Come for the Ride…

In my opinion, one of the riskiest tasks to creating an internet startup is the hiring of developers to create and build your website. Especially, for those of you who are web entrepreneurs, but not programmers. So much is riding on this aspect of the business in the beginning. The bottom line is you have got to check these people out! I am so tired of seeing people get ripped off. Why, because it almost happened to me during my first venture and it actually did happen to one of my colleagues. Nobody ever thinks it could happen to them, yet some of the smartest people get taken every day. I like to use the analogy that programmers are like home contractors, they can build you something great or they can take you to the cleaners. You have got to do your homework on these people! I cannot stress this point enough. Don’t just check their portfolio, find the contacts under each website in their portfolio and give them a call. If there aren’t any contacts, be weary. If there are, call these people and get some feedback. Get references, but don’t just ask for two or three. Ask them to supply you with ten and then you decide which ones to call. Anybody can find people to give bogus references. So don’t be surprised if you think your calling the CEO of some company, but it turns out to be his best friend. The bottom line is these guys are good. Very good! They know exactly what it takes to earn your trust and appear legitimate. My dad always told me that the greatest scammers are the best at appearing honest and sincere. Thats how they suck you in! A colleague of mine who spent about a year of his life creating an internet business related to the music industry, fell victim to one of these scum bags. Its really ashame because he had a great idea too. This company appeared so legit that he even flew out to visit their office and did not suspect anything. I would have fallen victim to this company as well, but my gut told me that two things were suspicious. First off, the guy just appeared to be trying to earn my trust a little too much. He sent me a video of the company, he even sent pictures of him and his family. It just didn’t seem right. Always trust your gut, I’ve found that its usually right. Secondly, for a company that was supposed to have over eighty employees, this alleged CEO had just a little bit to much time on his hands to try and convince me to use his services. Even their site looks kosher and I must admit, its actually pretty neat http://www.ispg.co.in/. Do they look legitimate? You be the judge. Happy hunting and tread carefully…

While watching the NBC news tonight, the big discussion was about how Obama copied a small portion of the speech from another governor and how Hilary copied some of Bill’s speech from years prior to help make their points.  While making the point on air, they showed clips of Deval Patrick from YouTube to point out the similarity in the words.  I wasn’t so into the topic as I was with the technology NBC was using, which were clips of very poor quality from YouTube.

Now, as a national broadcasting company with years and years of video in archive, surely they must have the exact same clip in higher quality locked in a vault somewhere.  Why would a nationally praised news program forgo digging up video of higher quality and instead show grainy videos from YouTube and call it a day?  Are we now getting lazy? Could it be because NBC is flat out admitting YouTube’s search and video distribution services are way better and easier than having a staff on board whose job is to dig up old videos?

Now, if everyone wants to play nice then this would be fine… in a perfect world old business would mix with the new and we would all share our toys.  However, NBC is the same company that has repeatedly banned their own videos from appearing on YouTube due to copyright violations.  Awesome clips of SNL (who no one watches anymore except YouTube helped revived it) have been removed repeatedly at the request of NBC.  Bummer for all of us who choose to have a life on Saturday nights but also wanted to check out things like Dick-in-a-Box or the People getting punched video.

So to be fair, I think NBC should be banned from using anything from YouTube on its broadcasts.  If you’re not going to share your toys, I don’t see why you should be allowed to play with everyone else’s.  When you showed the grainy video on your nationally televised news program, did the guy who stood in the crowd and filmed the grainy video get paid for their efforts?  Most likely not… so where do you guys really stand on your own copyright policies?

I just read an interesting article on another blog that talks about the recent NADA meeting and the state of advertising in the autos industry. One particular section caught my eye:

So went the conversations on the Moscone Convention Center floor with various industry execs. AutoTrader CEO Chip Perry, for instance, says that the one thing that dealers want to know from him is “why do you raise your rates 20 percent every year?” But, they seem to get the value of a medium that is used “seven times more than newspapers,” he says – even if their spending doesn’t nearly reflect it.

Cheaper solutions, of course, are available for dealers. But they don’t approach the traffic levels of “the auto industry’s search engine,” as Perry likes to think of AutoTrader.

It’s funny… the dealers are obviously asking for help and showing dissatisfaction but due to old business models that can’t bend, nothing changes. It would appear the need for a service such as ours is obvious; the trick is to create real value by getting the same level of traffic as the big sites and doing things better to help the sellers.

I’ve said this before… the cost of distribution has gone down a lot especially with the presence of the web. If dealers used to pay thousands to help get a magazine published with their inventory inside, they certainly don’t need to pay the same amount to get cars listed on the web. Digital storage is virtually free, dedicated hosting is cheap compared to a decade ago… a successful service that is also free is only a blink away.

Whatever the industry may be… if similar events are happening in your neck of the woods where your customers are becoming antsy, your best bet would be to show some flexibility in your business model instead of waiting for other startups to fill that niche. Believe me, they will.

Hopefully some of you reading this blog will be interested in cars as much as we are. If you are, then you’ll love the picture I’ve attached to this post.

This past weekend was the Atlanta SCCA’s first driving event. It took place at the local Six Flags parking lot. For those of you who have never heard of it, autocrossing is an event where people compete in timed event where you must navigate a course of of cones while knocking as few down as you can. The speeds get up to 50-60 miles per hour and the runs take between 45-75 seconds.

This is the reason I love cars. Competition. Getting together with friends and seeing who has the best prepared car and the best skills to navigate a course with really amazing machines. In the picture is my 1995 BMW M3. I’m driving and Wei is in the passenger seat. He was a great passenger. What a heck of a ride! This is the reason I’m working on EasyAutoSales.com. I’m passionate about cars. I love the look, the sound and the feel of them. I love the people they attract and see this as a way to help me in my personal car endevours as well as my entrepreneurial spirit.

Unlike analytics, (data about your own site) competitive intelligence is data about your competitors. Unfortunately, to get an accurate data set that you can rely on, tons and tons of data points have to be collected. Because collecting ISP data and hiring sample users ain’t easy, the companies that do the work usually charge a ton for the service.

When you think of competitive intelligence, a few large companies probably comes to mind: ComScore, Nielson and Hitwise. Each one of these companies charge $25k - $50k a year for their subscription and for the record, they all count traffic in slightly different ways.

So what’s a poor startup to do when you want to compete with the big boys but don’t have the same resources? Alexa? No, Alexa is a joke inaccurate… so what else?

As the web moves to web 2.0, luckily there are companies out there that are now offering cheaper solutions that are just as accurate. While these services may not give you as many ways to break down the data as the larger services, they do provide a solid foundation to size up your competitors.

The site I used the most is Compete.com. Similar to Alexa, you have the option to compare up to three to five sites on visits, uniques and some other data points. Although the service doesn’t offer too many options, the basic free options are what most advertisers use on the expensive services.

A new service I found that offers a lot more data points than Compete.com is Quantcast.com.  Though I’m not completely sure how accurate the data is compared with  other services, the amount of free information here does warrant a visit if you are doing any kind of competitive analysis.  So far my research using Quantcast on some of the bigger sites yielded expected results.  For smaller sites, I haven’t had a chance to verify the accuracy of the results.

However, for those of you who want to size up your competitors, definitely check out the above two sites and see what you can find.