Chris has just started blogging and he has a great post up on his blog about the importance of taking smaller bites when starting a company.
…one big takeaway was a collective resolve to build our next business by “taking smaller bites”, working toward a vision by executing more thoroughly around discrete building blocks of the idea.
I completely agree with this perspective. Even if you’ve got a grand vision, you have to execute like crazy in one small area. Once you matter a lot to a group of people, it becomes easier to reach out to more. Trying to matter to everyone at once is a tough game.
Great post Chris and welcome to blogging. I’m looking forward to reading more.
Alison stumbled onto this and sent me a link. There are 2 in stock on Amazon and the product has 70 five star customer reviews. Hurry before they’re sold out.
One of the real-time lessons we learned at Judy’s Book is that while UGC is great, without vigilant moderation of that content, you’re going to get a lot of noise in the system, which is not great. When we were aggressively seeking reviews, we relied exclusively on the community to flag posts and then reviewed those posts for compliance with our terms of use. This approach is ok, but doesn’t go far enough. We should have looked at every review and only approved content that was of value for review readers.
When we transitioned to deals, we adopted the same - anything goes, we’ll deal with spam - approach but quickly found that deal posters were flooding the system with deals that from our perspective were questionable. The problem was compounded by the fact that with deals, there is a financial incentive to posters - the more of their links they publish, the more likely they are to get paid. Initially, we tried to combat the problem with algorithms that gave higher preference to known posters, and more aggressive deal removal tactics. This helped, but we constantly felt like we were behind the curve.
The solution was a simple re-framing of the problem. Rather than let anything onto the site and then remove bad deals, we decided to only allow good deals onto the site. The way we did this was by creating a moderation queue. Anybody could post anything, but before anything came onto the site, it would have to be approved by a member of the JB staff. This simple decision completely eliminated our spam problem. A simple, streamlined interface made it quick and efficient to review deals and we saved ourselves a great deal of frustration dealing with bad deals on the site’s primary pages.
If you’re thinking about incorporating UGC into your site, I’d strongly urge you to consider a moderation queue approach. While you do sacrifice content velocity and incur a certain amount of overhead due to the review process, you gain a great deal in terms of content quality and less policing of the site’s content pages. While I can envision a few scenarios where quantity should come before quality, they are rare. When in doubt, err on the side of what will generate the higher quality user experience.
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.
I love having dogs at the office. Endless entertainment.
A friend of mine emailed me a link to this hilarious AP article about bovine minivan abuse.
Falling cow smashes van near Manson
By The Associated Press
MANSON, Chelan County — A Chelan County fire chief says a couple were lucky they weren’t killed by a cow that fell off a cliff and smashed their minivan.
District 5 Chief Arnold Baker says they missed being killed by a matter of inches Sunday as they drove on Highway 150 near Manson.
The 600-pound cow fell about 200 feet and landed on the hood of the minivan carrying Charles Everson Jr. and his wife Linda of Westland, Mich., who were in the area celebrating their one-year wedding anniversary. They were checked at Lake Chelan Community Hospital as a precaution.
The van was heavily damaged, including a broken windshield.
Charles Everson says he kept repeating, “I don’t believe this. I don’t believe this.”
The year-old cow had been reported missing by a breeder. It was euthanized at the scene.
You couldn’t make this up if you tried.
I noticed a small menu called “Search Shortcuts” in Yahoo Mail a couple of days ago. This is a great example of a simple feature addition that has a huge payoff.
People send photos around all the time and having one-click access to all photos in your email account is awesome. If you click on the link, you’re presented with a thumbnail view of the photos in your email which you can sort/slice etc. In addition, in the left nav you get a list of filters that allow you to narrow the list by person, by file type or by time. You can select multiple images and save them all to disk, or you can forward photos with one click.
I think this is absolutely awesome. They could have achieved the same thing with just the ?My Attachments” link, but instead, they thought about the primary use case and made it easily accessible. Features don’t always have to be complicated to deliver a lot of value.
I’m a big fan of Google Alerts and with the latest one I received it may have rocketed to the top of my list of cool features.
I normally delete these after reading them, but this one may be a keeper.
Andy has a post up on his blog about the decision to scale back operations at Judy’s Book.
Today was a tough day. For the second time in my life I had to tell a great team of people that the idea they’d worked so hard on was going away. After 3+ years, our management team and board of directors has decided to scale back our operations at Judy’s Book and seek a strategic acquiror.
As a CEO, I know this is the right thing to do for our investors. But as an entrepreneur it’s disappointing to stop chasing an idea just when it’s beginning to take root in the popular consciousness.
It’s been a crazy day but Andy’s done an amazing job helping the company deal with a difficult situation.
