Aug 31

Takeaways from @jaybaer’s Facebook Marketing seminar

Nerd 1 Comment »

I attended Jason Baer’s Facebook Marketing seminar at NACET last week. Usually these social media marketing seminars are fluff or so remedial they don’t yield any new insight. But Jason was extremely knowledgeable and I learned a couple interesting things from his talk and discovered a few sites and services that appear very useful. In all it made me realize we’re under-utilizing Facebook for our startups and need to implement a FB strategy going forward. Below are my notes and links to the relevant sources:

Five Different strategies to take with FB

Awareness
	- new Facebook page that actually collects emails
	- "win the news feed" x-factors - high target interaction weight
	- edgerank formula seems similar to HN "gravity" algorithm
	- Pagelever for better FB metrics (Edgerank checker = low end)
Increase Sales
	- ShopTab.net from Phx do this well (like CartFly?)
	- Direct response = higher end
Market research & insight generation
	- Liking page = expression of support (equiv digital bumper sticking). 
	- intersperse q's to keep interactive and prevent feed fatigue
	** play with polls more to activate people
	- Bulbstorm / idea challenges- good eg. ^ <- nother Phx co!
	** investigate ExactTarget
Customer Service
	- listen proactively, worst case = have a page and not attend
	- deleting neg comments is hugely detrimental, only if hate speech etc
	**** Kurrently realtime Twitter & Facebook monitoring
	- use discussions tab as a place to take discussions off the Wall. 
	- key to establish hours of operation just like phone CSR's. ground rules for posting
Fifth 
	^missed it - maybe someone else who was there can comment?
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Aug 23

An undiscovered gem of an AZ songwriter

Music No Comments »

I discovered Nate Stone about a month back randomly while working in a coffee shop in Flagstaff. I was fortunate to catch this performance he did this past Sunday of my favorite song of his:

I had a beer with him afterwards and he declared “this is the night I got my voice back.” I know the feeling of what it’s like to have been super prolific at writing music and then lose the spark. It was pretty magical to be present and witness him get the spark back. There was only maybe five people in the whole place but you could hear the responses from people when it kicked in for him.

Download his last album for free here. He said he’s got material in the works to record a new album. I cannot wait to hear what this guy puts out next. If you’re in the Flagstaff area he plays resident every Sunday night 7-9pm at Coffee Bean.

To see other guys like Nate (not necessarily from AZ) check this list I made awhile back. The Interwebs have apparently deemed it #1 google result for “acoustic artist” for whatever that’s worth.

Aug 21

I’m an ass. Eric Ries, I apologize

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I want to make a public apology for writing this post a few days ago. Stressful times but no excuse. I understand what happened now and this was a misunderstanding on my part. For anyone that cares here’s exactly what went down:

  • I had pre-ordered Eric’s book before SXSW and just assumed I had elected to receive the digital version.
  • I didn’t realize that his book was included in the AppSumo bundle I purchased at SXSW (cool). AppSumo apparently mistakenly advertised it as including the digital edition.
  • Eric’s email a few days ago was clarifying the mixup and just getting mailing addresses from the people that purchased the AppSumo bundle. I interpreted it as him just changing his mind and choosing not to make a digital edition that had been offered via his site and that I had purchased.

So basically I’m an ass for making that post earlier and jumping to assumptions before doing proper fact checking. Now that I understand the situation I feel bad and sincerely apologize. Eric, I’m sorry. Looking forward to reading your book. It’s an important work.

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Aug 19

Eric Ries, are you joking?

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Apologies for the rant in advance but this is a bigger topic than the title implies.

I had pre-ordered Eric’s book many months back because I’m interested in the lessons but also largely out of sheer support for CustDev/Lean startup movements. These are important concepts. The mysterious art of entrepreneurship is finally getting codified into a repeatable framework. IMO this is one of the more promising developments in terms of advancements that has the most potential to restore our economy from the shitter.

So I was surprised this email from Eric this morning:

Now arguably this is a trivial thing. Being nomadic & virtual I’m trying to slim down and have less physical stuff so I’d prefer the digital version I ordered, but barring the existence of that, I’ll take the hardcover. The stance taken here though seems pretty absurd. If somebody pre-orders a hotdog from you and you decide not to make it for some reason, you can’t simply insist that they accept a burger. What’s worse, it’s not even like he ran out of hotdogs, he just seemingly decided not to make them.

Again, in the grand scheme, not a big deal and I’m far more interested in the content so we can apply the relevant lessons to our . But what’s troubling is I’ve noticed a theme developing (Eric sorry to call you out personally as the example here) where founders are so immersed in conversion funnels and A/B testing and cohort analysis that they forget the basics of running a hotdog stand. This is the guy who (2nd to Steve Blank IMO) is in a position to massively influence the next generation of entrepreneurs and he has this approach to something as fundamental as basic customer service

Here’s a novel idea Eric: explain the situation and why you’ve chosen not to make the digital edition and realize that 98% of people will be fine with the hardcover. But give folks a choice for a refund if you can’t deliver the product they purchased. To insist that they accept a substitute with a 2wk ultimatum that they’ll otherwise forfeit their money – not how you do it dude.

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Aug 07

Lessons learned from 30 days of going carrierless

Lifehacks, Nerd 14 Comments »

July 7th I cancelled the account I’ve had with AT&T for the past twelve years and embarked on an experiment to see if it was possible to go carrierless and retain a somewhat normal existence. I’m happy to report after 30 days that this situation has worked surprisingly well. This post will summarize the key things I learned over the last month and offer some helpful nuggets of advice for anyone contemplating doing the same.

Context

The goal in cutting my mobile phone service was very simply to eliminate a non-critical expenditure in the effort of getting extremely lean financially while working on our startup. I had used skype on my iPhone prior to the switch and knew that it handled calls well. My concerns were primarily whether running daily phone calls over Skype via iPhone would be annoyingly cumbersome.

My setup

I have an oldschool iPhone 3GS, a Verizon 3G Mifi mobile hotspot (grandfathered in under the unlimited bandwidth plan they used to offer) and the Google Voice and Skype apps on my iPhone.

The Switch Process

I ported my AT&T number to Google Voice for $20. Doing so automatically triggers the cancellation process w/ AT&T. You’ll want to check what your early termination fee is if you’re still under contract – mine was $70 so I more than covered it in the past month. It took a day for the number port to complete during which time all SMS messages sent to my phone blackholed. SMS apparently doesn’t work like email where it will keep retrying to send until it goes through. It took about 3 days before I began receiving SMS after the port. Once completed I spent another $20 to keep my previous GV # as an alternate phone (it was printed on all the business cards I had recently ordered and I like the idea of keeping separate business & personal #’s).

Unfortunately the GV app alone on your iPhone won’t enable you to send and receive calls. You’ll need to setup a Skype account if you don’t already have one and get an online number to be able to forward your GV # to. Skype offers a $3/mo option that gets you unlimited calls in the US. With the Skype number configured as the primary forwarding number in GV I was now able to receive and send calls from my iPhone.

The Good

  • The obvious benefit is that this eliminated a $130/mo phone bill.
  • There is an undeniable psychological win in saying FU to AT&T.
  • I’m navigationally-challenged and rely heavily on the iPhone for directions. The good news is the GPS is a true GPS and works via satellites (the cell tower triangulation is apparently the fallback method when it can’t acquire a GPS signal). This means the location-based features continue to work in spite of not having a cell carrier.
  • An indirect result of going carrierless was that I picked up all the benefits of using Google Voice. Transcribed voicemails is an awesome feature that eliminates listening to long messages.

The Bad

Now, the not-so-good:

  • You lose the ability to send picture messages over SMS. This isn’t a huge deal and I’m sure there are apps out there that give this capability. I haven’t really missed this – it’s easy to just email photos but if you rely upon sending picture texts for some reason, this is something to consider.
  • I have no 911 emergency dial. This is an acceptable risk for me but if you have dependents or frequently commute through dark allies, losing this might be unacceptable.UPDATE: apparently 911 does still work – thanks Dave for the clarification. Now I can continue to live dangerously!
  • Call quality is flaky over slow connections. Skype degrades the call quality when you have poor connectivity. It hasn’t been a problem yet but there have been a few instances when I’m working over a shady connection that I have to relocate to continue a call. The Verizon Mifi has been surprisingly good for calls with the exception of about 10% of the time it just seems to be unreliable. If you have a 4G mifi card I’m sure this isn’t even an issue. The answer when making important calls is to plan ahead to be working over a solid ground-based wifi connection for the call.
  • Unfortunately there’s no way to disable voicemail on Skype – this is a known shortcoming and a lot of people have complained about it. So to ensure that GV handles your voicemail the workaround is to enable call screening on GV (formerly known as “call presentation”). It’s only mildly annoying but means you’ll have to answer calls and click the “1” button to patch the person through.

Headsups

So here are some random tidbits of advice based on what I learned:

  • Use Google Talk when in front of computer and save on outbound calls. I went through $9 in calls over the past 30 days on the pay-as-you-go plan. If you have the unlimited plan then this is irrelevant but Google Talk is free for US calls and you can offload some of your paid outbound calls to GT while you’re in front of the computer.
  • You need to setup Google Contacts for caller ID to work. This is simple/obvious but you need to have all your contacts loaded in GV for it to be able to associate names w/ calls and text messages. Skype will automatically pick it up from your Contacts in the iPhone so inbound calls should still register with a name.
  • If you’re calling someone who happens to have Skype the call quality is way better if you can just use Skype instead of Skype->phone.
  • Get the Chrome extension for google voice. It’s pretty slick – it gives you a toolbar button that lets you quickly make calls and check messages.
  • You need to remember to launch Skype when you restart your iPhone to keep it running in the background. Otherwise your phone won’t ring when you receive a call- you’ll just get the missed call alert via GV. I have it running on both my phone and computer and will typically just answer via the computer when I’m on it. What’s neat is the iPhone earbuds w/ the mic will work for talking on the computer and actually perform pretty well even in a noisy coffee shop.
  • The battery life on the Verizon Mifi is about 5hrs which is not enough to last all day. You should turn it on when in transit and switch over to a local wifi hotspot when you get where you’re going. If you forget and leave the Mifi on all day you’ll kill the battery. It has a USB input so you can get a standard cigarette lighter USB charger if you do a lot of driving.

Conclusion

The bottomline is this setup has proven totally adequate for my situation. There is some admitted flakiness over slow connections and annoyances like lack of ability to send SMS picture messages, but it’s 90% of the service for literally 6% of the price. Ultimately the factors you’ll need to consider in determining whether it’ll work for you are 1) criticality of 911 emergency calling 2) tolerance for occasional call flakiness 3) guilt level for not supporting your phone carrier. In tight economic times, saving $130/mo is significant – I would be re-examining my core business if I were a cell phone service provider. If anyone else has cut the cord and successfully run a similar setup I’d love to hear what your experience has been and if you have any hacks you made that improved it.

Jul 24

Kernel Dump Q2 2011

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So I’m reviving a tradition I had many years ago on here called “Kernel Dump.” It’s a periodic brain dump of everything I’ve been up to. It’s basically like declaring blogging bankruptcy for all the little things I’ve meant to write posts on and a way of clearing the buffer with a single catch-all update. This will be admittedly tl;dr for strangers and is more intended for friends and family that want to check in on me and see what I’ve been up to. Here goes as close to chronological order as possible starting from back in April timeframe:

A new startup

After almost five years at a company I helped start, I was providing little new value and it was time to move on. My cofounder continues to run it and I remain on the board but have since transitioned out of the day to day to pursue a new music-centric startup. We just closed our first licensing deal last week for the Scratch Audio technology with a company out of LA and are in process of proving out a niche application musical artists that utilizes our own platform and lets them enable fans to online.

Shortsale

Facing a growing amount of debt on my home in Scottsdale and a disappearing income source, I investigated the options of foreclosure and shortsale. I was fortunate to meet a solid dude in Phoenix via my friend Bill Ramsey who successfully navigated the short sale waters on my behalf and achieved a favorable outcome. I’ve been meaning to post a summary of what all was involved in that process. Before this past Christmas I had never heard the term before and in the span of one evening bouncing amongst three holiday parties, it came up in conversations at every party. I investigated it and determined it made a ton of sense given my situation. It’s an insanely useful option if you’re heavily under water and I believe if more people understood how it worked, more would take advantage of it.

Cabin move

With summer approaching and 110 deg days on the horizon I convinced my folks to let me move what few possessions I have up to their cabin south of Flagstaff. I’ve been living there since and have been lucky to have a rent-free temporary setup. My buddy Bryan who got me onto the Paelo lifestyle has been rooming there as well so I’m not a complete hermit at this point ;-) This is a guy I had met years ago who also ran a party bus business at the time. We share similar mentalities around CustDev and I’m 100% sold on the Paleo lifestyle at this point having lost 27lbs and 4 belt sizes. I could write for days on the back-to-basics life changes we’ve implemented with barefoot running, composting, chemical-free existence, organic-only diet and now with beginning to hunt our own food (Zuckerberg barely beat us to the punch).

Public Speaking

I was lucky enough on May 20th to have opportunity to speak for Ignite Phoenix as well as at the Arizona Disruptors Pitch Day. We ended up being extended an offer from Disruptors but graciously passed and opted instead to align ourselves with NACET, a technology incubator in northern Arizona with a great track record for helping companies commercialize their technologies. We still have huge respect for what Hamid and his crew are doing in Scottsdale (so great to see someone step up to the plate and incubate startups) but NACET was a better fit and has been a nice homebase in the pines. The Daily Sun had a pretty good summary the other week of what I’m doing there. I’m speaking tomorrow to a group of high school sophomores as a part of their YES week intro to entrepreneurship.

Microconf

Last month I got a windfall free ticket to attend MIcroconf in Vegas at the very last minute from the host . It was a conference I desperately wanted to attend but was precluded purely by cashflow. So of course I jumped on the opportunity and made the 4hr drive on I-40 from Flagstaff. Glad I did because I met a few incredibly badass people there. Some people are just bright stars, there’s no other way to put it. I wrote up some thoughts on Microconf afterwards. If you’re trying to strike out on your own with a small business in the web realm it’s absolutely something to put on your calendar for next year.

Going carrierless

So this is something I’ve so wanted to do for awhile and finally just pulled the trigger on last week. I killed my AT&T account and am now running Skype mobile on my iPhone over Verizon EVDO. I have the Verizon Mifi mobile hotspot which gives me mobile connectivity for my laptop and phone (I’m grandfathered in under an unlimited data plan for $60/mo so it’s tough to beat). I ported my cell number to Google Voice and have it so it rings my Skype on both my phone and computer. I now have a phone bill of only $3/mo. Calls are flaky at times but it’s 90% of the phone service I had before for about 2% the cost. I do important conference calls via the landlines at the NACET facility. And Verizon coverage is definitely superior to AT&T – before on the I-17 drive down to Phx my iPhone would cut out at various spots along the way. Over the Verizon card it has continuous service the entire way. Extremely happy with this setup. I plan to write-up a post exclusively on this topic once I hit the 30 day mark so I have enough context to comment intelligently on how adequate it is and what to know before switching.

Useful apps I’ve discovered

I moved my todo list to Things and have been very happy with it for GTD. It has native iPhone and Mac apps with a beautiful UI on each. My only complaint is it lacks OTA sync – it has sync over wifi so it’s not a huge deal but would be great if they offered it. Tungle has been a delight for scheduling calls. Those guys were recently acquired by RIM so I’m not the only one who feels this way. I was introduced to the iPhone app Fast Customer when I met its creator, Paul Singh while staying at Noah’s place for SXSW. Without question for $2 this app has the best ROI of any app I’ve ever purchased. Actually now it looks like it’s free so it technically has infinite ROI. It’s basically like having an assistant call a big company on your behalf and ring you once they have the CSR on the line. GroupMe is something I discovered at SXSW and it’s basically like an adhoc listserv that runs over SMS. It’s similar to Beluga only it doesn’t require that users have a smartphone since it uses SMS as the interface. Super useful for coordinating an evening with a loose-knit group of strangers. Glympse is another neat one. Almost like a more frictionless, temporary Loopt this app lets you publish your location via private Google map to select people. Similar to GroupMe it’s a useful tool for coordinating amongst groups moving around in an area.

Can of Awesome interviews

I made a New Years’ resolution this year to start podcasting interviews with people I admire. I did the first four starting out with the most influential mentors in my life prioritized in order of influence. I haven’t done one in awhile because I’m trying to keep with this trend and doing so mandates that I interview Jason Barney next. I hope to have that interview soon and may soon after open it up so it’s not impeded by this constraint. My intention in doing these interviews is to share wisdom from the coolest people I know. This is maybe a morbid thought but I want to pay tribute to incredible people while they’re alive and not wait to say nice things about them after they’re dead. Anyways, these are worth a listen. I know podcasts are an investment time-wise and I promise to not waste anyone’s time with these- there are already some incredibly interesting/valuable lessons shared by the guys I interviewed.

My eBook: Cart Drawn Horses

This is a work still in its infancy but I’m pulling together a small eBook that will contain everything I’ve learned about practical how-to for CustDev, rapid prototyping & validated learning. CustDev and Paleo are probably the two most life-changing things I’ve ever learned. There are great conceptual resources about CustDev but there seems to be a major void right now in terms of scarcity of practical guides “this is how you actually implement it.” I’m giving away the first 100 copies so if this is the type of thing that interests you be sure to sign up for a rough cut.

Music

I haven’t written much of any new music lately but a buddy and I and I have been playing a bit with our cover band Conjugal Visit. I attended a concert by The Glitch Mob in SF about this time last year and was blown away by what they were doing musically. That led me to start tinkering with a piece of software called Ableton Live. I now run the Ableton User Group in Phoenix and have met a bunch of people way smarter than I am who have been teaching me all kinds of stuff. I’m blown away by this software- it’s rare that something comes along and rewrites the rules for a field but this app is single-handledly changing what’s possible in a live performance with one or two people.

Travel

Other than Vegas I haven’t been traveling at all – been in cash conservation mode until I get some steady income from the various projects I’m working on. Two startup buddies of mine Chase and Josh just completed a month in San Francisco and I had really hoped to be a part of that but sadly it just wasn’t in the cards from a cashflow perspective. I’m hoping this latest deal we did for Scratch Audio will give me an excuse to make it out to LA next month. I met a ton of great folks last time I was there for Startup Weekend and have kept in touch with some. If you haven’t yet played with Namesake this is an interesting “Quora meets IRC” community. It seems to be still pretty heavily LA-centric but they opened it up to the public recently and it’s been getting a decent amount of growth.

Books

I’m about 2/3rds through Black Swan and have revised my opinion that it does actually have some value. Initially I was surprised why it got so much good press given that it was the equivalent of the falling rock sign for unpredictable catastrophic events. I read a new agey one recently called “Power of Now” – it’s a bit on the crystal-hugger side for me but it did one simple idea that has altered my thinking. The premise is that too often we live in the past or present (by hours, days or even years). There’s nothing wrong with planning or reminiscing in moderation but living in either means we’re missing an immediate opportunity. Life takes place in the present only. It’s such a cliched and simple concept but something about this book hammered this idea through and I’ve been consciously pulling my attention back into the immediate presence since reading it.

I got to review an advance copy of Derek Sivers’ book which is now out and it’s definitely worth reading (he even put me in the credits!). This is a guy who created a company from scratch and sold it for $20MM but then, more incredibly, put all the money in a trust for musicians. It reminded me a lot of Rework by 37 Signals- it’s a fast read packed with wisdom from this guy. I’m a week into resuming a course on speed reading that I had done ten years ago. This thing works if you stick with it. I believe being able to digest written information either 5x more or 5x faster than your competition is a huge advantage and this is the best resource I’ve found for increasing one’s reading speed. The other business one I’m reading is the 2nd edition of Solution Selling. I’m a horrible sales person and admittedly need to get better. Of all the books I’ve read on sales the first edition of this one had the most useful advice in terms of a framework and I’m looking forward to reading the updated version that has revised practices for software companies.

Fun Gadgets

I haven’t bought many toys lately but I’ve been getting a huge amount of enjoyment from this slingshot that we converted to shoot arrows. We haven’t used it to hunt yet but it’s absolutely capable of bringing down small game and given that compound bows start at $600 this $20 weapon is an awesome value. Chris Dumler in LA turned me onto this gravity-fed tea strainer and I use it daily. If you’re into loose leaf tea it makes it so much easier to make. My best friend gave me a mini RC helicopter for Christmas last yr and you just have to try these things to understand how cool they are. They’re about $25 on Amazon and gyroscopically stabilized so they’re super easy to fly. Lastly at the suggestion of this CNET review I got Klipsch noise canceling in-ear headphones. They make working so much better when you need to tune out background noise and zone out (great also for reducing travel fatigue on plane flights). BTW if you use Rdio for music, I have a great mix for zone out work music.

Learning

So aside from speed reading, I’ve committed to learning Rails and some basic development stuff. I figure at this point I’ll likely be involved with various web applications and dev teams for the foreseeable future and there’s huge value to understanding development from a low-level perspective. I met the Ming.ly guys in LA and Tyler pretty much sold me on Github, Rails, Hipchat, PivotalTracker & Heroku. After waffling on Python vs. Rails I’ve decided in favor of learning Ruby & Rails. I committed my first project to GitHub the other night. It’s a stupid simple Coldfusion app I wrote to be able to read Hacker News the way I like. My plan is to rewrite it in Rails and use that as a practical excuse to learn Rails. The Heroku deployment sounds awesome and I’ve already been tinkering w/ Pivotal Tracker which is very cool for agile project management. Lately I’ve also been tinkering w/ Agile Zen and actually did a makeshift Solution Selling pipeline using their free proj mgmt tool.

Plan for Q3

So as far as what I hope to accomplish this quarter:

  • I’d like to see us land another licensing deal for Scratch and ideally get it to a level of revenue that supports at least myself for now (as Bill Ramsey would say “a one-man boat”). Eric, my co-founder starts a new full-time job tomorrow and the ultimate goal will be to get revenue to a level that we can afford to have him full-time on it.
  • I’m very excited about testing this MixFork concept with musicians and proving that businesses can be built ontop of our technology platform.
  • We’re taking Paleo to a new level and I hope to have more to report on this front soon.
  • Really looking forward to incorporating Ableton in our live performances and writing some new original music.
  • On the side I’m pulling together a . This is the resource I wish had existed when I was going through the process and my goal is to give people a solid resource to educate themselves on what’s involved and take advantage of it as an alternative to foreclosure if it makes sense.
  • Lastly, you can’t time this type of thing but I’m hoping to meet someone. The solitary cabin existence has been super useful for getting a bunch done but it would be killer to meet another great girl at some point. I went on my friend Lyndsie’s show Valley Catch a few weeks back but no bites so far ;-)

Anyways, that’s the TL;DR update from Sean. If you’ve read this far and we haven’t chatted in awhile hit me up and let’s catch up. Santa Monica peeps: I hope to be back out there in September, if you’re around at that time let’s hang out.

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