A Small Rant About Lawyers My least favorite thing about lawyers (and I don’t make that statement lightly) is when they spend more of your money arguing why they shouldn’t do something than they’d spend if they just sat down and did the darn thing to begin with. Hmmmph.
Archives / August, 2005
Compression
Compression I had one of those "aha" moments the other day when I saw these powerful charts for the first time. It’s not that I didn’t realize that we humans have been adopting new technologies faster and faster over the last century (that would be a "duh" moment). It’s that I didn’t realize just how much faster the adoption had gotten relative to other technologies. The first chart here, from a report issued by the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve, shows the U.S. household penetration of new technologies on the vertical axis and years from date of introduction on the horizontal axis. And in case that wasn’t a clear enough visual representation, here’s the critical tabular data. It just…
For My Email (Bloglet) Subscribers
For My Email (Bloglet) Subscribers Many of you rely on emails from an outfit called Bloglet to receive notifications that I’ve posted something to my blog. However, as you no doubt know, Bloglet’s service is incredibly flakey, so many times, the notices don’t go out. I am trying a new service called Feedblitz, which will serve the same purpose but appears to be MUCH more reliable. For a couple of days, I will use both Bloglet and Feedblitz in parallel to make sure they both work, but then I’ll turn off Bloglet. You don’t have to do anything to convert your subscription over — I will do it for you. Just be aware that the emails will now be coming…
Unfolding the Map
Unfolding the Map I heard two similar catchphrases last week, both from entrepreneurs I respect, that are diametrically opposed: 1. If you don’t have a map, you can’t get lost 2. If you don’t have a map, you can’t get where you’re going How to reconcile the two? I think the answer is stage of company. In the early days of a business, being too rigid on what you’re building and how you interact with your customer set can doom you. You have to be nimble! Spry! Not care exactly what your endgame is, as long as it’s good. As your business grows and you have a customer base to support and numbers to hit, having too much product development…
links for 2005-08-19
Building the Perfect Team :: AO Entrepreneur Bernard Moon does a great job of articulating “how to build the perfect team” for your new startup (tags: Entrepreneur)
Book Short: Not As Deep As You’d Like
Book Short: Not As Deep As You’d Like Deep Change, by Robert Quinn, is a reasonably interesting collection of thoughts on management and leadership, but it doesn’t hang together very well as a single work with a unified theme. The promise is interesting — that we must personally abandon our knowledge, competence, techniques and abilities and “walk naked into the land of uncertainty” to undergo great personal change that can then lead us to organizational change — but the book doesn’t quite deliver on it. That said, I enjoyed the book as a quick read for a few of its more interesting concepts. For example, Quinn has a great crystallization of many things I’ve observed over the years called “the…
Why Publishing Will Never Be the Same, Part I
Why Publishing Will Never Be the Same, Part I As you may know, we published a book earlier this year at Return Path called Sign Me Up! Sales are going quite well, in case you’re wondering, and we also launched the book’s official web site, where you can subscribe to our “email best practices” newsletter. The process of publishing the book was fascinating and convinced me that publishing will never be the same. Even in two parts, this will be a long post, so apologies in advance. Front to back, the process went something like this: – We wrote the content and selected and prepared the graphics – We hired iUniverse to publish the book for a rough total cost…
Email and Business Development: Two Great Tastes…
Email and Business Development: Two Great Tastes… Interestingly, Chris Baggott offers compelling evidence for the opposite view he intended in his recent posting claiming email is not an acquisition tool. I respect Chris as a thought leader in the email marketing services industry and am a fan of what he and his colleagues have done in building Exact Target, but I think he’s dead wrong on this one. Email is a phenomenal customer retention tool, no question about it. I totally agree with the claim that website owners should never let a prospect escape from their website without signing up for an email program. It’s very true that spending money on website traffic can go to waste if a browser…
My RSS Feed
My RSS Feed In an effort to manage my blog and RSS feed a little better, I’d like to request that anyone who gets my RSS feed NOT via Feedburner — that is, via the default Typepad feed — resubscribe to the Feedburner feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/Onlyonce. Thanks!
Counter Cliche: It's Fun at the Top
Counter Cliche: It’s Fun at the Top! Fred’s VC cliche this week is a good one — that CEOs have the weight of the company on their shoulders, otherwise known as "it’s lonely at the top." He’s right in a lot of ways, and his two suggestions for dealing with it are good. To those, I’d add a third suggestion, which is to create a peer group of other CEOs that gets together periodically to talk, share ideas, and blow off steam. It doesn’t need to be something formal like YPO or YEO — just have a quarterly dinner roundtable with a handful of other local CEOs you know and respect, whether from your industry or not. But the counter…
A Ball Bearing in the Wheels of E-Commerce
A Ball Bearing in the Wheels of E-Commerce As an online marketing professional, I’ve long understood intellectually how e-commerce works, how affiliate networks function, and why the internet is such a powerful selling tool. But I got an email the other day that drove this home more directly. When I started my blog about a year and a half ago, I set myself up as an Amazon affiliate, meaning that any time someone clicks on a link to Amazon from one of my postings or on the blog sidebar, I get paid a roughly 4% commission on anything that person buys on Amazon on that session. According to the email report I just got from Amazon on Q2 sales driven…