For many years as a consultant, when a small business said they wanted a site search engine, I was flummoxed. The best site search option was clearly Google, but it was ugly (you had very little control over the appearance of the search results) and, of course, laden with text ads. I generally settled with a premier version of Atomz, but the quality of the search was fairly mediocre.

I’m pretty stunned that it took this long for Google to offer it (given the obvious demand), but here we are! Google is now officially offering “Google Enterprise: Google Custom Search Business Edition” (they are clearly taking their cue from Microsoft on product naming… Sheesh). “Custom Search Business Edition turns off Google Adwords advertisements in search results that regularly appear in the free version of the Custom Search Engine. If you wish to significantly change the look and feel of your search engine, you can build your own user interface and integrate an XML feed of search results.”

Before you get scared off by the name (“Oh no! Enterprise?!”), here’s the pricing rundown:

* Search less than 5,000 web pages: $100 per year
* Search less than 50,000 web pages: $500 per year
* Search less than 100,000 web pages: $850 per year
* Search less than 300,000 web pages: $2250 per year

I honestly think they are shooting themselves in the foot a bit with the high end pricing (I think they could charge a lot more), but it’s nice to see some small-biz-friendly pricing on the low end.

Of course, a big problem remains here… If I build my own non-google search engine, I can make the results pages happily spiderable and they’ll get indexed by Google (which means a swath of resulting organic traffic). If my results pages are generated by Google, I’m darn sure I can’t talk them into indexing them and treating them like high quality content pages.

Tomorrow evening I’ll be speaking at the SeattleTechStartups meetup (starts at 6pm– click the link for details).

The topic will be “Bootstrap Marketing for Web Startups: SEO, SMM, and Viral Marketing“. For the uninitiated, that’s Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, and Viral Marketing.

If anyone has anything in particular they want me to chat about, feel free to drop me a note (or leave a comment here). I plan to post the PowerPoint Deck and a “Related Links and Resources” page afterwards (which I’ll make available here as well).

Hope to see you all there!

During my tenure at Jobster, I never got to do what I had set out to do with Jobby– create a tool that small and medium businesses could use to make hiring people less of a pain in the backside. I don’t blame Jobster a bit– with $48 million in venture capital, you have to swing for the fences and go where there are vast piles of money to be had… Which means you start at the enterprise level and work your way down or start on the consumer level and work your way up (Jobster is doing both!).

When you have $0 in venture capital, the same rules don’t apply, however. I think there is a really serious need for software to serve companies in the 5-200 employee range– companies that don’t have the time or the budget to endure the painful ATS market that’s out there right now.

That’s why I was glad to see that Kirkland Rails God Ben Curtis has been building some snazzy recruiting software between his consulting gigs. I’ve seen a sneak preview and it looks SHARP.

If you’re a hiring manager (but can’t stomach the complexity and cost of the ATS scene), head on over to CatchTheBest and sign up to hear about the launch!

I’m going out on a limb to say that the future of cold-calling (and unsolicited offers in general) is pretty bleak. Which gives me great joy.

On one hand, unsolicited sales is getting cheaper, easier and (for a while) more effective- volume is going up.

On the phone front… With powerful CRM systems, companies can easily measure the success of cold calling and optimize it. Want more sales? Add more telemarketers. Run out of people to sell to? Buy a database in a new market segment. Sell to the same people again with a different pitch. With banks of low cost people who can call dozens of people per hour, you can see great success.

On the mail front… Digital printing is getting ridiculously cheap and companies have nailed the art of cost effective bulk mailing. Mailing lists are plentiful, cheap, and well targeted.

On the email front… Well, we’re all familiar with spam. And, of course, it’s pretty easy to send lightly customized emails to potential clients in a more manual way, liberally copy-pasting blocks of text.

Heck, even in the world of recruiting you see it. 15 years ago, applying for a job was a fairly careful and laborious task. You bought fancy paper, carefully crafted your resume, and often hand-delivered it. Now people can apply to dozens of jobs in an hour. Not qualified for a job? Who cares– it costs you nothing to apply. Fire and forget!

The problem with spam being so damn easy (whether it’s on the phone, in the mail, or on the intertubes) is that the volume gets high enough that sifting through these offers is no longer an effective way to spend your time. Essentially, it’s banner-blindness outside of your browser. Cold callers and marketeers are training us to flip our “ignore” switch as soon as we detect direct-marketing. So how do you know what to buy? Who to hire? Which non-profit to support? That brings us to…

Search is getting damn good, and social networking is actually getting useful

Years ago it was actually challenging to find vendors with a specific product/service. You could crack open the Yellow Pages and hunt around for the appropriate heading that you’re looking for (“Web Development – See Internet, Web Development”) and… at that point you have a list. No way to know if the vendors are good, bad, cheap, expensive, ethical or evil. You could try to network your way to a referral, but that was a bit of work, too. You could make a few calls to trusted colleagues/friends and see if they had any recommendations, but oftentimes they wouldn’t.

So, when the phone rang with a telemarketer, why the hell wouldn’t you buy from them? They’re just as good as your list of unknown vendors in the Yellow Pages. Add ‘em to the list, hear them out, get a bid/quote. Can’t hurt, right?

Nowadays, Google makes finding a vendor easy (or at least easier). Do a search, get a list. You’re done. No 40 pound book (I just dumped my Yellow Pages in my recycle bin the day after I received it- unopened). And it’s a bit more democratic– no longer is the vendor list sorted by who can buy the biggest ad, and no longer is the content controlled exclusively by the vendor. The TRUTH about the vendor (whether it’s good or bad) is becoming more readily available.

Enter social networking… With Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn answers (near as I can tell, the only useful piece of LinkedIn), I can ask ANYTHING and get trusted responses. A few months back (at my previous job) I asked on LinkedIn if people knew a good web development firm in Seattle and got about 20 responses… Many from people who I had actual relationships with. If you come up empty in your network, you can always drop in at Craigslist or Yelp and ask for recommended vendors from people who have first-hand experience working with them.

Mix it All Together and…

I just got a call from a very polite telemarketer selling technology outsourcing services. I told him I didn’t need any. He asked (as any good salesperson would) if it would be okay to follow up in a few months. I started to say, “Sure, can’t hurt”, but reconsidered. “Harry, I’ll be honest with you,” I said. “If I need your services in a month or a year, I’m going to give my business to someone that my friends and colleagues recommend. If I can’t get a recommendation, I’ll research it on the web and pick a vendor. If you want my business, my best advice would be to do great work for people in this town so that when I do start asking around, your name comes up.”

I think more and more people are thinking this way (even if they aren’t saying it). Between the deluge of marketing we’re getting bombarded with and the ease with which we can find a trusted vendor, I have high hopes that cold-calling (and Yellow Pages with it!) will meet a quiet death in the next decade or two as these tools and ideas find their way into the mainstream. If we can pull that off, then customer service (and product quality) will truly be the new marketing.

One of my favorite “design” bloggers out there is Josh Porter of Bokardo. In his most recent article, Josh contends that “designers need a place at the strategy table because their work depends on and is a direct result of it. If it’s not already, realizing the business strategy of the organization in an interface should be the designer’s primary job description.”

If you’ve ever given a designer a “we’re happy with how it works, just pretty it up” job (whether it’s a web site or a word doc), you need to read this article. Preferably right now (I’ll wait).

Unfortunately, I think Josh is overestimating both strategists ( “…off using terms like “conversion”, “user-generated content”, and “ROI”” ) and designers ( “…opining about “grid-based design”, “cross-browser rendering”, or “web standards”” ).

I’ve thrown out the idea in the past (and it tends to piss off a bunch of web designers): design (as most people define it) isn’t very compatible with usability and usually only a coincidental relationship with lofty things like “business strategy”. Designers’ brains (and the brains of the people who hire them) simply aren’t wired that way.

Don’t believe me? Take this simple test to see if you’re thinking about design in the wrong way:

• If you’re a designer: Open up your portfolio. If you don’t have a portfolio, pull up a mental picture of the last one you had. What does it look like? Lots of screenshots, no? Next to each screenshot, do you talk about the business goals of the client/employer? Do you talk about how the design performed after launch? Do you know how the design performed after launch? Do you CARE how the design performed after launch? Answer that last question honestly– of COURSE you care how it performed, but was acquiring that knowledge a higher priority for you than your next pixel-slinging / xhtml-wrangling task?
• If you’ve hired a designer: Look at the last time or two you’ve hired a designer. What type of person did you hire? Why did you choose that designer over the alternatives? Did you ask about business strategy? Did you ask about post-design performance metrics?
• Bonus question for non-designers: Have you ever thought or said, “If I was only better at Photoshop and/or Illustrator and/or XHTML/CSS/JavaScript, I could do this myself.”?

Maybe– hopefully– you are the exception to the rule.

What stands in the way of making things better?

Unfortunately, things aren’t likely to change soon. There are a few attitudes that stand in the way:

• Designers need to stop thinking and acting like artists and start acting like scientists. I’m honestly not sure this is possible.
• Non-designers need to stop thinking that they are good at crafting user experiences. Don’t get me wrong– they should certainly have an opinion, voice ideas, express concerns, etc. I’m not saying that they should shut up and let the expert do their job… They just need to realize that it’s possible to BE an expert.
• Everyone need to be willing to sacrifice pretty and sacrifice “cool”. At my last job (the only time I haven’t been self-employed in the last decade), the product team united around a user experience to create a public “resume”. It was a gorgeous multi-step experience with a few inline “wizards”. Users could edit their public profile after the fact in a seamless inline manner while viewing their profile (imagine lots of “edit” links next to editable data). The team loved it. The CEO gushed. The designer was proud. The users, however, were confused as hell.
• Non-designers need to hire designers with the right attitudes and reward the right successes. If both parties think the designer’s job is done when they hear, “Wow– that’s beautiful”, then there’s a problem.

I love pretty much everything Josh is proposing, but I’ve only met a tiny handful of designers who have the discipline to purposefully make something LESS PRETTY and LESS COOL to make it more effective. And I know even fewer product managers who have the discipline to ask them to.

Facebook’s goals and your goals (as a Facebook user) are starting to get misaligned. And it’s only going to get worse. I’ll come back to this in a sec.

Alan (former VP at my previous employer) has left Facebook. He brings up a lot of cogent reasons why.

For myself, I am a bit frustrated with Facebook. I receive a pile of “notifications”, “facebook mail” and (increasingly) “sponsored crap” every week, quite a bit of it quite deceptive in its desperate bid for virality (yeah, I know virality isn’t a word). Notes that say “John would like to see what you’re reading”, “Bob wants to know what your stripper name is”, and “Alex has posted some . Click here to view them!”… All of these things lead straight to the “install this app” screen that I’ve visited a hundred times.

We’ve all done it. Responded to these “personal” invites as if they really were personal invites (I have 6 iLike invitations from people who I’m SURE aren’t really that interested in getting me to use iLike), installed the application only to remove it a week later when you realize it doesn’t do a damn thing that actually adds value to your life.

I’d like to find the setting in Facebook where I can check a checkbox that says, “I would like to find what applications I want to install on my own, thank you!” (Can you find that option in the picture below? Am I missing a setting somewhere?)

So back to misaligned goals. One of my problems with free consumer apps is that the goals of the business are virtually NEVER aligned with the goals of the user. In the beginning of a startup (like Facebook), this doesn’t come into play. The business is 100% focused on adding value to the user. The user wants to get stuff done (share ideas, photos, communicate, whatever) and the business is desperately trying to help them reach these goals as effectively as possible.

Unfortunately, pretty soon the business runs out of easy ways to add value for the user. The growth curve slows down, and you start hearing people on the product team saying, “We want the users to…” more than “Our users want…”. And it’s about this time that investors are starting to look at the burn rate and wonder how the business is going to extract value from the user. With free services like Facebook, you have a few options… I’d imagine that they’ve functionally killed their virtual gift business by releasing a public platform like they have. So that leaves advertising or premium services. Unfortunately, I haven’t heard a whisper of premium services from Facebook.

The funny thing is, users really aren’t too keen on advertising, no matter how targeted they are. And with a high use-per-day app like Facebook, they become downright invisible to the users. Quite a few people have noted that FB advertising is pretty painfully ineffective. Which means that the business needs to make ads more plentiful, more invasive, or more expensive… All of which have pretty serious negative ramifications for the user. And because EVENTUALLY there is a drive for constant revenue growth at consumer facing web startups, where else can they turn? Of course, you could argue that Facebook, with their new ad platform, have a better understanding of their users that just about anyone (in terms of demographics and intent)… But between the ad blindness that is a huge problem on utility-style apps (when was the last time you read an ad in Gmail? How about clicked on one?) and because Facebook is built on trust of your NETWORK, I think the “but Facebook advertising can be sooooo targeted!” argument doesn’t hold up.

Take any free consumer site that’s more 5 years old and you see how ugly this slippery slope can get. Interstitial ads, Flash ads that obscure the content of the site, pay-per-click garbage, and more. If Facebook doesn’t start looking in other directions, this is where they’ll be in a year or two– trying to manipulate their users into clicking on (or viewing a lot of) ads.

Brief note to let my dear readers know that we’ve set up a blog for RescueTime. Right not it’s not that active, but will eventually contain lots of interesting things that we can learn from our anonymous users. By asking them a few questions, we’ll be able to look at how productivity differs by gender, age, industry, and more.

For now, we’ll tide you over with a long-n-wordy case study on our permissions marketing campaign and a link to my appearance on Dave Mason’s syndicated radio show. Good fun!

The best teams I’ve ever worked on have had a peculiar vibe of “mutual awe”. When I saw what my colleagues could pull off, I was dazzled. When I pulled off something cool, THEY were dazzled.

At the same time, I think it’s tremendously valuable to be a hobbyist in the areas where your partners are experts. I’ll never be a programmer, but I’ll always dabble– it helps me know what CAN be done. I’ll never be a salesguy (though I’ve been one), but I read books on how to sell. I’ll never be a writer, but I like to read about the art/science of writing good copy.

One of the blog entries that has stuck with me for a while is Guy Kawasaki’s post on workplace assholes (it even comes with a handy self-exam! (Are YOU one? Uh-oh. Am *I* one?!).

The main reason that the post/test stuck with me was one of the characteristics of workplace assholedom is this belief:

“I could do your job better than you’re doing.”

I’ve already sung the praises of small teams, but I’ll add this to the heap. The smaller the team, the greater to potential for mutual respect and/or awe. The larger the team, the greater the likelihood that SOMEONE on the team is thinking (or even saying) that they could make better design/coding/sales/biz decisions than the person who is currently making them.

Ironically, the larger the team, the greater the likelihood that they might be right.

http://bokardo.com/archives/design-is-not-art-redux/

Great blog entry about design by one of my favorite bloggers.

There has been some interesting discussion of late about the relationship between youth and successful entrepreneurship. It started with a from-the-hip post by Fred Wilson (which he later elaborated on).

After looking at the chart posted on Valleywag, it got me wondering about how old a fella has to be before he ought to get out of the business of startups.

After reading Fred’s musings and the (damn insightful) blog entry by Clay Shirky, I feel (at the ripe ol’ age of 35) less anxious about the whole thing. Of course, I might just be feeling young because I took the last couple of days off to pal around with my 70 year old father.

Clay states:

I’m old enough to know a lot of things, just from life experience. I know that music comes from stores. I know that you have to try on pants before you buy them. I know that newspapers are where you get your political news and how you look for a job. I know that if you want to have a conversation with someone, you call them on the phone. I know that the library is the most important building on a college campus. I know that if you need to take a trip, you visit a travel agent.

In the last 15 years or so, I’ve had to unlearn every one of those things and a million others. This makes me a not-bad analyst, because I have to explain new technology to myself first — I’m too old to understand it natively. But it makes me a lousy entrepreneur.

“A Lot of Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing”

One thing that struck me about the “unlearnings” that Clay brings up is that they are pretty idea-centric. That is to say, these are the sort of learnings that could keep you, as an entrepreneur, from hitting upon the “big idea”. As I’ve mentioned before (liberally quoting from folks who are smarter than I am), ideas aren’t necessarily in short supply. While I’m sure many startups fail for lack of a good idea, I’d wager the majority fail from poor execution. Methodologies, strategies, and staffing levels that work at Fortune 500 companies simply don’t fly in a small company. The careful modeling, planning, and PowerPoint wrangling that you learn in business school really isn’t a great way to invest your time when your business model might need to change dramatically in a month or two. And I’d wager that the more experienced you are (and the more confident you are in your hard-won wisdom), the less likely you’re going to be able to adapt to working in a small business environment.

I want to explore this a bit more, but (given that I’m buried under a pile of email) it’ll have to wait for another blog post.