Rahul Pathak : My Personal Blog

I have the good fortune of working with Matt Johnson at Judy’s Book. Matt is insightful and absolutely bloody hilarious. If you’re in the mood to be entertained while you’re being educated, run, don’t walk to his blog.

He has a post up there today about some pictures on a VC website. The partners are shown at Pebble Beach, posing next to their Ferrari’s, standing by their biplanes. It’s awesome. I hope their LPs saw some of those returns.

Kathy Sierra’s blog ROCKS! This is no surprise to anyone, but everytime I cruise over there, I am driven to think and I love that. This is an older post of her’s, on the so-called ‘wisdom of crowds.’ Her graphic below pretty much says it all.

The post is fantastic. If you have any interest in product design, you should read it.  Bottom line: Design-by-committee produces bland, boring products.

Great post on Startupping in which entrepreneurs are asked about their best and worst decisions. Some that stayed with me:

Ross Mayfield - Biggest Mistake — Not taking bigger risks earlier.
Maybe because in hindsight all risks are clear, but I always find myself regretting not taking bigger risks earlier. For example, open sourcing the Socialtext code was something we waited on until the company had strong footing. Partially because we thought there would be cannibalization, partially because we were understaffed to really engage with the community. But I believe if we bought this bullet earlier in the history of the company we would be reaping better rewards. As a planning exercise, now I always try to ask two questions: “How could we take more risk?” and “What risk can we take that creates the greatest amount of options?” I find there is always a way to do a little more, in particular by getting past instinct to control prevalent in so many entrepreneurs.

John Battelle - Pick one constituency and stick to it. Very early on, we decided that FM would be “author driven”. We could have made the company “advertiser driven” but it struck me the core business had to do with the folks who produce the sites we work with. At Wired, it was all about the ideas. At the Standard, it was all about the journalism. One clear core driving force helps clarify decisions during the tough early years.

Dick Costolo - I’ve made loads of mistakes so I’ll try to think of one with a good lesson for startups - one of the biggest mistakes I made in a previous company was accepting a high dollar contract once for something that wasn’t core to the vision of the business we were running at the time. While the revenue initially feels great, there’s nothing worse than pursuing a piece of business that isn’t core to the startup’s vision.

I highly recommend this post since although experience is a valuable teacher, it’s far better to learn from the experiences of others where you can.

One of Brad’s posts led me to The Winery Website Report Blog which so far has been fantastic. The initial post was about “failing to address a point of pain” in talking about the ‘hiatus’ of the Winery Report. It led me to a post titled “What should you put on your home page?” In it, there’s a link to a presentation (pdf - 2Mb) at eMetrics 2004 about Amazon and how they use automation and A/B testing to decide what goes on the home page. One of the coolest things about this is that it goes through some of their iterations and shows how data is often counter to intuition.

The bottom line - measure, measure, measure and let the best performing idea win. It’s hard to commit to this concept because designers, executives, product managers, all have their own ideas about what will and won’t work. The beauty of a consumer website is that if you’re willing to put yourself in a position to iterate efficiently, you can quickly find strategies that work.

Related Posts:

Adam Duvander - Simplicity Rules - Data Rules Amazon - Simpler Home Page Design Leads to Drop in Orders

Greg - Linden - Geeking with Greg - Talk on Amazon A/B Testing

Since I started blogging, I’ve been using Feedburner’s tools to manage my feed and to check on site stats etc. It’s a fantastic service and I find myself logging in every day to see how things are going. Over the past couple of days, I noticed that clicking through on certain links in the Site Stats section would generate ‘Page Not Found’ errors. Actually, they were generating “There is no spoon” errors. I love the touch of whimsy that’s pervasive throughout the site. Little things like “There is no spoon” instead of “page not found” make me me feel good about giving them my money. No mean feat, especially when I’m smiling when something is going wrong.

Having had the importance of maintaining working URLs beaten into me by Dave, I was concerned about this. A quick check showed the blog was fine and that the URLs in FeedDemon worked as well. I then decided to email Feedburner’s support using their webform.

This was late Sunday - I got the standard “Thanks for emailing us” response, following by a live email about 2 hours later. The note said that I might have the wrong URL, to which I wrote back saying that the link I sent it had been pasted from the Site Stats area. The next morning I got a note apologizing for the problem, telling me that they had a bug and giving me an approximate timeframe for resolution (measured in days, not weeks.)

Even though I contacted them because something was wrong, I came away feeling really good about the interaction. Their reponse had almost everything you want to see in a customer service email of this sort:

• Apology
• Acknowledgement there was a problem
• Notification of a fix with timeframe for resolution

They made me feel important, and they committed to fixing my problem. All this happened over the course of a few hours on a Sunday night. I’m impressed.

(I really do hope the fix goes in as expected so I don’t have to be disappointed.)

UPDATE: 2/27 - Fixed, as promised. Awesome.

When creating anything, you’ve got to get the basics in place first. Once you’ve done, that you can build on it. This sounds trite, but this quote from Fast Company’s series on Customer Service illustrates the issue perfectly

When Jeanne Bliss, a 25-year veteran of the customer-experience wars and the author of Chief Customer Officer, worked at Lands’ End at the beginning of her career, she realized, “You’ve got to do reliability first: 24-hour delivery and answering the phone on the second ring 99.9% of the time. Then you’ve earned the right to do more.” Get the package there on time, and you can add a holiday poem to the box–which is what Lands’ End did. Then, because kids often have as much fun with the box as they do with their gift, the company included instructions for turning the cartons into cows, sheep, or horses.

Suddenly, getting a mail-order package is an experience, from the inside out. But Lands’ End (and UPS) had to deliver first, and play games second. It knew it would take more than a genius to fix a Christmas present that showed up on December 28.

The challenge here is that getting the basics right is really hard and you’re never done. You have to keep working at it and obsessively act to improve it. In addition, as a small company, you’ve also got to innovate. Balancing these two needs isn’t easy and even when you start doing it right, and growing, you’ve got to make sure your scale doesn’t prevent you from delivering on your core promise. The good news? If you start off doing this right, you’ll earn enough goodwill to screw up once or twice. You’ll still have to get it right, but you’ll have some more time.

Sounds obvious, but it’s easy to forget. Mark Hurst’s post on Richard Branson prompted me to read the Fast Company article he was talking about. It’s fantastic. One thing jumped out at me while reading it:

What Branson understood two decades ago is just now beginning to be embraced by other corporate leaders: We should be having fun when we’re spending our money…

…He takes on intransigent industries that treat customers inexplicably badly and shows that he can offer not only a better deal but a truly entertaining experience. The approach has made Sir Richard a multibillionaire and Virgin a beloved brand–as well as a $10 billion-a-year operation.

Helping your customers have fun doesn’t seem important (or profitable) but I think it’s critical. If people feel good while giving your their money, I think you’ve pulled off something amazing and it’s likely that they will do it again.

Mark, thanks for making me think and for pointing me to a great article.

It was Alison’s turn with the clicker and she picked well. I was sitting through “Raising Helen” on the Oxygen Network (I know, I’m appalled as well) and I heard the following tagline during a commercial break.

“The most advanced piece of technology you’ll ever pee on”

It was an ad for a pregnancy test. Awesome. I’ll never forget it.

UPDATE: I was initially appalled at the movie choice and now I’m appalled that I’m actually sucked in…

Looks like Digg has let some of their domains back in. This follows closely behind Dave’s post on banned domains which made the front page. Coincidence?

This is the classic problem facing startups looking for talent. Do you hire someone who’s been around the block, been knee-deep in the industry for years, or do you look for someone who’s smart, hungry and can figure things out?

There’s no question that experience can be valuable, but there are times when it can work against you. As Andy Monfried writes:

Frequently, people with experience would say, “Media planners won’t do that.” “Agencies wont commit budgets without a site list…” Turns out the media planners did. Because we were not afraid to change the language — we did not know any better, we sold it - and it worked. Had there been someone internally, beating us over the head, with all their previous media experience, telling us NOT TO DO IT - we probably would not have.

The trick is to find people who have had enough experience that they can avoid common pitfalls but who are receptive to learning from the environment and who are willing to challenge the status quo. The market today isn’t the same as it was 15 years ago; not all of the experience gained may be applicable. Someone who can take in today’s input with an open mind and process it in light of prior experience is invaluable. This sort of person is also extremely rare.

When you’re setting out to do something different, sometimes people without experience are the ones who find a way. There’s a great post on Ask the Wizard in which Dick Costolo talks about hiring the ‘Best Available Athlete’ which is right in line with my thinking.

As with all people-related decisions, there’s no right answer, but I would pick someone I enjoyed working with who got stuff done and could adapt over the ‘perfect on paper’ candidate every time.

P.S. I’m reserving the right to change my mind about this in about 15 years or so.