Posts

ZippyKid is a boutique web hosting service that manages WordPress for you, so you can manage the content of your website.

How did you get started?

Over past 3 years, I’ve noticed an increase in clients asking me help with their WordPress sites. I wrestled with outdated plugins and insecure configurations for ~30 sites before I started to notice patterns. Being a programmer, I automated the things I could and looked for tools to help me manage everything else.

Tell us a little more about the tools you use on a daily basis.

It can vary, but this is what you’ll find me using on most days:

• 15 inch macbook pro
• iPhone
• Omnifocus
• Omnioutliner
• Netbeans
• Vim
• Github

Can you tell us a little about your backoffice infrastructure?

Github/Git for version control, Rackspace Cloud for hosting, Chargify for billing and custom scripts to install/update WordPress across multiple servers.

What were some of the biggest mistakes you made in growing your business?

I waited 365 days way too long to launch the site. I kept thinking about all the things I thought I needed: a rock solid billing system, proper control panels, status monitoring, [insert 435820746254 other excuses here]. I should have started this a long time ago.

If someone wanted to start a business similar to yours, what advice would you give to them?

Don’t wait. If you’re honest with your customers, they’ll understand and help you. I’ve told my customers that it’s just me and one person to answer emails, this helps manage their expectations and mine. I don’t promise 24/7 support, I promise fast loading, secure, and reliable websites.

***

A couple things I noticed while talking to Vid:

• He’s a smart guy and has managed to avoid over-engineering the product. For example, he’s using an off the shelf billing system to avoid having to build it in-house (which, traditionally, is a nightmare to build and maintain). Notice that most of the workflow steps are manual — he hasn’t invested time/money into building anything fancy just yet. Instead, he’s proving that the business is viable before investing too much into it.
• Three words: Monthly Recurring Revenue. My favorite kind of business.
• The service and/or the process isn’t groundbreaking or new, he’s simply using his expertise to make his consulting life a little easier.

You can find Vid at Third Party Code, check out ZippyKid, read other Back Office Exposed features andsubmit yourself for a Back Office Exposed feature.

Pretty much every startup you’ll ever meet will say it is better than its competitors. However you want to measure it—speed, technology, revenue model, whatever—a young company will say it outperforms others in its class. What’s more, it’s smaller and nimbler than the big companies, so it will be able to innovate faster and stay ahead of the curve.Just one problem: That’s exactly why it will fail.

What a startup should do instead—to give itself the best chance of surviving—is enter the market at the low end of performance, Thurston says. That is, offer a product that’s not necessarily as good as its competitors, but is cheaper and more accessible. “Lower cost, lower performance, and gets better over time,” is how Thurston puts it.

Less features, more win. I love it.

These people understand that this is the single best way to make your odds of success better — you can’t hit a home run without first learning how to hit the ball in the first place.

Rather than looking for the next idea that’s going to make them an overnight success, the best entrepreneurs spend their time improving the fundamentals of their business using metrics. By learning how to consistently hit these singles and doubles, these entrepreneurs set themselves up to knock a home run out of the park.

Hand-wavy strategies are overrated. Pick a few core metrics (signups, conversion rates, etc), use tactical techniques (A/B testing, landing pages, better calls-to-action, etc) to make the numbers even better and,most importantly, block off time on a monthly basis to review the previous month’s results and make decisions about the next month.

Little wins on a day to day basis are the best to consistently and methodically grow.

Kadavy, Inc. is a Media company that I bootstrap with User Interface Design / User Experience consulting. The end goal is to be myself for a living.

How did you get started?

It all started with a really simple, really meta blog post on a Blogger.com blog, about 6 years ago. I wanted to share what I learned and encountered by following my curiosities day-to-day. Over time, opportunities to make money have come out of this.

**What tools do you use on a daily basis? **

• 13″ MacBook Pro
• IKEA Jerker Desk
• Wacom Tablet
• Aeron Chair
• Green Tea
• VooDooPad
• Google Calendar
• Gmail
• iPhone
• Freshbooks
• Google Docs
• Google Analytics
• Google AdWords

Can you tell us a little about your backoffice infrastructure?

I invoice using Freshbooks, which is great, but it’s a little awkward for keeping track of ad revenues from ad networks. I end up creating a client, emailing myself the invoice, and entering payment, whenever I get a payment from an ad network, such as Google AdSense. Since oDesk is one of my clients, I use their time-tracker when I’m working for them, and billing and payment is automatic. I also have to create “imaginary” invoices for them to get the data into Freshbooks.

What were some of the biggest mistakes you made in growing your business?

I can’t say that I would do much differently because it’s a long process, and – for my style – there isn’t any way around that. But, over time I’ve learned that every business has a product or service, customers, suppliers, and competitors. Really understanding the nature of all of these elements, and how they relate to one-another, works wonders in recognizing the difference between a weak business model, and a strong one.

**If someone wanted to start a business similar to yours, what advice would you give to them? **

Forget about money and follow your interests and curiosities. Share what you learn, and be thirsty to learn from others. If this isn’t enough to make you happy and fuel your patience in waiting for success, you should do something else. Also, this post on the way I work may be of interest.

You can find David at kadavy.net, read other Back Office Exposed features and submit yourself for a Back Office Exposed feature. Photo of Kadavy, Inc. at a cafe is from a Chicago Tribune article on Foursquare.

But just because automation is the goal doesn’t mean it’s the way to start. The good thing about automation is it’s efficient; the bad thing is you cannot learn because you’re not involved in the process. And at the start, learning is where you should be spending most of your time!

For example, when SpareFoot began they weren’t sure how to charge storage companies. Should it be a $20/month listing fee? Or a flat “finders fee” per lead? Or a commission on leads which convert to sales? Could they charge extra for a “premium” listing? Should purchases go through SpareFoot so they can extract their cut, or should they bill storage companies separately?

If they had picked a strategy and automated it, there’s a low chance they would have picked the right one. All that time spent writing and debugging code, worthless.

Instead SpareFoot decided to automate nothing. When a potential buyer made a search, they grabbed their email or phone number and said “Thanks, we’re going to find you a great deal by Thursday.” Then they banged the phone all day, calling up regional storage facilities. Their pitch was awesome: “I’ve got a lead for you; his name is John Doe and he’s looking for a 10×20 with air conditioning. If your rate is competitive, we can do the deal today. By the way, if you want us to send leads like this to you all the time, it’s $20/mo to list with us.”

The bold phrase in there is damn compelling, right? And of course they varied the offer based on current pricing theory or in real-time based on the interaction with that particular storage facility.

None of this — determining the pricing structure and amount, building relationships with facility managers, and ensuring buyers’ success — would have happened if they started by writing code or any other sort of automation.

When I started MailFinch, I did everything manually — printing, folding, stuffing, licking, stamping, addressing… everything. When I was ready to start scaling, I knew the pain points better than anyone else. Scaling was the easy part.

MailFinch Product Roadmap

**1) Core Product: Create Letter and Accept Money
**

• I wanted people to be able to upload a letter and send it.
• Before they actually could send it, they need to pay me. Paypal made it easy to accept money on day #1. (Incidentally, I made my first sale about five hours after the site launched.)

**1A) Analytics **

• Google Analytics is free. Install it.
• Setup goal tracking. (In my case, the goal was to successfully create a letter and pay for it.)
• Start reviewing the sender and recipients of each letter to see if a pattern emerges. (In my case, we collect physical addresses for both and we’ve got the sender’s email address.)

**2) Focus on Repeat Users: Same Users + More Letters = $$$
**

• Talk to users. (I can’t stress this enough.)
• Review analytics. Daily. You’re looking for any patterns that appear — common email domains, common sender/recipient address attributes, etc.
• Reach out to users that have sent more than one letter. Why are they using us? How did they do this before? What else do they want to see?
• Prioritize bugfixes and feature requests by the amount of money a customer spends with you.

**3) Increase Traffic and Stickiness: More Users + Same Users = $$$!
**

• Once the core product is done (major bugs are dead, new features are coming/deployed), it’s time to think about how to grow. Do this by making the product stickier and/or increasing traffic. (Ideally, do both.)
• Lightweight CRM capabilities — manage contacts, tasks, lists and campaigns from one portal.
• Easy one-click contact importing via Highrise, Salesforce, Batchbook, etc.
• Find as many local newspapers as possible. Start cold calling real estate agents and insurance agents that have a half-page (or larger) print ad — these people have money and presumably understand the value of direct marketing.

3A) Analytics for traffic growth features

• A/B testing frameworks are nice, but expensive to setup. Focus on quick “deep dives” into your database to answer specific questions. (eg, for a user that has more than 1,000 contacts uploaded, how often do they login? How many letters do they send each day/week/month? How have they segregated their lists?
• Basic cohort analyses are really helpful for tracking new user signups each week. They’re even more helpful when you know what new features were deployed on a given week. Use Excel, you don’t need anything fancy.

This road map isn’t designed to be some sort of checklist that you work your way through. Instead, you’ll probably find yourself doing the same thing I did — repeating #2 for while until it’s becoming clear that a real customer need exists. Item #3 is still a work in progress for me, we’re about halfway through that list of things but it’s looking pretty promising so far.

If nothing else, remember the core of this road map:

1. Launch the first version ASAP. Ugly is fine, it just needs to work.
2. *Start talking to *customers. **Your mom/wife/dog is probably not a customer, go pick up the phone.
3. Repeat and Iterate.

Now, go make some money.

1. Who’s looking at your site anyway?

A look at your traffic sources can help you measure the mix of traffic arriving at your website and see the effect of marketing activities, both online and off. Normally, the biggest chunk of a site’s traffic comes from search engines, followed by roughly equal streams of traffic from referring websites and from direct traffic — that is, people who type in a Web address. If your numbers to look like this, it could be reflection of where you’re actually getting noticed the most. (e.g. If direct visits are up and you recently invested in a full page spread in the NYT, there may be a correlation there — use better tracking codes in the future so you can measure this properly.)

If you’re a business and your graphs look spiky, that’s not a good thing — your goal is build long term traffic. I’m not telling you to ignore StumbleUpon, Twitter or any of the other social media tools out there, just make sure that you keep a close eye on your daily conversion rate. If you’re using Google Analytics, setup the Goals feature immediately and you’ll have instant access to your conversion rates.

2. Are visitors finding what they want?

Pay attention to the average number of page views for your site. Most people may think that higher page view counts are better — but that only holds true at big entertainment sites, such as YouTube and MySpace, where clicks directly translate into more ad revenue.

If you’re running an online retail store or your general company website and the average page views seem high, things get a little trickier. In most of these cases, you’ll find that the site bounce rate is also high (relative to avg. page views) which can sometimes indicate that people simply aren’t finding what they’re looking for.

In general, focus your efforts on improving your daily conversion rates by A/B testing to determine which pages result in higher conversion counts. This is dirt simple — use Google’s Website Optimizer for free. It takes 5 minutes (seriously! read this: how to pick A/B test candidates) to setup a test page, insert the code and kick off the test. Depending on how much traffic you have, you’ll be able to generate reports on how your new page compares to the old one.

3. Keep an eye on your bounce rates.

A bounce rate in the 20-30 percent range is pretty good. Though, most unoptimized websites will have bounce rates that top 50 percent — certainly not good. Spend some time figuring out what your users are looking for and give it to them. Use a free service like Crazy Egg for a super-easy way to visualize what users are clicking on and make more of whatever it is.

If you’re using Google Analytics, keep a close eye on your bounce rate by traffic source. In my experience, this one report can help you make the biggest improvements. For example, if your search traffic is more likely to bounce than direct or referring traffic, you should start digging into the search terms that visitors are using to find your site — it’s likely that the page they’re getting dropped on to doesn’t match up with what they were searching for.

If you can bring your bounce rates down while simultaneously maintaining (or, better yet, increasing) your conversion rates, you’ll make a ton of money.

4. Track your goals!

I already told you to setup the goals feature — if you haven’t, go back and re-read #1. The Goal Funnel tracks customers during the sales process and gives you the ability to determine where they dropped off — this is the rate of abandonment and you should keep a super-close eye on it if you’re really trying to get users to sign up or buy something on your website.

Use the info you learn here to improve the individual steps your visitors take to complete a goal on your website. It’s easy and you’ll probably smack yourself for not doing this one thing earlier. A friend of mine did this on his website (selling tax services, of all things) and he made an extra $10,000 in the following month simply by reducing his rate of abandonment. Easy money.

5. People don’t have to know your name — get over it.

It’s so funny to watch people searching for the name of their own company on Google, Yahoo or whatever other search engines are out there. If you’re one of those people, listen to me: STOP. The people that search for your company’s name to find you are not the people you need to worry about! Be concerned about all the people searching for the stuff you sell that never find you.

If you sell shoes, then people should be able to find you when they look up the specific shoes they want. After all, no one (that I know) cares whether they buy their shoes from Sports Authority or Foot Locker — they just want to know who has the damn things so they can go get them.

Conclusion

Simply having a website doesn’t cut it anymore — set aside an hour a week to review your key metrics and setup some tests for the following week. That’s really all there is to it. You don’t need fancy reports or custom-made analytics! Stay focused on conversion rates and goal funnels — you’ll make a killing out there.

So, the above is a pretty basic list — what tips do you have?