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DETHKLOK W/ CHIMAIRA AND SOILENT GREEN
Sunday, July 6
Doors/Bar @ 7 pm | Show @ 7:30 pm
Austin Music Hall
Tower Club VIP Tickets include:
2 tickets available.
Email tickets2008@austinpreneur.com if you'd like them
The tickets have been claimed. Maybe next time!
I'm reading Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely, and came across a story that reminded me of bootstrapping a company.
In 210 BC, a Chinese commander named Xiang Yu led his troops across the Yangtze River to attack the army of the Qin (Ch'in) dynasty. Pausing on the banks of the river for the night, his troops awakened in the morning to find, to their horror, that their ships were burning. They hurried to their feet to fight off the attackers, but soon discovered that it was Xiang Yu himself who had set their ships on fire, and that he had also ordered all the cooking pots crushed.
With their ships gone, the soldiers had no route of retreat. Winning was the only option. And win they did. 9 battles in a row before defeating the Qin forces.
This is similar to when a bootstrapper enters the Valley of Death and commits to their venture, but before they are making money and cash flow positive. They are forced to figure out how to make it work with what they've got. The timeline is not completely in their control.
We're always tempted to leave ourselves an escape route or path of retreat. And usually that's a good idea. But sometimes there aren't enough resources to mount the attack and cover the retreat. In order to be successful sometimes you have to commit the resources to what you believe in because the retreat option isn't acceptable. Sometimes once you head down a path there is just no turning back, so you might as well commit all of your resources to getting to the end.
When I was CEO of SKYLIST, this happened twice. We were growing and needed to shift focus based on customer demand and a rapidly changing market. Both of those times it was focused on eliminating unprofitable customers and focusing sales on specific types of opportunities. Each resulted in a temporary drop in revenue but strengthened the long term sustainability and profitability of the company.
When Datran Media bought SKYLIST, we went through the same exercise again. Each time the SKYLIST business came out stronger than before and had replaced the revenue with better customers within a year.
Each time it was the right thing to do and left us stronger than before, but each time we went into it kicking and screaming. Change is hard. When something works, we often get the urge to just do that over and over - well past the point where it stops working. It felt bad to move away from lines of business we had traditionally dominated.
But it was turning point for the company. Had we not burned the ships behind us, I'm not sure we would have survived and succeeded.
Some companies just make you feel loved and appreciated. They are getting harder and harder to find but they do still exist. I hope I can make OtherInbox a company makes its customers feel loved!
There is this local eyeglasses store called Southwest Vision on Bee Cave Road in Austin that has impressed me more than once with their customer service and commitment to standing behind their product. First off, everyone that works there is as nice as can be. But they also take care of their customers. I had a scratch on a lens and brought it to them the day after my warranty had expired and they replaced it anyway. Months later I somehow warped one of my lenses and it was popping out and they replaced it for free well after the warranty had expired.
Citibank also came through for me recently. My first credit card was set up in 1994 with Citibank and the account is still active. Back then they were putting your photo on your credit card and every year or two the send me a new card with the same photo from when I was 16 years old. As long as they keep doing that, there is no chance that I'm getting rid of this credit card! I haven't been using it much at all and a few months ago stopped charging to it entirely. But I didn't realize that my dry cleaner had that card and was charging to it every month. A few months later, I had $160 in charges and $130 in late fees! I called Citibank and explained what happened - they transferred me to a manager who promptly waived not only the late fees but also all of the finance charges! They definitely made me feel like a valued customer and specifically told me how they appreciated that I had been a customer for more than 10 years.
And they say all corporations are evil!
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I know they are trying to provide good customer service, but I really wish that waiters would stop refilling my iced tea when its half full.
Normally, I put a single sugar into my iced tea. But then I drink some and the waiter comes along to refill it and suddenly its not sweet enough. So now I need to put in more sugar, but not a whole packet because that would be too sweet and so now I'm trying to pour out only half the sugar pack and I end up leaving a half-empty sugar pack on the table which spills on the table and ends up on my pants.
I wish they would wait until my drink was almost empty before refilling it!
eMarketingandCommerce.com just published my article about How Social Networking Can Learn From E-mail. This was based on my earlier blog posting to Deliverability.com and edited by Carla Vicens.
I'm smiling as I write this, but I must admit that it took me a while to see the positive side of things. At first I was very insulted and angry. But now I think it's a funny story and worth sharing.
Someone I don't know sent me a question on LinkedIn about the best way to raise money for his email marketing company. The question was sent to a group of people, not just to me.
Even though I didn't recognize the person, I clicked on his name to see his profile and try to help him out. I immediately saw that he was involved with email marketing and went to his company's website to learn more. When I clicked on the Consulting tab, I had a strange sense of familiarity reading the text.
It seemed so familiar. I went to the SKYLIST website and looked at the description of our consulting services... and they were exactly the same. I know that they copied and pasted the text from our website because I personally wrote the text on our site.
I'm just including one example below, although there are other examples of entire paragraphs that were copied word-for-word if you look for them. Every page of our website is clearly marked "copyright 2008 SKYLIST, Inc. All rights reserved."
Here is their website:
and here is the same section on our website:
Hopefully he'll see this post and change his web page. Either way, I'm flattered!
I'll be speaking on a panel at 11:00am called "Managing Your Digital Landscape: Success Stories" along with
Andy Meadows, CEO, Live Oak 360; Tony Schum, Director of Economic Development, Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce; and Sam Decker, CMO, BazaarVoice.
Looks like a great lineup with lots of good friends participating including Dave Evans, Bill Leake, Jon Lebkowsky, Lorin Rivers and Michael Wilson.
My personal portfolio of companies is well represented! BazaarVoice, Datran Media, OneSpot and Small World Labs.
Everyone seems to agree that email is great. There are many types of communication that I prefer to receive via email over other channels such as postal mail, the telephone, fax, carrier pigeon, etc. I love how at the Apple retail stores they will email my receipt to me instead of printing it out (save a tree!). I get much less postal mail now that all of my financial institutions and utilities have "paperless billing" options that send monthly statements by email. Judging by the popularity of these services, I'm not the only one who feels this way.
Yet everyone knows that email is broken. The problem is bigger than just spam. Michael Arrington recently declared email bankruptsky and deleted his inbox. There are two fundamental problems, both of which are only getting worse:
1. Our actions generate more incoming email than we have time to read
2. We want to respond to more emails than we have time to
Spam is part of the first problem. But another part of the first problem is that its a lot easier to sign up for new emails than to decide which ones to unsubscribe from. Over time, you get more and more things that you've signed up for as well as more and more spam that you don't want. You start off with a clean slate and then just add more and more baggage over time until eventually the only solution is to get a new email address and start over.
The second problem stems from the fact that email lets you easily communicate with more people than you could before. It's very easy to write a single email, copy and paste it for 5 different recipients, and end up with 5 replies coming back at you. Email multiplies quickly. Yet we're still typing each reply one at a time.
Both of these problems are just getting worse. As we more offline things go online we will only get more newsletters, receipts, statements, warnings, notifications, etc. Soon my car will be sending me emails and my house and my dishwasher. There will be too much to go into a single "inbox".
And as more things go online we connect with more other people. The more people we connect with, the more we want to communicate, the more emails we send and the more replies that come back at us. RSS, Blogs, social networks and Twitter all help to alleviate this problem. Rather than blasting an email out to 100 people, you can just post it to your blog or on Twitter.
As the number of online communications grows, not all of it needs to happen in email and not all of it will be manageable within email. I don't really want to have receipts in my email - that's just the most convenient option available to me. In the end, that receipt needs to end up in a filing cabinet, database or expense report. I want to be able to find the receipt later if I need it, but it doesn't really belong in my Inbox.
This doesn't mean email is dead or that email shouldn't evolve. Quite the opposite, email needs to get better and helping us find the messages we want and ignore the ones we don't. We need to be able to reliably unsubscribe from emails we don't want and trust that the ones we do want are legitimate.
We need to start thinking about a more sophisticated Inbox than just a list of messages sorted by date.
this was cross-posted from the OtherInbox blog
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