Tony Wright dot com

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.

Most of my personal hosting sites are hosted at a shared hosting company called Dreamhost. They’ve had some growing pains and certainly can’t handle any significant traffic, but they are a great host for dabbling (if I’m doing anything serious, like Jobby– now sold and gone– or RescueTime). They also have the benefit of hosting as many different domains as I want under my plan.

Dreamhost had some sort of hiccup after midnight last night, resulting in TonyWright.com being functionally dead in the water.

By the time I got in front of a computer this morning (9 hours later) I had 4 emails letter me know (3 from complete strangers). It’s heartening as hell to know that perfect strangers are trying to read my blog and making noise when it’s not available. Cool!

This charges me up to get back into blogging a bit, so stay tuned.

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

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

(this is totally unrelated to anything I’ve blogged about before)

A friend sent me a link to an old article on SFGate.com about the environmental impacts of having children.

Two delightful excerpts:

“Hall and his colleagues found that a single new American born in the 1990s will be responsible, over his or her life, for 22 million pounds of liquid waste and 2.2 million pounds each of solid waste and atmospheric waste. He or she will have a lifetime consumption of 4,000 barrels of oil, 1.5 million pounds of minerals and 62,000 pounds of animal products that will entail the slaughter of 2,000 animals.”

Wow.

Another gem:

“In terms of energy usage alone, [which is] a convenient measure of environmental impact,” Knight says, “the average Ethiopian uses one 310th of what we use. So when an American couple stops at two kids it’s like an Ethiopian couple stopping at 620.”

This makes me wonder at the irony of passionate environmentalists driving around a couple of kids in their Prius’. It also makes me wonder if every single dollar we spend on environmentalist causes oughtn’t be redirected to things like birth control education, birth control research, and free vasectomies.

The right to freely reproduce is so sacrosanct in this world (and especially in the US) that people get REALLY uncomfortable when discussing (or even thinking about) the relative immorality of reproduction.

RELATIVE. I’m not going to go so far as goofiness like the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. I’m all for continuation of the species. But can we set aside our love of sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood and think about the consequences of our actions?

One parting thought. When I talk a bit about the fact that my wife and I don’t have any plans to have children, most parents sadly shake their heads. “You don’t know the joy that you’re missing” or “You’re going to be so lonely when you’re old,” are common responses. From what I can tell from this article, there is no apparent relationship between having children and happiness/contentment/satisfaction (the only exception being if you WANT to have children but cannot).

(for the record, I eat meat, drink from paper cups, drive when I feel like it, and occasionally don’t recycle. So I’m throwing stones from a bit of a glass house, here)

With much pageantry and fanfare, the 2012 Olympics logo has been unleashed upon the world, and it appears to be a disaster. It reminds of another logo debacle back in my home town.

My favorite bit of coverage on the logo is (predictably) from Seth Godin, who talks about the accompanying quote on the press release:

“This is the vision at the very heart of our brand,” said London 2012 organising committee chairman Seb Coe.

“It will define the venues we build and the Games we hold and act as a reminder of our promise to use the Olympic spirit to inspire everyone and reach out to young people around the world.

“It is an invitation to take part and be involved.”

What the HELL does that even mean?

It reminds me of the book I’m reading (and continue to be bowled over by)… “Made to Stick” by the brothers Heath. One of the stickiest passages in the book is when they talk about John F. Kennedy saying “”I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” The Heaths suggested that nowadays a statement like that would’ve gotten thoroughly mangled by corporate wordsmiths to read more like “The United States will leverage our aeronautical expertise and our commitment to scientific excellence to achieve what we feel is a laudable goal for this decade. Our actions need to reflect the promise of our established national brand. The support this brand, we invite the world to watch us and be inspired as we begin the 10-year process of getting to the moon.”

When you start throwing around big money for branding and having your corporate spin doctors pile on the double-speak, it can feel pretty damn manipulative. And now that anyone can voice their opinion on these wonderful intertubes of ours, the people who feel manipulated can let you know how they feel. Well, as London 2012 organising committee chairman Seb Coe says, “It is an invitation to take part and be involved.”

Human beings are pretty hardwired for instant gratification. We’d all be healthier and happier if we went to the gym regularly, ate right, brushed our teeth, went to the dentist, avoided overexposure to the sun, etc. Instead, we sit in front of the TV because it’s easy and entertaining. We eat fattening food because it tastes damn good.

To search engine marketing equivalent to sitting on your ass in front of the television with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s is PPC (pay per click) search engine marketing. Don’t get me wrong– I understand that wrangling Google Adwords can be hard work. There is a lot of skill and science there. But it isn’t necessarily the most healthy way you could work to market your company. In fact, with all of the attention and competition that you find in Adwords, it’s oftentimes a pretty lousy deal. And, for the businesses that don’t have a strong viral component, it’s a flow of visitors that will stop the instant you stop spending the ad dollars.

The smart Adwords folks will carefully craft a funnel that goes all the way to a “conversion” - whether it’s a sale, a user signup, or whatever. Say you’re selling a widget online for $50, with a 50% profit margin (walking away with a clean $25 per widget– not bad!). All you have to do is make sure you pay less that $25 per buyer and you’re making money with Adwords.

Unfortunately, here are other widget sellers out there. They might be sitting on a huge supply of widgets that they have to unload at a loss (meaning that they can bid more per click than you can). They might be backed by VCs, who are hollering at them to drive up sales (even if it’s at a loss). Maybe their profit margins are higher than yours, allowing them to comfortably bid higher. Maybe their funnel is more effective than yours. Or they might just not be bright enough to know how much profit they make on a per-widget basis (”We might lose money, but we’ll make it up on volume!”).

So what’s the best alternative to Adwords?

It’s good old fashioned organic traffic. Being “linkworthy”. Search engine optimization. Burying your customers in service to the point where they are fanatical about recommending you to their widget-buying friends. Building compelling content on your site/blog so that people will link to you (this is a subset of SEO nowadays, really).

It’s not as fun, not as easily measurable, and it’s not NEARLY as instant as pay-per-click marketing. It’s the lifestyle equivalent of eating your veggies and taking a brisk jog a couple of times a week. Sadly, most businesses don’t have the discipline to invest time and money in efforts that generate healthy organic traffic. It just doesn’t provide the short-term shot in the arm that CPC does.

Brian Halligan (of Small Business Hub) offers some pretty compelling arguments for investing in SEO:

1. If you rank high for organic results, it is (typically) long lasting. So, the time/money you spend helping yourself move up the ranks is relatively persistent while the PPC campaign is money spent over and over again.
2. Organic results are clicked on a lot more than paid results, especially for well educated crowds. I read a study that showed dramatic differences as you moved from high school eduction to associate degrees to bachelors to masters to phd’s. The more educated your prospect, the less likely they are to click on an advertisement. If you are selling to high school students, you should buy cpc ads. If you are selling to engineers or professors, you need to think more about seo because that’s where the volume is.
3. Organic clicks convert at least as well as paid clicks. Marketing Sherpa’s Search Marketing Benchmark study of 3,217 marketers showed that organic clicks converted at an average of 4.2% v. 3.6% for paid.
4. Often times searchers visit your site more than once before self-selecting into a form, whitepaper, etc. We track this data carefully at HubSpot and notice that a decent portion of the leads we get are from people who have visited the site through multiple searches over multiple months. Organic search campaigns have more latency.
5. Marketing Sherpa reports that in the b2b environment, less than one-fourth of b2b buyers to look to paid listings in their first try at accessing information.
6. Many think of Google as a search company, but I think of them as a modern media conglomerate with an ultra-efficient mechanism for selling advertisements that work particularly well in the longtail. Like other media companies, Google benefits from efficient pricing of advertising. As more and more niche companies start to advertise on Google, their prices will become more efficient and their rates will become less and less attractive relative to other media outlets.

So do yourself a favor. Head over to SEOMOZ (my personal favorite SEO resource) and spend a few hours reading their free stuff.

(and be sure to eat your veggies)

I am a big proponent of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) at Jobster… I find the elusiveness of it exciting and the economies of scale interesting.

Anyhoo, I’ve always tried to “own” the search phrase “Tony Wright” in search engines. I have a big leg up (owning the tonywright.com domain), but I have some stiff competition. My arch-nemisis is a UK politician who shares my name. He’s written about and linked to (by name) several times a week, so I don’t have much hope of being the number one result.

Recently, much to my horror, a new Tony Wright has flashed onto the scene… And this guy is (get this) trying for the world record of sleep deprivation (11 days, if you’re curious).

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.

In the startup world, people oftentimes use the term “runway” to describe the amount of time we have before we run out of money and need to be profitable. I just read a quote which I think is a lot more appropriate (and creates a greater sense of urgency).

“An entrepreneur who’s just left his day job is like a guy who jumped off a cliff and must assemble his airplane on the way down from a bag of parts.

That airplane is revenue and profit. You need to build that airplane before you hit the ground.

The bottom line is: TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!!! Do not waste a minute of it surfing the web, IM’ing, blogging, hanging out at Starbucks, networking with interesting but useless people, or ANYTHING that does not contribute to building that airplane. After the airplane is built and you’re flying, then you can relax a bit and do more of the stuff you enjoy.”

Love that.