I just re-read “Getting Real” over my most recent trip to New Zealand. If you’re not familiar with it (you should be), it’s 37Signal’s manifesto on making simple web software. They are simply fanatical about making software that is as simple as possible.

It’s delightfully amusing when someone counters with the inevitable response of, “Well, that’s just ridiculous. Simple doesn’t work for EVERYTHING. What about Fortune 500 Accounting Software?” Their response (I wish I could find it, but I couldn’t come up the search query to dig it up) is, rougly, “Then you shouldn’t solve that particular software problem. Go solve something else and leave the complex problems to some other schmuck.”

I *love* that.

When starting up a company, you truly have a choice of what problems you want to solve (other people aren’t so lucky). I wholeheartedly endorse the idea of solving simple problems (which allows you to stick to simple solutions).

I’ve recently been attending Seattle Tech Startups meetings, which has exposed me to lots of startups that are in various stages of their existence. With a few exceptions, most of them are looking for seed stage or Series A funding.

As I considered it, it occurred to me that solving a problem whose solution is dependent on outside funding is a choice as well.

Don’t get me wrong. Funding is valuable, and sometimes critical for success.

But starting a company is pretty much laying down a bet to test a theory. Maybe you’re betting that your formula can make a better search engine. Maybe you’re betting that users want to share video online. Maybe you’re betting that jobseekers want a better utility to help them with their job search. or maybe you think that there’s a small (but passionate) group of lifehackers out there who want a time management tool. Regardless of what problem you are solving, you are betting your time and your money that you have some sort of secret sauce that allow you to build a business. Unfortunately, you can seldom test your theory without adding some “fuel” to your new company’s tank (in the form of time and money).

I’m constantly astounded by the people who seek funding before they’ve managed to test their initial theory by building and launching the absolute simplest feature-set that would solve the problem they are hoping to solve. The side effects of going after funding too early seem downright painful:

• It’s a huge time sink. You have to write and iterate on a business plan. You have to deliver countless dog-and-pony shows. You have to deal with lawyers. All of these things distract you from executing on your idea.
• Without at least some demonstration that your users/customers are responding positively to your solution, you are long odds for an investor. Even a proven team has a 70% of outright failure, and only a tiny chance at tremendous success. Chances are, an investor is not going to be eager to give you particularly favorable terms if all you have is an theory that you’d like test out. Conversely, if you can show even the slightest growth and can hand your investor a pile of emails from people who are excited about your offering, his odds for a good return on his investment just went up.

I totally recognize that building your idea and vetting it with a small userbase (acquired through word-of-mouth or some clever guerrilla marketing) isn’t always easy. I also recognize that bootstrapping can be painful. And, of course there are a lot of ideas that cost a pile of money before you can ever know if they are any good (for example, if I thought I could run a cable tv company better than Comcast, I might need a few dollars to lay down the fiber).

But, the more I hear stories of crappy term sheets and overbearing VCs, the more I feel compelled to limit myself to ideas that are simple (a la 37Signals) and cheap.

[edit: a friend of mine mentioned that his initial response to this post was that cheap ideas weren't defensible. If you can build the idea without significant capital, what's to stop the next guy from doing the same thing? I'd offer two responses to this. First, I'm only saying that it should be cheap to TEST YOUR THEORY. The person who wins in a given space is often the guy who builds the better business. Once you've tested your theory, you'd better be willing to dive in with both feet (and more money, if necessary) to make it happen. Second, just because an idea can be easily duplicated doesn't mean that the business can. Digg was built in a weekend-- exactly how easy would it be to knock them out of their position of relative dominance?]

Ten years ago a very small set of public figures had to care about their “public persona”.

Increasingly, everyone (or at least everyone with professional aspirations in the white-collar world) needs to start paying attention to the “face” they are presenting online.

Over the last year there have been plenty of articles about people who have botched their online persona. It doesn’t take many photos of your weekend exploits to turn off a potential employer, investor, or partner.

Doubtless these articles have prompted many people to take a slash-and-burn approach to their online persona. Making their MySpace pages private, disassociating themselves from online galleries, shutting down personal domains– I’m sure there are plenty of tactics to trim your presence.

But it looks like you can venture too far in the direction of online anonymity (tip o’ the hat to the great article over at Web Worker Daily). Some highlights of the article include:

• It turns out that a staggering 77% of recruiters do online searches on candidates.
• 25% hiring managers do online searches on candidates.
• 1 in 10 hiring managers so social networking searches on candidates

It looks like hiring managers lag a bit behind recruiters in terms of net-savvy, but this number isn’t going anywhere but up.

The article offers some good advice on how to control your online brand, mostly centered around scrutinizing and pruning the data about yourself that you make available. The article doesn’t give a ton of detail on how to actually CONTROL what pages return for your name in Google.

Here are a few tips for people who have–or are willing to have– a personal website (I’ll add some tips for people who DON’T want to get into such web geekery next!):

• Get a domain name. FirstnameLastname.com is ideal, but if you can’t get that, make damn sure that your first name and last name are somewhere in the domain name.
• Make sure your first name and last name are in the title tag of your home page. If your name is common, you might ponder adding your city, job title, or key skill(s) to the title tag. A search for John Smith might return a useless amount of data for a searcher to sift through, so they might pivot for a search like “John Smith Seattle” or “John Smith programmer”.
• Header tags. Your first name and last name should be in an h1 tag on your home page. The same advice about other search phrases applies.
• Links links links. This is the most important aspect of controlling search results… It isn’t easy and there is no shortcut. It’s more a lifestyle than a task. You need to have links to your web site and the link text needs to be EXACTLY your name. So, if I were linking to my own site, a link that says “Check out this guy” would be bad. A like that says “Tony Wright” would be good. The best example of the power of links is the phenomonon of “Google Bombing“. Google has altered their search algorithms to sidestep abuse like this, but links (and link text) is still hugely important.

  How could I possible get people to add the text “Tony Wright” to their web pages and link them to my site? It’s actually pretty easy. You most certainly have friends who have some web presence. All they need to do is find some corner of their web site to add it to. Do you participate in any web communities? Forums? Do you comment on blogs? Ever post on Google Groups? All of these places have ways where you can link back to your site (note: blogs are becoming less of an option here due to the nofollow attribute).

So what about the (vast majority of) people who really don’t want to own or maintain a web page? It’s real easy to forget that most people don’t enjoy writing/blogging, don’t have web geek skills, or don’t have time to invest in such activities. That’s fine– you can still control your results.

There are hundreds of sites out there that allow you to create online profiles. Many of them are decidedly unprofessional (MySpace, etc), but many of them cater to professionals. It doesn’t really matter which one you choose, though you should aim for the mainstream where you can and pay attention to how the site’s profiles adhere to the SEO rules discussed above. For name SEO, Jobster reigns supreme out of the box.

So here are your SEO steps for people who want to control their brand by creating a profile.

• Select a place to build a profile. Jobster and LinkedIn are your two best bets. I have a personal bias for Jobster (it’s where I work!). Whatever your opinion, Jobster has a leg up on the SEO front, which will make step #3 possible.
• Build out a kickass profile. Be honest but craft your message carefully.
• Links links links. Just like #3 in the previous list, find ways to link the your name to your profile. This is certainly the hardest step, but it’s the most important.

I’m a huge fan of tagging as a means to organize data. It’s powerful and flexible– and it oftentimes has some pretty exciting social ramifications.

If you aren’t familiar with tagging (and you want to be), you could get up to speed fairly quickly by checking on the wikipedia entry on Folksonomy. If you’re more interested in insight rather than information, you should check out what Josh Porter has to say on the subject (Josh is hands-down one of the most insightful bloggers out there IMHO).

As a guy who built a web 2.0 resume posting doohickey (chock full of taggy goodness), I’ve put a ton of thought into tagging, specifically in the context of UI. So it was with great interest that I attended the SXSW panel entitled, “Tag, You’re It!”. The panelists consisted of a lot of impressive folks– George Oates from Flickr, Heath Row from DoubleClick, Ben Brown from Consumating.com, and Thomas Vander Wal (the guy who evidently coined the term “Folksonomy”).

The panel was interesting but like a lot of SXSW panels, the more you knew about the topic, the less interesting it was… But, I digress.

The most interesting moment (for me) was during the (very short) Q&A session. A person asked the question, “How do you deal with synonymous tags?” It was obvious that this was not an uncommon question– George Oates had a canned answer for that question…. “You don’t,” she said (yes, George is a girl). “It’s perfectly okay and wonderful that 3 people might tag a single data object in three different– but really similar– ways.” There it was, case closed.

The panel was wrapping up, but I wanted to shout, “Hey WAIT A MINUTE. That’s GOT to be wrong!”.

As I reflect on it, it turns out that there are (at least) two types of tagging– one of which is clearly a winner. The other (which is the type we applied at Jobby and currently are dabbling with at Jobster) is doomed to failure unless we get clever about how we pull it off.

Tagging where the Selfish Motivation is Organization

Flickr and Del.icio.us are the tagging poster-children. They are wonderfully simple– they provide a storage repository for big chunks of personal data (photos for Flickr and bookmarks for del.icio.us) and give you a powerful means to organize them. People oftentimes tag in radically different ways. Some people have dozens or hundreds of tags. Others have only a few. As George pointed out, people oftentimes tagged things with very similar tags. One person might tag a resource with “rockstar”, while another might tag it with “rock_star”, and a third might tag it with “rock-star”. This is fine with Flickr and Del.icio.us… With the service they offer, it’s most important to allow users to label their data in the way that makes sense to them.

The core functionality is organization, and the ability to search/browse/find similarly tagged objects is serendipitous. As a Flickr user or del.ico.us user, you really have no huge incentive to have your data be found by anyone else.

Tagging where the Selfish Motivation is Improved Findability

The only panelist whose userbase was largely concerned with findability was Ben Brown, of Consummating.org. Essentially, his site (recently sold to CNET) is a site where geeks come and tag themselves so they can get matched up with other geeks so they can fall in love and make lots of baby geeks, presumably. This is not unlike the tagging model that we used at Jobby (and currently use at Jobster). People labeling themselves to get found by other people.

This is where the tagging concept starts to break down a little bit. All of a sudden, it’s no longer important what tags you’d use to describe yourself– it’s a hell of a lot more important what tags people would use in a search to find someone like yourself. There are a few unfortunate byproducts of a system like this:

• You are incentivized to lie. The more desperate you are for a date/job interview, the more likely you are to lie. Why not tag yourself “slender”, even if you’re not? Might get your profile a few more views and one of the viewers might latch onto one of your other qualities. Why shouldn’t I tag myself “Ruby on Rails”, even if my experience with it is woefully limited? Maybe some manager out there will find my resume as a result of that tag and just maybe he’ll be wowed by something else he sees.
• You are incentivized to pour on the tags. The cost of adding a tag is very low, and every tag will increase the likelihood that my resume/profile will be viewed. This creates a lot of tag noise. Instead of having a nice and concise list/cloud of scannable tags, you can start seeing tag collections that are less than manageable. A smart coder will tag himself as “coder”, “programmer”, “developer”, “engineer”, “software developer”, “software engineer”, etc.
• Synonyms matter. A lot. Ben used an example of his perfect woman for a search… He did a search for a woman who was tagged “coffee” and “cigarettes” (ew). The problem with tagging in this model is that Ben’s search simply won’t find a woman who is tagged with “caffeine lover” or “smoker” or “chainsmoker” or “coffeelover”.
• People who are tagging data need to be smart about the psychology of searching, which they never will be. In the SEO biz, there are lots of tools (some of them very expensive) to allow a person to understand what people are searching for (to allow you to craft your content and meta-data to map to those search behaviors). People looking for a date or a job don’t have the time or money to figure out whether hiring managers are searching for “programmer” or “developer” more often. If the tagger is sophisticated enough to even consider this problem, he’ll probably (to be on the safe side) tag himself with both.

So, are you screwed if your service has tagging to enhance the findability of your users? I hope not. Here are a few strategies we’ve used at Jobby and Jobster to keep tags from getting “spammy”:

• Suggested tags. This is the best thing we did with Jobby and (unfortunately) it’s a feature that is really buried in the UI on Jobster. With Jobby, we essentially took what data we had on the user and presented tags that seemed likely to be of value to the user. So if a user tagged themselves “HTML”, we could fairly reliably say (given how often the two tags went hand in hand for other users) that they might want to tag themselves “CSS”. This also has a nice side-effect of giving your users the ability to tag themselves with a click rather than by typing all of their tags. And, of course, it encourages people to use the most popular iteration of a tag (using “CSS” instead of “cascading-style-sheets”, for example).
• Add scarcity to your model. At Jobby, we allowed user to assign a skill level to their tags (beginner, intermediate, advanced). There was functionally no limit to the number of tags, but it makes it a touch more difficult to lie. A lot of fledgling web geeks might be comfortable saying they know JavaScript, but a lot LESS comfortable saying they are JavaScript experts. At Jobster, I think we’ve provided a more elegant solution. Users are allowed to have up to 5 Superstar Tags– basically, these are the skills/areas that you feel you’re best at.
• Add REALLY SMART suggested tags within your search UI. We did this (in kind of a clunky way) with Jobby, and people LOVED it. With Jobster, we’re JUST starting to experiment with this, but I think it’s critical for tagging to work (when findability is the primary motivation for tagging). You’re search experience needs to be smart enough to present similar and/or related tags. Further, it needs to be smart enough to give the user a sense of the popularity of given tags.

I’m still waiting to see a site that really manages to nail the tagging/searching experience when the motivation isn’t just for personal organization. I’d love to hear more ideas on how this could be pulled off.

Jobster is hiring! We’re having a devil of a time finding solid software developers (though we do have a new one starting Monday).

In my recent participation and attendance at Seattle Tech Startups meetings, our problem is not unique. I would say fully a third of the self-introductions I hear are along the lines of “Hi, my name is John Smith from backrubr.com [note: I just made that up!] and we’re looking for talented web developers!”).

A quick look into the Jobster search database seems to indicate about 1,200 jobs across the country with the keywords of “web startup jobs“… Given the challenges I’ve seen people have hiring web developers, this number seems low (though I’d wager that 75% of these jobs are packed into Seattle, Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York). With demand like this, it’s no wonder that there are sites that are totally dedicated to job opportunities with tech startups.

On behalf of all of the people who are suffering through trying to fill reqs for web developers, I’d like to publicly thank all of the people who (a decade ago) were telling all of the students who were considering web careers to look elsewhere (“Web development jobs are all moving offshore! That industry is doomed!”).

So I’m diving back into blogging.

My longest stint as a blogger was for a few months while Brian Fioca and I were working on Jobby. My blogging efforts there were pretty pragmatic and business-centric. My reasons were limited to communicating to users (to let them know that we were frantically responding to their feature requests) and gunning for press/attention with a bit of blatant link-baiting (which turned out to be quite a bit easier than I’d imagined).

Once we sold to Jobster, there was already an army of Jobster bloggers filling these roles. Jason (CEO) and Phil (CTO) were both active bloggers, and we also had an official jobseeker blog to communicate with our users. And, of course, we had just purchased recruiting.com which, at that time, was a blog about recruiting.

I was out of reasons to blog. I didn’t feel didactic and certainly didn’t feel like talking about Web 2.0 (which, apparantly, I should add to my resume).

So what prompts the return?

• First of all, I find myself far away from the people that I’ve spent the last decade with. I’m not sure how many of them want to keep tabs on me and what I’m thinking about/working on, but here’s an opportunity for them to do so if they do.
• Second of all, I find myself having some things to write about. Ideas about design, user experience, customer service, running a web business, and more. You’ll see some of these in the coming weeks.
• And third, there have been some recent goings-on at Jobster that I’d like to add my voice to.
• Fourth, as I interact with other geeks from other startups, I realize I have something to offer. I’ve had a few email exchanges with folks who have told me that I was damn helpful. Wow. How cool is it that I could just type something, and help someone with their business? Andy Sack, who started Judy’s Book, says about blogging, “The more you put in, the more you get out.” I’d like to see if I can get this feedback loop by putting some in.
• Finally, I’ve got a project that I’m working on (on the side– not plans to have this interfere with my work at Jobster) that I’d like to start talking about.

So, welcome back to my brain (but don’t get tooooo comfortable).

In the web 2.0 world, user-generated content is king. Blogs, Forums, YouTube, Flickr– all have armies of users who are giving away content (some of which is actually compelling).

Regardless of the poor signal-to-noise ratio in user-generated content, it’s certainly turning marketing on its ear. It’s no longer what you (or your high-priced advertising firm) say about your product or company– it’s what the masses say. And the masses are sometimes not very nice.

Amazon was the one of the pioneers of user generated content with their user reviews. From what I understand, several of their major manufacturers were upset by negative reviews by users and wanted them removed. Amazon held firm, and the sanctity of their user-reviews was preserved. Amazon knew that the instant they started editing and removing negative reviews would be the instant that people would cease to value the content.

Jobster is just starting to dabble in the user-generated content game. It’s a natural evolution– job seekers want the security of having a deep understanding of a potential workplace… Which is something you simply can’t get from a job interview and a 15 minute tour of the facility. So, with the At product, users can record their impressions about a particular workplace through a nifty question and answer interface.

Some of the people in the company are horrified. They are envisioning the day where a user says awful things about the work environment at one of our top clients. I’d be scared, too. Our clients pay us a lot of money to provide them with a tremendous service, and might well feel a sense of outrage if they see a former employee bashing them in a public forum on our site.

The unfortunate truth of the matter is that you simply can’t put the genie back in the bottle. It’s only getting easier to express your opinion on the Internet. Honest discussion about what it’s like to work at a particular business is valuable information– if Jobster doesn’t succeed at creating a hub where such information can be posted and viewed, someone else will. If none of the major jobs players creates the hub, the expression will find an outlet on blogs, in discussion forums, or elsewhere.

So how do we deal with a negative comment when it comes to our attention? I should lead with the fact that firm policy has not been set here. I’m just thinking out loud. But, I think the first thing that you must do is set some editorial guidelines. No personal attacks on individuals. No obscenities.

Assuming a negative comment gets through these (relatively lax) guidelines, your best bet is to encourage contrarian viewpoints. If someone bashes your book on Amazon.com, encourage your fans to post there and the detractors voice will diminish in a sea of supporters. Similarly, if a company gets clobbered in our At offering, surely you have a sea of happy employees you could encourage to get the truth out there? If you don’t have a sea of happy employees, I’d probably suggest adjusting your work environment.

The great thing about Jobster customers is that they all necessarily have a sea of happy employees. Jobster’s core product is predicated on using the power of networking and referrals to find new employees. If you have a lousy environment, Jobster simply wouldn’t work.

One of the things that always strikes me about the jobs space is that most people think it’s decidedly unsexy when compared to the other “Web 2.0″ stuff that’s going on. It isn’t photosharing, it isn’t social bookmarking, and it isn’t an AJAX-infested online office suite, so why would someone want to be involved?

I myself got involved in the jobs space because I saw a business need that wasn’t being well-served… In short, I didn’t do it because I loved the recruiting/human resources game or because it was an exciting technical challenge, but because I felt that I could create a great product that people would buy. There are business-geeks and webtech-geeks… And I’m certainly a little of both. But it was definitely my inner business geek that drove me into this industry.

But, in my first few days at Jobster, my opinion on the sexiness of the jobs space is starting to change… And yours should too. Below are a few random points to consider:

• Jason Goldberg, our CEO (who is just a year older than I am), is a finalist of for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year. Here’s the press release. Jason said in the meeting the other day that honor wasn’t for him, but rather for Jobster as a whole.
• As I’ve been ramping up, the Jobster .com development team has been wrapping up our next release. One of our VPs suggested to one of the team members that he should take a day or two off because he’d been working so hard. His response was that he’d rather dive into something new to keep his momentum. People here just plain love their jobs.
• In a management meeting yesterday, Jason said that Jobster was heavily discussed at a recruiting conference. During a presentation to hundreds of recruiters, a speaker asked people to raise their hand if they hadn’t heard of Jobster. Not a single hand went up. For a product that has barely existed for 12 months, that’s downright amazing. Jobster is turning the industry on its ear. You can’t get sexier than that.
• Everyone here is scary smart. Huge swaths of the team come from the technology companies that are considered by many to be where the dream jobs are. Think about that for a minute… People are leaving places like Amazon and Microsoft to go work in the jobs space.
• Jobster is generating lots of revenue. Where many Web 2.0 companies struggle with revenue-models, customers are tripping over themselves to buy our product. The sweet curve of sales growth is pretty darn sexy, especially when stock options are involved.

So, scoff at the jobs space if you like. But changing an industry that is measured in the tens of billions of dollars is pretty darn sexy if you ask me.