Blog reflections

I think I just learned something as a blogger: My last few posts have gotten more feedback in the form of comments and emails than any posts previously. I'll state the obvious -- It's clear (today) that my readers want to read posts that are truly authentic and revealing in nature. The posts surrounding the evolution of Judy's Book and what's been hard and what's been easy at the company are posts that I was just a bit uncertain and uncomfortable about writing and revealing. I'll try and do more of that going forward.

I'm in the midst of preparing for my next board meeting and will be putting into practice the steps I wrote about a couple weeks ago.

What's been easy at Judy's Book

PR
The Judy's Book story and the momentum of local in the marketplace have been a great combination. We've been featured in great national (NYT, Business week) and local (Seattle times, etc) publications, without much effort.

Offers & Discounts
I shouldn't be but I am somewhat surprised by how voracious people (specifically our customer base) are to get free stuff and to save money.  Consumers will do a *LOT* of work to get a deal (esp. something free).  Moreover, the offers are smoewhat viral – at least within a certain demographic

Questions & Answers & Community
People love to ask & answer questions on topics they care about. The community features on Judy's Book seem to work really well. 

Status & Validation
Member scores/rankings + earning points through chat (via comments).  Once again, we are a competitive and numbers orientated culture and it shows with the ranking of leaderboards, trust score, and personal validation.

What's been hard at Judy's Book

Following up on my post yesterday, below are answers to the question of what's been harder than expected at Judy's Book.

Achieving critical mass in local

Momentum in any one location doesn't transfer to others – you have to fight the same fight over and over.

Attracting + keeping people (i.e. consumer users as opposed to businesses)
Getting onto a person's radar screen is hard (harder than anticipated). Even with a big funnel, converting visits into signups, signups into repeat visits, & then into active use requires lots of money or passion or (best case) both at once.  I know this is the process any business must go through, but doing this in the domain of "local reviews" only was hard. It's not so hard to get people engaged at the point of time when they are searching for a plumber but this engagement doesn't necessarily translate into a huge number of reviews.

Getting money from local merchants
Local merchants and local marketing spend just hasn't moved online at the rate that we anticipated when we started the business. Moreover, the degree of fragmentation (location + category + size + etc.) and the inability to reach the decision-maker (I came to believe that self service for this market won't work -- I think you need feet on the street to address this market). We began to talk about this problem as the cost of sale problem at Judy's Book.

SEO
SEO should be pretty straight forward but when your business gets 30% of traffic from Google search, being good at this is harder than we thought it would be. Google holds all the cards, they keep changing the rules, and the time delays before results are make the entire process of getting traffic from google painful.

This is not an exhaustive list. There are lots of other things that have been hard too...but this is what bubbled up for my management team. Tomorrow, I'll post what has been surprisingly easy for us at Judy's Book.

Three questions to ask yourself

I liked this commment from one of my readers:

Andy:
Way to "open source" the dev thinking process. 

Incidentally, as someone early on in his career path, it seems individuals all too often forget to ask themselves the same three question equivalents:

1) What am I struggling with/finding as roadblocks to personal growth?
2) What am I good at/love doing/find easy?
3) What do I value/where should I be aiming my strengths?

Best,
Matt

More open source thinking coming your way.

The meeting that led to Judy's Book insights

The evolution of Judy's Book was sparked by a management meeting we had about 6 months ago. At that meeting, we asked ourselves the following questions:

 

  1. What are the hardest problems in our current business approach - the market issues that we keep struggling with over and over?
  2. What’s (surprisingly) easy about our business – the things that are working better than expected?
  3. Where’s the parade?  What major trends are we trying to get in front of with our business?

What would our business look like If we:

  • Stopped trying to do what’s hard,
  • Did more of the things that are easy, and
  • Made sure we were in front of the biggest parade we can find?

I think this is an excellent list of questions that management teams should ask themselves about their business every six months or so. I'm looking forward to revisiting this meeting again in January.

My two cents on google - youtube

1st penny: Isn't America great?! Start a company, generate effectively no revenue and 100 million views a day, sell out for 1.6+ billion dollars, in about 20 months!!

2nd penny: Doesn't this deal make Murdoch seem all the smarter. I remember when News Corp bought Myspace and people were skeptical about the deal and today Myspace's video is outpacing youtube?! It makes him look like a genius.

Judy's Book insights

Judy's Book was started with a couple of simple insights about people. We knew people used word of mouth to make decisions about purchases of products and services. We thought that it would be useful to create a company that fostered a community of people online to share recommendations. Judy's Book was born as "your friends' yellow pages."  We put a product in market and have worked hard toward that vision. We've been successful -- we get over a million page views a month, we've got half a million reviews, etc.  About six months ago, we started a process of understanding our business and more specifically understanding our customer.

We interviewed our customer, we analyzed what was being clicked on, and went through a management process and came to the following conclusions:

Our Consumers
Our users wanted more from our site than simply "reviews".  Our users were interested in answers to their local purchasing decisions. Up until recently, we had really only been focused on the quality side of local purchases (that was our initial hypothesis). What our users were expressing to us was a few important insights:
- Purchases were a result of finding the best quality at the right price and that what they were interested in was value
- Price mattered most to them

In addition, we got clear on who our target customer is and what it is that we should be doing to serve them. Bottom line, our customer likes the online community, shops regularly, doesn't like to pay retail, tends to be more female than male, tends to be age 25-45, enjoys promotions, coupons and deals.

Our Product
ii) Our focus on local "only" wasn't working. Local is critical to our business but our product had created too many empty local silos. The example here is that a new user in Memphis, Tennessee would come to the site and wouldn't experience the living breathing site that Judy's Book is -- because of the way our product shows the data to this person.

One of my next posts will be about what how we took these conclusions and modified Judy's Book insights.

One thing that makes blogging great

This blog post is dedicated to Nicholas.

I graduated from Brown in 1990 and have had varying levels of success over the past 17 years keeping in touch with friends from that time (it's true it was the best 4 years of my life).   I've managed to establish a regular ski trip with 4 other friends (Mark, Jay, Andrew, Rufus), I've managed to start a business or two with one friend from school (Shaun), I talk regularly to one friend (Jon), but there are a handful of friends who I inevitably lost touch with after Brown. Try as I might to write or call to continue a relationship with these guys, I was unsuccessful.

Well, one of these 'lost' friends recently has been reading my blog and periodically leaves me comments. I have to say that it makes my day each time he does....no, we're not hanging out at Louies', smoking cigs at the echo chamber, or playing drums with dung beetle.  I've always been a Nicholas B fan ....always thought he was a good friend just never could figure out a way to keep our relationship up. Blogging -- unintentionally, has provided me with the perfect vehicle.

So, I'll keep writing for you Nicholas and I want to encourage all me old friends to comment on my blog or email me.

Corporate evolution

I've been waiting to write this post for a while.  I'm going to write a series of blog posts about corporate evolution -- the blog posts are going to explore the why's and the how's of making the decision to evolve as a company.  I've got lots to say on the topic because I've been living this topic for the past 6 months or so at Judy's Book. We're approaching the eve of releasing an exciting new feature set and natural evolution for Judy's Book.

Companies evolve every day, either consciously or unconsciously.  Early stage companies in particular, need to evolve to survive and thrive. Normally, this process is meant to be seemless to a companies constituents -- employees and customers. However, sometimes you have an insight into your customer and product that requires a more significant evolution to occur.  I think we at Judy's Book have had such an insight...but more on that tomorrow.

social software trends

I got this from the summary of the Future of Web Apps Conference' 

  1. User generated content and social software trends
    This is a bit of a catchall, but I’d like to list what has been working and not working in the user generated content space.
    1. Not working:
      1. Requiring participation from square 1. Not all users need to participate to generate social value.
      2. Buying communities.
      3. Social networks for the sake of social networks.
      4. Wikipedia consensus model (many people contribute to one idea for the greater good) is not a good model in general and probably cannot be duplicated outside Wikipedia.
    2. Working:
      1. Giving users control, being open to different uses you did not anticipate.
      2. Dunbar principle – segments of under 150 people.
      3. The individual should get value and the organization should derive aggregated value from all the individuals.
      4. Social sites have and need different types of users and each should be motivated/rewarded equally.
      5. Many voices generate emergent order: you can get much value out of all that data.

Simple suggestions for a quality board meeting

  1. Compile all materials in one pdf file (easy for board members to print out in one step and easy for you to control content)
  2. Send materials at least 24 hours in advance
  3. Assume board members have read the materials
  4. Have board meeting center around strategic issues facing the company -- ie. what 3 questions do you want input on? 
  5. Overall, make the board meeting conversation in style and not reporting in style.

Making Board Meetings Constructive

I had a board meeting last week. We had prepared a power point deck of 28 slides -- it was full with lots of information.  The problem was that the entire meeting was spent on reporting -- and we didn't get the benefit of actually discussing the real issues facing the company at this time.  As a result, the board meeting was dry and dull.

After the board call ended, I jumped on a plan to go visit with Brad Feld -- our lead investor in the Series B.  We had sushi dinner and discussed the changes going on at Judy's Book and the board meeting. It turns out that in less than 30 minutes of dinner, I had more suggestions, insights, and constructive feedback than I had received during the entire board meeting.

The net result: I'm going to still send out the 28 page power point -- but I'll assume it's been read and I'll try and structure the board meeting on issues facing management to engage the board in constructive conversation.

Remove your sofa

I participated in a tea ceremony in Kyoto yesterday. The tea master was an old wise man who told me that he travelled to the US recently and realized that the problem with the US is the sofa. It prevents people in the US from learning to sit properly, breathe properly and fundamentally takes the culture away from its center. He thought that people should remove their sofas and couches from their homes and hotels. I didn't argue with him. It's an interesting perspective. He was clearly wiser than me.

As we finish our remodel, I am reconsidering the purchase of a sofa. So if you come to visit you may have to sit on the floor.

Marketing with online communities: Turning quantity into quality

Brad Feld's Post on the 80-19-1% rule in online communities is insightful and spot on. To give people a better sense of how I think about the rule and online communities, I thought I'd share some info about our perspective on managing the 1% hopefully growing to 19% at Judy's Book.

CityeditorMarketing at a start-up is tough business. Marketing at a start-up with an online community is really tough business. You need to be focused on traffic volume to be recognized as a vibrant player in the marketplace but diligently watchful over the activity contributed by that traffic to make sure it aligns with your business goals. In January, we launched a City Editor program for the most active members on Judy’s Book to kick off our first loyalty program. Since we launched, the program has accounted for a large amount of the post activity (approx. 20%) on the site—and membership continues to grow by 20% each week. Now that we’ve got a captive audience of loyal users, we’ve been experimenting with the best way to turn the quantity of content into constructive, quality content that has value to our tens of thousands of readers daily.

 

We recently instituted a new set of rules for the program. Here’s what we think is working:

 

  • Small rewards, awarded frequently: We used to offer a big reward incentive at the end of each month but few members went for it as they felt it was unobtainable. Recently we switched to offer small rewards each week and as a result content has more than doubled on our site in the past quarter
  • Tell them what you want: If you don’t tell them what to write about, the content will be fragmented and hard to monetize.
  • Provide direction: Even the most prolific writers run out of stuff to say. Give them ideas, suggestions and tips on new topics to contribute to your site to keep the content flowing
  • Give them a rule book: Inappropriate and harassing content is distracting to readers. Make sure your contributors play by the rules and dismiss anyone that doesn’t

 

We’ll probably lose a few members over our adoption of these rules for the city editor group but ultimately we hope (and think) that what we’re left with is higher quality contributors that can help us carry out the Judy’s Book mission over the long haul. 

US open commentary

Agassi_1I've been tivoing (is that a verb?) the US Open and watching it late at night and this weekend I managed to watch the Agassi - Becker match. I was moved to tears and as I've spoken about it with others -- so were many others.  For me, this was the most significant sports hero retirement in my life. I remember Larry Bird and Michael Jordan retiring....I was a big Celtics fan growing up. But their retirements were lost on me because I was too young and their games were ultimately team sports. Andre's retirment really struck me -- in part because I'm going to be 40 next year and feel my own age coming on, in part because I grew up watching Andre and rememeber him with his long hair, and also because it was one of the most vulnerable human moments I've seen in sport.

There's a great post on publishing 2.0 about developing applications for the average user. 

Google’s problem with vertical search adoption (as documented by Bill Tancer at Hitwise) is a lesson on how average people adopt and use applications. Most people use Google’s main search rather than the vertical options (which are plainly listed on Google’s main page) because they see “Googling” as a simple, elegant, one-stop-shop for any and every search need — this is how most people function. Using different search engines for different types of searches is several standard deviations of complexity away from average user behavior — the people who adopted Google for its simplicity are the same people who won’t stop to think what type of Google search they need to do. They just Google search. Just one, plain, simple application.

Life is complicated. People cling to simplicity and proven results. Behaviors are deeply ingrained and do not easily change.

For me, this is a profound post and incredibly relevant to the challenge of Judy's Book and others who operate social networks that haven't achieved critical mass in the market yet. That's most of us non-myspace companies and networks.

The post reminds me of a speech I heard Mary Meeker give on technology adoption. She said, if you're replacing some consumer behaviour, then your product needs to clear the technology adoption hurdle by being twice as good (good could be fast, easier, cheaper etc) to get people to switch.  Otherwise, consumer inertia sets in and they don't switch.

Google's simple search interface managed to get the average user to switch from yahoo, alta vista, and lycos because it cleared the adoption hurdle.  The question we're (at Judy's BooK) left contemplating and attempting to prove is what is required for Judy's Book to clear the same hurdle.

Netscape

I've been watching Netscape's re-launch. I've been a fan of the work that they've done there -- but consumer traction isn't following and I'm wondering why.

I read today that In three months, and since the debut of Netscape's venture into presenting news channels influenced by visitors' recommendations, its popularity has plummeted, according to analysis by Alexa.com.

Three months ago, Netscape.com was the 238th most visited site. This week Alexa calculated it was in 438th place.  It's been downhill for Netscape since late 2004, despite numerous efforts at reformatting and re-launching.

Why don't consumers care? 
My quick take is :

  1. I'm too in touch with subtle changes to sites and movements in the marketplace and that causes me to over-value differences which aren't apparent to consumers
  2. Jason is doing a good job building buzz in the 2.0 community but that hasn't been communicated clearly to consumers (this is hard to do)
  3. Re-launching a property isn't an easy thing to do
  4. Getting a blip in traffic is not hard to do -- the hard part of building a real web property is figuring out the secret sauce and impressing customers each and every day with something unique and different

All these thoughts will be important for me and my organization to keep in mind as we move forward.