A Better Way to Shop

I love Zappos.com.  It’s rapidly becoming the only place I buy shoes.  Their web site experience is ok – not perfect, but pretty good, but their level of service is just unbelievable.  They are doing for e-commerce (shoes in particular) what Eos is doing for air travel.

They’re always great at free shipping and have always been super responsive and very personal and authentic when it comes to customer service.  But today took the cake.  I emailed them when I placed an order for new running shoes because I also wanted to buy one of those little “shoe pocket” velcro thingies that straps onto shoelaces and holds keys and money for runners.  I didn’t find one on the Zappos site and just asked if they carried the item in case I missed it.

Less than 24 hours later, I got an email reply from Lori, a Customer Loyalty Representative there, who apologized for not carrying the item — and then provided me with a link to buy it on Amazon.com which she had researched online herself.

Zappos’s tag line on their emails says it all:

We like to think of ourselves as a service company that just happens to sell shoes.

Does your company think of itself and its commitment to customer service like that?

Like Fingernails on a Chalkboard

Anyone who worked in the Internet in the early days probably remembers all-too-vividly how silly things got near the end.  Even those who had nothing to do with the industry but who were alive at the time with an extra dollar or two to invest in the stock market probably has some conception of the massive roller coaster companies were on in those years.

The memories/images/perceptions all come crashing down in the latest chapter of Tom Evslin’s blook hackoff.com in a manner that reminds me of the sound of fingernails racing down a chalkboard.  You’ve heard it before, you can’t forget it, you squirm every time you hear it, but you can’t tear yourself away from it.

I think Chapter 9, Episode 6 and Episode 7 lay out every single stereotype of the Internet’s bad old days in two easy tales:

– The CEO who says “The main reason for this meeting is to figure out how to get the stock price up again”

– The blaming of the investment bankers for the bad business model

– The head of sales who doesn’t understand his vanishing pipeline and the CEO who turns a blind eye, sacrificing future sales to make the current quarter’s numbers

– The surprisingly shocking realization that adding 30 new people per quarter costs a lot of money

– The parade of the lawsuits, lawyers, and insurance policies

– The notion that all problems can be solved with a new product, which of course must be built immediately, but with a smaller engineering team

– The struggle about laying off staff and the comment that “you can’t cut your way to growth and greatness”

If you’ve haven’t tried the blook yet, you can start at the beginning with the daily episodes, on the web or by RSS, or you can download chapters in pdf format on the site.  It’s a great piece of daily brain candy.

My podcast with OnBoards is live, talking with Raza and Joe about the importance of adding independence, first-time directors, and diversity to startup boards, and how Bolster helps companies achieve that quickly and inexpensively.

I’m writing a lot about Boards at the moment on the Bolster blog. We’re compiling all of those posts into a couple of eBooks. Once all of that is done, I’ll put some digests up here on StartupCEO.com as well as make the eBooks available for download.

But the gist of it is that we are working hard to break the logjam of diversity on startup boards, and we’re starting to meet with some great success with our clients.

Agile Development

Sometime last year, our engineering and product teams embraced the Agile Software Development framework.  Without going into too much detail (here’s the Wikipedia entry for those who want it), the concept of Agile Development is to run software development in small pieces with a focus on more communication between product and development teams resulting in collaborative requirements development.  This leads to a “release early and often” environment where there are continual improvements.  For us, we group development projects now into a “release” that consists of a series of usually six, two-week “iterations.”

The release planning and iteration planning meetings are reasonably long meetings that involve the major stakeholders, product management and engineering.  The process also includes a very short, 10-minute Daily Stand-Up meeting with everyone on the team to review progress and identify roadblocks to completing the two-week iteration.  Requirements are not heavily documented and discussed more or less on the spot during the iteration meetings.  Because there’s a major pull-up every two weeks and a minor one every day, it’s easy to be light on requirements and for product management to constantly be in the loop with engineering to see progress, test functionality, and make mid-course corrections.

This methodology isn’t for everyone, but it’s particularly well suited to the kind of work we do at Return Path — small team, multiple internal and external stakeholders, very dynamic market, and web services as opposed to packaged software.

Our efforts have been bolstered by some limited consulting and more important, a fantastic web-based workflow management tool geared towards Agile Development run by a company called Rally Development in Boulder.  Think of it as Salesforce.com for your engineering and product team.

We’ve had great success with this methodology to date.  Engineering productivity is way up, product management visibility and input into development is way up, the level of friction/noise between product management and engineering is way down, and we have a much tighter grip on our development milestones than we ever have in the past.

Agile and Rally have worked so well for us, in fact, that we’re starting to extend the concept to other parts of our business, which I’ll write about separately.

Mail Fusion

For 8 or 9 years now, we haven’t received a single bill by U.S. mail.  We use PayTrust (originally PayMyBills.com) for “online” bill pay.  We have a P.O. Box somewhere in South Dakota that we’ve redirected all our bills to.  The bills get opened, scanned, we get an email, we enter in a payment amount and date.  No fuss, no muss.  PayTrust even figures out which bills can be electronically delivered and provides an easy interface to set that up directly into the PayTrust account as well.  I haven’t received a bill or written a check in years.  I think we pay something like $9/month for the service.

I just ran across a new service this week called Earth Class Mail (thanks to my colleague Alex Rubin for pointing this out) that does the same thing for ALL of your snail mail, with a twist.  You direct all your mail (presumably not magazines) to a P.O. Box, and they first scan in all the envelopes.  You see them and decide what to do with each item — forward to you, scan in and show you online or via pdf, recycle, shred, etc.  The cost seems to range from $10-60/month depending on volume.

Certainly a good idea, at least for people who travel a lot or people who have to pay for a P.O. Box anyway (not sure it’s for everyone), and another interesting service where email takes center stage as the mission critical delivery vehicle.

The Acquisition (a parody of a parody)

I just spent a great 4th of July with my brother Michael, one of the finer and funnier people I know.  Among other things, we treated ourselves to about the 18th viewing of Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I on DVD.

One of our favorite moments in the movie is the Broadway musical version of “The Inquisition” (lyrics, download MP3).  Since both of us work in the online marketing industry (Michael is a marketing manager at search agency Did-It), Michael came up with the brilliant idea of a parody of a parody…so here goes, all in good fun.

The acquisition, what a show
The acquisition, here we go
We’re on a mission, have you heard the news?

The acquisition, serve those ads
The acquisition, we’re so glad
We’ll make an offer, that they can’t refuse

Google, don’t be boring
WPP, don’t feel set
Yahoo seems to be ignoring:
It’s better to lose your market cap than your market!

Hey, Steven Ballmer, what do you say?
“I just got back from Avenue A”
“Avenue A?  What’s Avenue A?”
“It’s what I ought not have bought, but I bought anyway!”

The acquisition, what a show
The acquisition, here we go
We know you’re wishin’ that we’d go away.
But the acquisition’s here and it’s here to stay!

Happy 4th, everyone!

How to Crush Your Competition

My friend Karl used to call this the “embrace and extend” theory of competition, and when it works, it’s brilliant.  I just found a new example of it yesterday (thanks, Jack!) that’s very illustrative.

I have been a Firefox user for a couple years now and love the browser and its extensions.  I almost never use Internet Explorer any more — although sometimes I “have to,” because there are a couple of web applications I use that just don’t work well in Firefox, like Outlook Web and online banking.  Hopefully some of that will change over time as Firefox gets more mainstream, but in the meantime, there’s now a Firefox extension that allows you to open certain web pages in Internet Explorer — within Firefox.  I’m not sure how it works technically, and I’m not sure I care, but basically, the new tab that opens with the designated web sites has the little Microsoft “e” as the icon on the tab, and voila — the sites work perfectly using the Internet Explorer engine within Firefox.  So now I never have to open up Internet Explorer again.

Score one for Firefox on the competition front.  How can you apply this kind of competitive framework to your business?

Here’s the link to download the extension, then once it’s installed and you’ve restarted the browser, simply go to the Tools menu and then the IE Tab Options link to add the URLs you need to add.

Book Short:  Continuing to make “sustainability” a mainstream business topic

The Big Pivot: Radically Practical Strategies for a Hotter, Scarcer, and More Open World, by my friend Andrew Winston, is a great book.  It just got awarded one of the Top 10 business books of 2014 by Strategy+Business, which is a great honor.

Andrew builds nicely on his first book, Green to Gold:  How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage (post, book link) (and second book, which I didn’t review, Green Recovery), as I said in my review of Green to Gold, to bring:

the theoretical and scientific to the practical and treat sustainability as the corporate world must treat it in order to adopt it as a mainstream practice — as a driver of capitalistic profit and competitive advantage.

Andrew’s central thesis, with plenty of proof points in the book for our planet of 7 Billion people, rapidly heading to 9-10 Billion, is this:

Whether you take a purely fiscal view of these challenges or look through a human-focused lens, one thing is clear: we’ve passed the economic tipping point. A weakening of the pillars of our planetary infrastructure— a stable climate, clean air and water, healthy biodiversity, and abundant resources— is costing business real money. It’s not some futuristic scenario and model to debate, but reality now, and it threatens our ability to sustain an expanding global economy… If this hotter, scarcer, more transparent, and unpredictable world is the new normal, then how must companies act to ensure a prosperous future for all, including themselves?

Andrew’s writing is accessible and colorful.  The book is full of useful analogies and metaphors like this one:

Climate can also seem easy to write off because the warming numbers don’t sound scary. A couple degrees warmer may sound pleasant, but we’re not really talking about going from 75 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit on a nice spring day. As many others have pointed out, the right metaphor is a fever. Take your core body temperature up one degree, and you don’t feel so great. Five degrees, and you’re sick as a dog. Ten degrees, and you’re dead.

The book also does a really nice job of looking at the externalities of climate change in a different way.  Not the usual “I can pollute, because there’s no cost to me to doing so,” but more along the lines of “If I had to pay for all the natural resources my business consumes, I would treat them differently.”

Some of Andrew’s points are good but general and maybe better made elsewhere (like the problems of short-termism on Wall Street), but overall, this book is a great think piece for all business leaders, especially in businesses that consume a lot of natural resources, around how to make the challenge of climate change work for your business, not against it.

Two things occurred to me during my read of The Big Pivot that I think are worth sharing for the people in my life who still don’t believe climate change is real or threatening.  The first is Y2K.  Remember the potentially cataclysmic circumstance where mission critical systems all around the world were going to go haywire at midnight at the turn of the millennium?  The conventional wisdom on why nothing major went wrong is that society did enough work ahead of time to prevent it, even though the outcomes weren’t clear and no one system problem alone would have been an issue.  I was thinking about this during the book…and then Andrew mentioned it explicitly towards the end.

The second is something I read several years ago in my personal news bible, The Economist.  I couldn’t find the exact quote online just now, but it was something to the effect of “Even if you don’t believe man created climate change, or that climate change is real and imperiling to humanity and can be fixed by man, the risks of climate change are so great, the potential consequences so dire, and the path to solve the problem so lengthy and complex and global…it’s worth investing in that solution now.”

Let’s all pivot towards that, shall we?  If you want to download the introduction to the book for free, you can find it on Andrew’s web site.  Or for a three-minute version of the story, you can watch this whiteboard animation on YouTube.

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 yet.

But today I had another two breakthroughs — I switched from AOL Instant Messenger to Trillian for my IM client, and I started using Skype.  Trillian is pretty cool and of course free.  I’ve never used MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger seriously, so the value for me is less in the aggregation of all three clients, and more in tabbed chatting.  Just like Firefox, the client lets you have all your chat windows displayed as tabs in a single window, which is much simpler and cleaner.  But better than Firefox, you can detach a chat window if you want to see it separately.

Skype is really cool.  I understand why the company will be sold for a good price, although I still don’t understand either $3 billion as a price or eBay as a buyer.  For those of you who don’t know what it is, Skype is voice Instant Messenger on steroids.  The basic functionality (for free) is that you can ping someone computer to computer, and have a real time voice chat if you are both online and accept the connection via your computer’s microphone.  If you decline the connection, it saves a voicemail for you.  The extras, which I haven’t tried yet, include SkypeOut (you can dial a real phone number from your computer for $0.02/minute, anywhere in the world) and SkypeIn (you get a phone number to give people so they can call your computer from a phone).  The quality was pretty good — certainly as good as or better than many cell phone connections, if not up to land line or VOIP standards.  Permission and usage/volume controls will be an issue here long-term since this is much more intrusive than regular test-based IM, but when it works, it is a beautiful thing.

Now, just like the vendor mayhem in the blog/RSS world (Typepad, Feedburner, Feedblitz, etc.), we need to get Trillian to incorporate Skype into its client so there’s a truly universal chat application.

(Written by both my Bolster co-founder Cathy Hawley and me)

I’ve attended two remote conferences, which Cathy dubbed “Zoomsites” — one here at Bolster and the Foundry Group CEO Summit.  Both hold interesting lessons for how these kinds of events can work well.

We founded Bolster two months into the COVID-19 pandemic, and our founding team had not met in person after 6 months of working together. Now, luckily, we’ve all worked together for many years, so we have a lot of trust built up, and have a very strong operating system which includes full team daily standups. Still, nothing beats face-to-face interaction. If you’ve ever founded a startup, you know how impactful it can be to work side by side, bounce ideas off each other, and collaborate as you learn more about opportunities and challenges in your market. 

We also have a strong belief in the power of the team, and the need to work together to ensure that we are aligned on all aspects of the business. And, we had a successful launch, with more interest in our marketplace than we had anticipated, so we knew we needed to step back to have a planning and strategy session.

We’ve done many executive offsites, and couldn’t imagine having an impactful offsite remotely, and we all agreed that we would be comfortable meeting up in person. So we started planning a 2-day offsite together in New York. Unfortunately, it turned out visitors to NY from Colorado and Indiana, the two states we were traveling from, needed to quarantine for 10 days when they got to NY. While technically we could get around this because we weren’t staying for 10 days, we decided to follow the spirit of the rules, and cancel our travel.

Since we really needed to have the planning and strategy session, and we’d blocked the two full days on our calendars, we decided to test out a ‘zoomsite’ – an all-remote video call. We modified the agenda a little – some things good in person fall flat on video. We knew we wanted to have really engaging conversations, and keep the agenda moving along, so that all eight of us could fully participate and complete the necessary work. I’m happy to say that we came out of the offsite with a revised strategic plan, new six-month goals set, and owners for each of the different workstreams. And, we had fun. Success!

The Foundry Group CEO Summit has been a different animal — it’s wrapping up today, but there’s been enough of it so far this week to comment on.  Foundry took a regular annual event with a large group (50-75) and moved it online.  They did a great job of adapting to the medium, spreading the event out with a few hours a day over multiple days to avoid Zoom fatigue and optimize attendance; scheduling content in shorter bursts than usual; making good use of breakout room technology; and encouraging heavy use of Zoom’s chat feature during sessions to make it as interactive as possible.  Like the Bolster event, there were some elements missing — all the great “hallway conversations” you have at in-person conferences where people are staying in the same hotel and seeing each other at meals, in the gym, between sessions, etc.  But it has also been a big success with enough community elements to make it worthwhile. 

Want to have a Zoomsite? Here are some tips:

• Make sure you have the tools needed for each activity. When you are brainstorming in person, you may use sticky notes or flip charts to write on. Remotely, you can use Google Docs or Sheets or tools like Note.ly or Miro
• Prep the sheets or docs ahead of time, so that people can engage in the activities easily. At our Zoomsite, we modified our blue-sky brainstorm session so that we each answered a few questions in a Google Sheet. We had a separate section for each person, and the exercise was easy to understand and engage in, and people got straight to work.
• Schedule in more breaks, shorter sessions, or less than full-day meetings. We had a couple of hour-long breaks during the day, which helped people to focus.  Foundry did a great job of getting everyone’s attention for a few hours every day, for more days than a normal in-person conference
• Plan your technology. At the Bolster meeting, we learned this the hard way. We tested out the idea of doing a “walk and talk” session where we’d each walk in our neighborhoods, and have a couple of strategic conversations just on the phone. Unfortunately, the technology didn’t work for everyone, as they hadn’t all used Zoom on their phones before, it was windy in some locations, and cell service dropped people from time to time.  Probably not the best idea we had!
• Include a social component. We were a little skeptical about this at the Bolster Zoomsite, but we’d always incorporated social time into offsites, and we really value connecting as people, not just as professionals, so we gave it a try. On the second day of our Zoomsite, we took a 2 hour break at the end of the day, and came back for drinks and dinner together. We had personal conversations, including sharing our favorite tv shows. Eight people on video eating together might sound odd, and we weren’t sure if it would work, but we all agreed that it was fun, and we’d do it again.  I missed the Foundry “Virtual Fun” session, but they did a virtual game show run by our sister portfolio company, Two-Bit Circus (and also had investigated Jack Box Games as another option for virtual games via Zoom screen share plus real-time voting and other engagement via phone).  I heard that session was great and engaging from people who attended

We all hope life returns to some kind of normal in 2021, though it’s unclear when that will be.  And there’s definitely value to doing meetings like this in person, but at least we now know that we can have a successful remote offsite or larger conference event.  As with everything, it will be interesting to see how the world is changed by COVID.  Maybe events like this will figure out how to mix remote and in-person participation, or alternate between event formats to keep travel costs down.

A New Member of the Internet Axis of Evil

Fred has written a series of postings over the years about the Internet Axis of Evil, roughly in order here, here, here, here, and here (I’m sure I missed some).  The basis of the postings is great — that, as Fred says:

There’s a downside to an open network. It’s the same downside that exists in an open society. There are a lot of nuts out there who want to do bad things (the evildoers as George W Bush calls them). And we all have to spend a lot of time and money making sure that we are protected from them. It’s a huge burden on an open network and an open society, but i see no way around it.

So far, the members of Fred’s club are:

Spam
Viruses
Adware/Spyware
DNS Hacking
Comment Spam/Link Spam
Phishing
Click Fraud
Really Simple Stealing

So today, I propose a ninth member of this esteemed club:  Survey Fraud.  A lot of people don’t know it, but one of our biggest businesses at Return Path is market research — or a subset of market research known as online sample.  Our brand for this part of our business has historically been Survey Direct , but next week, entirely appropos of this posting, we are changing the name to Authentic Response.

What we do in this business is work with market research firms to drive qualified, interested, double opt-in members of our research panel to take online quantitative surveys.  It’s a little like the email database marketing business (which is why we’re in it), although the dynamics of qualifying for and taking surveys are totally different than lead generation, and we have a separate team that supports the research business.

Occasionally, surveys carry a small cash incentive, usually in the $2-5 range, to thank people for the time they spend taking the survey, which can often be 15-20 minutes.  Usually we just pay people via PayPal, although we also allow people to donate their incentives to our favorite charity, Accelerated Cure.  You’d think at $2 a pop, it’s not so interesting, but there seems to be a cottage industry that’s sprouting up that I’m now calling Survey Fraud — the art of faking your way into a survey or completing a survey multiple times, in order to collect as much incentive money as possible.

First, there are message boards on the Internet where the Survey Fraud perpetrators hang out and share information with each other about surveys — things like “hey for XYZ survey, you need to be a 40-year old homemaker in zip code 12345 with a college degree” that encourage people to fake their way in.

Second, there are more serious thugs out there who write bots and scripts and create dozens or hundreds of phantom online identities in order to “take” a single survey 100 times over.  $2 adds up when you can earn it 100x in 5 minutes with the help of a little Perl script.

The people who conduct Survey Fraud are just as pathetic as the other members of the Internet Axis of Evil.  We have to constantly stay 10 steps ahead of them in making sure our system has state of the art security — a feature we are trademarking called Authentic Validation — in order to fend them off and make sure our clients get 100% authentic survey results as promised.  I can’t share with you our complex security methodology, since that would compromise it (geez, I sound like the White House, sorry), but as Fred says, it’s a huge burden that we have to bear in order to run our survey business on the Internet.

So congratulations to our Authentic Response team on their new name and their constant efforts to fight the Axis of Evil, and to all who commit Survey Fraud, please take your “business” elsewhere!