Marcelo Calbucci

 

    This kind of email really make us happy and energyzed to continue on.

 

    A customer replying to us after we answered a customer support question (XYZ is the name of the competitor replaced)

"Thanks so much.  .  I recently set up a XYZ website and it was so easy to use.  Then I tried to upload additional pictures and nothing happened.  I tried several times and sent 3 emails for help and no one responded to me.  So I am so happy that you got back to me so quickly!  What are your thoughts on XYZ?

 

Thanks again!

Debrah
"

 

    How do you treat your customers?

 

    I just installed Xobni and one of the features was an Analytics that tells you the average time to respond email.

 

    Take a look at the graphic...

 

 

    Notice the amazing change in October. From about 2-4 hours on average to reply an email, to about 10 minutes!

 

    Do you want to know the answer? Inbox Zero. Thanks again to Brad Feld to let me know about this heaven sent email strategy.

 

 

    A list of influential Seattle entrepreneurs *and* bloggers.

 

 

 

    A quick question to the more law versed readers of this blog: In 2011 when the aliens come to Earth, will most patents filled to date be invalidated?

 

    See, one of the key requisits of a patent claim is that it has to have no prior art. I assume most of the ideas that we file for patent are already a prior art in some other planet.

 

 

 

    There are 3 kinds of startups: The ones that measure no expenses to get the job done and raise tens of millions of dollars. The ones that are so cheap that they design their own logo despite that none of the founders are a designer, and the ones that know when to spend and when to save.

 

    Ben Elowitz, the CEO of Wetpaint, just wrote about when to hire external help for your startup on the Seattle 2.0 blog.

 

    It hit me in the middle of my face.

 

    For the first two years, Sampa was too frugal. I saved everywhere I could and that was not the right answer. One example was that I didn't want to pay more than $100 per template for our users, and that was not the right move. We also took too long to engage a Marketing firm and tried to answer a lot of hard marketing questions (brand, logo, name, positioning, copy, etc.) ourselves.

 

    Now we are much better at understanding when to hire contractors/consultants to help us. It's not about how much it cost that you should think, but the cost in relation to the acceleration that it can/will bring to your business.

    We are about to put a bunch of job posts out very soon, from all ranges of expertise needed in a startup, and I started thinking about all the job posts I've written on the past, either for Microsoft or for Sampa, and which ones worked and which didn't.

    After a few weeks of thinking and stepping back by asking the whys of every detail of job posts, I came to the conclusion that almost all job posts treat candidates like idiots and incapable of making decisions. They do that by putting job posts that can be understood by the lowest common denominator.

    Let me be clear that the problem is not the language, but the fundamental content of a job post.

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but most job posts have the following format:


    Not necessarily all the job posts will have all the sections above, but if they do, it'll be on that order and, most of the time they don't include anything outside of those sections.

    Exercise: Go to your favorite startup or BigCo website and dissect their job posting into those sections.

    Ok, that's fine, you might say, but what's the big deal about it?

    The fundamental problem that I think exists in job posts is that what we really want is to find somebody that will get the job done, but since we don't write that explicitly, we put some other content that we think correlates to it.

    For example, we write how many years of experience somebody need to have. Why? Probably because we want somebody that is less experienced than we are think that years of experience will correlate to the value the person will bring to that position. Or, when we ask for somebody with a CS degree, or an MBA. Or, when we write a list of all the technologies somebody need to know, because we assume that they knowing something that we already use is the easiest way for them to get the job done.

    The fact is that technology change, knowledge evolves, and experience, sometimes, is a brick wall on your head that prevents you from having an open mind to tackle a new problem the best way possible.

    And I know a lot of smart hiring managers, although they completely understand all of the above, will continue to write the "traditional" job posts, including (gasp) myself.

    Next time, instead of listing all the things somebody should know, list what they should do and ask "can you get the job done?".

 

    Until my mid-20s I had a beach house in Ubatuba (read Oobatooba), a coastal city about 3 hours from Sao Paulo, where I grew up.

 

    For those that live on the Eastside, there is a Mexican restaurant called Ooba's which makes great Mexican food (it's always packed full during lunch time). They have three locations: Bellevue, Redmond and Woodinville.

 

    One time, I was telling the cashier at the restaurant (it's a bit of self-service place) that I was from Brazil and he told me he was the owner and the name of the restaurant was actually Ooba Tooba because of the city of Ubatuba. Now, what are the chances?

 

    According to Craig, the owner, he had a baby sitter from Brazil when he was growing up, and his family went to Brazil a few times to visit her in Ubatuba.

 

    Yes, the world is a small place.

 

 

PS: The granite stone on my kitchen countertop is also called Ubatuba and it also came from Ubatuba.

 

 

    I just announced a contest for Seattle-area designers to create a logo for the Seattle 2.0 site. If you are a local designer or design firm, check it out.

 

 

 

    Next week the MIT Enterprise Forum will host an event called "Are you ready for an IPO?". Really? IPO? I think this will be a video playback of some talk from 1999.

 

    Don't get me wrong, the MITEF puts some very interesting stuff up, but this is just a killer, I mean, a time killer.

 

 

    In December last I wrote about the high number of IE 6 users out there and our push to get our users to upgrade to IE7 or Firefox. Well, in less than 45 days the number of users running IE6 went from 32.7% to 27.2%. It's a progress, but not enough to make us drop support to IE 6.

 

    I think when IE 6 is below the 5% mark we might make a harder push, meaning, forcing users to upgrade, just to avoid the cost of maintaining support for that browser.

 

    Tonight I'm going to the WSA Industry Achievements Award at the Westin Hotel. I look forward to seeing some of my fellow entrepreneurs and get to meet a few new friends.

 

    And, tomorrow morning I'm going to the NWEN Breakfast where Kelly Smith will be talking about the pains of being an entrepreneur. That's supposed to be very good, first because Kelly is a good speaker, second because a lot of talks are about how great being an entrepreneur is, but they don't prepare you for the rough moments.

 

 

 

    Here is a tip to entrepreneurs: Don't try to artificially increase your Alexa/Compete ranking by asking your friends to install the toolbars and visit your site. This is not sustainable and your company is going to look like a falling rock the month after.

 

    I just published the Seattle Startup Index for January/2008 on the Seattle 2.0 blog.

 

    Lots of companies/sites being tracked (260 total).

 

    Sampa dropped two positions but that can be accounted by the two new companies that debuted on the rank ahead of us. The fact is that we dropped our numbers on both Alexa and Compete rankings.

 

    The Alexa explanation is easy. We were featured in TechCrunch in November and that is just "phasing out", plus, add to that our re-focus into the family space and you get the perfect storm for a dropping Alexa Ranking.

 

    Compete on the other hand is supposed to be more resilient than that, according to them, but they are clearly not. Google Analytics show us having a gain of 15-20% M-o-M in PV and UU, but Compete shows a drop of about 5%.

 

 

    Kevin Merritt (blist) just wrote a wonderful post about his DEMO experience on the Seattle 2.0 blog. Totally worth reading from somebody on the trenches.