Come for the Ride!

Forming a council of trusted people was one of the best things I’ve ever done for my startup. The idea is to hold a weekly or monthly meeting discussing current challenges with a group of people who have nothing to do with the day-to-day of the startup; and preferably nothing to do with the company period.

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If your website serves ads and your banner clicks help pay for groceries, then you owe it to yourself to optimize your banners for maximize click-throughs. For the past two years we’ve been doing this manually – changing placement, playing with colors, and even testing text-only ads vs. graphic and text-ads for maximum CTR.

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While reviewing our Amazon S3 account earlier this week, I came across an old unused bucket that had apparently sat dormant for an embarrassingly long time. As great as cloud hosting may be, paying for excess stuff you don’t use or need is simply idiotic – hence my determination to rid this problem in 5 minutes.

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Well, it’s only a month into 2010 so technically I’m not too late to do a reflection post for last year. 2009 was a year of many changes for me and my startup. We hired a few people, we lost a few people. Overall I would say the startup has gotten stronger as a result. Below are probably some of the biggest takeaways I got out of the whole experience.

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Let me begin this post by saying I love Quantcast for analytics! I love how the service doesn’t charge $50K or $10K a seat to access its metrics. I love the charts, graphs and user interface they came up with. I also love how it lets the webmaster setup direct measurement so its data falls in line with internal Google Analytics reporting. (Unlike reporting served by Alexa, Compete and ComScore which are pure speculation as far as I can tell.)

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