Marcelo Calbucci

    Today, I saw a question on a distribution list that I participate (Seattle Tech Startups) about a startup being blocked by email servers and not being able to deliver email to its customers.

    If email is a key element on your strategy to attract and retain customers, and you are one of the technical persons responsible for that, do read this...

Once upon a time...

    When I started Sampa I had a lot of problems with our confirmation email not reaching our customers. It wasn't they were going to the Junk Folder, it wasn't even getting there because spam filters were deleting it. So, through a lot of pain, investigation, phone calls, tips from other startups, we improved our distribution of email considerably.

    Here are some of the tips I recommend you to try:

Tip 1: Reverse DNS

Make sure you have Reverse DNS setup correctly. If you don't know what it means, ask something that understand DNS. Basically, if your domain is "sampa.com" and it resolves to "207.115.80.184", make sure that a reverse lookup to that IP address will resolve to your domain name.

Tip 2: Use a single SMTP outgoing server

Always send your emails from the IP address above (from Tip 1). Don't use a separate "email server" unless you also setup a DNS/Reverse DNS entry for that sub-domain (like "mail.sampa.com")

Tip 3: Age Matters

If your domain was created or acquired recently, that matters a lot for Spam filters. Try to purchase your domain months (or a year) before you release your product. Also, avoid using ID Protection on your Domain WHOIS information.

Tip 4: Don't include the obvious spam words

You probably know that including "viagra" on the title of your message is guaranteed to get you to a Junk Folder, but there are many other words you should avoid using on the title or body of your message, like "cialis", "debt reduction", "mortgage", "mesothelioma", "paypal account", etc. Think about all the spam that you received and what keywords they contain.

Tip 5: Use "On Behalf of" when appropriate

Google Groups and Yahoo Groups use that often. Why don't you? If user A is send an email to user B through your site, don't impersonate user "A", but send as "Sampa on behalf of A". Now, this is a bit more complicated SMTP construct (it's not just changing the TO address), so learn how to do that. On .NET it means setting the "Sender" property.

Tip 6: Who are you?

Some companies and spam filters will give you bonus points (as to not end up on the Junk Folder) if you include your physical address and your phone number at the footer of the message.

Tip 7: Let your users out

If you don't include an easy unsubscribe link at the footer of your message you will certainly be penalized by spam filters and by human reviewing your email messages. Plus, you'll get some of your users angry! Which leads me to...

Tip 8: Take care of customers complaints

Promptly reply to request from your customers to be removed from the list. Either remove them once they request it, or give clear and easy instructions on how they can opt out of that category of email. Some users complain to their ISP and if the ISP receives just a few of those, they will block your IP.

Tip 9: Call the ISP

If you were blocked by AOL, Yahoo, MSN, EarthLink, etc., call them. Go to a search engine and find out how to contact them. We've been blocked by many ISPs until we called them.

Tip 10: Don't bounce twice!

Every time you get an email that bounced, for example, because the user misspelled his address, just remove that from the list. Keep sending messages to the same email address that bounces over and over again is a sign of a spammer. Are you one?

Tip 11: Get users to help

The more users that add your domain to the "Safe Domain List" the better. Most services use that criteria to increase your "points".

Tip 12: Sender-ID and more

There are technologies that are likely to increase the number of emails that get through, however, they are new and not widely tested or accepted.

Tip 13: Buy your way in

Have money? GoodMail Systems can get you through.

    The tips above are the "obvious" ones ('obvious' meaning if you get banged on the head enough times they become obvious). There are another bunch that you can play with users behavior that can also make a huge difference, but that you'll have to figure out on your own, or hire me to tell you.

    In a post in GigaOM last night, Kevin Kelleher* tries to create some news story that revolves around how positive the $35.50 per stock is for Microsoft, which shows a basic misunderstanding of stocks or the value of any "product". (Disclaimer: I'm not an expert either!)

    Here is the gem that he wrote:

"... Microsoft had a $300 billion market cap at the end of Thursday, before its earnings report, about 150 percent of Google’s (GOOG) and roughly double that of Apple’s (AAPL) on the same day. That’s a lot of market cap, and to get it to rise 11 percent means pumping in $33 billion dollars.
..."

    Can you spot the issue? Yes, it's the bold red text and the title of this post.

    Here is his math: Market cap of Microsoft was $300 billion yesterday, today is about $333 billion, so $333 B - $300 B = $33 billion dollars. Genius!

    Yes, it's true, Microsoft Market Cap grew by $33 billion dollars, but it absolutely doesn't mean that "$33 billion" dollars were invested ("pumped") on Microsoft.

    The two basic mistakes is that he assumes that all stocks were traded that day, or that the initial price of the stock was zero. Both are incorrect.

    Roughly, the right math goes like this: 217 million stocks were traded today, bringing the stock from $32 to $36, which really means pumping $868 million dollars into the stock!

    I'm glad I don't take investment advice from bloggers (like myself).

    Now, to the important story: Wow! Microsoft did kick some ass this quarter and I'm happy to all my friends that are still working there, including my wife.

* Who the heck is Kevin Kelleher? GigaOm doesn't list him as an editor, contributor or anything.

    Yesterday I removed 85 blogs from my Blogroll, which is the list of blogs I read everyday. Some famous blogs were cut, including Scripting News by Dave Winer, Wired Magazine, Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen and a bunch more.

    I'm still subscribing to 155 blogs, but about 80 of those are very slow in adding new content (about once a month or less).

    The sad reality is that I was knowing too much, if there is such a thing. I was absorbing too much information that was not adding value to my startup or to my personal live.

    The noise reduction is tremendous already. Most of the blogs that I read have a lot of duplication and very little new information. You can read TechCrunch, Read/WriteWeb, Mashable, GigaOm and others and you'll find there is a 90% overlap in coverage.

    Then there is the VC-blog-clan with Feld Thoughts, VentureBlog, The Post Money Value, EarlyStageVC, etc. This group has only 75% overlap of posts, but still a huge overlap.

    I'm finding that knowing less might be a good thing.

    What is important it's not how much you know, but how what you know can be used to improve your personal and professional life.

    I found out through a comment on my blog post that Inbox Zero is a bigger "movement" than I originally thought. Merlin Mann from 43Folders gave a great talk at Google about it. It's 1 hour long, but it is worth spending 1 hour to save thousands (or tens of thousands) of hours for the rest of your life.

    My first action after watching the video was to turn off all Outlook email notifications. No more beep, change mouse cursor, desktop alert or anything else. I'm even thinking of having Outlook closed for long periods during the day.

    So far I've been 3 days doing that and I feel like a new person. It feels that I just discovered email for the first time. It's useful and good!

    Contrary to what I thought about Inbox Zero is that you don't have to have an empty inbox. It's ok to have emails that wait there, but they have to be waiting to be read. If you read it, Merlin recommends one of 5 actions:

• Delete (Archive)
• Delegate
• Reply
• Defer (add to Calendar/Task List)
• Do

     He is good at explaining each one has their own way of organizing things, so people should find what works for them. But one thing that I'll do immediatelly is to get rid of all the folder (taxonomy) structure on my Email. His point is that if you need to think where an email goes, in terms of which folder, you are already spending too much time with it. Put everything in the "archived" folder and use search to find it later.

    Here is 43Folders collection of posts and interesting things on how to do Inbox Zero.

    Last week I wrote about a change that we've made to our sign up pipeline for Sampa that caused a dramatic drop in mistakes in a particular field. But I didn't write what the change was exactly, and that got Dave Naffziger (Judy's Book) very curious about it.

    First of all, let's be clear this is some of those obvious things, and there is not a "wow" to it, just a "d'oh". Yet, every web application has so many "d'ohs" that fixing each and every one is a challenge.

    Second, this is valuable information to Sampa. It's valuable to Sampa's competitors as well and that is why I decided not to say what it was.

    After some thought during the weekend I realize this is not a strategic advantage to Sampa, and our competitors probably already know about it, so why not come out and say it?

"Site Name" vs. "Web Address"

    You know how GoDaddy calls it "dot-Com name" instead of "domain name"? It makes it so much more down-to-earth for the non-technical folks.

    About two months ago, our marketing team redesigned our website. One of the changes was to call the first step on the sign up "Name your site". That sounded very good. It was less techie and more approachable.

    Then, we went through a second change to the sign up pipeline to improve the conversion process. This was done by a User Experience consulting group we partnered with. They did a great job at cleaning up and streamlining our sign up process, and they kept the "Site Name" part of it.

    As I was deploying the new site, I started to think if this would get people confused at what exactly they were entering on that field. Despite the fact that we have very simple and clear instructions, my gut was telling me some people might not be reading the instructions and getting stuck on that step. So I added a log and start recording every mistake users made, and bam!

    Lots of users were entering their full name, name of their companies, title for their site, etc. After looking at the logs it was clear that we needed to change it so I replaced every instance of "Site Name" ("Name your site"), to "Web Address" ("Choose a web address"). Immediately we so a huge drop on the number of mistakes. People were not adding spaces, symbols or invalid characters anymore. Although, a couple of people still make that mistake every day.

More discoveries...

    But there was a second learning. Some people, probably the more tech-savvy users, were entering full URLs or full domain names like "http:// mysite.sampasite.com", "johny.sampasite.com" or "johny133.com". So the second fix was to not give users an error message if we could extract a valid subdomain name for that site, stripping all the "http://" or "www" or ".com" at the end.

Takeaways

     I know I might sound like a paranoid guy measuring the effectiveness of a single field, but this is a mandatory field on the main conversion pipeline for our product. If 10% of users make a mistake and get stuck, you are getting 10% less conversion. How stupid would it be not to measure it and fix it? No matter how many analytics tools you use, at the end of the day only you know your own product and how to identify and fix the semi-broken pieces of your sign up process.

    Yesterday I decided to adopt the ZIS (Zero Inbox Strategy). I learned about it from this post by Brad Feld.

    Like many of us, my inbox was becoming unmanageable. I'm on a startup and we have very little "noise" email, still, by the end of a week I would have accumulated between 50 and 100 extra emails on my inbox. After a couple of months I had easily 600 to 800 items on my inbox. And just to be clear, those were items *requiring some action*!!!

    The difference between me and Brad Feld (besides startup experience, wealth, name, hairline, working style, ...) is that I have lots of items on my inbox that require hours of coding before I can cross them out. But it won't stop me from trying.

    Since yesterday I had only 1 item on my inbox. Everything coming my way I try to reply immediatelly, read it immediatelly, or add to my to-do list and remove from the Inbox.

    I don't know if this is going to work on the long run, but my email strategy was getting worse and worse and I had to do something.

    This has been a week of lots of changes. I've probably made 7-10 deployments of Sampa.com and Sampa site on the last 10 days or so. We got a new sign up pipeline and we've been measuring and fixing it.

    Just to give one example, changing just 1 word (actually 2 words) on the sign up screen caused a drop of 14-16 failed sign ups per day. Before, 14-17 people per day were making the same mistake when trying to sign up to Sampa. After the phrase change it dropped to 0-2 per day.

    We also are playing with other parts of our system a lot, the only problem is that we usually need to wait 36-48 hours after we've made a change to measure its impact. Ideally you want to wait a whole week so you avoid getting only weekdays or only weekend data, but we can't run a 10 week test. It's too long.

    It's likely that we will continue doing that over the next 2-3 weeks, and doing some AB-Testing on this period as well. That should be fun.

    Allen Stern writes about Scribd (a document sharing startup) being filled with pornographic content.

    Here is an interesting fact about Scribd: Is so easy to sign up that even a caveman could do it, and there lies the problem. Sites that are this trivial to sign up, that either don't use CAPTCHA or have no email confirmation, can fall pray to "Porn Bots". And no, that is not some kinky fantasy toy.

    I don't think the term "Porn Bots" has been coined yet, but the adult industry is an early adopter of any technology that advances their business. Social Media sites are one of their favorite because a lot of them are just plain dumb when dealing with their "smart bots" that automatically create fake accounts, upload content and link back to their sites.

    I've seen too many (Web 2.0) services making this kind of mistake. Now I wonder who is laughing more, me without millions with unique users but with CAPTCHA, or them. Ignorance is bliss.

    I've just spent the last 3 hours trying to make our new "Welcome to Sampa" message look just a tad similar in Outlook 2007, Hotmail and GMail. Each email application/service renders HTML a little bit different, but enough to make you crazy.

    GMail is more aggressive at removing some of the styles that you applied to your email, while Hotmail and Outlook 2007 have really poort HTML 4.0 compliance.

    And don't even get me started on Entourage for Mac. Another nightmare.

    I'm going to Nathan's event tonight. Looks like will be a very good gathering of founders, CEOs, entrepreneurs and investors.

    If you are going let's chat.

    I've got an email from Network Solutions telling me I could save a bunch if I renew early the sampa.com domain. Instead of paying $34.99 per year (yes, that is how much Network Solution charges!) I would pay only $19.99.

    But here is the interesting aspect of this email. The SAMPA.COM domain will expire in 2011 ! ! !

    Clearly, I'm not going to renew and they just reminded me to transfer my domain out of their network and into some reasonable registrars (like eNom).

    I know of three startups looking for kick-ass developers to join their team in very high level positions (CTO, VP of Engineering and Sr. Architect). If you know anyone ready to make the jump from BigCo into the startup world let me know and I'll give the info.

    Just to be clear to my friends at Microsoft (or any other big company), being a VP of Engineering has nothing to do with being a VP at Microsoft. A VP of Engineering (or CTO, or Architect) at a startup is a very hands-on person, writing code, installing servers, design and implementing features, architecting components, testing it, etc. The ratio of "useful production" to "management crap" is very low.

    This year will be known as a turning point on the character of the pilots of Formula 1. Not a week goes by that a new scandal doesn't pops up, usually involving some unethical behavior from one or more pilots, mechanics or big bosses.

    More specifically, McLaren, Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton are always on the middle of the controversy.

    On the top of my head, three sad moments this year (I'm sure there are more):

• During qualifying Alonso takes longer to leave the boxes after the pit stop to prevent Hamilton from doing a quick pit stop, hence guaranteing the pole position.
• Alonso and Hamilton are involved with a espionage scandal that costs McLaren $100 million (!!!) in penalties.
• During a safety car lap on Japan's GP, Hamilton reduces speeds abruptly causing two cars behind him to crash.

    Very sad. Like any sport, when things like this start to happen the audience starts to loose interest.

    We took our eye off the ball for a few months and we were all celebrating our great growth month-over-month when yesterday I received an email from our Data Center. We were consuming more bandwith than what was allocated on our package. Our costs are going up.

     Here is our monthly transfer total for the last 6 months:

• April: 72 GB
• May: 106 GB
• June: 118 GB
• July: 131 GB
• August: 197 GB
• September: 141 GB
• October: 165 GB (est.)

    There is a strong correlation between data transfer and page views, although, it's not perfect because small changes on the system can cause step-functions on the amount of data transfer.

    If you look close at the data you'll see that in September we had a drop of 28% in total transfer despite the fact that we served more page views. The primary reason is because we enabled HTTP Compression. If we hadn't done that, our transfer rate would be about 300% for October to what it was in April.

    But the reason we enabled HTTP Compression was primarily to provide our users with faster downloads when using our service, the bandwith reduction is just a bonus for us.

    Mike Koss is starting a new organization called StartPad.org. The goal is to help entrepreneurs (including first timers) get started with their idea by providing the necessary infrastructure for them to work on it.

    The purpose, according to them is:

"

StartPad.org is an organization for software-industry entrepreneurs, developers, and students. Our mission is to promote startups and development projects by providing:

• Education
• Referrals to service providers/professionals
• Peer support for technical problems
• Startup infrastructure (office space, IT support, data center)
• Networking for hiring/recruiting and forming partnerships

"

    Check out the website: http://startpad.org/ and join the Google Groups

    I've published the Seattle Startup Index for October/2007 today.

    Sampa is now at position 29 (up 4 from last count) just below Trumba. Our growth has been very good for the last few months.