Automated Love Return Path is launching a new mini feature sometime this week to our clients. Normally I wouldn’t blog about this — I think this is mini enough that we’re probably not even saying much about it publicly at the company. But it’s an interesting concept that I thought I’d riff on a little bit. I forget what we’re calling the program officially — probably something like “Client Status Emails” or “Performance Summary Alerts” — but a bunch of us have been calling it by the more colorful term “Automated Love” for a while now. The art of account management or client services for an on-demand software company is complex and has evolved significantly from the old days of…
Archives / June, 2010
The Greatest Minds in Email
I recently returned from a six-week sabbatical. It was fantastic. I blogged about it here if you’re curious about the experience. It turned out that, while I was gone, we had probably the most successful, least dramatic six weeks in our 10 year history. I had assumed that’s because the team buckled down while I was out, and so did our Board. Little did we know what really happened during that six week stretch. It’s often said that when the cat’s away, the mice play. The short video below is what greeted me today at an all-hands meeting. If the team can crank out such great work and have this much fun while I’m out, well, I guess I should…
I Don’t Want to Be Your Friend (Today), part II
I think Facebook is starting to get out of control from a usability perspective. This doesn’t mean it’s not a great platform and that it doesn’t have utility. But if the platform continues on its current path, the core system runs the risk of going sideways like its various predecessors: GeoCities, MySpace, etc. Maybe I’ll go in there to look for something or someone, but it won’t be a place I scroll through as part of a daily or semi-daily routine. I wrote about this a year ago now, and while the site has some better tools to assign friends to groups, it doesn’t do any better job than it did a year ago about segregating information flow, either by group…
Why I Love Our New Product
Why I Love Our New Product Return Path officially announced a new product today called Domain Assurance, which I blogged a little bit about here. It’s a very exciting product that will help reduce and ultimately eliminate phishing emails – spam’s even more evil cousin that leads to identity theft, malware, further propagation of spam through botnets, and all sorts of other goodies. The product is in beta now with a bunch of top ISPs and brands. Those are a lot of reasons to love our new product. But for me, there’s more. For starters, this is the first new product (entirely new product, not just a feature or extension) that we’ve launched in years. While we’ve made some…
Getting Good Inc., Part II
Getting Good Inc., Part II It was a nice honor to be noted as one of America’s fastest growing companies as an Inc. 500 company two years in a row in 2006 and 2007 (one of them here), but it is an even nicer honor to be noted as one of the Top 20 small/medium sized businesses to work for in America by Winning Workplaces and Inc. Magazine. In addition to the award, we were featured in this month’s issue of Inc. with a specific article about transparency, and important element of our corporate culture, on p72 and online here. Why a nicer honor? Simply put, because we pride ourselves on being a great place to work — and we…
I Love My Job
I Love My Job The picture below is a picture of my dress shoes in my closet at home. You may note that they all have dust on them. That's because I didn't put them on once for six weeks. When we started Return Path back in 1999, we sat down to write our employee handbook, and all I could think was "what things can we add in here that will make this company a unique place to work?" And one of them was a six week paid sabbatical after 7 years. It didn't occur to me that we'd even exist after 7 years. Then for good measure, we said, "7 years and every 5 years after that." I'm happy…