Come for the Ride…

Being the senior interactive marketer on the team, I feel I need to address something that recently happened on this blog. For our regular readers, nothing noticeable happened. However, for those affected, I want to apologize for any inconvenience it may have caused.

As part of the team’s training on everything interactive, it is my job to come up with various exercises for the team to test and enhance our understanding of new technologies, online promotions, viral marketing and business development.

During a recent meeting I assigned one of the co-founders the task of promoting this blog. Even though his primary function is business development, I figured learning how to build traffic would be useful to learn while the main site is under construction. The goal of the assignment was to get 100+ subscribers via FeedBurner before our main services launches since the idea of this blog is to share our story with fellow entrepreneurs who may be in similar stages on their startup. After all, the point of this blog is to chronicle our progress and to educate others based on various successes and failures based on our actions.

Unfortunately it seems I may have over estimated my co-founder’s understanding of building web traffic and as a result, the vague assignment resulted in us crossing the line of acceptable promotional techniques.

In addition to some of the valid methods of web promotions through networking events, telling friends and family and so on… it seems he had made a questionable post on Craigslist which brought in unqualified traffic. I remember getting an IM from him while working that said “I’m testing something new and I’m confident this will be in tons of traffic.”

Well, as most of you know, no analytics program has live, up-to-the-minute data so after receiving the message I kind of just left it at that.

A few hours later I logged into Analytics and saw the graph above. We had indeed gotten a spike in traffic. As I dug deeper into sources of referral, it seemed like half of the increased traffic was typed in while the other half came from Craigslist. Curious… I dug deeper until I finally landed on referring page.

What I saw REALLY disgusted me and even more so, I was shocked that we were the party responsible for the message. It would appear for his test, he had placed a job opening on Craigslist saying the blog needed to a designer to revamp its looks but on top of that, he also made the claim we had a $10,000 budget for the revision!

Even though we did receive a spike in traffic, unfortunately neither of the statements are true and I am honestly disappointed and sorry that we resorted to tricking users to come to the site. As someone who uses the web and hates spam, this action was totally unacceptable.

So why am I writing about this mistake instead of just letting the incident pass and hope nothing bad happens? Well, there’s a lesson to be learned here and I’m hoping this entry will prevent others from making the same mistake.

1. A spike in any unqualified traffic from any source is a waste of resources. People that came to the site looking for a $10k payoff don’t care about our content vs. people who are coming here to get stories about our entrepreneur adventures.

If this was done at a larger scale where we would have to pay for bandwidth, the additional traffic would have costed us money and the visitors would not have converted to paying customers; a double whammy.

2. People don’t like to be tricked. While my co-worker may think this was a clever idea when he made the post, his actions made the entire team (and business) look bad. Have we now completely lost our credibility? I don’t know but we are still getting hate mail and comment spam days later as a result.

3. Screw ups out shine a good performance! While my co-worker did actually generate some good traffic in parallel, his efforts to generate qualified traffic were completely lost in this scandal. In case you think this is a good way to impress your boss, don’t do it!

4. People still get tricked easily. This isn’t so much a mistake on our part as much as it’s an observation. Even though the post looked questionable, we are getting a good number of people asking for a chance to chat in order to discuss the project at hand. Sorry guys, we don’t have the budget for this upgrade right now.

5. The unknown… while I can only see what the immediate feedback has been, I’m really not sure what extended damages this unintentional test may have caused. I really hope no long term or permanent damage has been done but in all honesty, I just don’t know for sure.

With that note… I hope our mistakes will prevent you from making the same.

My father has this saying, “Never stop learning.” He’s in his mid-70s and he’s always trying to learn new things. Mind you, he has a B.S. in Chemistry, Masters of Public Health and a Ph.D in Toxiology, so he’s got no shortage on knowledge already stored up in his noggin. With this said, every challenge you take up in life should be a learning experience. You should be looking to expand your horizons and grown in your professional. Without going beyond what you normally do and what you already know, you tend to stagnate.

Early in our projects life, I felt like after the initial startup period and development, I stalled as a person. I was using all my acquired IT skills in a very comfortable manner. To a certain degree, we had the basic site and communications up in a timely manner. However, when the actual site development came into play, I’ve found my current system of site development is too slow and methodical for our purposes. My experience comes from projects that have high availability and mission critical reliability needs. We do testing to no end. We come up with programming plans, have code reviews and  reliability is job one. However, EasyAutoSales.com is a highly agile, web marketing company that needs to exeute quickly for maximum effectiveness.

In a few situations, my programming methods have had to be replaced with a small development team that can work more quickly. I’ve had to change my role and learn to be a manager. Wei has pushed me to contact developers via Guru, oDesk and any PHP forums and choose a team that reports to me, and in turn him. In this, I’ve had to admit to myself that I didn’t have an answer for every programming situation. I like to think I’m a pretty stout developer, but learning how to change my role is something I need to learn for this project and future projects.

My advice to anyone starting up a new business (online or otherwise), roll with the punches. You’re going to have to learn new skills and expand your horizons. Don’t fight it. You’re going to have to choose to pick your battles about doing things “your way” versus whatever it takes to get things done.

Ever since I started doing this venture full time about a month ago, work has been non-stop. I’ve managed to endure 15-18 hour days skipping nights, weekends and holidays working, but on the bright side, I’ve been skipping early mornings waking up a little later too.

All work and no play is turning my head into mush… and while I’ve encouraged other entrepreneurs not to burn themselves out, it seems like I’ve fallen into the same trap overseeing the project.

The funny thing is, this isn’t a problem with being too much work. I’ve definitely been busier during other times of my life and juggling the same if not more things on my plate. The problem seems to stem from working on one main thing and not giving my brain time to rest to process thoughts in the background; where most of my solutions generally appear.

In the same fashion that you don’t build your muscles in the gym, but during your rest periods outside the gym, I need to cut back some hours and give the brain some rest. I have a feeling I can probably be just as effective working 6-8 intense hours vs. 15-18 drawn out hours. Either way it’s definitely worth testing to see if feelings of sluggishness disappear.

All I gotta say is thank goodness for my dogs… without them to bug me during the day about going outside, I’d probably be locked in all day.

How fast can you start a business doing it by yourself? How much faster can you grow a business by working in a team? I just read this article from one of the blogs I subscribe to and the author too advocates working in a team environment for startups.

The truth is, the more right people you have on a team, the faster things can get done and the quicker you can grow. Even if you are a master of all trades, having moral support by your side can greatly enhance your attitude towards the business. Besides, all things require time and attention and as one person, you only have so much bandwidth to give.

Let’s take our favorite entrepreneur Marcus Frind of PlentyofFish.com as an example. I first heard about him while surfing WebmasterWorld.com and like everyone else, I was shocked and somewhat envious when I heard he made a million dollars on his site from AdSense alone. Based on his latest video, he claimed to make about $5 mil a year maintaining his site and working on it part-time. Not too bad for a programmer who created the site to learn asp.net.

Throughout my research on the web to see what site he created, I did not stumble upon one bad article about this guy. Seeing how he’s a nice guy, I don’t see why I would. However, even though everyone was focusing on the money he made, the truth is even with $5 mil a year in revenue, a ton of money was being thrown out the door by keeping the business as a one man operation. How much more could he had made had he hired a business development guru or marketing guru? How much would that have cost him? How much did it cost him by not growing the team?

As a business development person, these are the things that are a cause for concern in my world. For programmers, maybe not so much? (Because they have other worries)

Working with a team isn’t all sunshine and lollipops, but a good team with complementary skills and experience does have value and it’s one we’re banking will pay off.

I’ve got to agree with Wei a bit. Some of these developers look very good. They have a good backgrounds. But they throw a blanket statement at you with a “cover letter” that is far too generic (why do I care if you’ve been developing in .NET for 3 years when I clearly want a LAMP project done?). They try to oversell themselves by giving information that I don’t care about. I’m very happy that you all have ISO 9000 certification, but that’s, for the most part, useful only in manufacturing where an actual product is made. Code isn’t exactly the same thing. Now, tell me you guys use Extreme Programming or Spiral Programming methodoly and I can get a feel for what you’re all about. I’ve sat here for the last 3 hours looking at people who are bidding for our work and I’ve only come acros 3 people that I feel good about. Either the general web programming population isn’t as mature as I would hope or or they are just horrible communicators.

Wish me luck…