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.

1. I started as Director of Product Management at Adroll
2. KnowledgeBid is cranking in a nicely automated manner
3. I’ve been posting a lot on twitter
4. Semi-regular posting will resume/continue…

1. Ask for the most interesting, fun, and relevant information from the user first. Ask for the most senstive, boring, and personal information from them last.  Example:  If you are trying to sell cake on your website, the first piece of information you should ask for is what kind of cake the user wants.  This is why they are on your site.  They will be happy and excited to give you this information.  Much more happy than they would be to give you their email address, cell phone number, or credit card number.
2. Only ask for information when it is absolutely necessary. Every additional page you include in a signup process will result in attrition and on a smaller scale, every question you ask will do the same.  Sure it would be great to know every users’ birthday so you could send them a happy birthday email, but if you’re selling cake do you REALLY need to know it?  You can also break the information gathering process down into smaller pieces.  Example:  You only need payment and delivery information if they actually place an order that they need to pay for and have delivered….so ask for it only when they need to pay or have something delivered.
3. Break the process down into easy to swallow steps. We’ve all seen daunting signup forms that stretch below the fold.  Nothing says “signup” like one of those guys.  Ideally your users will feel like they are working on a project and not actually signing up for anything.  Prompting users with one or two questions and a nice big button will move them through the process quickly and draw them in.  Lumping them all together will cause gag reflexes.  Of course too many steps will cause damage as well, but if you follow #2 you should be OK.
4. Only create barriers when abuse makes them necessary. If you’re building a consumer site, chances are you’ve had some sleepless nights thinking about fraud, abuse, etc. and how you can prevent those problems.  This is important stuff to think about and plan for, but there is no need to build barriers to prevent problems that don’t exist.  Example:  making users verify their email address will prevent fraud…but if you have no users (and no fraud) there is no reason to create this barrier.
5. “Invite” and “share” only when appropriate and only after you have “sold” the user. Everyone now knows that inviting and sharing are how sites organically grow.  That doesn’t mean you should ask your users to import their whole address book and share the news of their pending cake purchase.  Instead carefully lead the user through the signup process and prompt them to share  with relevant people once they have bought into the service and have something worth sharing.
6. Test, test, test. If you already have a signup process in place, try tweaking it towards a sticky system and see if it works.  If your site is currently configured for a traditional non-sticky signup (email, password), take baby steps and measure along the way to see if you’re making progress.  The counter argument to sticky signups is that users are comfortable with traditional signups.  This is definitely true to some degree…however I’ve never met anyone that enjoyed them.

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Examples:  Sticky & Simple

Anyvite:  Juicy information up front, dry stuff in the back, super easy sharing.

Craigslist:  The LAST bit of information asked for is your email address.

37 Signals Job Board:  Clean and direct with relevant questions first.

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Examples:  Sticky & Complex

Pageflakes:  The page is already built and ready for you to personalize and claim.

Netvibes:  Straight into the juicy info needed to build your personalized page.

Widgetbox:  Build your widget first, then claim it if you want to.

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If you like geeking out about this stuff check out the gallery at Product Planner and easily examine the flow of your favorite sites.

Blackberry + Tether:  Email anywhere on the device and ~DSL connection anywhere on my laptop with the tether (can’t do this legally with an iPhone or android phone yet).

MacBook Pro:  Sweet edgy laptop perfect for my coffee shop emo twitters.  I just want to fit in.  And it’s the best computer I have ever owned.

Belkin 4 Port USB Hub:  1 USB plug at my desk currently hubbing/organizing my printer, mouse, monitor and phone cords.

Refurbished <$200 22 inch LCD Monitor:  Used flatscreen HP monitor from on Amazon – stays at my desk and allows me to have healthy ergonomics.

Molskine Notebook; Ruled, 5×8 :  Some people get crazy with these.  I find the best function is elimination of loose notes floating everywhere.

What am I missing?

Both Simple Gifts and Lord of the Dance are wonderful songs and very fitting for today.  If you have a minute take a look at the lyrics below while  listening to my favorite versions.  Aaron Coplands’ Appalachian Spring is also worth a listen.

Lord of the Dance performed by The Christmas Revels

As far as I know, none of the hedge fund, fund of funds (FOF’s) mentioned in my report are engaged in a conspiracy to commit fraud. I believe they are naive men and women with a notable lack of derivatives expertise and possessing little or no quantitative finance ability.

This statement is not only accurate for the managers of the billions that went to Madoff, but also dead on for many other funds that are collapsing. This period has served as a stark and poignant reminder to the world that it is very, very, very difficult to successfully manage money over time.  Over the last 10 years, money management has been a boom industry as a rising tide has raised all ships.  Fund managers have been striding the earth like giants, bringing in jaw dropping incomes and gobbling up luxury properties around the world.

But the pendulum is begining to swing back hard.  Just track down someone who’s been managing money for +30 years, and you’ll realize just how far back it could swing.  They’ll tell you stories about the late 70’s when rotational programs at manufacturing companies were the hottest jobs around and money management was considered very boring.  MBAs wanted nothing to do with professional investing or money management.

The transition has certainly begun.  If you have skills regarding revenue generation and expense management, you’re pretty attractive to an employer right now.  People suddenly know about CDs and FDIC insurace.  The hardest jobs for MBAs to get this year will be at GE, Kraft, Amazon, 3M, Colgate, Unilever and the like.  Two years of investment banking experience doesn’t buy much any more, let alone a cush job at a fund and a shot at high six or even seven figures.

Money management as an industry will certainly survive.  The Bauposts, Bridgewaters, Berkshires, Kleiners, and TAs will still be managing lots of money in 2019.  But only time will tell how far back the tide will receed for the rest.

The most effective systems accomplish all three criteria above and are also able to link a user’s profile to the user’s actual identity. When this link is created, users are concerned about how their profiles are seen by others so they ask friends to help raise their score/count to respectable levels. Prime examples are friend/follower counts on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. If you use one of these sites, think about how many successful adds you needed before you stopped worrying about your friend/follower count. I think for me it was ~50 on each, after which I stopped caring at all. Along my way to 50 I dragged others in deeper by adding them and asking them to add me, and new users were brought into the system who then set out to raise their own scores…wash, rinse, repeat. The primary score these systems highlight within user profiles is the friend count, because increasing friend counts fuel growth and is the exact user behavior they are trying to elicit. Very powerful stuff.

The second tier of systems don’t (or are unable to) connect user profiles with actual user identities, but users that become engaged with these services become mindful of the scores attached to their profiles. Prime examples are Yahoo Answers’ “answers” and “best answers” counts and Yelp “reviews” and “first review” counts. I created profiles on these systems long ago but since my actual identity was not connected with my profiles, I felt no shame in having crappy profiles with low scores. I’ve never gotten engaged with these systems but if I ever do, I’ll likely try to improve these scores since they are attached to my profile, which again is the behavior these systems are trying to promote.

After these first two tiers of systems, the relative success of incentive systems trail off drastically. Systems that don’t have a social component can still award points to users for desired behavior, but there is little incentive to manage these scores upwards when no one else sees them. Systems that don’t highlight relevant scores within user profiles fall in the same bucket – if they’re not public and viewable, no one cares. Lastly, systems that award money or prizes instead of scores end up anchoring the desired behavior on the value of the prize. Consumer sites can’t afford to reward user behavior with more than nominal values over the long run, so users end up anchoring the value of their behavior on the nominal value of the reward. For this reason I’ve yet to find a widely successful incentive program utilized by a consumer website that was based on monetary rewards or physical prizes.

If you can think of any examples of consumer sites that effectively incentivize users differently I’d love to hear them. Post a comment!