Marcelo Calbucci

 

    I blogged about this same thing on the two previous "Cyber Monday". There is no such thing as Cyber Monday except in the head of some marketing people.

 

    Don't believe me? Check Max Freiret from Compete.com analysis.

 

    Please, blog about it and let others know. It's ridiculous that in such day and age people can get away talking lies as facts.

 

 

    If you know my coding style you probably know how much code I can crank out per day. I sometimes brag I'm one of the fastest developers in town (and there is no lack of developers in Redmond ).

 

    The fact is that I'm not the fastest on the keyboard, or the best at creating amazingly "simple" code, or very good at creating architecture that yields good results. My secret to success is optimizing the heck of my typing. Seriously.

 

    The story goes back to when I was 15 years old and I was starting to learn how to type using a book -- about typing -- my mother had. I had a computer for just two years and was a master of using just two fingers. But I decided it was enough (mostly because I've got an Apple II and I saw another guy typing really fast, which impressed me).

 

    Anyway, during my self-taught lessons of typing, I would type entire phrases of books and every time I've made a single typo, the rule was that I had to backspace all the way to the last punctuation mark. Forcing me to type the same sentence over and over until I've got it without any mistake. That not only taught me how to type, but also how to minimize the probability of hitting the wrong key.

 

    A lot of my early life with computers involved very mechanical tasks, like entering 3,000 numbers into a spreadsheet for my Grandfather furniture-manufacturing company, or typing the addresses of 8,000 hotels. Quickly I learned the power of optimizing your typing style.

 

    Today, I might spend a whole day just thinking and trying how I'm going to create something that requires a lot of typing. At the end, it might have taken longer, but I learned the best way for sure. The next time I have a similar task I already know what to do and since I've been doing this for over 15 years I have a bag full of tricks to be very proficient at developing code.

 

    Believe it or not, but sometimes I even use Word, Excel, Access, JavaScript, C# and other tools to create code. Yes, I use C# to create code to myself. And after IntelliSense I can wrote hundreds of lines of company without having to type more than a few characters per line.

 

    Now, after all this rambling I just want to say that I think Visual Studio 2008 will be the biggest revolution in developer productivity of the last 10 years. And I just used it for a couple of hours so far!

 

 

    GDrive, aka, Google provided cloud-storage didn't happen yet. Microsoft has even come out with the LiveDrive Beta (or Alpha) ahead of Google announcing anything. And, let's be honest, Microsoft is not the fastest product-shipper out there. So, what gives?

 

    Here is my wild-guess... Google is trying to offer an unprecendent amount of storage and an unprecedent kind of service. Not only will it work with Windows, Mac and Linux, but it'll integrate beautifully into all those OSes and provide a web-based access. On top of that, it will offer 100 GB for free, or more!

 

    So why is taking so long? Because they need to build up the dozens of data centers to store all that information.

 

    After days of download, I manage to install VS 2008 Beta 2, but the RTM version is available already.

 

    Does anyone know a cost-effective way for me to install VS 2008 RTM at my home computer? Even if it's a trial-version with a time-bomb is ok for me. When the product is available in stores I can go and buy one, but until then (which will probably be January) I'd prefer to use the RTM than the Beta 2.

 

    I know MSDN subscribers can download it, but I'm not one -- BTW, how much does it cost to subscribe to MSDN?

 

    I've lived on the "long tail" world before the term was even coined. I don't call myself an expert on it, but I have a pretty good visual picture of what it means -- no, seriously, it's a graphical picture of the query logs that I plotted when I worked on MSN Search.

 

    People understand the the "long tail" is about a curve that starts very high, drops quickly and stretches "forever" into the X-axis. But if you really plot a long tail curve, like the top 10 million search terms, it would look like a vertical line followed by a horizontal line. It's a very steep drop.

 

    It's pretty hard for people to grasp that, the same way it's hard when we talk about trillions of dollars of budget deficit. We talk, but do we visualize it?

 

    The non-long tail view of customers and products is the old 80/20 rule, where 80 percent of sales comes from 20% of the products. The long tail is far, far way from that. It's more like 99/1, where 99% of sales come from 1% of products, or in search terms, 99% of the query volume comes from 1% of terms (not quite like that, but close).

 

    If you know nothing about the long tail, there are two things that you must remember:

• Averages are pretty useless -- You have 10 products, one sells 1,000,000 units per month, the other 9 sell 1 unit per month, so the average is 100,000 units per product -- aka, useless data.
• A handful of the top N "things" can make a huge difference on your business.
• There is no such thing as a stand-alone "long-tail" -- It must exist with the head of the curve otherwise it's probably uninsteresting from a business perspective.

    Let's just assume that 90% of Sampa's traffic comes from the top 1% websites (that is not the case, but I'm just using it to illustrate here). That is a clear example of a long tail play. In a case like this, where we have over 30,000 sites, it means the top 300 sites drive 90% of our traffic. If you start to drill down, you might find out that the top 30 sites represent 25% of traffic (again, this is just hypothetical). Now imagine most of those 30 sites decide to shut down. You might have lost 25% of your traffic in a blink. The flip side is when you get a handful of very active, very popular sites, where you might gain 20%+ traffic in a week.

 

    Another more generic example is a site that sells chairs. Even if it has 10,000 different types of chairs you can assume the top few dozens will probably represent 50% of all sales, and the remaining 9,950 will represent the other 50%.

 

    That is a long-tail play. But notice that selling only the bottom 9,950 would mean a drop in 50% of potentail revenue. And given the law of manufacturing goods, the most popular items are usually the cheapest to produce and the ones where you might have the most profit from (I know, it's way more complex than this)

 

    I really despise companies that are doing a "long tail play", but are ignoring the top of curve. Can you imagine if Amazon refuses to sell the best selling books because it wants to optimize to the "long tail"?

 

    The last piece to remember is to not confuse a niche (or "vertical") with a piece of the long tail, but that is a whole other post.

 

 

 

 

    It's known it should be "re-send" and not "resend", but what about the ones that work either way, like "email" vs. "e-mail" or "start up" vs. "start-up" (or even "startup")?

 

    For Sampa, I standardized every spelling the same way Microsoft uses it. Not because I love Microsoft, but because Microsoft has a huge number of experts in multiple languages working very carefully at determining the ideal spelling and syntax of terms.

 

    That said, we use "email" on Sampa and on my every writing about startups I use "startup".

 

    I'm sure there are many other examples where either people spelling it wrong, or both spellings are correct. Can you think of any other case?

 

    Last week Redfin asked how they should display their Search Options, offering a $250 prize for the winner proposal. This week, they showed some of the proposals and ask what their users are looking for.

 

    When I saw the first proposal last week I immediately thought the answer didn’t matter much because the question was fundamentally wrong. And it all boils down to be a Database-driven service or a Search Engine service?

 

    First of, let’s be clear there are 100 engineers that understand how to develop database apps very well to each developer that understands search engines. So, when you build a vertical search engine (like Redfin), it’s more likely that you find a typical developer that knows how to store and retrieve large amounts of data from a database.

 

    If you look from a 10,000-feet view, a database and a search engine are one of a kind. Both contain data that will be queried and return results. As you get closer to the ground, you start to see the differences and soon you realize the way they work and what they offer to the end user is significantly different.

 

    A database has your typical rows and columns, it has a sort order, it has filters – which Redfin is calling “search options” – and you pretty much get a deterministic response in a specific sort order (Price? Square feet? Distance?). That is typical. That is what most “vertical search engines” do – by the way, they should be called “vertical databases”. – Go to any Real Estate site that offers a search service and the way they work is pretty much the same.

 

    What they lack is personality, which search engines have. Most Developers (or Program Managers) believe other people think in deterministic terms. Why? Because they ask people what they want and they give a very specific response: A 3-bedroom house, with 2.5 baths in Redmond with a 2 car garage with a price between $600K and $700K. That is pretty specific. That is what the customer said she wants, so we must enable this person to find it, right? Coincidentally, that fits very well with a database driven app. Here is the ‘WHERE’ clause, here is the ‘ORDER BY’, here is the ‘FROM’. Bang! I have a “vertical search engine”.

 

    The fact is that people don’t know what they want. When they say it *must* have 3-bedrooms, they might be flexible into a 2 or 4-bedroom, maybe there is a bonus room that would work out great as the 3rd bedroom. Maybe they requested 3 bedrooms because they thought it would be on their price range. The fundamental problem I am trying to tell is that giving users filter options (or “search options”) is the wrong way.

 

    The solution is to allow users to define their rank formula. This is very different from filtering because you are not eliminating any result; you are just moving the best ones to the top and the less interesting ones to the bottom. How do you present that to the user is the secret sauce. I don’t have an answer for that but I could think of a few ways. Ideally, you let users enter a location and click search and the results will display *all* the houses near that location ranked by the most common criteria (this would be a auto-learning ranking system). Then, you give them knobs to control what was called the “search options”, finally, for the more hands on users you let them order how important each of those options are for them. For example, the number of bedrooms is more important than the square footage of the lot which is more important than the year it was built. I can see the UI in my head and is not that daunting.

 

    In 2005-2006 MSN Search had a neat option to allow you to tweak its ranking formula, by moving some sliders like “fresh content vs. old content”. It got a lot of buzz at the time because it let you play with search results in a way that was not possible before, except if you worked on a Search Engine.

 

    Now Glenn, you don’t have to pay me $250 or anything but lunch and I’ll gladly spill out more details to you. You’ll probably save $235.

 

    Last week MSNBC released their new Homepage redesign. It is more beautiful than before and it's a major change to what it used to be, but mostly, they just moved things around without doing anything "smart" on how to find out what news I want to know about.

 

    Anyway, one of the "coolest" elements of this redesign is the integration of the current weather on the header of the page. It uses beautiful suns and clouds to tell you what the current weather at your location is. It's not a shaby, tiny element. It's big and calls attention to it.

 

    But why tell me what the current weather is at my location? I never looked at that to see what is the current temperature (I have a thermometer) and I never look at it to see if it's sunny outside (I have a window).

 

    They should have used that space to put the weather forecast for the next couple of days. That would have been something that I look forward to see every day.

 

    If you have some bad news to tell the world that is probably the best day and time around here in the US. Nobody is reading or writing news. I read 170+ blogs (down from 250 after my last cut) and there is less than 10% of posts of a regular day of the week.

 

    I guess the next window is on December 24th between 1PM and midnight.

 

    I guess I forgot to tell you that our team has grown by 50%. We were 2, now we are 3. We hired Roy Leban (ex-SchoolSoft, ex-Microsoft, ...) as the in-house User Experience guru. Roy started two weeks ago with a challenge: how to fix everything that I've broken!

 

    I've learned a lot about user-experience (UX) on the last 8 months, since I first met with Hillel Cooperman (Jackson Fish Market). It quickly became clear that I knew near nothing about UX. I didn't even knew the things I didn't know. Fast forward 6 months, and I know way more about UX. I know the basic mistakes I've made, I know the basic rules I've broken.

 

    So, we went on a quest to find somebody that could help us with regards to that, and by coincidence Roy became available at the perfect time, with the exact skill set that we needed.

 

    Over the last two weeks Roy has been mocking up screenshots of how things should look. Turns out that we have more than 400 unique screens, and that excludes any error message or content (static) screens. Of course Roy is not going to Photoshop each screen.

 

    The idea is to create an overall user experience to somebody building a site with Sampa that is consistent with what we are trying to be (a personal website service), and that has a unique visual language that makes us standout from the crowd.

 

    The redesign will be awesome. It's 180 degrees different from what we have and it's different from anything else on the web as well. Which means it will either be an instant success or not, and, in a startup, a quick feedback loop is the best thing you can get.

 

    So today, I started coding parts of the redesign. We don't have any of the visual language yet, but we have an overall idea of how things will work. That redesign will make us throw out about 60,000 lines of code (15% of our codebase), and the rewrite will take another 40,000 lines or so. My estimates is that it will take between 8-10 weeks to write those 40,000 lines of code (5,000 lines/week), which would put us at a launch date around mid-January. However, as with any software-cost estimate, this one is probably wrong.

 

    Stay tuned and I'll keep you informed of our progress.

 

 

PS: Did I ever say how much I hate IE 6? Worst browser ever.

 

 

 

    Sampa just got coverage on TechCrunch. We just released a set of 3 new features: Recent visitors lists, comments avatar and visitor upload pictures.

 

    Michael Arrington (TechCrunch editor) doesn't go into much detail of these features -- they are quite easy to "get it" -- but he does nail one very good point better than we could have ever said ourselves:

 

"...we've had some difficulty in categorizing them"

 

    This has been a challenge we had with investors and press (but not with customers). We don't fall into any clear-cut category of web-based (or Web 2.0) service:

 

• We are not a social network, but have many features from social networks.
• We are not a substitue for web-site creation service, but we allow you to create a personal website.
• We are not a media sharing site, but we allow you to share it.
• We are not a family-tree service, but we allow you to have one.
• We are not a distribution list, but we have great two-way email integration.
• ...

    So, what is Sampa? We call it "personal private networks". It's your personal space on the web, where you have the control to share who you are with who you want.

 

 

 

 

 

    A friend of mine is an investor on Yapta. I've got to confess that every time I hear about a new travel service I just ignore it. There are too many sites that promise to find the best price, organize your trip, find cheap hotels, create a travel blog, etc.

 

    So Yapta, automatically falls into my category of "must ignore". The problem was that I never really knew what they did, until this friend explained to me. Instead of telling me all the things that Yapta did, he went right to the heard: "Yapta helps you get a refund on airline tickets that you already purchased, but dropped in price". To which I said "really?!". Wow that is worth telling my friends about.

 

    I just think Yapta should re-think their homepage and focus on that one differentiator. As soon as I go there I'm welcomed with "Planning a trip?"... Which just trigger my "another-travel-site-must-go-somewhere-else" reflex.

 

 

 

    Argh! This is what happens when you use unsupported browser extensions!

 

    I clicked on "Clear Cookies for Domain" on the IE DevToolBar, but guess what? It cleared all my cookies! Not only for the domain that I was in (which was sampa.com).

 

    This is very nasty because not only I'll have to remember passwords for dozens of sites that I have not entered the password for a long time, but many sites that don't support sign-in but do allow customization -- like MSNBC.com -- will lose my preferences!

 

    Double Argh! Triple Argh!

 

     I always felt those quick-lending services (like Money Tree) were a huge rip off of people that didn't know better, or were desperate to a quick fix of cash to pay debt.

 

    Mike Mathieu went many steps further than me (which I did nothing) and created a site called Predatory Lending Association (PLA). It's a satire of those organizations and what they represent, except that the facts are pretty sad and more and more low-income people get sucked into their jaws.

 

    The headline might sound more than it really is, but we finally are the number 1 result for the query "Sampa", a.k.a. a "vanity query" or a "brand query". For a long time we were #3, below a site about "Computer Readable Phonetic Alphabet" and below Wikipedia. Then, we moved to #2, just below Wikipedia, which is strange because the page about Phonetic Alphabet had a much higher PageRank than the Wikipedia page.

 

    On top of that, there are no advertising for that keyword, so we are really the number 1 result.

 

    We are number 14 for "Create a Free Website", which is where we would like to be #1 and that will take time, a lot of time.

 

    It was a long 12 hour event. As in any event involving startups, entrepreneurs or technology-types, it end up being worth it because of the networking. I've met and talked with about a dozen or so entrepreneurs and investors. I was actually surprised at the number of investors (Angels and VCs) present at the event, and the low number of people trying to "sell" me their consulting services.

 

    Some of my blog posts from yesterday, include:

 

• Live blogging Entrepreneur University from NWEN
• EU: Mike Mathieu - All Star Directories
• EU: Financing Strategies
• EU: Focus on the audience
• EU: Craig Kinzer on Go-to Market Strategies
• EU: Sunny Kobe Cook. Again?

 

     Will I go next year? Maybe. Would I recommend to a friend? Maybe -- If you are thinking about starting a company, or if you just founded your company, yes, it's worth it. You'll learn a lot and meet lots of interesting people. If you've had a company for 2+ years, incorporated, launched a beta product, learned about financing, marketing, strategies, exit, etc., then, it might not be that interesting except by the networking part.

 

    My final feedback to the EU Organizing Committee:

 

• The food was awful! $300 bucks to get a tasteless pastry and a coffee in the morning, and a boxed lunch with a wet bread? Come on, you can do much better.
• Finally an event with Wi-Fi. I had some hard time at some tables, but mostly I could use it without a problem.
• Did any of you saw the slides before the event? Somebody needs to tell presenter some basic PowerPoint etiquette, like don't fill the screen with text, don't read the slides and use larger fonts. I have perfect vision and couldn't read some of the slides.
• I've bet during the survey a lot of people will say one of the things they like the most is the networking aspects. So why so little time for networking? Why not a 20 minute-break between sessions? Or one 30-minute in the morning and 30-minute on the afternoon? The problem with the 10 minute break is that after a restroom stop and getting a drink there isn't much time left to network.
• This is a small complaint: text that should be read from a distance should use san-serif font, like Helvetica, but the badges name were using a serif font.

 

 

     I'm looking to get at least 1 email address of a founder, CEO or another executive on the companies listed below. I'm trying to keep an up-to-date list so that I can spam ask questions to make the Seattle 2.0 Startup list more interesting.

 

     Feel free to send email to me at marcelo/sampa.com.

 

Companies:

 

AdReady
Atomic Moguls
Avvo
Bag Borrow or Steal
Beet Inc.
Biego
BigOven
Bioscreencast
Blist
Broadband Sports
Bus Monster
CampusChai
Cdigix
ClayValet
Collab-O-Matic
Conenza
Cozi
Digini
DigWorks
Down2night
Earth Class Mail
ExtraHop Networks
FlowPlay
Formotus
Fremont Forward
Frigy
Fyreball
GarageBand.com
GimmeNow
GoGoMo
Goose Networks
GotVoice
Grads Wanted
Grouped.com
Healia
HomeMovie
Human Proxy
HyBlue
Icebreaker
iCultur
iLike
iMedExchange
Instacalc
Investment Yogi
Jobster
Joingle
Jookster
Jott Network
Limber Media
Linebuzz
LiveMocha
Medio Systems
MegaBuzz
Menuism
Mercent
Metafos
Minecode
MixPo
Mixxer
MobIncentive
Movaya
Mpire
NewsCloud
NimbleBee
Noonhat
nuTsie.com
Openomy
OwnYourPhone
PayScale
Pelago
Peppers and Pollywogs
Pheromone Trail
PhoneSherpa
PilotOutlook
PixPulse
Popshops
Positive Motion
PrestoGifto
Redfin
Ripl
SmartSheet
SnapTune
SnapVine
SongSlide
Spoken
SportsUltra
Style du Jour
Super Oyester
SWiK
Synapse
SyngerG Software
TeachStreet
TextPayMe
They're Beautiful
Thinglefin
Thrift Books
Trailfire
TravellingWave
Treemo
TrenchMice
Trumba
Trusera
UberSquare
Urban Spoon
Versionate
VoxPixel
WebFives
Weedshare
Wetpaint
XoomPad
Yapta
You Just Get Me
YourSports
Zeenami
Zillow
Zoji
ZooDango
Zumende

     Sunny Kobe Cook (founder of Sleep Country USA) gave the afternoon/closing keynote. Wasn't she a speaker at least year EU? Or the year before? Either way, it's a repeat. How about getting Jeff Bezos for next year?

    This is going to be my last live post. Now, I'm going to drink some beer/wine and mingle with other entrepreneurs. Tomorrow I'll post about the breakfast/lunch (yuk!) and other feedback on the event.

    Just finished watch Craig Kinzer talk about taking your product/service to market. Don't you know him? Have you heard about Scene It, the game? That's his product.

    First of all, it is great to hear somebody that has so much experience. Everything they say is super valuable. He failed and succeeded multiple times and that is the kind of experience you can't get in books or in school.

    I won't write about details of his talk because it was too broad and too much information for this blog.

    At the end of his talk, each person that made good questions during the Q&A got a copy of Scene It. One woman got two copies because her question was so good according to him.

    I listened to the same panel talk about how expensive IPO is, the problems with IPO, current IPOs....

    Question: How many CEOs of companies about to go public are attending this event?

    My widely uninformed guess is: zero. I'll go one step further and say that there are no one here that has raised a VC round for their current company. So, even talking about a Series B is a waste of time.

    Entrepreneurs have too much to learn, they can't learn everything so the limited space on their brain needs to be wisely filled with things that *mater*.

    Oh God, now they are talking about Earnings per Share...

    It's official: I have PDD (patience deficiency disorder). Round Table or Panel formats are too slow and that is very annoying.

    I'm here watching Bob Tassone moderate three speakers talking about "financing strategies" (although they are being quite off topic talking about everything from recruiting to selling). The panel include Mike Stull (Pacific Bioscience Lab), Doug Gorder (Gorder Consulting) and Diane Renihan (Bag Borrow or Steal).

    One people have to give their presentation alone, up there with a PPT, they prepare for it. They come knowing exactly what they are going to say. On Panels, they are there without any supporting material (visuals) and they have this sad Q&A format where a moderator throws a question and waits for two or three to respond. They respond very slowly, without passion and that triggers my PDD enzymes.

    I left for a few minutes to watch Robbie Cape from Cozi to talk about "Preparing for Take-Off". I couldn't listen much longer because I felt his advices were not applicable to a wide audience. The jewel was "you must spend 4 to 6 hours a day recruiting, if you are not doing that you are probably doing the wrong thing". Really? Well, it works well if you have a pot of gold under your desk. My advise to entrepreneurs is to spend 4-6 hours of their day building the product, and the rest raising money. On your spare time you network.

    Second presentation for me was from Mike Mathieu. Ex-Microsoft guy, left and build All Star Directories.

    He didn't talk much about ASD, but about his personal ups and downs with building a company, and learning when and how to let it go.

   A very experience entrepreneur and investor once told me that founders give themselves too much credit for the value they have on their company, i.e., assuming they are irreplaceable.

    I have a good understand of what I do and my worth value. I never believe people cannot be replaced. Some people might be harder to replace because of the perfect unusual fit into the company, but companies have their blood flow, and when people leave that doesn't stop. In certain cases, even if the last person leaves the blood flow continues!

    I'm going to be live blogging NWEN Entrepreneur University. Just talked to John Cook and he is doing the same.

    The morning keynote was from Peter van Oppen on reaching high altitude. It was very interesting his view on hiring people to your company. He define the "3 Es" that you should look when hiring people.

    In order of importance:

1. Energy: People that have drive and are bouncing off the walls
2. Excellence: People that know how to channel that energy
3. Experience: People that have the experience to where you want to be (not where you are)

 

    We are listing more than 200 startups on the Seattle 2.0 blog.

 

    Sampa continues to climb on the list despite the fact that Compete proves once more they are out of whack because they show a drop in our reach. Alexa, Google Analytics and our own internal stats have the same growth level, which validates that we are actually growing at a steady and fast pace.

 

    We moved 1 position to #28 in Seattle, just behind BigOven, which, by the way, is getting a lot of press today.

 

    For the first time ever, our Alexa ranking is below 40,000, more specifically at 38,960. That is pretty amazing if you think about there are millions and millions of sites and services on the Internet, and we are on the top 40,000. Actually, we would be on the top 10,000 if Alexa (or Compete) was better at tracking page views because they don't count any of our IFRAME pages, which Sampa relies a lot on.