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. 

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.