Blog Entries - December 2007

Care and Feeding and Safety

admin — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Before everyone left work for the new years I gave them a pre-signed expense receipt approval with two lines on it labeled TAXI.

(Yes, we use paper expense reports - it looks more like real money to write $$ on paper. Which is why people use Excel to model revenue.

I told my folks that if they were going out they should take a taxi to/from. And please to wear a seat belt in [...]

Sunday Stumble Traffic Spike Edit this entry.

admin — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0100

I think we’ve all experienced some post or story going to the front page of Digg. Until the digg-Nazi’s bury it because (gasp) we stink of SEO. Whatever. But today we had several pieces of content on one of our sites stumbled. Apparently God’s second cousin told all his friends. And they had the day off and nothing particular to do. So they all showed up in a rush and viewed 2.7 pages/person/average.

And we actually hit the bandwidth limit on that particular server/pa [...]

Useless Day Meeting: Priceless

admin — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0100

I told you we were going to get our real employees and outsourcing folx (accounting, legal, design, etc) together today. So we did. Not because I told you so, but because today is the most useless day in American business. Who actually works? Well, we worked (a bit) and had fun (a lot) and learned (some interesting stuff).

At one point our accountant, who may have the smallest actual sense of humor in North America, looked up and said: “Well, if you don’t enjoy that and it [...]

VC Xmass Party Money (Part Deux)

admin — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0100

[This is part two - read part one first]

Now, you have to know that, while they were doing well top-line-wise with our revenue (we were close to revenue neutral with a negative burn rate of only a few grand a month), they were definitely pumping red ink ($100K+/month) and on a growth hiring curve. And they’d just moved into bright shiny new offices - we were in a B Space dump that was priced as C Space.

So there were new-hires going to these parties and seeing these grea [...]

VC Xmass Party Money (Part Uno)

admin — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0100

I am reminded of the most egregious use of VC money since boo.com burned 20 quid notes to keep warm in the winter. Worse than anything Webvan did. Probably more stupid than the dog commercials from pets.com. Yes, it is my infamous Xmass party story.

It was near the ugly end of the first tech boom and we’d just sold our company (for stock!) to a Canadian competitor who was buying some plug in revenue on their way to a C Round of $15M or so.

Let me back up and explain some t [...]

Monday Morning Quaterbacking

admin — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0100

One of our guys (well, gal, but that sounds funny) sent me an email and suggested that we do a meta-review. We always do a post-project review to find things we could have done better. She suggested that we take a look at the whole year and look for stuff we could have been smarter about.

Not Ruby vs. Ajax (geek delight!) but everything.

So we’re doing an all-hands, including our (expensive) outside council, (cheap) outside accountant, etc, and take a look at the year.

[...]

Presents for Everyone

admin — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0100

It was a good year here at what one employee called “The House That Dilbert Built.”

We had a good financial year, got some excellent new clients, wrote some neat stuff, etc.

We even got some cool new work/friends/colleagues. The people who left went happily, to better jobs or to more advanced schooling.

We made some really interesting mistakes and learned enough from a few of ‘em so that we shouldn’t be seeing them again.

Finally, we are r [...]

Would You Rather Have $1M or Another Year?

admin — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0100

Stupid question, take the $1M, right? Well, I’m not talking about salary, I’m talking about capital to use in your business. And time is capital too.

Let’s say you’re doing a startup with 6 guys. Your burn rate is gonna be around $100K/month, give or take, depending on where you live, who you’ve hired, and if you were stupid enough to rent a copier or something. So figure $1M buys you another year of burn before you have to do something unexpected and amaz [...]

Does #1 in the SERP Make you the Owner?

admin — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0100

One of our clients is a web retailer. Their model is that they pick up products in their niche that aren’t widely available outside of their local geographic market and sell them on the web. Most of the manufacturers they deal with are “old style” businesses — they have manufacturing plants and their idea of marketing is to offer the grocery stores a coupon to give to their customers. If the manufacturer has a web page, it hasn’t been optimized at all.

So [...]

Mo Better Meetings: Fewer and Smaller

admin — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0100

I was reading a very good post by Krigman on How Twitter is Dangerous and realized how far from my previous mega-corp personality I’ve drifted.

I should clarify that I am NOT a twitter user - I have a wife, kids, a company, and a history/biography book jones - I am not suffering from a lack of attention, information, or things to do. (I don’t have a facebook or myspace page either.) It’s not that I don’t get it, it’s just that I don’t want it.

Dog Tutu’s on the Internet

admin — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0100

(Scary Outer Limits voiceover) “Imagine if you will, a sensible B2C executive planning a foray onto the internet to sell ballet clothes to animals….”

Well, not exactly, but take that as an example. We had a longtime partner in our offices explaining why the worldwide market for dog tutu’s was easily capturable via e-commerce and judicious SEO.

Look, his logic was impeccable - 300M Americans (20% of the world population), 100M dog owners, etc, etc. The ol [...]

Bewitched by a Superstar

admin — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0100

Once upon a time I had this guy who worked for me - astoundingly fast high quality coder. You know all those studies about guys on the right hand side of the productivity curve? This guy was out there. But he had a rotten temper. And he was always the smartest guy in the room. (He usually was, but that is not the point.)

I was reminded of him while watching Bewitched last night:

Isabel Bigelow: [after quitting/being fired] I can’t just walk back in there now.
Jack Wy [...]

New Word: Trilemma!

admin — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0100

I was reading the volokh conspiracy and ran across this fragment:

Do you know the password to the laptop?” If Boucher does know the password, he would be faced with the forbidden trilemma; incriminate himself, lie under oath, or find himself in contempt of court. Id . at 212

Roll that one around for a second - trilemma. Yummy.

I recently blogged about some desire we had for space. I guess our trilemma there was: potentially tough work environment, tough geographic [...]

Outsourcing Infrastructure to Amazon: Don’t

admin — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 21:00:00 +0100

Amazon have just announced a pay-as-you-go (PAYG as they say in blighty) scalable database to go along with their computing cloud. You'd think that someone as pro-outsourcing as I am would be ecstatic. Actually, I would NEVER consider using Amazon's outsourcing resources, for a number of reasons.

First, let's look at what someone much much smarter (and richer) (and more famous), Dave Winer, has to say:

Today, when a company raises VC, it's probably because their app h [...]

Two Locations Are Double Trouble

admin — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0100

We were looking to do some expansion, not so much because we’re hiring, but because finances are good and people are crammed up. We don’t want stupid SFO sytle hipster Ikea space - but I think a little elbow room and a conference room with 100ft2 of white board is a good thing. And maybe I get an office with a door. ‘Cause I talk a lot and people are tired of it.

The tricky bit is that we have a sweet sweet lease on our current space. I signed it when space was loose [...]

When Managers Scarily Code

admin — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0100

Back in the day (when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Google had not yet evolved) I could write code in C, C++, Objective-C (shut up, they are not the same thing), csh, sh, etc. There were a host of other tools in my kit (brief macros, REXX, etc) that I could use to impress the other hiking-boot clad geeks.

Today in a re/planning meeting we discovered a piece of code that needed writing. I volunteered. And the room erupted and not in cheers.

Let me summarize:

Oh. My. God. N [...]

Marketable Skills != Marketing

admin — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0100

Sorry, sad geek talk, but I was going through my fatter-than-Al-Gore RSS feed today and happened upon a very nice post in SEOptimise entitled: The Six Most Marketable SEO Skills. (No charge for the follow link boys! )

To summarize:
1> Analysis
2> Programming
3> Web Design
4> Social Media
5> Blogging
6> Sales

Good stuff - but only if you are not worried about getting outsourced to India or China. The problem with what I will [...]

Business News Driving Relationships

admin — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0100

Not the WSJ, though I love the freeness of it after 25 years of subscriptions - that is $5K in today's dollars! No, I mean reading the local business journal of your area. And we make it a habit to subscribe to the online business news where our clients are based.

At Promote-My-Site we're not an SEO company, though we are building a tool for people who want to use social media sites more effectively. But this is the newest part of our business and we have clients and partners scattere [...]

I Fear Dilbert

admin — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0100

And not because bald guys who talk to their dogs are spooky. We have a LOT of Dilbert cartoons at work and I have several signed (early) books from my Palo Alto days. I get called PHB a lot, but in an affectionate way (I hope).

No, I fear the Dilbert moment - when I make a Pointy-Haired-Boss decision and nobody corrects me. Right now our culture is pretty, well, egalitarian is a mild word. Forward focused opinioneering? There is a buzz word in there somewhere.

We recently had a [...]

Christmass Parties Stink

admin — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0100

But not here - we don’t do them.

Well, we do go to the local pub and take cabs home. And eat big steaks. (Chicken or Tofu as you desire.) Not at pub, at local expense account place. With whiskey.

Why no Xmass parties? 50% likelihood of lameness.

We’re not into lame.

So we place spread bets ‘cross the festive season.

Sorta like everything else.

——
Update one: it’s 6am and I already have three emails from peopl [...]