Not-so-Counter Cliche: Forecast Early and Often There’s no "counter" in this week’s counter cliche, although this is a cross-post to two of Fred’s recent postings. In his VC Cliche of the Week, he talks about the need for early-stage companies to forecast often, and he was nice enough to cite Return Path as his case study. I thought I’d give some color on this from our perspective here. Forecasting is a pain, so we adopted the model of as 12-month rolling forecast with quarterly reforecasts (and correspondingly quarterly incentive comp structures) out of necessity. For early stage companies in emerging industries, there are simply too many moving parts in the business to provide enough visibility to produce an accurate 12-month…
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A Typepad User, and Proud of It
A Typepad User, and Proud of It SixApart showed huge corporate courage today when they emailed their entire blog user base, apologized (for the second or third time) for service interruptions the past month, then announced a cash remedy. As a default, they’re giving everyone half a month of service for free. This is obviously a huge hit to the company financially and probably more of a gesture than anyone expected. But better than that, they allowed users to click through to their web site and automatically get a full month for free — or a month and a half for free — if they felt in good conscience that the service outages were more harmful to them. They also…
Overload
Overload Fred had a great posting last week called The Looming Attention Crisis. He talks about how he’s at his limit of trying out new technology and consuming information/feeds. He’s right — except I’d argue there’s nothing looming about the crisis. Those of us who were early adopters of RSS (perhaps early adopters in general) are in full Overload mode at this point. The negatives associated with this problem are pretty clear. One of my very first postings, Present AND Accounted For, talked about the perils of multitasking on interpersonal relationships; that’s probably the biggest negative to the availability of all this information. Attention, as Fred says, IS in fact a zero sum game. The great problem associated with all…
Beyond CAN-SPAM: The Nightmare Continues, Part II
Beyond CAN-SPAM: The Nightmare Continues, Part II A couple of months ago, I blogged about two well-intentioned but very unfortunate new laws on the books, one in Michigan and one in Utah, designed to protect children from advertising that’s harmful to minors, but in fact full of unintended consequences. Today, the Detroit Free Press had a great article about how the law in Michigan is so poorly conceived and executed, that not only is it angering legitimate businesses, it’s actually angering the parents who were supposed to be its principle beneficiaries. One parent’s quote in the article pretty much sums it up: “What was the whole point in signing up if it’s not doing any good? Is this just the…
Return Path Blog is Up
Return Path Blog is Up Today we launched our new corporate web site at Return Path. We’re trying an experiment. We’ve reinvented large portions of the site as a corporate blog (for those of you who follow Fred’s blog, the two of us just realized last week that we had both done this to our companies’ web sites at the same time without knowing it). As I said in my introductory post on the new site, we’re casting the blog as an Online Resource Center for Email Marketers. There are no hard and fast rules for how corporate blogs are supposed to work, so we’re experimenting with it. I hope all of our friends, employees, customers, and investors, as well…
In From the Perimeter
In From the Perimeter I’m at the Direct Marketing Association’s annual massive trade show (DMA*05) in Atlanta. While there are lots of things to potentially blog about, I think the most interesting one is the simplest. When I started attending the DMA’s shows six years ago, the only interactive marketeing companies who exhibited were email vendors and the occasional sweepstakes company — and any interactive marketing company who did bother to show up was relegated to a small booth space in a corner of the trade show floor, away from the real action. A friend of mine once told me it was easy for him to hit all the email guys at DMA — just walk around the perimeter of…
Response to a Deliverability Rant
Response to a Deliverability Rant Justin Foster from WhatCounts, an email service provider based in Seattle, wrote a very lengthy posting about email deliverability on the WhatCounts blog yesterday. There’s some good stuff in it, but there are a couple of things I’d like to clarify from Return Path‘s perspective. Justin’s main point is spot-on. Listening to email service providers talk about deliverability is a little bit like eating fruit salad: there are apples and oranges, and quite frankly pineapples and berries as well. Everyone speaks in a different language. We think the most relevant metric to use from a mailer’s perspective is inbox placement rate. Let’s face it – nothing else matters. Being in a junk mail folder is…
Hackoff – The Blook
Hackoff – The Blook Fred and Brad have already posted some pertinent details as well, but here’s a must-read for you – entrepreneur Tom Evslin, who has a great blog, has just launched an online book, serialized as a blog. It’s about a fictitious Internet bubble company called Hackoff.com (nice name!), and you can subscribe to the episodes of the book, either by RSS feed or by email. The first episode and various subscription options are all here. Tom’s a great writer and had front row seats/was a lead actor in the bubble. The first episode has me hooked. This is going to be fun!
RSS Advertising
RSS Advertising This is two-day-old news by now, but in case you missed it, we just announced than we – Return Path – are partnering with Feedburner to take RSS advertising to the next level (coverage here, here, and here). As you probably know if you receive my feed or other ones, Feedburner has been doing some experimenting with ad units at the bottom of feeds for months now, first using Amazon and more recently Google AdSense to serve up ads. And as you may know if you look at ads closely, neither of those services has done a great job making the ads truly relevant. I can’t tell you, for example, the number of times I write a posting…
Reality Bites
Reality Bites So Oracle is buying the $1.5 billion revenue Siebel for $5.85 billion, and eBay is buying the at most $60 million revenue Skype for $2.4 billion, which could grow to $4.1 billion if Skype hits some performance targets. Huh. Must be all those pesky customers, receivables, and assets bogging down Siebel’s books. UPDATE: Fortune’s David Kirkpatrick, one of the most insightful journalists covering technology, makes some sense of this in this week’s Fast Forward column.
It’s Easy to Feel Like a Luddite These Days, Part II
It’s Easy to Feel Like a Luddite These Days, Part II In Part I, I talked about tagging and podcasting and how I felt pretty lame for someone who considers himself to be somewhat of an early adopter for not understanding them. So now, 10 weeks later, I understand tagging and have a del.icio.us account, although I don’t use it all that often (quite frankly, I don’t have tons of surfing time to discover cool new content). And I’ve even figured out how to integrate del.icio.us with Feedburner and with Typepad. I’m still out of luck with Podcasting, mainly because my iPod and computer setup at home makes it really difficult to add/sync, so I haven’t given that a shot…