Category Archives: Business

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A WhiteHouse.gov petition:

States should not be allowed to prevent Tesla Motors from selling cars directly to customers. The state legislators are trying to unfairly protect automobile dealers in their states from competition. Tesla is providing competition, which is good for consumers.

I’ve never appreciated the laws and relationships between car manufacturers, dealers, etc. I want to buy my cars directly. The established groups typically require legislation to maintain the status quo and I’d certainly like cars to be ‘disrupted’ by a company like Tesla.

I feel the same is starting to happen in the alcohol industry…

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I’m excited to attend the upcoming Digital PM Summit, produced by the smart guys at Happy Cog (Greg Hoy and Greg Storey) for digital project managers. I’ve seen presentations by and met a number of Happy Cog folks at conferences like SXSW and it’s clear they do great work.

Having taken on a larger project management role at Crowd Favorite, I realize I should try to continue my ‘education’ — this is sometimes more challenging in an industry where there is no shortage of highly technical resources online but not a ton about the nuance of managing clients, setting expectations, and so on. The speaker line-up suggests I will walk away with plenty to think about and am excited to chat with other like-minded folks…

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Horace Deidu at asymco had a question he hoped Tim Cook would answer at D11:

Why is the iPhone not sold as a portfolio product? Meaning, why, after six years, is there no iPhone product range being updated on a regular basis. Having a portfolio strategy is not only followed by every phone vendor but also by Apple for all its other product lines, including the iPad, which came after the iPhone. In other words, please explain why the iPhone is anomalous from a product portfolio point of view.

Which is a good question, Tim spoke to this point:

Think about the evolution of the iPod over time. The shuffle didn’t have the same functionality as other products. It was a really good product, but it played a different role — it was great for some customers it was strikingly different than other iPods. The mini played a different role than the classic did. ..

…and I found Horace’s follow-up interesting:

The comparison to iPod is not entirely appropriate because as a music player, the iPod had a relatively small set of jobs to do. It was hired for exercise, escapism, isolation, etc. It was not hired for apps and services which extend the medium itself. In other words it was not a computer. As a computer, the iPhone has a near infinite set of jobs to be done and it’s the hundreds of thousands of apps which help it perform them.

Though, doesn’t the iPod Touch fill nearly all the same “infinite” jobs in that point? The biggest one missing being cellular communication (messaging, voice calls) in a device one always carries (not a separate phone vs. computer).

It seems through services (iMessage, FaceTime) Apple is starting to pull the mobile world away from the carrier ties allowing (potentially) easier and more market penetration… right? Then they’re just selling devices (like iPods) like they’ve always been doing. Worth noting, it appears the same appears to be happening with Google via Hangouts (messaging, calls).

The same is also happening with the ‘app’-ification of television producers and distributors, right?

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An excellent commencement address “I wish I’d heard” by Chris Schroeder over on Linkedin:1

You will have bosses, mentors, parents, and friends who tell you “how the world works.” They will share how their paths are the only paths to success. You will see classmates who do the same—and might even feel they are “passing you” (whatever that means) in their pursuit of the obvious. Good for them.

Resist.

I keep seeing a number of preconceptions floating around out there and arguments about black vs. white. Only recently I’ve started realizing there’s a lot of “unobvious” being missed…

  1. Linkedin is becoming an amazing source of analysis and thinking by smart folks (but don’t call them ‘bloggers’). See related: What competition is WordPress up against? ↩
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The Denver Post’s Andy Vuong highlights the four Denver-based companies that will be involved in TechStars Boulder this summer. Elihuu being one of them:

“[Designers have] tested the market, they’ve figured out price points, they’ve figured out materials, they’ve figured out processes — and they need to get this thing manufactured,” said co-founder Dorian Ferlauto. “They come to us and we find them the best matches.”

Its great that the multiple TechStars locations (Boulder, NYC, Seattle, Boston, etc.) has allowed for these locales to help ‘bring up’ local companies instead of ‘ship in’ entrepreneurs from around the country (sure, that still does happen).

But, this also means there’s more tendency for those folks who started a company locally to maintain and grown their network, continue to stay in town where their mentors and funders reside, grow a startup ecosystem, find more resources, stick around, and turn around and mentor the future incomers. I may be overstating, but in the early days, most successful TechStars companies simply moved to California shortly after getting investments after demo day…

TechStars Boulder 2013

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TechStarsCongratulations are in order to the newly announced summer 2013 class at company incubator and accelerator, TechStars Boulder. It’s hard to believe this is already the 7th group of companies to spend their summer in Colorado.

Having chatted with David Cohen back in July 2006 about his new “summer program” idea, I can remember that TechStars was exactly the kind of thing that young companies and entrepreneurs should clamor to be a part of: access to great mentors, help with raising funds, building a product or service around a market, etc. At the time I had no co-founders, no company ideas, and no good foundation to take advantage of the opportunity about to launch in the coming months…

Fast forward six years and having observed from the outside and made friends in TechStars and working with Alex (a Boulder TechStars mentor) and a very smart group of folks at at Crowd Favorite: I’ve learned a lot about successfully building a web application, designing a solid web experience, taking something from concept to implementation, hiring, iterating and dealing with feedback, making decisions, presenting to stakeholders, communicating, and so on.

Through a circuitous route1, I’m happy to say that the newly-inducted team at Elihuu (pronounced E-lay-who) has asked me to help lend advice and mentorship around building their web-based company. The idea behind Elihhu is to use proven processes and allow technology to connect designers (with product ideas) and manufacturers (who have extra capacity) to create products together and sell them in lieu of the typical agency / brokerage model. I’m proud of what the team has designed and built in a few short months and it’s been fun to watch and be involved in. Now it’s time to turn it into a business… I’m excited for what the summer will bring!

Kudos class of 2013 and best of luck this summer…

  • AdsNative
  • Augur
  • Brandfolder
  • Elihuu
  • Given Goods
  • GoodApril
  • hull.io
  • LeChat
  • Prediculous
  • Shopventory
  • ShowShoe
  1. I’ve worked with Susanna in Boulder since I was in college and I had met Dorian, a family friend, through her many years ago. She re-introduced us a few months ago when Dorian started looking for a team to design and build her company concept and knew that was the kind of thing I did day-to-day now. ↩

Where do you post your job listings?

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I’ve been involved with hiring dozens of fine folks at Crowd Favorite over the past few years and I (think I) know what has and has not worked for us. While our sample size isn’t large enough to draw definitive conclusions, and our industry (web design, development) is unique is some ways I’m curious what others have found to work well.

I see at least three big approaches to finding a good candidate for a job.

Personal Connections

I was hired by Alex after reaching out to him through his blog and after having met at a few local meet-ups (including the inaugural Startup Weekend, where we also met our company counsel). One of our front-end developers was interviewed and hired after meeting Alex at a Refresh Denver meetup. I’ve seen plenty of startups and other companies bring on individuals (and merge with other companies) only after long-time personal and professional relationships are fostered — and I’ve seen those work very well.

People often tout “getting a job is all about who you know” which is fair, but doesn’t tell the whole story. It helps to have an “in” because the more opportunities and availability you have to get to know someone and how they work, the better off you both are at deciding if you’re a good fit for each other.

Alex recently posted a position on his blog in lieu of placing it on the company website — ideally he can find that right fit through a more “personal” channel.

Job Listings

I’d say this is the default mode of operation for most companies in our industry: write a job listing that describes the company, what you do, what the position needs to do, what experience is needed and so on. Applicants read dozens of these descriptions, but they’re much like a resume form the hirer’s perspective: they usually do no more than snag someone’s attention to get them to investigate further (visit your website, check out the team, etc.).

While this approach certainly casts a wider net (for a small fee) beyond your social circle, existing industry, and so on, it also means a bit more work is needed to find the signal in the noise. We’ve had mixed results with all these job listing sites:

  • Craigslist: great for reaching a wide audience
  • 37signals: good to find folks in the industry, but high visibility means you may be skipped past for ‘sexier’ opportunities
  • LinkedIn: able to cater very well to existing skills and folks currently employed (usually matches intent)
  • Authentic Jobs: great for a narrower set of design-minded individuals looking for opportunities
  • Careers 2.0: aimed at fairly technical developers, but low volume (does not usually match intent)
  • Company Website: only good for people who already know about you

Recruiters

This is arguably the most expensive approach (depending on how much your personal and professional time is spent evaluating applicants, going to meet-ups and conferences, getting to know folks personally) but can yield high-quality results with little-to-no effort on your part.

Finding the right fit and getting into a routine with a recruiter is just as hard as bringing on an employee or key service provider (lawyer, accountant). You set expectations, you provide feedback, you go back and forth, you communicate a lot. But once your needs are ‘locked in’ you can have excellent candidates dropped in your lap.

Of course, the typical pricing model incentivizes recruiters to be good at finding you the right candidates: they get a percentage of the employee’s salary that you ultimately hire. So they’d be wasting their time (and profitability) qualifying and presenting candidates that aren’t a good fit.

Hiring Manager

Do you have someone full or part time (Human Resources? Office Manager?) in-house and dedicated to finding good candidates, exploring the above avenues, reaching out proactively?

We’ve not attempted to have position like this ourselves. Mainly because we don’t necessarily have the churn or volume of hires needed to justify the position. But, we’ve pondered this outbound and inbound hiring approach as we realize many larger agencies and companies employ it for good reason. At a point it’s cheaper and easier to get good candidates as a good hiring manager already knows the culture, what a good fit looks like, can talk about the technologies, processes, etc. and dedicate their time exclusively to finding matches.

These are my observations on posting jobs and different approaches to finding job (career?) candidates. What have you found works well?

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The team at Crowd Favorite has been working on a solution to a problem a lot of designers and developers (and folks that work with designers and developers) didn’t quite realize they had: when working on a project you typically take notes on the side… but you usually throw that away and lose the snippets of code, outlines of todos, open questions and decisions, etc.

Capsule replaces that scratch document you have open when you’re coding. It creates an archive of your development artifacts.

Instead of keeping a text file open when working on a project, using Capsule means you can have a simple archive of all those notes and easily reference them in the future.

Initial reactions and reception have been very positive from the development and WordPress community so we’re all very pleased.

Be sure to check out Alex’s post on Capsule to read more about the thinking and decisions behind this (free) product.

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Facebook just invited press to an event at its headquarters on April 4th to “Come See Our New Home On Android”. Sources tell us it will be a modified version of the Android operating system with deep native Facebook functionality on the homescreen that may live on an HTC handset.

Something tells me Facebook making a phone with HTC may go as well as that time Apple made a phone with Motorola.