Startups

The Power of Thanks

(Would it be cynical to have titled this post “Links are Currency… You should always say thanks when someone hands you a 5 dollar bill”?)

I’ve been struck by the power of saying “thank you” twice in the last 24 hours.

The first was when I was reading my fearless leader’s blog. He was writing about a recent post by Guy Kawasaki who was, in turn, talking about a paper by a Stanford Psychologist. Confused yet?

Anyways, in the comments of Jason’s blog, someone who worked for Guy took the time to stop by and comment with a simple “thanks”.

The second time was on my own blog (now rising from the ashes). Ryan Carson took the time to stop by and say thanks for linking to his damn insightful blog post.

I don’t know how Jason felt about the thank you that he received (having it come from Guy’s assistant cheapens it a tad, IMHO), but I definitely was effected by mine.

I saw Ryan speak in a panel or two at SXSW. He seemed sharp. But I still harbored a bit of grumpy jealousy (he’s managed to get a tremendous amount of attention for an app that grosses a mere $150k year…) and a healthy amount of suspicion (a web geek who dresses well with an affinity for hats?!). But between his recent blog post about shifting from selling Dropsend to actually marketing the damn thing (very humble!) and dropping by my z-list blog to say thanks for a link, he’s gone way up in my book.

The fact is that links (even from a small fish like me) are pretty darn valuable. Value aside, you not lose sight of the fact that the person linking to your blog has picked your blog (out of 55 million on the ‘net) and your post (out of probably more than a billion posts out there). That attention should feel downright precious, as Kathy Sierra points out. But you need to consider that SEO is the key ingredient to success online, and that links are THE key ingredient to SEO.

Plain ol’ text links are currency. Linking to a site has value. If you took the time, you’d probably be able to assign a dollar value to it. The time you take to say thanks (to a-listers and z-listers alike) will probably be worth it and will almost certainly help your link karma.

Building Software Isn’t the Hard Part

Okay, it might be a bit of a stretch to say that building good software isn’t hard. It’s really hard.

But chances are, if you’re creating (or pondering creating) a software startup, it’s because you think you’re good at building software. Maybe you’re a great UI guy. Maybe you’re a killer coder. But either way, you’ve looked at what’s out there and you’ve said, “I can do better”… And you dive into the challenges of building a great piece of software.

The problem is that you will almost invariably focus on the problems and challenges that you are good at (especially if it’s your first business).

What prompted this post is a bit of blog surfing that led me to a post by Ryan Carson about DropSend. If you aren’t familiar with it, DropSend is a nice little app that allows you to email large files for a small fee. Ryan has been amazingly transparent about his business, so we know that DropSend has made about $100k in annual profit on $150k in revenue (though I’m assuming that doesn’t account for the time Ryan invests in it). Not a bad return on his initial investment of about $12k in development. Ryan has also been transparent about his desire to “flip” the app. He’s very publicly selling DropSend… until now, perhaps.

In the post, he recounts an email that he received encouraging him to invest a little time, effort, and money marketing DropSend. The email that Ryan received had lots of detailed advice, but the part the stuck out to me was:

I’m just going to be really honest with you. Simply because I don’t want to see someone purchase your site, run some basic marketing on it and make a killing off of it, whilst you did all the hard work.

After reading the email, Ryan says:

I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. How had I not seen this? Why have I been wasting DropSend’s capabilities to bring in valuable revenue for us?

The lesson here is that entrepreneurs are often very skilled, but not necessarily in the right areas. Web Geeks start consulting companies or product companies. A mechanic opens a garage. A fix-it guy opens a hardware store. The list goes on. The smart entrepreneur realizes that they just moved into an area where their core competency now no longer represents the majority of what they should be focusing on.

The guy who emailed Ryan was right on a lot of fronts. But I think he was dead wrong about Ryan having already done the “hard” work. Ryan’s clearly a seasoned developer and project manager. He’s sharp about finding cheap and effective resources (locally and now, apparantly, in Russia). Building high-quality web applications isn’t hard for him any more. The hard part is always the part that pushes outside of your core skillset into the unknown. As Ryan says, “I’m not sure my friend’s advice is 100% the way to go, but it’s a damn good start.”

Honest Content

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.

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