web 2.0 conference

I'm sitting in my first panel. It sucks. Perhaps it's I'm simply frustrated by my lack of election news coverage. Perhaps it's that none of the rooms have enough seats for everyone ...so I'm sitting on the floor for 90 minutes and my back is killing me. Perhaps it's that I'm tired of conferences with poorly moderated panels -- there's got to be a better communication and engagement model for conferences. I hope it gets better from here....and I hope I can get up from the floor.

election news coverage

I'm at web 2.0 conference and am sitting in the advertising 2.0 panel (more on that later) and I am looking for results and forecasts for todays election coverage. You know some real time election coverage online. You know what -- I can't find it -- this sucks. The internet has a way to go as a real time coverage medium -- tv still rules at times like this.

I've spent about 15 minutes typing in searches and going to blog sites as well as big brand news sites like CNN and nytimes -- and I'm just not at all satisfied with the experience.  Let me know if you have any suggestions of where I should be looking....

Agenda for Judy's Book management meeting

I thought I'd post the agenda for our internal offsite tomorrow.

12 – 1 lunch with the entire company

  • How can we accelerate making money?
  • What is it that would make what we’re doing cooler? (i.e. stand out more)

1 – 2:30 High level topics

  • Review answers to :
    • How can we accelerate making money?
    • What is it that would make what we’re doing cooler? (i.e. stand out more)
    • Who are we -- pitch judy's book in 30 seconds or less
    • When thinking about our constituents
      • How and why are we different? The differentiation topic revisited for the consumer. 
      • What is JB benefit to retailers local and national?

       2:30 – 4:00 Q4 topics

– Improving quality of user experience on site

– Product roadmap

• What does an “integrated site” mean?

– Role of local

– Role of reviews

– Role of trust score

Q4 prioritization -- what are the major initiatives we should be putting our shoulder behind?

     3:30 – 4 Distribution

Improving reader acquisition and distribution?

Increasing link generation?

Refining our content strategy?

 4 – 4:30 Expectation setting

– Need to put out an operational map for Q1 & Q2 before the end of the year

       4:30 – 5 Operations

                   – Team structures going forward

Parking garage topics

– Newsletter signups and selling

– Toolbar

Outside.in

A friend of mine -- Steven Berlin Johnson -- just launched outside.in.  I think it's a cool concept -- worth checking out and reading about it in his blog. He's attempting to create a single place that unites all the hyperlocal content on the web. I know a bit of the challenges that await him....I'm looking forward to touching base, drinking beer, and talking about the web and local content. Until then, my advice to him is to focus on creating the definitive guide to park slope neighborhood and nail that (period) (before trying to scale).

Customer feedback and humble entrepreneurial pie

We've been getting a lot of customer feedback in response to Judy's Book evolution.  This post should give you insight into some of the dialogues that I've been having lately.  This feedback is not positive -- it's hard for an entrepreneur to hear this about their company. Especially when the customer is right and reasonable. That said, this feedback is critical to hearing AND responding to....it points out the areas in your company that are weak. 

All in all, this correspondence is a healthy piece of humble entrepreneurial pie.

This is a post from a Judy's Book customer on my investors blog (BRAD FELD)

I have to say that I am disappointed with Judy's Book's new focus on deals/shopping. I see that it is probably easier to monetize a deals site than a review site, but I hoped that JB would 1) resolve problems with the reviews (which I mentioned in a previous comment on this blog, and still do not appear to be resolved) before expanding their focus, 2) that deals would be integrated with reviews (i.e., when I am reading a review of Company X, deals for Company X are also displayed) rather than creating a completely separate section, and 3) that Judy's Book would improve their response time on emails and "feedback" messages from "never" to something more reasonable (perhaps an automated acknowledgement sent immediately and follow-up from a real person within 2 business days - is that really too much to ask?).

On a related note, as a JB user I was recently interviewed by a JB staffer about the new deals portion of the site. As a "thank you" they sent me a T-shirt, but they sent it two sizes too small. What would have been a nice gesture ended up irritating me and wasting their postage. It would have been better if they had just sent a note.

Get good at what you already do before you expand.

This is my response to the customer

Cmadler,
Thanks for taking the time and care to provide feedback.   I'd like to take a moment to respond to your 4 comments:

i) You are right. As a company, we've had a bigger appetite for feature and scope than what we've been able to digest in terms of delivering users a quality user experience. I am aware of this fact and it is a flaw in our culture that I am working hard to correct.  You are right to point it out -- as has my lead investor Brad Feld -- and all I can say is that I acknowledge the weakness and I hope that what we put out in the future is an improvement.

ii) A follow up to your point above, we are working on creating a higher quality integrated user experience for Judy's Book users. This will take a few months of work -- and will be iterative in nature. As you may know, we're working hard on evolving Judy's Book into a place for smart shoppers.

iii) Timely response to customer service requests is a fair and reasonable expectation (period).  Servicing a large community site with such a small organization is a challenging task -- but not responding is unacceptable.

iv) Your t-shirt : Simply, this was a well intentioned error.  Please tell me the correct size so that we can get you the right size shirt.

I'm sorry if you're experience has been sub-optimal ....we're working hard to improve the experience and provide more value to our customers.

Yours,
Andy Sack

Mpire: A cool company in the ignition portfolio

I had lunch with Matt Hulett, CEO of mpire yesterday at Hiroshi's, the local Eastlake Ave. East sushi restaurant in Seattle.  It was our first meeting -- but I've known about mpire for a while because they are an ignition company, I'm friend's with Dave Cotter one of the founders, and they are across the street from Judy's Book.
After lunch, I went and looked at their site and I think what they're doing is quite cool. It's worth checking out....sort of a kayak for shopping. Keep up the good work guys.

Google Coop and Local

Overall, I think this is really cool and makes a lot of sense especially with the amount of new sites & blogs created every day. To me the benefits are:

  1. Targeted search results (we could make sure for example that our customers only saw the most relevant results to them)
  2.  Plug & play solution: search is hard and if smaller shops can leverage google technology to deliver custom solutions, it will get picked up
  3.  Focused lens: gives the user/business the opportunity to customize their experience on the web or a website. Sites like Brad's lejit or even dig are already doing this. They are letting the community chose what type of results they want to see.
  4. Local/social search: makes a lot of sense for a community site like ours where we could make sure that customers get the most relevant results. The negative is of course (my bias on digg as well) is that the results represent a skewed view.

A simple post about leadership

I'm reminded -- and I need to remind myself -- that leadership is made up of many things.  One component that I want to emphasize today is simplicity. Leadership is about making things simple. The world is a complex thing. In fact, the fourth law of business is that businesses tend to complexity.  The leader of a business must fight this complexity -- and communicate simplicity to the world, to customers, and to employees. 

What device will win in the living room

I could have titled this post the tv. vs. the pc. vs. the game machine. My bet is ultimately still on the tv. I nkow the stats show people spending more time on the pc and I know people are watching youtube and myspace video....but I gotta say, it's hard to beat HBO on my plasma. Don't get me wrong -- I believe the PC is still undervalued by advertisers and my career is built more around PC life than tv life....but when thining about what device will win the convergence war in the consumers living room -- I think it's the tv.

photo enforcement program

I got my first ticket from the City of Seattle for running a yellow - red light at 11:40 PM. This technology and the underlying system are both impressive and scary.  If you haven't gotten a violation yet -- be forewarned, the systems watching us are getting better, more sophisticated, and at $101 more profitable. I tried to upload the video clip but was unsuccessful. Take my word for it -- it's effective.