Apple retail store experience amazes

I went to the Apple store yesterday. I was truly impressed. As I was leaving the store, I saw one of the employees there approach a customer leaving at the same time. The employee said, "excuse Mam, I'm one of the managers here and I noticed that you were waiting for a long time. I wanted to make sure that you were satisfied with your experience and that there was nothing else we could do for you. " Basically the manager had noticed that this customer might be upset (turned out she was not) and the manager wanted to make sure that this customer did not leave the store with a strong negative consumer experience.
It's hard to appreciate this moment in a blog -- but  I was blown away by this moment of awesome customer service.  Why was I blown away?

  • First, in a land of shitty customer service, this manager had one eye and was king. It was a simple action that communicated a lot about how much Apple the company cares for the customer.
  • Second, I was impressed by the motivation of the individual manager who made this action -- he wasn't getting paid or compensated for going out of his way that much.
  • Third, the action totally avoids negative word of mouth and turns a possible negative into a postive experience.
  • Lastly, the action has network affects on others -- I just overheard the conversation and am now dedicating an entire blog entry to the topic!

Advice to local reviews sites

I frequently get approached and pitched by people trying to enter into the local reviews and word of mouth referrals business. It happened again today....and my advice to this entrepreneur is the same as it was to other entrepreneurs in the space.  (Forgive me if this is a repetitive post)
i) GET TO CRITICAL MASS

  • Do this by limiting geography -- stay in one geography for 3 years. Yes, 3 years. Do not expand geography for the first 36 months. Every successful online local business has been in one geography for 3 years.
  • Do this by limiting the number of categories or professions you're trying to get word of mouth on. Do not try and do the entire yellow pages. Choose at most five categories. I might suggest: restaurants, dentists, doctors, auto mechanics, and real estate.
  • Do this by aggressive customer acquisition. Whatever your strategy for customer acquisition, get aggressive about. Do not sit in an ivory tower and expect to get to critical mass.
  • Aggregate content from other places on teh web so you can avoid the empty database problem
  • Spend as little money as possible

ii) Go back to step i

Simple advice: Try hard not to raise money

At open coffee this morning, we had a great turn out. About 20 people were there. The place was buzzing and good conversation abounded.  One entrepreneur was asking me about raising angel money in Seattle and I heard myself say -- Try as hard as you can not to raise money. The advice is simple to say and hard to follow. That said, raising angel money is always harder than you think it is. Moreover, getting paid for removing some customers pain has the double benefit of growing your customer base and the entrepreneur retaining ownership in their company. Just my two cents for the day.

Acai Plus at $40 a bottle

My brother swears by this stuff. He says it's changed his life and the way he feels. He's so into it that he's sending me a bottle. I'm open to my life changing and feeling better -- but I'm a little skeptical of a company using multichannel marketing and promising to pay people up to 1.5 million per year. That's a whole lot of life changing juice. Check out this page from their web site outlining their payment scheme...and drink up.  I'll let you know more after I try this stuff for a week.

The job market is too hot

I was chatting with one of our lead developers at Judy's Book and he told me that he's received about 20 offers of employment in the last week!  Many from recruiters and people he didn't know -- but he was amazed and said the market has never been like this before. Given the public nature of Judy's Book wind down, people were coming out of the woodwork to contact him. So for all those people who have emailed me in the last few days about developers -- you need to move faster, much FASTER, the developers were "open minded" and "unemployed" for all of 36 hours max.

Judy's Book lesson #1: markets win

My first and biggest lesson learned from the past 3.5 years can be summed up in a business school lesson I learned many years ago and now really grok: markets win.  You know the adage about putting a quality manager in a lousy market and the market winning. The reverse has also been stated: put a lousy manager in a great fast growing market and the manager seems like a winner. The primary job of an early stage CEO is to get into a great market. I thought that online local search was such a market -- but the details of that market have stumped many a company and many an entrepreneur. 
Online local requires critical mass in a geography and a category. Online local also requires local customer acquisition. Both of these items are very challenging for any company -- and make the market of online local gnarly. I still think the market is a good market -- someone is going to make a lot of money -- but trust me, online local anything is HARD. Very hard.

Emotions of winding down a company

I haven't read a lot about the emotions that accompany a wind down.  For that matter, I haven't read a lot about the emotions that accompany business in general. This post is about my emotions.
The past week has been filled with anxiety once I knew what was happening and before I told the employees, with relief from telling employees what was happening, embarrassment of having failed and reading about it in the newspaper(not succeeded in the way I hoped -- I actually don't view Judy's Book as a total failure but more on that later), and sadness of letting go of the company dream as well as letting go of my mother in law.
Sadness is where I'm at today. Many people including myself worked hard for a long time to try and make this business work.  It didn't work the way I/we had all hoped. Now people are working hard to wind things down responsibly and they're starting to look for other jobs. In situations like this, employees move on fast -- no one wants to be the last one not to find a seat with another company. It's a bit like an adult version of musical chairs.  At times, I can feel some of the angst as they look for work.  I'm struck by the realization that there are a whole host of relationships with people I like -- that I used to see everyday and now I know that I won't see them. That's a bummer! I'll miss them. I'll miss my investors and our die hard customers. I'll miss Judy's Book. It's sad to see all that come to an end. Yep -- Sadness is where I'm at today. 
I'm glad it's been sunny in Seattle...reminds me that everything is going to be ok in time.

Lessons in Internet Layoffs: Word travels fast

I'm going to write some blog entries about the process I'm going through with Judy's Book. One lesson learned is an obvious one -- word travels FAST in the internet age. Case in point: I announced to the company that we were going to be doing layoffs at 11AM on Tuesday.  By 11:20AM, people were IMing and emailing with past employees. People we hadn't even heard from in a over a year contacted us and asked what was going on. By 3PM, I had gotten an email from 2 reporters asking what the story was. I posted my blog around 4PM and by 5PM, there was a post on both the Seattle PI and techcrunch.
Some things to think about:

  1. That was fast! Imagine any business doing a lay off or winding down 20 years ago and compare it to the story above.   Word may have taken 6 months to travel as far as it did in 6 hours today. Wow!
  2. Don't try to contain a story like this -- all you can do is get out in front of it and hope for the best. Stories and the truth want to be free.
  3. Have a press and blog strategy on the checklist of any layoff you're doing.

Time is the enemy

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. We've (I've) made plenty of mistakes along the way with Judy's Book, but our decision last year to focus on local shopping wasn't one of them. Greg Sterling has been more eloquent about this opportunity than I'll ever be, but I'm certain the ideas we're pursuing here at Judy's Book will ultimately become a significant piece of the online and local
shopping puzzle, and I'm sorry that I and my team won't be the ones to carry the ball across the finish line.

Depending on how you count it, Judy's Book is my fourth or fifth startup, and it definitely won't be my last. It's hard to say goodbye to great ideas and even better people, but it's also exciting to be looking ahead to a new chapter. More to come...stay tuned. Don't turn the channel.

Seattle Start Up Shout Out: Blist is one to watch

I met with Kevin Merritt, CEO of Blist today. They're still in stealth mode and not talking much about what they're doing. But I assure when they do start talking, people will listen. Consumers, businesses, and investors will all listen. What they're doing is very cool!  When Kevin gives me the go ahead, I'll give you more of my opinions about the company. But in the meantime, keep an eye out -- blist is one to watch!

Insane valuations

I was on the phone with an entrepreneur friend of mine and he was saying that valuations out there are getting pretty frothy and they are indeed!  It's no wonder that ebay finally had to take a $2.6 billion writedown on its skype acquisition.  No wonder indeed. And today at breakfast I heard that the rumour mill had Microsoft valuing a 5% stake in Facebook at $300 to $500 million, which places the value of Facebook at roughly $6 to $10 billion! Read about it here. Note that I wrote about this deal weeks ago and feel that I actually played a role in starting the rumour ;-)

MIT Enterprise Forum presentation

I'm presenting tomorrow night at the MIT enterprise forum on moving from idea to business.  Here's the cliff notes version to my presentation:

  • Ideas are cheap
  • Creating cash flowing business is a process. It’s expensive in terms of time, money and passion
  • Things I try to remember:
  1. KISS
  2. Cash Flow is King
  3. Customer Acquisition is Queen
  4. Listen to your gut
  5. Teams make businesses, not individuals

Be something to someone

I met with Brandon DeCuir of Divvy, a new very early stage company in Seattle. They're implementing a local social networking application that allows people in a location to share. My advice to him was to try to be "SOMETHING TO SOMEONE". In other words, he was at the stage in the process where he was interested in the idea that people in a geographic area like a neighborhood or a city block would want to share lots of stuff like tools, toys, DVDs etc.  Sure, it's an interesting idea but I told him to choose an audience and an item that people wanted to share regularly (daily or at least weekly). Ultimately, as we talked I told him to either focus on letting condo owners in a condo complex to share tools (kind of an interesting idea) or to let gamers in a block exchange cartridges. I'm not sure if either of these ideas is really a great idea for a business (I don't think I'd pursue either of them) but I tried to give him constructive feedback while cautioning him on the challenges I've faced at Judy's Book.

flying sucks

I just got back from SF today and the title of my post states the obvious. That said, while in the SF airport I came across a business called flyclear.  This is a business that was started by Stephen Brill of American Lawyer (and Court TV I believe). And I think it's a killer. They're selling 1, 2, and 3 year subscriptions to the service which allows you to cut the lines in security in exchange for a fee and a a bunch of profile information. The sales pitch is awesome for any business traveler. For $100 per year paid today you get to move to the front of the line in select airports.  And if you want, you can "lock in" the $100 price for 3 years because the price of the service is likely to increase as they roll out more airports and expand. Nothing like customer financed businesses!! Great float. I'm going to sign up today even though they're not yet in Seattle....my guess is the service won't make traveling any easier or better in a significant way but I'm willing to pay $100 today so that I feel like it may suck a little less the next time I fly.

Email PR

I'm an adviser to Pixsy, a very interesting video search company. I've known the CEO, Chase Norlin, since my abuzz days. He was at Sony and Sony was a customer of abuzz.  Yesterday, I got another email blast from Chase -- he probably sends out an email blast every other month. I wrote him back that I thought he was the master of email PR. His actions got me thinking about using email as a PR vehicle (duh?). Not very insightful, kinda obvious, and really powerful. I wonder why more CEOs don't follow Chase's behavior....myself included.