Rahul Pathak : My Personal Blog

Tom Evslin has a fantastic post on his blog about why pay caps are a great idea and I completely agree.

A free market demands pay caps for those who have been insulated from failure. Should’ve been in the bank bailout billfrom the beginning (although there shouldn’t have been a bank bailout bill at all).

The counter-argument that talent will leave the bailed-out institutions is nonsense.

First, why would we assume that the people who head these institutions are talented at anything beyond maximizing executive pay?

Second, where is all this formerly expensive talent going to go?

It’s a cogent articulation of how I’ve been feeling about the situation and while you may not agree, it’s worth a read.

I think there are two components to trust and in my mind it comes down to intent and competence. Both are critical. At LookStat, we’re aggregating microstock earnings data and crunching it to create actionable information for microstock contributors. A critical part of this is convincing users to trust us with their earnings stats.

What are your intentions? (Or more accurately, what do people think your intentions are?)

It’s not enough to just have good intentions. That’s nice, but it only counts if other people (ideally your users) believe that you have them. Potential LookStat users need to see us as people who are genuinely interested in creating value for them rather than doing them harm.

For a startup with little to no brand recognition, the only way to do this is by being open, transparent and accessible and working to convince one user at a time until word gets around. In the early days, who you are and who will vouch for you is critical. At some point, the balance shifts and the individual becomes less important than the brand, but that will take time. Until then, get out there and make friends - meet as many people as you can.

Do you know what the hell you’re doing?

Good intentions are worthless unless they can be backed up with appropriate actions. Our potential users may believe we want to do the right thing, but if they don’t believe that we are competent, there’s not much point going further. People have to believe that you have the skills and technical competence needed to protect them.

The Answer to Both Questions Has to be Yes

Each component taken by itself is necessary but not sufficient to gain trust. Being honorable, but clueless or being competent, but evil leaves you in a similar place from your users’ perspective. You need both components to start to gain trust. One closing (but very important) reminder - like most things that are worthwhile, trust is hard to gain and easy to lose. You have to take it seriously and you have to keep working at it.

From an old post by Glenn Kelman on Guy Kawasaki’s blog that’s new to me:

“… successful entrepreneurs can’t be convinced that any other startup has their troubles, because they constantly compare the triumphant launch parties and revisionist histories of successful companies to their own daily struggles.”

Newsweek’s behind the scenes look at the election is fascinating reading and one thing that popped into my head as I was reading it tonight was the role of measurement & self-evaluation:

For the first two debates, the Obama campaign asked members of focus groups to turn dials to measure their response to the candidates. Every time Obama seemed to quarrel with McCain, or even criticize him, his readings went down. For the third debate, the word went out: no “Crossfire”-type wrangling. The Obama campaign had been bracing for attacks on his relationship to Bill Ayers for months (in the spring, focus groups had been assembled to gauge how those attacks would play to the public). The format of the third debate brought the two candidates almost side by side, seated at a table, so Obama would have a more difficult time keeping his distance. But he prepared, as always, to keep his cool. In rehearsal, Craig-as-McCain was so over the top in his efforts to bait Obama that both men dissolved into giggles at one point. But at other times, Obama allowed himself to get angry. Later, when he watched a video of the rehearsal, he saw himself and vowed: no shouting, no talking over McCain. A little subtle needling might be permissible.

None of us should ever make the mistake of thinking that we don’t need feedback or that we won’t benefit from a critical evaluation of our performance.

Seth has a great post on his blog about the Wired article about the making of the iPhone. He highlights an amazing point:

The takeaway for me is that there were nearly insurmountable hurdles in terms of investment, partnership, technology and even security, and that at any time, the easiest thing would have been to just say  ‘forget it.’ Everyone would breathe a sigh of relief and move on. Important stuff is usually like that.  

I think Seth is spot on. You always have to work for the good stuff. Whether it’s waking up every day trying to get traction with a startup or pushing through mile 18 of a marathon when every muscle in your legs is screaming at you to stop, it’s always more satisfying when you keep your chin up and continue putting one foot in front of the other. It’s feels easier to quit but if you keep pushing, succeed or fail, you’re going to feel better about yourself in the morning.

In general, in startups, spending money carefully is a good thing. Cash is the lifeblood of any company and spending it wisely is critical. Having said that, there are areas where you should be prepared to spend because your business depends on it. It doesn’t pay to be too cheap when it comes to your attorney, your hosting & infrastructure and most of all, your people. Identify the critical elements of your business and spend appropriately in those areas. Be as cheap as possible everywhere else.Don’t get me wrong, you have to spend money slowly, but if saving a little today costs you a lot tomorrow, you’re making a bad decision.  

Dave has a great post up about transitions and he talks about folks at Judy’s Book going above and beyond the call of duty to make sure that work gets done and things get fixed, even as they were moving on to other things. I’m in violent agreement with Dave on this one. People have been fantastic and I have nothing but great things to say about the team.

Dick Costolo has another great post up on his blog called Too Many Chiefs or Too Many Indians. The post is about hiring at early stage startups and whether to hire experience or youthful enthusiasm first. Dick favors experience initially and has some good arguments backing it up.

First of all, in the first year to eighteen months of the business, everybody is generally heads down and go, go, go. By bringing in experienced people who understand the industry, their roles, and what needs to get done, you as entrepreneur are less likely to have to play grown-up and deal with the management issues that can frequently pop-up among a largely junior staff. It’s critical in the first 12-18 months to run as fast as possible, and by bringing in experienced players that can hit the ground running, you give yourself an opportunity to get a lot accomplished quickly. Secondly, as the organization grows from 4 to 20, if your first few people are senior, you can be confident that the future leaders of your organization are do-ers, people who rolled up their sleeves in the early life of the business and know how things operate ‘under the hood’.

Ask the Wizard should be in your subscriptions list if it isn’t already.

There’s a great interview of Jeff Bezos in the October 2007 issue of HBR. I think Amazon is making some great moves lately with their web services initiatives, their foray into movies and music and after reading this article I came away even more impressed than I was before.

It helps to base your strategy on things that won’t change. When I’m talking with people outside the company, there’s a question that comes up very commonly: “What’s going to change in the next five to ten years?” But I very rarely get asked “What’s not going to change in the next five to ten years?” At Amazon we’re always trying to figure that out, because you can really spin up flywheels around those things. All the energy you invest in them today will still be paying you dividends ten years from now…

…For our business, most of them turn out to be customer insights. Look at what’s important to the customers in our consumer-facing business. They want selection, low prices, and fast delivery. This can be different from business to business: There are companies serving other customers who wouldn’t put price, for example, in that set. But having found out what those things are for our customers, I can’t imagine that ten years from now they are going to say, “I love Amazon, but if only they could deliver my products a little more slowly.” And they’re not going to, ten years from now, say, “I really love Amazon, but I wish their prices were a little higher.”

It’s a great piece and while it’s long, it’s well worth it.

We released some significant new functionality on couponlooker today. (We also put out some new features on Judy’s Book which I’m really excited about but more on that tomorrow.) Kurt and Dave (Ops and Test) deserve a special thank you for great work in helping us iron out the kinks in this release and making sure the site is up and running.

The biggest user-facing improvements on couponlooker are the inclusion of ‘% off’ filters and related merchant filters to help users navigate search results.

The reason I’m excited about the filters is that they add significantly to user value. If you do a search for ‘digital camera’ on couponlooker, you are presented with a set of results for digital camera coupons (naturally enough) and at the bottom of the page, we present a set of links that allow you to refine your search:

If you click on say the 50% link, you are shown digital camera coupons for 40-50% off.

This is a simple change, but goes a long way to helping users navigate the search results. The merchant filters serve a similar purpose. They also help normalize data across coupon sites so “Dell Home” and “Dell Home, Inc.” aren’t treated as separate sites.

We also released an early version of a sponsored listing system that allows sites to promote specific coupons. These are clearly marked as sponsored listings and clearly distinguishable from the main search results.

As before, we continue to de-dupe coupons found on different sites in order to help users find the unique offers out there that are available to them.

Alex has a good post that goes into some detail about how we implemented the above features and it’s well worth a read if you’re interested.

With couponlooker, our goal is to drive traffic to the best coupon sites on the web. We’re also continually adding sites to our index. If you have a favorite coupon site, let me know and we’ll get it into the system.

These aren’t radical changes, but we’ve got to keep getting better at the basics in order to deliver value. There just aren’t any shortcuts.