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Gear Burger: Turbocharged

Rob Webb — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 06:06:47 +0000

Gear Burger has been turbocharged. You can read about the improvements here.

Side Benefit of User Testing: Team Unity

Rob Webb — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 05:18:19 +0000

For the last several months, we’ve been undergoing a large redesign of a critical and complex user flow at Adroll. At this point, several hundred hours of work have gone into the project. Our UX intern started the project with a company-wide customer identification exercise that got everyone focused on who we’re targeting with our product and who we should be designing for. We then conducted extensive user testing with target customers throughout development which resulted in radical shifts from what we thought would be the “right” solutions out of the gates. The result is not only a better and easier to use product, but also a unified team. User testing not only focused our team on our target users’ behavior but also virtually eliminated internal debate and the resulting tension regarding who thought what would be best for our users. In the long run it’s very possible that the side benefit of team unity will match the value of the much improved product.

Gear Burger: Outdoor gear deals straight to your inbox

Rob Webb — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:24:20 +0000

My buddy Chad and I launched Gear Burger a while back as a little side project. When you sign up for the service, you select your preferred gear type and gear brand preferences (e.g. men’s hiking and skiing gear made by Patagonia, Salomon and Volkl). Gear Burger then monitors one-deal-at-a-time sites like Steep and Cheap and Tramdock and sends you email alerts when an item that matches your preferences goes on sale. The sales we see are generally 10 – 20% cheaper than the cheapest sale prices on the web. You can also browse past deals within the catalog where you can also find individual products that you would like to follow and get alerts when they go on sale. The live deals section contains all of the deals we are seeing that are currently active. To date our system has seen 21,740 deals and tens of thousands of alerts. We find it super useful for snagging great gear deals and we hope you do too.

Better can beat better + cheaper

Rob Webb — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 04:49:42 +0000

I recently met a scrappy entrepreneur who is working on some very interesting technology that has potential to help large enterprises. He described his product as “ten times better and ten times cheaper than the competition.” It’s easy for entrepreneurs to slip into the mindset that their product needs to beat the competition on all fronts: price, service, technology, etc. The truth is that if you build something that really is 10x better than the competition, there is no reason to massively cut the price as well.

Cool projects for kids

Rob Webb — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 18:38:03 +0000

Subscriptions for healthy things are the new black. We love our vegetable subscription and delivery service because quality veggies are something we want in our life but they are time consuming and difficult to source. Along the same lines, a company recently launched bringing subscription service to hands-on projects for kids called the Project of the Month Club. The service allows you to select delivery frequency and project type for interesting, educational, healthy, pre-screened projects for kids ages 4 – 11. The “Master Builder” projects look like construction-type projects like treasure boxes and birdhouses while “Future Designers” projects are more decoration/design oriented with belts, jewelery kits and similar stuff.

We don’t have kids but I loved interesting projects when I was growing up. My mom would bust her hump to make sure my brother and I had something to work on no matter where we were. It was a ton of work for my mom, but awesome for my brother and me and I’m sure the people around us appreciated it as well….busy kids = happy and quiet kids.

I really like this business as a subscription model. Like veggies, quality projects for kids are widely accepted as healthy and good but they are tough to source. Also, as Project of the Month Club grows as a distribution channel, they could start to attract project makers, which would decrease their hunting and acquisition costs significantly…in fact they might even be able to avoid purchasing the projects at all and just take a commission on sales. Additionally…and this might be a stretch…if the project pipeline was visible and interactive on their site, there might be potential for a Threadless-esq marketplace where product makers marketed and promoted their submissions and buyers could influence production/output. I’m not sure this fits with the drop-ship model but it’s interesting to noodle on.

Strive valiantly

Rob Webb — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 22:52:15 +0000

It is not the critic who counts,
nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbled,
or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena,
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood;
who strives valiantly;
who errs and comes short again and again;
who knows great enthusiasms, great devotions;
who spends himself in a worthy cause;
who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement,
and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly,
so that his place shall never be with those timid souls
who know neither victory nor defeat.

-Theordore Roosevelt

Email deliverability hacks

Rob Webb — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 22:44:14 +0000

Email deliverability is a big deal…and unfortunately it’s as muddled as transaction processing. There are hundreds if not thousands of service providers who will tell you whatever it takes to get you to buy their product and ungodly amounts of marketing materials. At the end of the day, blacklists are nearly impossible to get off and email plays an integral role for nearly every web app in existence (sidenote: check out Product Planner for great visuals of email/signup process flows). Ted Rheingold of Dogster has written the best best list of email deliverability best-practices that I have seen yet. Auren Hoffman built on Ted’s post with a great list of email deliverability troubleshooting suggestions. Unfortunately I found these post via Noah Kagan only after I had spent countless hours wading through email service provider jargon & propaganda. Hopefully this post will save others some pain…

The stats behind Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Law Review

Rob Webb — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 09:05:14 +0000

I’m a law school nerd and watched Obama speech with a friend who asked me what it really means to be Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Law School, one of the credentials that I find most indicative of Obama’s intellectual horsepower.

Every year around 7,500 people apply to Harvard Law School. Roughly 560 students matriculate with, on average, a 3.8 undergrad GPA and a 99th percentile LSAT score. After 1L year studying legal theory, around 40 of the best students are appointed to Harvard Law Review based on their first year grades and writing. Law Reviews are highly competitive student run scholarly journals considered mandatory by many for high-end legal careers. For the 7% that make it on to Law Review, 2L year is more legal theory plus highly detailed editing of emerging legal scholarship pending publication in the journal. At the end of 2L year, one member of Law Review is elected to be the next year’s Editor-in-Chief by the existing members. The Editor-in-Chief then runs the process of producing the next year’s editions of the journal. Since 1887, 121 people have been appointed Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Law Review. There were more than 7,000 Rhodes Scholarships granted during the same period.

Glance

Rob Webb — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 02:18:00 +0000

In my post a while back about my picks for the best service providers for startups, I included my favorite desktop sharing software, Glance, which I use religiously. Glance was recommended to me by a friend and I use it for all my demos also for some internal stuff when sharing a screen is needed.

Last night I ran into a friend I see every couple of years and talk turned to startups. I was amazed to discover that my friend’s cousin Taylor Kew is one of the founders of Glance. My friend was happy to learn that I use Glance ~5 times a week. I was then saddened to hear that Taylor passed away in August ’07 of lymphoma. If anyone at Glance sees this, thanks again for delivering a great service. I can’t imagine how tough it must be to work through losing a founding member of your team.

The power of defaults

Rob Webb — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 21:47:27 +0000

The snack machine in my office building gets a steady flow of patronage throughout the day. Last week I used a dollar bill to buy a 50 cent pack of gum and noticed that the 50 cents I was owed wasn’t returned automagically. I then hit the coin return button and the machine coughed up my change. Somewhere out there, there’s a genius that revolutionized the vending machine industry by changing this default. I’ve left at least an extra dollar in the machine since I first noticed this change last week. Brilliant.

Edit: So it turns out I was totally wrong about this. My dreams of a revolutionized snack vending machine industry have been shattered. Thanks to bostonwolf’s comment I realized had assumed the machine retained change. I was wrong. If there is change owed after a transaction, the machine spits up the change in the coin slot ~2 minutes after the purchase. Too bad.