The Quiet E-Commerce Renaissance

E-commerce has undergone dramatic change in the last two years.  Zynga has cracked social gaming and virtual goods wide open, producing enormous transaction volume.  Groupon has crushed local service group buying and created a multi-billion dollar cash machine.  Gilt has pioneered invite-only branded high end flash sales.  All three of these companies have pioneered new e-commerce models in a matter of months, have been locked in the tech news spotlight, and have spawned hordes of fast-followers trying to get in on the action.

However outside of the consumer spotlight, there are several companies that have been revolutionizing web based e-commerce tools available for businesses.  Shopify, AvantLink, Shopatron, AdRoll, and FeeFighters are each dedicated to helping their customers sell more and sell better online.  They don’t receive the public fanfare of their consumer facing brethren like Zynga, Groupon and Gilt, but all have offerings that create unique value and some are growing at a similarly furious pace.

Calculating Online Advertising Return on Investment

I’ve been helping a friend write a business school case on his company. I haven’t done too much but it’s been fun to see the process. Recently I helped with an appendix covering the ROI calculation when dealing with online advertising campaigns. I thought I would include it here in case it might be useful for other folks.

Paper Prototype User Testing

A heavily underutilized tool in the UI development and testing toolset is the paper prototype user test.  Paper prototype tests have literally saved me and the companies I have worked for hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars.  The test itself is really simple.  Like all other forms of user testing, the most difficult step is getting the testers to show up and do the test.

Setting Team Expectations and Evaluating Performance

Over the last year I have been inspired for a number of reasons to bone up on my skills related to improving employee performance.  This great post by Ben Horowitz led me to High Output Management by Andy Grove, which is a phenomenal reference for any manager. I have found Chapters 11 through 16 to be particularly useful.  Grove’s core message is that more often than not, an underperforming employee is likely being mismanaged.  Specifically, it is likely that the employee does not know what management expects the employee to do.  When an employee underperforms, Grove advises managers to double back and make sure it is abundantly clear what exactly is expected of the employee, what metrics will be used to evaluate the employee’s performance, and when the employee’s next performance review will occur.

Gear Burger: Turbocharged

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

Liftopia.

A much needed update!  I joined Liftopia back in November as VP of Product.  My primary role is to lead the charge on the technology development side of things but as is the case with all startups, everyone does a bit of everything.  I joined the team right as we were heading into our peak season and have spent the last six months trying to pump out features that would improve our season results and keep the wheels on the bus.  We still have a long way to go but we had a great season, and when we have a great season that means we were able to help ski resorts have great seasons as well which is very cool.  We’re now heading into a period of lower transactional volume which means we will be able to crank out a ton of development work, as we don’t have to worry as much about bug fixes, transaction processing optimization and customer support issues.  I’ll post updates here as we release features and design changes.  I’m also going to start blogging again (although Twitter is still sucking me away).

Side Benefit of User Testing: Team Unity

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

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

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.

Busy Months

It’s been a busy couple of months.

1. I started as Director of Product Management at Adroll
2. KnowledgeBid is cranking in a nicely automated manner
3. I’ve been posting a lot on twitter
4. Semi-regular posting will resume/continue…

How sticky is your signup?

Nothing bugs me more than a bad signup process.  The signup should be viewed as your site’s sales process.  The ball is in your court to  close the deal when someone starts the signup.  Don’t blow it!  A few things I try to keep in mind when analyzing or building a signup process…

My Picks: Top 5 Gadgets

I was recently asked an interesting question.  “What are five tech gadgets that you can’t live without?”  Some of my picks aren’t really gadgets…I just went with the stuff I derive the most value from in a work context.

Air and Simple Gifts

I really enjoyed the John Williams arrangement  “Air and Simple Gifts.” played today at the inauguration by Yo-Yo Ma (cello), Itzhak Perlman (violin), Gabriela Montero (piano) and Anthony McGill (clarinet). 

2 years and 200 posts

I started this blog 2 years and 200 posts ago.  The time has flown by.  I’m still having fun with it and no major missteps so I’m sticking to my plan.  Just over 50,000 pages viewed so far.  Thanks for reading!  I’ll try to keep things interesting.

The Money Management Boom

As the Madoff scandal continues to unwind, the best reading for background on the situation continues to be Harry Markopolos’ letter to the SEC in 2005 (pdf, html) entitled “The World’s Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraud”. Not only is his analysis of the Madoff situation spot on, his analysis of the funds and funds of funds that invested in him is also very true:

Creating user incentives

I’ve recently spent a good amount of time looking at systems used to motivate users of consumer websites. Across the board, the systems that are most successful 1) have a social component 2) highlight relevant scores within user profile and 3) award points that have no actual or implied dollar value.

Facebook: Reach and Saturation by Country, Part III

I checked in on Facebook’s growth and added to the data set used in Part I and Part II. The data is a bit too big for a spreadsheet so I used iCharts to make a dynamic chart that allows for easy visibility. Use the slider on the side to zoom in on the other 90+ other countries. Notice that their global growth continues to accelerate.

Cool projects for kids

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. 

Strive valiantly

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

Farm Fresh to You: Great veggies & scurvy protection

We’ve been using a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) service for the last several months called Farm Fresh to You. It was recommended to us by a friend when we moved to the Bay Area earlier this year. We get the “regular” box of veggies delivered to our doorstep every two weeks which costs $30, home delivery included. We signed up for the convenience of getting tasty fruits and veggies delivered on a regular basis but I priced out our most recent box on the Safeway grocery delivery site and found that we’re also saving 50% on cost.  If you think this writeup is useful use promotional code 378 when you sign up. This code is valid as of July, 2013. You’ll get $10 off your first order and we’ll get a free box.

Trade shares of players and teams on OneSeason

My friends Mike and DJ launched OneSeason about two months ago and have built a very interesting platform for buying and selling synthetic ownership interests in sports teams and players among friends. Think playing cards merged with an online industrial strength trading platform.

Good reads

Lots of good reading material recently. A few good ones:

Is it a Terrible Time to Move? (Kedrosky) The Daily Beast

Anatomy of a Meltdown The New Yorker

Hitched to Someone Else’s Dream (Stonyfield Farms) Inc

The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace Rolling Stone

Thinking Outside the Box (Costco) Fast Company

Complete airline luggage cost data

I think I’ll be shipping my luggage this winter. Data from WSJ report.  A separate CNNMoney article here with a nice Liftopia plug.

Email deliverability hacks

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…

Obama and Chicago economics

The WSJ ran a short but interesting piece this weekend which focused on how Obama is perceived among Chicago School economists given his background with the University of Chicago. The piece focuses on the thoughts of Richard Thaler, one of the leaders in the school of behavioral economics which has largely examined the efficient markets theorized by the old Chicago School crowd and identified scenarios in which actors systemically fail to make efficient decisions. This line of study is an interesting glimpse into human behavior and is very important in the context of efficient market arguments which all assume decision makers behave in efficient ways (e.g. a person will take $2 in exchange for $1).