Side Benefit of User Testing: Team Unity
For the last several months, we’ve been undergoing a large redesign of a critical and complex user flow at Adroll. At this point, several hundred hours of work have gone into the project. Our UX intern started the project with a company-wide customer identification exercise that got everyone focused on who we’re targeting with our product and who we should be designing for. We then conducted extensive user testing with target customers throughout development which resulted in radical shifts from what we thought would be the “right” solutions out of the gates. The result is not only a better and easier to use product, but also a unified team. User testing not only focused our team on our target users’ behavior but also virtually eliminated internal debate and the resulting tension regarding who thought what would be best for our users. In the long run it’s very possible that the side benefit of team unity will match the value of the much improved product.
Gear Burger: Outdoor gear deals straight to your inbox
My buddy Chad and I launched Gear Burger a while back as a little side project. When you sign up for the service, you select your preferred gear type and gear brand preferences (e.g. men’s hiking and skiing gear made by Patagonia, Salomon and Volkl). Gear Burger then monitors one-deal-at-a-time sites like Steep and Cheap and Tramdock and sends you email alerts when an item that matches your preferences goes on sale. The sales we see are generally 10 – 20% cheaper than the cheapest sale prices on the web. You can also browse past deals within the catalog where you can also find individual products that you would like to follow and get alerts when they go on sale. The live deals section contains all of the deals we are seeing that are currently active. To date our system has seen 21,740 deals and tens of thousands of alerts. We find it super useful for snagging great gear deals and we hope you do too.
Better can beat better + cheaper
I recently met a scrappy entrepreneur who is working on some very interesting technology that has potential to help large enterprises. He described his product as “ten times better and ten times cheaper than the competition.” It’s easy for entrepreneurs to slip into the mindset that their product needs to beat the competition on all fronts: price, service, technology, etc. The truth is that if you build something that really is 10x better than the competition, there is no reason to massively cut the price as well.
My Picks: Top 5 Gadgets
I was recently asked an interesting question. “What are five tech gadgets that you can’t live without?” Some of my picks aren’t really gadgets…I just went with the stuff I derive the most value from in a work context. Read the rest of this entry »
Air and Simple Gifts
I really enjoyed the John Williams arrangement “Air and Simple Gifts.” played today at the inauguration by Yo-Yo Ma (cello), Itzhak Perlman (violin), Gabriela Montero (piano) and Anthony McGill (clarinet). Read the rest of this entry »
2 years and 200 posts
I started this blog 2 years and 200 posts ago. The time has flown by. I’m still having fun with it and no major missteps so I’m sticking to my plan. Just over 50,000 pages viewed so far. Thanks for reading! I’ll try to keep things interesting.
The Money Management Boom
As the Madoff scandal continues to unwind, the best reading for background on the situation continues to be Harry Markopolos’ letter to the SEC in 2005 (pdf, html) entitled “The World’s Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraud”. Not only is his analysis of the Madoff situation spot on, his analysis of the funds and funds of funds that invested in him is also very true: Read the rest of this entry »
Facebook: Reach and Saturation by Country, Part III
I checked in on Facebook’s growth and added to the data set used in Part I and Part II. The data is a bit too big for a spreadsheet so I used iCharts to make a dynamic chart that allows for easy visibility. Use the slider on the side to zoom in on the other 90+ other countries. Notice that their global growth continues to accelerate. Read the rest of this entry »
Cool projects for kids
Subscriptions for healthy things are the new black. We love our vegetable subscription and delivery service because quality veggies are something we want in our life but they are time consuming and difficult to source. Along the same lines, a company recently launched bringing subscription service to hands-on projects for kids called the Project of the Month Club. Read the rest of this entry »
Strive valiantly
It is not the critic who counts,
nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbled,
or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena,
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood;
who strives valiantly;
who errs and comes short again and again;
who knows great enthusiasms, great devotions;
who spends himself in a worthy cause;
who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement,
and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly,
so that his place shall never be with those timid souls
who know neither victory nor defeat.
-Theordore Roosevelt
Farm Fresh to You: Great veggies & scurvy protection
We’ve been using a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) service for the last several months called Farm Fresh to You. It was recommended to us by a friend when we moved to the Bay Area earlier this year. We get the “regular” box of veggies delivered to our doorstep every two weeks which costs $30, home delivery included. We signed up for the convenience of getting tasty fruits and veggies delivered on a regular basis but I priced out our most recent box on the Safeway grocery delivery site and found that we’re also saving 50% on cost. Read the rest of this entry »
Trade shares of players and teams on OneSeason
My friends Mike and DJ launched OneSeason about two months ago and have built a very interesting platform for buying and selling synthetic ownership interests in sports teams and players among friends. Think playing cards merged with an online industrial strength trading platform. Read the rest of this entry »
Good reads
Lots of good reading material recently. A few good ones:
Is it a Terrible Time to Move? (Kedrosky) The Daily Beast
Anatomy of a Meltdown The New Yorker
Hitched to Someone Else’s Dream (Stonyfield Farms) Inc
The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace Rolling Stone
Thinking Outside the Box (Costco) Fast Company
Complete airline luggage cost data
I think I’ll be shipping my luggage this winter. Data from WSJ report. A separate CNNMoney article here with a nice Liftopia plug. Read the rest of this entry »
Email deliverability hacks
Email deliverability is a big deal…and unfortunately it’s as muddled as transaction processing. There are hundreds if not thousands of service providers who will tell you whatever it takes to get you to buy their product and ungodly amounts of marketing materials. At the end of the day, blacklists are nearly impossible to get off and email plays an integral role for nearly every web app in existence (sidenote: check out Product Planner for great visuals of email/signup process flows). Ted Rheingold of Dogster has written the best best list of email deliverability best-practices that I have seen yet. Auren Hoffman built on Ted’s post with a great list of email deliverability troubleshooting suggestions. Unfortunately I found these post via Noah Kagan only after I had spent countless hours wading through email service provider jargon & propaganda. Hopefully this post will save others some pain…
Obama and Chicago economics
The WSJ ran a short but interesting piece this weekend which focused on how Obama is perceived among Chicago School economists given his background with the University of Chicago. The piece focuses on the thoughts of Richard Thaler, one of the leaders in the school of behavioral economics which has largely examined the efficient markets theorized by the old Chicago School crowd and identified scenarios in which actors systemically fail to make efficient decisions. This line of study is an interesting glimpse into human behavior and is very important in the context of efficient market arguments which all assume decision makers behave in efficient ways (e.g. a person will take $2 in exchange for $1). Read the rest of this entry »
Mary Meeker/MS Tech Trend Outlook
Very interesting presentation put together by Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley and presented yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit.
Buffett on equities
Great Op-Ed by Warren Buffett in the Times yesterday.
Today people who hold cash equivalents feel comfortable. They shouldn’t. They have opted for a terrible long-term asset, one that pays virtually nothing and is certain to depreciate in value. Indeed, the policies that government will follow in its efforts to alleviate the current crisis will probably prove inflationary and therefore accelerate declines in the real value of cash accounts.
Equities will almost certainly outperform cash over the next decade, probably by a substantial degree. Those investors who cling now to cash are betting they can efficiently time their move away from it later. In waiting for the comfort of good news, they are ignoring Wayne Gretzky’s advice: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.”
I don’t like to opine on the stock market, and again I emphasize that I have no idea what the market will do in the short term. Nevertheless, I’ll follow the lead of a restaurant that opened in an empty bank building and then advertised: “Put your mouth where your money was.” Today my money and my mouth both say equities.
Investment Research after the storm
The last two weeks have kept most in the finance community glued to the headlines trying to figure out which earthquake will hit next. Mainstream media analysis has been focused on global economic issues and with numbers like $700B being thrown around, the $5.7B investment research industry, which has felt a substantial impact from the debt crisis and the Wall Street shakeup, has been largely overlooked. Nearly 3,000 equity research professionals have already been directly impacted. Read the rest of this entry »
Expert networks and sell-side research analysts
The recent partnership announcement between the Gerson Lehrman Group and Credit Suisse sparked some commentary from research industry insiders who were surprised that GLG was letting sell-side analysts access the GLG network, even for what is sure to be a hefty fee. I was a bit surprised to learn they weren’t doing this already. GLG and other expert networks have tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of experts in their networks. Sell-side research operations, while they may be on the decline, still control 75% of the $5.7 billion in trading commissions distributed to research providers annually. At KnowledgeBid, our best customers are firms that sell research and services based on primary research. Contact us if you’d like to learn more about our network and how we can help you meet your customers’ needs. We’d love to help.
Investment Research: Continued Shift
Ongoing market turmoil and the intensifying financial crunch have accelerated ongoing shift within the investment research industry. This morning Credit Suisse and the Gerson Lehrman Group announced a strategic partnership that will 1) give Credit Suisse analysts access to GLG consultants; 2) give GLG clients access to Credit Suisse analysts; 3) give GLG access to Credit Suisse distribution channels.
CareerBuilder valued at $1.35B, down 13% since ‘06
Reuters is reporting that Gannett has purchased another 10% of CareerBuilder from the Tribune Company for $135M at a $1.35B valuation. The last time CareerBuilder was valued publicly was in ‘06 when Gannett and Tribune bought a chunk of CareerBuilder from McClatchy at a $1.55B valuation. That’s a $200M loss in value over the last 2 years. Compete shows a 16% decrease in CareerBuilder’s traffic over the last year. This must have been an interesting negotiation because CareerBuilder is a large private company and the buyer and seller were both large existing stakeholders. Although losing $20M sounds bad, Gannett’s own stock has dropped nearly 50% this year alone, nearly $4B lost in market capitalization. Barron’s reported last week that Tribune, taken private in ‘07 by Sam Zell for $8.2B, will be “hard-pressed to avoid bankruptcy, given plunging newspaper profits and its $12 billion of debt. Even a sale of the Tribune-owned Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field for more than $1 billion would do little to cut Tribune’s debt. Zell says Tribune has adequate liquidity, but its public debt trades for less than 40 cents on the dollar, so investors aren’t convinced.”
So even though CareerBuilder has dropped in value, it may be one of the better assets on both company’s balance sheets (Cubs and Wrigley aside). I sure am glad I’m not in the newspaper business.
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