or is it just a synapse that fired and shot out of their mouth?  If any of those conditions are met, then for the love of Pete, do not say yes.

Notice that I’m not suggesting to shut it down.  Not right away.  If it isn’t part of your core business, it’s probably just going to whither on the vine no matter how many resources you pour into it.  If the idea isn’t fully developed, the person has already wasted company time, and your time.  Defend your resources from these black holes.

Be conscious of how often you’re being asked to divert your resources.  Be conscious of how often you’re actually allowing yourself to be distracted, too.  If the problem is chronic and you’re having to refocus your team over and over, then shut it down.  If it feels like I’m speaking directly to you, then you know exactly what you need to do.

Moral of the story — tire covers sold: zero.

Original photo at http://www.flickr.com/photos/naughtomaton/388242905/

A few hours ago I left the Moscone Center in San Francisco at the conclusion of Google IO, the developers conference.  This was my first Google dev-con and it was as I expected — full of good content, good food, and knowledgeable people.  I was particularly interested in the sessions around Google App Engine (GAE), Google Web Toolkit (GWT), and Android (mobile).  There were some pleasant surprises, such as each attendee receiving a free Google Android G2 phone (HTC Magic) as well as the announcement of Google Wave, the new real-time collaborative program framework.  It was a conference for coders, that is for certain.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ve probably heard about Java support in GAE.  Getting GAE/Java up and running couldn’t be easier because it’s packaged as an Eclipse plug-in.  When you’re setting it up, you also get GWT bundled right in.  And deploying your first Hello World application?  Easy as microwave popcorn.  Ola Bini (ThoughtWorks) of JRuby notoriety gave a session at Google IO on JRuby on GAE, which means that Rails fanatics should be happy to know that their apps should deploy on GAE with little modification.  Ola also built a demo of (probably) the first 3rd-party Google Wave robot extension (with early access to Wave sandbox)… written in Ioke, a folding programming language (designed by Ola) that runs on top of the JVM, deployed on GAE.  A demo without the fancy IDEs.. just Emacs and deployed at the CLI.

Google Wave was announced at the keynote presentation (HQ YouTube video) on Thursday morning.  I walked in a few minutes late, and they were showing real-time chat between two different client computers.  Imagine onKeyPress event triggers, as opposed to waiting to hit Send.  That’s what I saw on the big screens.  There was a huge applause, which puzzled me, because I used to use this all of the time back in the days of ICQ chat.  But as the demo went on, it became far more impressive… far more compelling from a product/service development standpoint.  Google built a set of APIs that allow us to construct real-time collaborative apps — built entirely on GWT.  Wave keeps a history/timeline that tracks revisions and can be played back by the user to see the state of the collaborative work (whether it be a wiki, blog post, map, anything really) at any given point in time.  And because it’s based on GWT (AJAX), the same code can be deployed on mobile devices, such as Android and iPhone.

Google also made the conference fun.  Kicking it off by giving away a free HTC Magic… I felt like a kid (but from a movie) under the Christmas tree (in real life, I usually received an envelope with cash).  Wednesday (day 1) night, there was a nice “after hours” party (21 and up), with lots of drinks, food, authentic party-rousing DJ (Mike Relm), Maker Faire gadgeteers, and video games.  I played Missile Command and Centipede, and pwnd.  There was also a bar-code scavenger hunt with our new Android phones.  I haven’t heard what the first place winner received.  I shared a lunch table with the winner, Abraham, a few hours before the hunt ended, and he was guessing the prize was a t-shirt, whereas I imagined it was a Google-branded hybrid SUV that gets 130 MPG.

To sum it up, I thought it was a great conference.  I only wish I could have attended more sessions.  I look forward to playing with Google Wave, deploying actual production JRuby apps on GAE, tooling around with my new Android phone, and hacking my first Android app.  It was  also very affordable ($50 academic, $300/early-bird).   I’ll definitely be back next year.

I saw Dave McClure, Master of 500 Hats, speak @ an SDForum several weeks ago.  Dave has over 18,000 followers on Twitter, and is a Silicon Valley veteran, startup consultant, angel investor, and self proclaimed marketing “nerd”, but most of us would probably s/nerd/expert/ig. Well, at least us nerds would.  Some background information on Dave from his site bio: he’s a veteran software developer, entrepreneur, startup advisor, angel investor, and blogger.  He’s an advisor or investor for Mint.com, SlideShare.net, KissMetrics.com and a plethora of other tech companies.  His current passion is helping startups with Internet marketing, product strategy, and startup metrics.

The last part, startup metrics, is the topic that Dave covered in his talk.  He started giving this talk a couple of years ago.. and he calls it: Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR!! (Startup Metrics for Product Marketing & Product Management). You can see his SlideShare presentation here.  AARRR is an acronym that stands for:

Acquisition: users come to Web site from various channels
Activation: users enjoy 1st visit and have a “happy” experience
Retention: users come back , visit site multiple times
Referral: users like product enough to refer others
Revenue: users conduct some monetization behavior

I’m not going to regurgitate his entire presentation in this article.  Dave presents a lot of interesting ideas and tools that companies should use, but I’m here to get specific about Measuring What’s in the Middle.  As Dave puts it, that’s the good stuff, referring to what’s in the middle, Activation, Retention and Referral.

Caveman Metrics – Ugh.

If you’re an entrepreneur or have ever been involved in an online marketing campaign, one of the first questions you ask yourself (or get asked) is, How do drive millions of people to our site? That’s acquisition.  There are many ways to obtain traffic, from paid advertising campaigns, promotional offers, getting online press, as well as a host of sinister methods.  Recently, a strong emphasis has been placed on building traffic through social networks, such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.  So, lets just imagine you plan on doing all of these above — paid advertising, SEO for organic result boosts on search results, blogging, Twittering, promotional giveaways, the whole nine yards.

What do you do next?  Naturally, you log into Google Analytics, Web Trends, or look at your Webalyzer reports and say, “Wow, look! Last week we had 3,000 visits to our site, and 2,900 were uniques!” You take a look at your subscription/signup stats, and say, “Whoah, dang. In that same period we had only 12 account registrations and 3 inquiries.”

With out-of-the-box Web measurement tools, that’s pretty much what you get.  Search keyword referrals (how people found your site), ad campaign CTR (click-thru rate), visitors/uniques, day/time graphs, and so on.  They look really cool, but what are they really telling you that’s valuable?  This is what I call caveman metrics.  You take a cursory head-count of visitors coming in, and take a look at the bottom line of how many signed up.

Pirate Metrics – Aarrr!

Be very specific about what you’re measuring.  Within the activation, retention and referral categories, define goals for which you can measure conversion (success).  For instance, create a metric for a “happy first visit” — such as spending X time on the site, and performing Y actions.  Another metric could be the measure of sign-ups for a specific feature within the site that you’re trying to push the user to, such as signing up for a free widget, newsletter, etc.  Only with specific goals and measures can you tweak and re-measure with any level of confidence that you’re steering user behavior in the right direction.

Revolving Door or Turn-Style

Depending on how well you tune your internal Web strategy, your site can resemble a revolving door or a turn-style.  A revolving door meaning that people walk into the roating glass cylinder and exit before they even step into your establishment.  Or your Web site can resemble a series of turn-styles where you strategically lead them into actions for which they pass through (and are counted) with the expectation that they’re moving forward and getting some value/benefit out of the experience.

When you visit a Web site (even one that you traverse often), take notice of how this site leads you to actions.  That’s not by accident.  It was designed to lead you there.  When you visit a new site that is a complete turn off, or just doesn’t engage you into action, also take notice.  Those are every day examples of turn-style vs. revolving door experiences.

Conclusion: The Fundamentals Apply

There really is no short cut, no silver bullet.  Tools exist that can help you measure more effectively and efficiently, but these tools do not know your business.. they do not know your goals.  Only you know what those goals are.   The point of this article: go beyond basic metrics (i.e. WebTrends, Google Analyitics, Webalyzer, etc.) because alone, they do not tell you anything about your Web site strategy.  Get specific about the user segments that are visiting your site, and what you want each of these segments to do so that they’re happy, they come back for more, and they refer their peers to your Web site.  Keep tuning your site strategy so that you continually increase those results, and reap the plunder… aarrr!

Of course, I’m not doing Dave’s presentation/content justice.  He speaks at meetups/conferences often, and I highly recommend seeing him because his lessons are easy to digest and immediately applicable.  Here’s a video from a couple years back of Dave McClure giving a turbo presentation.  The content of his presentations today is very similar, which in my opinion, speaks volumes.

A few weeks ago I decided to look for a local design firm to handle some UI (user interface) work on a small Web application project.  I figured I could repeat the success that I had from one of my recent projects in which I found some local (Detroit / southeastern Michigan) talent and services to complete a job.  Some of design firms did not have complete contact information (i.e. phone number, address), so I figured that they were probably home-based or part-time firms, which, in all honesty, was fine with me, in the context of this small project.  Some of them had incredible portfolios, but a majority of them were just decent, in terms of their presentation… which, given their market, is a bit of a shame.

I found a total of five design firms that I liked — all small houses, nothing at the caliber of Fry or Organic.  Those with phone numbers available, I called.  No humans answered, so I left messages.  And all five I wrote e-mails to (or filled out their contact forms), explaining my interest in having them do some simple design and UI work for a “small but professional Web-facing application.”  On the technical side, I told them it was “basic HTML/CSS and static graphics work — no RIA (i.e. Flash, Flex, etc.) or heavy AJAX/JavaScripting”.

So, you’re well aware of the macro economic downturn we are experiencing.. right?  Here it is, ripe, juicy, low-hanging fruit for the taking.  And how many of the five hands are grabbing for it?  Zero.  Absolutely not a single e-mail or phone call back.  I was shocked, and really disappointed.   I actually pass by one of these firms a couple days a week, and I see people there, I assume, working.  Maybe someone just dropped the ball inadvertantly, in all five cases, right?

Several days later, I find contact e-mail addresses either by domain name record, or somewhere else on their Web sites (where possible, one only had a Web contact form — no e-mail, no phone number).  At this point, it’s purely for research: How many of these people/companies will respond with anything? Mind you, we received no bounce-backs from dead e-mail addresses.  The second wave of inquiries go out..

Absolutely nothing.  I am, to this day, floored.  I have been tempted to knock on the door of the firm that I called, left a message, and wrote two e-mails to, and speak directly to the first person at the door: Hey, any chance you’d like some business? But, no way.  As much as I would love to help out a local small business, if you can’t even return a phone call or e-mail, just imagine the teeth pulling required to get work done.  A molar for a first draft creative?  A root canal for a delivery on the UI templates?  I think not, especially when I would be the one feeling the pain of the extractions.

The moral (or molar) of the story is this:  He or she who “shows up” wins, because the competition sure isn’t. When an opportunity presents itself,  find out everything about it, and if it fits, own it. But step one is reply to your inquiries, and do it fast.

When Delta bought Northwest, there were a lot of questions as to how they would manage the frequent flier incentive programs.  They’ve kept the miles program separate, with exception to the Medallion and Elite qualifying miles credit unification.  However, just the other day Delta announced the “Link SkyMiles and WorldPerks Accounts” — simply provide both of your account numbers, and bingo, they’ll give you 500 bonus miles (to your Delta SkyMiles account).

So now, you can send miles back and forth between Delta & NWA without penalty (as I understand).  That’s a really cool feature because sometimes Delta has great redemption deals (i.e. 47K miles redemption for business class round trip tickets), and Northwest has their PerkSaver program (i.e. 12K miles redemption one way, and cash for return trip).  I just used the PerkSaver program for the first time — 12K miles + $149 for round trip from DTW to SFO.  Not shabby.

Point of the Post: Get your 500 free miles simply by linking up your SkyMiles and WorldPerks accounts!

The Mountain View JavaScript Meetup Group kicked off their 2009 season @ Google (Googleplex in Mountain View – building 43, Tunis). Trevor was the resident Google employee that hooked up the conference room. Nicholas Zakas of Yahoo! gave a talk on the performance of local variables vs. global variables in JavaScript. Lesson? Use local. In fact, inside of a function, if you refer to an object/variable outside the scope of that function several times, it pays dividends to assign a local variable reference to that object, and call on that local reference instead of multiple calls to the outer-scope variable. Other languages, he points out, have the advantage of automatic compile-time optimizations; however, it’s up to coder in JS to optimize the code. So, rather than just accept the fact that “local vars are faster than global vars“, he proved it with tests across several platforms/browsers, and showed interesting graphs.

Davey Waterson from Apatana (of Ruby/Rails IDE fame) presented on ActiveRecord.js. Very cool and easy way to hook into databases in a cross platform manner in JS. Getting and setting persistent data across JS to a client or server is quick and dirty with ActiveRecord.js. It’s cross platform, cross browser. Easily connect to SQLite or even MySQL using Jaxer, Apatana’a Server-Side JavaScript engine. I use Aptana IDE (an Eclipse derivative) for Rails development in Linux, as a side note, and it’s quite sharp. Man alive, that’s three versions of Eclipse installed on my laptop.

Last talk was given by Tom Robinson of 280 North. He spoke about his port of Rack (minimal interface between webservers supporting Ruby and Ruby frameworks) into JavaScript, called Jack (on Github). I’ll let you check out the Github page for a better explanation of what Jack does for you, and spare you the cut-and-paste.

I liked having the meetup @ Google because there’s already plenty of people on-site to attend, and that made out of some quality Q&A sessions. Okay, I like the smoothies in the lobby, and snacks dispersed around the office too.

Just as I started off my morning with a fresh WordPress installation, and a new years optimism rushing through my veins, trying to think of a way to kick off a new blog with enthusiasm, champagne, fireworks… I noticed the steam billowing from the top of my tall coffee mug.  Ahh.. freshly brewed, hot silky smooth black coffee.. a coincidental metaphor for my new blog.

[lift mug - take sip]
Oh dangit, WAY TOO HOT! Tongue feels like sandpaper.
[lower mug  - ka-plunk!]
[splash of hot-liquid recoiling directly into right eye]
@^%^*#&&!%@!!

My 3.7 year old daughter asked me, “Daddy, band-aid for eye?” Yes, Grace, band-aid for eye.

So the lessons of the entry:  If you have a plan, chances are, you’ll get to where you want or need to go.  When things come up (ex: searing hot coffee scorching tongue and eye), you may need to adjust, reschedule.  MySQL configured. WordPress installed.  Warm, inviting, and clever first blog post, rescheduled for tomorrow.