I woke up to a little tweet from Tony, the CEO of Zappos, yesterday. The @missrouge refers to is Tara Hunt, who specializes in community marketing. Running 197 slides and introducing terms such as homo-feelgoodomicus, this presentation is amazing and a must view for anyone looking to build a successful business, be it online or off.
According to Tara the key to a successful business is helping homo-feedgoodomicus feel good. She goes on to outline seven reasons that happens is the key to success:
1. happy customers talk to more people about their positive experience;
2. unhappy customers talk to the MOST people about their negative experience;
3. happy customers are repeat customers;
4. happy customers will pay more for an awesome experience;
5. happy customers are loyal;
6. happy customers will drive your marketing for you;
7. happy employees are more productive, creative, and loyal.
Tara then lays out the pillars of happiness (autonomy, competence, relatedness, and self-esteem) and gives specific ways that you can increase each of these incorporating great case studies along the way (including Zappos of course).
The basic takeaway is that if you are aware of the principles of happiness when designing your product or service you can become an agent of happiness. And who wouldn't want that?
My summary does not do the presentation justice. While 197 slides may seem daunting, you can blow through them in 10 minutes. Putting them in action could last a lifetime.
I got this note from Apple today:
Dear Lance,
Thank you for being a member of .Mac! Your .Mac membership is set to renew on September 27, 2007 PDT. Your credit card will be charged the day before your .Mac membership anniversary date and your account will renew for another year.
As you know, we've been enhancing .Mac to make your connected life even easier. .Mac makes it easy to share what you create with iLife '08 and publish with iWeb - Photocasts, blogs, podcasts, and other web pages. Your .Mac account includes 10 GB of combined iDisk and email storage, with options to upgrade to more. Your iDisk is accessible directly from the Mac OS X Finder and from a browser on any Internet-connected Mac or Windows PC. Backup 3 makes safeguarding your valuable files easy and convenient with features including one-step backup of photos, movies, and music. .Mac Groups lets you bring the groups you belong to online to share messages, calendars, group files and web pages. And .Mac provides a steady stream of discounts and member benefits on Mac-related software and services. Be assured, there's more to come in the year ahead.
Please take a minute to review your account settings. If you want to change any of the details regarding your account, click here to update your Renewal Settings first.
I want to cancel my account but can not do so via the "click here" link. iTarded.
Why do I want to cancel. "Because it is not possible to simply change your .Mac member name." iTarded.
"If you activated or renewed your .Mac account within the past 30 days through the .Mac website with a credit card, you can cancel your .Mac account for a prorated refund." So what exactly I do when you send me an email with no option to cancel? Let them bill me and then cancel? iTarded.
There is a big big difference between being a hardware company and a service provider. Not sure if Apple gets that just yet.
This little surprise showed up today:
Dear Lance Weatherby,
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN®) recently agreed to reduce their Registrar Transaction Fee from $.25 to $.22. What does this mean for you?
Good news. You have been credited $.03/yr for each domain name you registered or renewed dating back to July 1, 2006* -- $.60 has been placed into your Go Daddy® account with this customer number:
Me thinks that most companies would have just kept this in their own bank account.
Nice move. While the $.60 really means nothing to me (and based on the 20 million domains GoDaddy has this is costing them about $500,000 on the bottom line), I feel like I am dealing with an honest company that is treating me fairly.
This bad:
From: y-alerts@reply.yahoo.com
Date: April 13, 2007 1:04:27 PM EDT
To: my email address
Apple delays launch of operating system
Notice the time date stamp. Apple issued the press release announcing this at 4:30 PM EDT yesterday. It showed up via RSS very, very shortly thereafter. Yahoo! Alerts has over a 20 hour lag time. How alerty is that?
Not very. And it is the reason that I have been trying to cancel them. I have a little problem though. According to the Web interface I do not have any alerts.
Well I obviously do because they keep showing up every day. I have been going back and forth with Yahoo! customer support about this for about a month now. After blaming it on 1) me, 2) timing, 3) my browser, and 4) my Internet connection this was their final resolution:
From: alerts-feedback@cc.yahoo-inc.com
Subject: Re: Feedback - How to turn off my Alerts (KMM92622784V50476L0KM)
Date: April 8, 2007 12:41:35 PM EDT
To: my email address
Reply-To: alerts-feedback@cc.yahoo-inc.com
Hello,
Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Alerts.
We sincerely apologize for this issue you are having with Yahoo! Alerts.
At this time we would like to reassure you that we are doing everything
in our power to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. Although we
can not offer you an estimate as to when this problem will be fixed,
please be assured that we are aware that the problem exists and our
engineers are further investigating the issue. Unfortunately, we cannot
offer any further information regarding the problem
We appreciate your reporting it to us -- your input helps us to identify
ways to constantly maintain and improve our service. We are always
striving to keep Yahoo! Alerts the best alert notification service on
the planet!
Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Alerts.
Regards,
Jordan
Yahoo! Alerts Customer Care
So they know there is a problem, are basically telling me thanks for telling us about the problem, but that is all we can tell you. Yuck!
Part of the auto-reply from a Technorati support submission:
Dear Technorati User,
Thank you so much for taking the time to drop us a line. If you are reporting a problem you may be having you will be contacted by a support technician once we have had a chance to review your message.
If you don't hear back from anyone within a week, please accept our apologies for the delay as we may be experiencing a backlog in Support. Please feel free to send us a reminder of your ticket.
Nice. Violates four of the deadly sins of providing good consumer Internet services.
Here's a little advice for the yet to be named new Technorati CEO. Once you decide what you want to focus on as a business, focus on the customer. Or maybe, just maybe, it should be the other way around.
Do credit cards have digits to represent the month of the year and nearly every web site requires that you select the month by its proper name?
Is it a fruad detection test to see if you are smart enough to do a conversion and thus worthy of a credit card?
Some people even think that putting the number and name on a pull down is a major coup:
Another score for 37signals:
when entering credit card information during the Basecamp subscription
purchase process, the dropdown menu for selecting an expiration date
contains both the numeral and name of each month. Similar
widgets in other checkout forms tend to list only numerals; I tend to
think with one or the other and rarely both, so it’s nice to see them
put together.
I actually see the named month much, much more than the numbers. There has got to be a reason for this It can't be that hard to present a number like what is on the card. I am curious. Why do Internet merchants do this?
I have been a loyal subscriber to The Wall Street Journal since 1987. Or I should say a loyal subscriber until last week. It seems that the WSJ has decided to reward my loyalty by charging me 76% more then what they charge new customers.
As a new customer I can get a deal where I pay $99 for a year of service plus eight weeks free. As a subscriber of 20 years the best deal that I can get is $353.62 for two years. When a sales rep told me that the only way I could get the deal was to cancel my account, I did. My thought at the time was that I would just start over in 90 days
But now I don't really miss it that much. I might not renew at all.
Moral of the story; don't take advantage of your most loyal customers. If you do, they will find out, get annoyed, perhaps come to the conclusion that the value is no longer there, and then tell all their friends about it.
As I mentioned last week, Nelson Chu gave a great presentation at the Q3 MoneyTree meeting.
The title of his presentation was Tips for Entrepreneurs: Know Your Customers! Nelson was kind enough to share his presentation with me. From Nelson's point of view are are three reasons to get close to your customers. It enables you to identify big waves, it drives focus, and it creates value.
Big waves are important. Many thing the most important element to success. By knowing your customers it enables an entrepreneur to be specific about the target customer. To know:
Who is going to sign the check?
What is their burning problem?
Why your product is a need to have and not a nice to have?
When they are going to buy due to urgency?
Where you are going to sell it and the implications for the business?
Focus really does two things. It builds excitement among investors and sets the business focus. The latter enables you to build the right team, build the right product, and build early customer validation.
When you combine the above you create value. Big waves drive investor interest and exciting valuations. And actually having customer traction typically, but not always, drives valuation reality.
Nelson gave good food for though for any entrepreneur wanting to start a company. He is also the type of VC that I think any CEO would want on his side. He is smart, strategic, and most importantly measured. I have a hard time seeing Nelson blowing up if things are not going as planned.
Of the Evoca audio blog comment system.
From Scott Burkett. Listen to it, he has some interesting things cooking at the Startup Lounge.
Evoca is a company that has created a Web applicaion that makes it very easy to to create, organize, share, search voice recordings. They are also my first "client" as an ATDC Venture Catalyst.
They recently released a TypePad widget for their Browser Mic. It installed in three easy steps in a few minutes and can be found to the left. The widget also works for Blogger and WordPress.
I don't normally request comments but give the Evoca widget a whirl and let me know what you think. Just click on the record button.
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