JobThread blog

Announcing EasyPost -- reaching niche job boards just got easier

2007-04-09T12:32:00.000-05:00

We're proud to announce that we've just launched EasyPost -- which is also to say that we've relaunched JobThread. EasyPost is the best way to reach targeted, high quality candidates on niche sites via the JobThread network.

JobThread is quickly becoming the publisher's choice for online recruitment advertising solutions and we're tying all of these great publishers together into convenient audience packages for recruiters and hiring companies. For example, the technology package lets recruiters reach a dozen top niche tech sites as well as a host of targeted blog sites with one posting.

Within each EasyPost category, there are three audience reach options:

Test Reach (free)
Good Reach
Best Reach (Featured Posting on all sites)

So, there's always a free job posting option. But for those hard-to-fill positions, where you need high quality candidates, there are two premium reach options to choose from.

And if you're a publisher/blogger and would like to learn more about the JobThread network and getting a job board or widget for your site, please feel free to contact me at:
eric at jobthread.com

Here is a quick walk-through EasyPost:

1. Enter your job info:

2. Choose your audience target:

3. Select a Reach option (Test, Good or Best):

4. Ta da! Your job is posted and being sent out to the best audiences on the web.

Defamer Job Board for hollywood, entertainment jobs

2007-03-29T10:27:00.000-05:00

Defamer is the gossip rag covering the behind the scenes activities of "the producers, the agents, the PR flacks, the studio execs, and the screenwriters" that make Hollywood tick. Defamer reaches over 2 million readers who are 6x as likely to read Vanity Fair and 4x as likely to work in entertainment.

Given those demographics, we're happy to see that the Defamer Job Board has just launched. In Defamer's own words:

Introducing The Defamer Job Board: Your Soulless Climb Up The Hollywood Ladder Just Got A Little Easier

Because we realize that there are only so many staplers hurled from the hand of a displeased boss one's skull can successfully withstand before call-rolling motor functions are impaired, we're happy to introduce the Defamer Job Board, a service to help you trade in that old, abusive model for a newer, shinier, and somewhat less violence-prone superior. Listing open positions costs just $25 for 30 days, and employers are encouraged--nay, strongly encouraged--to e-mail jobshelp AT gawker DOT com to request coupon codes to help them get started on the process of hiring the person who will eventually ~~murder~~ replace them.

Lifehacker Job Board for programming and design jobs

2007-03-08T12:55:00.000-05:00

Lifehacker is a site that gives tips and tricks for managing information and time and has developed a huge following (over 2 million uniques a month) with the web savy. The Lifehacker job board is also linked with the Gizmodo job board and is a great way to reach their combined audience of over 6 million programmers, designers, business folks.

Their board is chock full of programming and design jobs.

More from Lifehacker:

Surfing Lifehacker instead of working because your job sucks? Trying desperately to fill a staff position with AutoHotkey scripts? Meet Lifehacker's new Job Board, where open positions for productive people abound, and employers can post a listing for the meager sum of $25 for 30 days - now that's cheaper than Craigslist! (In San Francisco, anyway. In NY, Craig's List is also $25, and free everywhere else. Sorry, Craig.)

If you post a job on Lifehacker's board, it will also appear on Gizmodo's Job Board, for instant access to both gearheads and productivity hounds. Employers, believe you me, Lifehacker readers are just about the smartest pool of candidates you can find. Searchers? Check out the Job board now, which is bustling with possibilities for your next career move as I type. — Gina Trapani

New York Software Industry Association Job Board

2007-03-06T11:43:00.000-05:00

The New York Software Industry Association (NYSIA) was founded in 1992 and has become the leading trade association for software, IT and web development companies in the NYC area. They represent about 500 member companies and their Job Board is a great way resource for the New York software community.

Gizmodo Job Board ("Geeks, Tech Editors, Publicists, and Circus Freaks For Hire")

2007-03-05T15:15:00.000-05:00

Gizmodo, the massively popular gadget guide, has launched the Gizmodo Job Board. I think they describe it best:

Brian here. Just saying hello. It's Monday. Suppose you're at your desk, thinking about how your boss is a jerk for making you work Sunday. Or, if you're a boss, thinking about that numbskull Tommy in the Engineering department. He has got to go. Well, I've got something you might be interested. Gizmodo's new Job board.

It's no secret that while the general public shuns gadget geekdom like we're lepers with phones and mp3 players falling off our persons, tech editors, publicists, and engineers, well, they read us. So, it makes sense to post a job to replace that idiot Tommy, or find a job to get away from idiot boss, on Gizmodo. (Gizmodo Job Boards: Geeks, Tech Editors, Publicists, and Circus Freaks For Hire)

Already a slew of postings...

PaidContent Job Board -- top talent for media companies

2007-02-22T11:12:00.000-05:00

PaidContent was founded by Rafat Ali and is the "go to" source for what's going on in the online media/publishing industry. The PaidContent Job Board runs like a who's who list of major media companies that are looking to hire top industry professionals.

Another bonus is that job listings are promoted very well throughout PaidContent as well as being sent out to their email subscription list each day.

Gawker Job Board for the NY media savvy

2007-02-20T13:13:00.000-05:00

Gawker is a NY-focused blog that covers "daily Manhattan media news and gossip" and has a pretty massive following. It's currently the 26th most popular blog according to Technorati.

The Gawker Job Board is quickly becoming a key source for advertising, PR, marketing, new media and publishing jobs in New York city.

More about Gawker from Gawker:

Gawker is Gawker Media's flagship title, a mix of pop culture and media gossip, updated up to two dozen times a day. Gawker is compulsory reading for New York editors and reporters, and often sets the agenda for the entertainment weeklies, gossip columns such as Page Six, and the soft sections of newspapers such as the New York Times.

“…the national go-to spot for keeping up with the rich and scandalous, the media elite and the pop-culture trends of the moment." [New York Times]

"Everyone who is anyone in chic Manhattan is reading gawker.com -- or should be." [New York Daily News]

As a bonus, there's apparently always a small chance that if you have an interesting/funny posting, they'll post about it on Gawker.

Crazily enough, super-fun ads may even end up here on Gawker. Why not? Seriously, some afternoons we just spend the day looking for apartments on Craigslist and searching online for better jobs. (Gawker wants you jobbing)

Marketing Pilgrim Job Board for SEO/SEM

2007-02-20T10:14:00.000-05:00

Andy Beal is a search engine marketing guru and editor of the Marketing Pilgrim blog. The Marketing Pilgrim Job Board is shaping up to be one of the great niche sites to find jobs and reach candidates in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) industry.

the year of Niche Job Board Networks

2007-01-26T10:58:00.000-05:00

I've always liked the jobs space.. well at least since 1999 when I first got into it. And so it's great to see the onslaught of companies that are trying to provide better products and services these past few years (JobThread included). At the end of the day, jobs are a basic necessity and have a huge impact on quality of life. Better jobs, better lives, more growth.. a better world. (Yes, it's true, I am that sappy.)

Last year, I said that it was the Year of Little Job Boards. And it was and this year is starting out that way, too. More and more little job boards. Most of the online jobs space is online recruitment advertising.. and that's one of the things that the web can do well.. provide targeted advertising. And that seems to be the best direction for online recruitment right now, helping companies reach the people they need to hire. Reach those people where they live: online.

So, this year looks to be the year the niche job board networks really take off. By that I mean, having niche sites, publishers, blogs, organizations band together into networks to combine and collectively leverage their audience reach. One example of that is (beware: plug coming) the Open Source Technology Group (OSTG), who has combined job boards for Slashdot, Linux.com, IT Managers Journal, Freshmeat and Newsforge so that they are all linked together and leverage the 9 million programmers and IT folks that visit their sites. (JobThread powers this network.)

Joel on Software -- "Great software jobs, great people"

2006-09-05T16:48:00.000-05:00

Joel Spolsky has added a job board to JoelOnSoftware. It is certain to be a great way to reach programmers, developers, admins and testers. There's also a management category and Joel's site is likely read by a good number of biz / tech managers / senior managers. We're excited to see Joel launch a job board as his site has so far stayed away from running ads and this is a good sign that Joel sees jobs as different from general advertising and more of a community generated classified service. Here's a bit from Joel on his new board:

Now, for some details. In order to keep the quality of the listings high this is not going to be a free job listing board. Listings cost $350.
...

Now, about the rule we made that you have to post the company name. A lot of recruiters are working on a contingency basis. They don't get paid unless they fill an opening. These recruiters generally don't want to post a company name, because then applicants could go straight to the employer and the recruiter would be cut out of their commission. That's why you see so many job ads in traditional places like classifieds that are totally vague about the specific company where you'd be working.

That, unfortunately, is not going to work for us. Every good software developer I know has a choice of where to work. They don't want to work for a "TOP INVESTMENT BANK". Some investment banks are really nice places to work. Others are sweatshops. Some are ethical. Many are ethically challenged. Some require suits. Others are business casual. That's why we want to know the name of the company that's hiring, and unfortunately that means that recruiters who don't want to reveal the company name are really barking up the wrong tree. Try Craigslist, shugah.

The design is simple and straight-forward and he mentions on his blog that more features are to come.

Note: This site is not powered by JobThread.

Coroflot for creative professionals

2006-08-29T13:35:00.000-05:00

This site was pointed out to me today and I thought, wow, very cool. Coroflot is a job board (not powered by JobThread) for creative folks where the strongest categories are industrial design, interaction design and graphic design. Coroflot is from the folks at core77 which is a blog/community about industrial design stuff. Here's a snippet from their About Us page:

Coroflot is a career and community site for creative professionals. Coroflot hosts individual creative portfolios and a database of job and project openings. The thriving community that visits the site daily represents a cross-section of the global design industry-working designers, design managers, internal and external hiring professionals, business managers of design firms, marketing and product management professionals, students, and educators.

The site covers cross-discipline design, with Industrial Design, Interaction Design and Graphic Design the three most popular categories. The audience returns daily to monitor the ever changing array of content, and uses a variety of tools and resources found at the site to help them in their careers.

Note: This site is not powered by JobThread.

TechGigger Job Board -- jobs at VC backed companies

2006-08-24T12:22:00.000-05:00

tech:gigger (created as an offshoot of the alarm:clock blog that covers new tech ventures) has launched a new tech:gigger Job Board. The job board is entirely focused on being a source to find jobs at venture backed companies. At the moment, it looks like they have the strongest focus of their listings for management positions, design and programming jobs.

For companies, alarm:clock has substantial traffic and reaches a great audience if you have a job listing for a VC backed company.

NextNY job board for NY tech/biz/design crowd

2006-08-17T11:18:00.000-05:00

NextNY is a small professional group of a few hundred (and growing) of NY's up-and-coming tech, business, design folks. Or as the mission is put on the About NextNY page:

nextNY is a fun way to connect both socially and professionally with young people who have a stake in the future of tech and new media in New York City.

So, if you're in the NY area and fit that description, I'd encourage you to join. It's a great group and have organized some good events (such as a Pitch Camp, an open house at Google, a Startup 101 with some great entrepreneurs and investors and social events like dodgeball). They launched a nextNY job board recently (ok, powered by JobThread, but we'll list other good boards here as well, promise) and it's a great way to reach top talent for mostly early to mid-level positions in New York city.

Little Job Boards

2006-08-16T18:24:00.000-05:00

This year is probably going to be the year of Little Job Boards or at least the year that Little Job Boards start to sprout up on niche sites around the Web.

While it's true that there are a lot of job boards out there (anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 or more depending on where the numbers come from), the bulk of those have typically been a pure play job board (like Monster.com) or a section of an online newspaper site
(like nytimes.com).

The new thing this year is that niche sites (whether a publisher, blog or organization) are beginning to realize that they have a highly valuable audience/community that visits their site everyday or a few times a week. And it is particularly these more focused, targetted, high quality people that companies and recruiters are trying to reach and hire.

One of the main reasons that niche sites have such a great opportunity is that (not to beat a dead horse but) while the big three job boards have 70% of the $2 billion online recruitment ad market, recruiters and companies have been fairly unhappy with their job posting experience. As a typical posting on a site like Monster can result in a large number of unqualified responses. Another point is that while jobseekers that visit major job boards are typically "active" seekers, the ones visiting an industry blog, niche site, etc are not really looking for a job -- and of course, tend to be exactly the type of person that companies are trying to reach.

Anyway, we're of course excited about this trend and will begin to point out or profile some of the interesting new boards that pop up (hopefully they will increasingly be ones powered by JobThread Groups -- which is our free, turnkey job board product).

A couple of the more successful boards that have launched recently in the tech, design area are: 37signals' Job Board and TechCrunch's CrunchBoard.

I remember when I was at HotJobs in 1999, we were already seeing the fear of print newspapers coming true: online job boards were eating their lunch. When wondering about who would eat the lunch of the big job boards the site I thought of as the most dangerous competitor was Craigslist because of its free model and geographically-focused design and word-of-mouth only marketing and niche sites like Dice.com. Of course, I still think that Craigslist will begin to suffer from the same problems that the bigger boards have in time.. but there's a good amount of time for them to worry about that.

Where I'm going is that it certainly seems that a looming threat for online job boards will be very niche content or community driven sites (such as niche publishers, blogs, organizations, professional groups, etc). I don't think that Monster et al will have to worry about losing their market to niche sites, but I can realistically see the 70% market share they have now going down fairly predictably over the next several years -- while at the same time, the total dollars going online will be steadily going up.

Hmm.. It's been a while since I've posted here, and I've said a few times that I'll try to keep things more regular... So, we'll just have to see. (Also, I don't think future posts will be this long or rambling:)

John Sumser asks about referrals

2006-04-20T14:23:00.000-05:00

John posted a bunch of questions about referrals yesterday and asked the companies in this area to respond.

Q: Is a product that offers a suite of tools a good idea? (I rephrased this one)
I'd have to agree with Jason Goldberg at Jobster that there's not much need for a distinction there. At the end of the day, if a single product can help a recruiter reach quality candidates then everyone's happy.

Q: Do referrals negatively or postively impact diversity programs?
That's a good question. I don't have any stats on it, and would have to give a non-response that it probably depends a lot on the type of company, the industry, the location...

Q: On a related note, do referral programs really get you "more of the same"?
I think this is more the central issue. If you take "more of the same" to mean:

If the referrer is a high quality, A-player type person, will referrals from that person deliver more high quality candidates?

Here, the answer is a resounding yes. Referrals have been shown to deliver better employees (more productive, fired less often, remain employed longer).
(Relating back to the question about diversity) If the referrer is of a certain demographic (age, ethnicity, etc.), will referrals from that person deliver candidates with the same demographic?

Again, I don't have any stats. But, while I do believe that diversity has a highly positive impact on organizations, I think the key hiring metric is the quality of the new employee and their fit with the organization.

Q: Is there a limit to the extension of the referral network? (In other words, do you at some point, reach a set of diminishing returns?)
Yes. In practice, most referrals tend to be only one or two degrees away. On JobThread, the huge majority of referrals are just one or two degrees.

Q: What is the geographical or industrial overlap between competitor referral groups?
Hmm. I'm not quite sure what this one means... Do you mean, say, the New York Linux Users group vs the Unigroup of New York (which is a New York unix users group)? If that's the question, then I suppose it doesn't matter if there's any overlap as that just increases the chance of reaching that potential candidate.

Q: Are referral processes fundamentally geographical? Do they evolve along professional lines or other affiliations?
I'd say that referrals in practice are fundamentally geographical. Which is to say that if I know of a good job opening in New York, I wouldn't refer a friend of mine in California (unless I knew he was looking to move to NY or would consider it). I also would pass the info on to him unless I thought he was interested in a new role or thought that he might know someone in NY that is a good fit. (Not entirely sure if that was the question.)

As for how they evolve... I think who you know develops along many lines: professional, where you went to school, activities, friends, etc.

Q: Are there really "super connected" referrers?
I tend to think of "recruiter" here ;>

I'm guessing that's not what you mean though as that's part of their job and get paid for their expertise. From personal experience, I do know people that simply know a lot of people and are happy to help make referrals / introductions. It's just good karma and good business in my opinion.

Q: What are the things that supplement and/or turbocharge the referral process?
I think the key is driving awareness. This is making sure that the people you know that may be interested in a job or may know of someone to refer, know that you're looking and what you're looking for.

Pretty much every company I worked at has had an employee referral program (Merrill Lynch, HotJobs, Bernard Hodes, New York Times). And at each company, pretty much no one really knew what jobs were open or even what the referral reward was.

And for recruiters, most of the recruiters using JobThread have thousands of contacts in their contact managers (sometimes categorized into different groups). But, it's impossible to call everyone.

So, email campaigns are one very good way to keep people aware. Recruiters use JobThread to send email campaigns (as it doesn't make much sense to try to create and send an email newsletter with open jobs using Outlook to thousands of people) as well as build up their subscriber base via their JobThread site. We have seen this to be a highly effective method to help drive referrals.

Referral rewards also help. It's likely not going to be the key motivation for anyone to spread the word, but it's a nice thing to do. (Also, we have seen that jobs with a referral reward get passed on twice as often as jobs without.)

Q: Can a referral system be built on a blog (or other publication) audience?
Absolutely. This is an emerging area and a great opportunity for recruiters to reach high quality candidates via niche media and/or groups.

Q: Is there enough connections between members of an audience to consider them the foundation of a referral program?
I think it depends on the group, organization, blog/media that is the audience. For example, the Wall St Journal's audience has a very good demographic and covers a good range of industries and job types. Compare that to the New York Linux users group. I think the smaller the group, the more connected they will be to each other and the more effective it will be in generating leads/referrals.

Q: Does a purchase audience (using job ads or outright click acquisition) improve or corrupt the value of a referral system?
My guess is that it really depends on how well the ads are targetted. I think a good example is comparing the result of a job posting on Monster vs a posting to the New York Linux Users group (NYLUG) jobs page. If you're looking for a programmer in NYC, Monster will likely deliver tons of unqualified applicants and will probably deliver a few very good ones.

I think if you can purchase a targetted audience, it was probably a good purchase.

Q: What are the ten things that are most likely to improve referral program results?
Hmm. Ten is a lot, esp considering how long this post is.

How about three:

Increase awareness through email campaigns
Get your own web destination where you can build your own network of subscribers to your jobs
Offer a referral reward (it's just good karma and good business)

Q: Is money only useful during an employment peak (like today's environment) or should it be a component of the overall offering?
Again, I think it's good karma and good business to offer a reward.

Let me take a moment to thank John Sumser of Electronic Recruiting News for starting this discussion.

-eric

Wondering about edgeio

2006-02-28T17:20:00.000-05:00

There's been a huge amount of buzz about edgeio and I've been thinking about it since first hearing about it on Techcrunch. It does seem to be the start of something cool, and probably we'll give our users the ability to tag their jobs to show up there (sometime soon).

Over at Techdirt, a question was posed (which is something that has been asked in different ways by a few people I know):

What problem do blog classifieds solve?

I wrote a comment to that post which can be summarized as... at least in the jobs area there is a deep need that is not being met by the big job boards, but it doesn't seem that edgeio's first iteration is really addressing it either.

What it does have though, is a lot of traffic and time. It's only been out publicly for a day or two and so I do think (hope) that we'll see interesting developments from them in the coming weeks and months.

First NY Tech Meetup

2006-02-10T15:25:00.000-05:00

We went to our first NY Tech Meetup a few days ago and had the chance to present JobThread to a great crowd. It was also interesting as Indeed was there and we were to present right after them. We already send our jobs to Indeed and they've delivered great search results to our users' sites and job postings, so it was a very easy transition.

It was also our first presentation in front of an audience of more than just a few people... and, well, I'm not a great public speaker, so there were a bit of first time jitters there. In the end the "gong show, show-and-tell" format saved us as people were able to just jump in with questions and I didn't have to worry about making a presentation as much.

Probably the most memorable presentation was given by one of the engineers at Meetup for a project called: DoubleFeature Finder, which is described as a way to: "Find local showtimes scheduled back-to-back and spend the entire day at the movies!" The tagline somewhat sums up the tongue-in-cheek quality of the site:

"Never sneak into movies!"

Also, it was cool to meet Joel Spolsky... actually, we never really met, though he did give a presentation about Copilot right after us and showed a clip from a video documenting the summer internship program that built it.

We did meet one of the guys behind SuprGlu though, which is a very nifty site.

We'll most likely keep going to the NY Tech Meetups, so if you're in NY and looking for an interesting group, I'd give it a try.

Kosmix - Tagging the web

2006-01-27T14:02:00.000-05:00

Some interesting things in search today... Joel Cheesman spotted a new look that Google has been testing out:

Personally, I like it. It looks cleaner to me, and I don't mind the navigation on the left. Another thing to note, with the increase in real estate on the left, as opposed to the current placement above the search box, Google will be able to integrate more vertical search options, such as jobs, much easier. (see Joel's post)

But, something else new and cool has been spotted by Matt Marshall called Kosmix -- which is a new search engine that tries to organize results by category -- from Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, two of the co-founders at Junglee (Junglee was acquired by Amazon and, according to the post, they knew Sergey Brin and Larry Page at Stanford and actually tried to acquire Google a couple of times):

To organize its results, Kosmix doesn't use pagerank -- or popularity, based on the number links to a page. Kosmix decided pagerank is inefficient when it comes to categories. "There is no affinity to topic, when you are ranking by raw popularity," says Harinarayan.
Instead, Kosmix looks at what pages that link to other pages are saying -- to take a bigger stab at judging the meaning or subject of the page. If the linking page is saying something similar to the page it links to, you can begin getting at its meaning, or at least muster up enough information to categorize it by topic. Harinarayan calls it "category rank." Kosmix is essentially tagging pages with categories. "Auto-tagging the Web," as Harinarayan puts it.
Kosmix has started with a health search, but will soon roll out travel and politics search, and will follow with a rolling thunder of scores of other types of searches, Harinarayan says. (see full post)

Sounds like they might be able to do some interesting things in the jobs space...

I just did a couple of searches on Kosmix and it is pretty cool.

Quote Junkie

2006-01-27T00:12:00.000-05:00

I came across this amusing bit on the Alexa site by Geoffrey Mack:

JANUARY 24, 2006 - Posted By Geoffrey Mack

A lifetime ago I used to work at Charles Schwab in tech support for their revolutionary online trading program the Equalizer (revolutionary... see, I still speak the language of the kool-aid drinkers.) Anyway, Schwab had this group of users that we referred to as "quote junkies." The junkies would call all hours of the day getting stock quotes, jamming up the lines and probably drinking way too much caffeine. They had to have their quotes... now! Schwab actually closed some accounts and eventually put all customers on quote quotas. When a QJ exceeded his quota it was cold turkey time. No quotes. A bunch of customers went absolutely bonkers and began calling any Schwab number they could find to beg, borrow, bribe or steal a quote. Sometimes it felt like I was running a methadone clinic.

Ok, I'll admit it. I'm a quote junkie... Yes, I'm one of those folks that check site stats, usage and other little numerical bits to monitor how things are going. I'm getting better though.

Web 2.0? (Good things are happening)

2006-01-24T10:53:00.000-05:00

Well, I went to a NYSIA event yesterday called "Web 2.0: Wave of the future." It was a panel with Dennis Crowley (Founder, dodgeball.com), Joshua Schachter (founder, del.icio.us), Fred Wilson (Partner, Union Square Ventures), Bob Wyman, (co-founder, PubSub). I'd never been to a NYSIA event before and was somewhat enticed by the title (although we--Jason and I--really hate the "Web 2.0" term... I think Fred Wilson summed it up fairly well by saying something along the lines of: It's sad... but it's where we are) and the chance to meet some other entrepreneurs in NYC.

In the end, while there were some funny bits and entertaining exchanges... I'm not sure what really came out of it. One thing that Joshua Schachter said stuck in my mind. He was responding to a question about dealing with people misbehaving on del.icio.us by creating fake tags, etc... and he said that there are always people trying to do some type of "attention theft"... which is really just advertising in a fairly malicious way. And that is both true and sad. Fred Wilson seemed to have some strong opinions on punishment and even retribution which would probably make for a more entertaining panel.

Most people seemed to agree that there's been somewhat of an explosion of new web companies helping smaller groups of people (or communities) and making smaller amounts of money and that this is all good.

So, I guess I walked away with the hazy idea that good things are happening.

JobCentral traffic spike

2006-01-19T10:58:00.000-05:00

Wow, Joel notes the traffic spike (via Alexa) that JobCentral got from the erroneous NYT article...

I guess PR does go a long way...

Customer Service needs a better name

2006-01-18T23:33:00.000-05:00

I've been doing a lot of customer service lately... well, that's not quite right. The amount of time spent on customer service has been going up steadily day by day. When we launched the new site about a month and a half ago, there were no requests for help for a while. It was a mysterious, magical time when folks just found out about JobThread, signed up and started using it.

Now, I guess as the user base grows, people occasionally wonder why something doesn't work or why it doesn't work better or why we don't have a certain something or... well, basically our users ask and we try to answer and make things better. This is all fairly normal stuff in a product cycle, but for some reason it came to me that I should stand up and preach to the choir. Maybe that's not the right metaphor...

In a way customer service is like HR. Both are critical functions that really drive a business: one is a bit like the senses and the other is a bit like the heart or the brain matter. But both suffer from really bad PR -- generally speaking, both groups are pretty much looked down upon or ignored or given minimal resources, etc.

Anyway, it came to me that customer service needs a new name, a better name. Probably HR, too. If anyone has a suggestion, please send it in. Otherwise, we'll be left to our own devices.

Propaganda that's what we need. hmm. ok.

Wireless in NYC subways!

2006-01-18T23:28:00.000-05:00

I didn't know about this before, but it sounds like we'll soon have wireless in NYC subways:

After five months of delay, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority on Wednesday closed the bidding process for proposals to build a wireless network in the system's 277 subway stations.

Doesn't mention if it will be free... (we really like free), but it's one of those unexpected things that make you feel good.

Spotrunner: Adwords for TV

2006-01-11T15:13:00.000-05:00

Just saw this on SiliconBeat...

Spotrunner, a start-up that comes out of its closed beta today, is... a unique self-serve, web-based ad-buying system for TV. Think AdWords, but for TV ads.

It looks pretty nifty... Wonder when google will buy it.

David Galbraith's Fantasy things to say to a VC

2006-01-09T13:31:00.000-05:00

So, Guy Kawasaki posted The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs (of which he actually lists 11) yesterday (following up on his Top Ten Lies of Venture Capitalists):

Here are a couple snippets that I enjoyed:

5. "No one is doing what we're doing." This is a bummer of a lie because there are only two logical conclusions. First, no one else is doing this because there is no market for it. Second, the entrepreneur is so clueless that he can't even use Google to figure out he has competition. Suffice it to say that the lack of a market and cluelessness is not conducive to securing an investment. As a rule of thumb, if you have a good idea, five companies are going the same thing. If you have a great idea, fifteen companies are doing the same thing.

6. "No one can do what we're doing." If there's anything worse than the lack of a market and cluelessness, it's arrogance. No one else can do this until the first company does it, and ten others spring up in the next ninety days. Let's see, no one else ran a sub four-minute mile after Roger Bannister. (It took only a month before John Landy did). The world is a big place. There are lots of smart people in it. Entrepreneurs are kidding themselves if they think they have any kind of monopoly on knowledge. And, sure as I'm a Macintosh user, on the same day that an entrepreneur tells this lie, the venture capitalist will have met with another company that's doing the same thing.

David Galbraith listed his Top 5 fantasy replies to questions in a presentation to a VC:

Now that its possible to bootstrap a modest web service, I fantasize about really telling the truth to VC's.

Top 5 fantasy replies to questions in a presentation to a VC:

Q. How big is your market?

A. $0

[The current market size is $0 because I haven't been doing any paid work because I have been building this product for a marketplace of 1 - me. I built it because I really want this and believe in it.]

Q. What is your burn rate 6 months from now to fund growth?

A. No real growth will be apparent 6 months from now.

[We don't really need that much money the burn rate won't be that much, I'll be doing things on the cheap since I am as tight as a Camel's ass in a sandstorm and if the growth is exponential it'll likely look flat for 6 months.]

Q. Do you suffer from founderitus - i.e. would you step aside for more seasoned management?

A. Yes and No - but Yes. Steve Jobs is just super duper.

[I suffer from founderitus in spades, the reason I start companies is that I have a problem with authority. Steve Jobs is my hero not Sculley. However, I'll be moving to take a 'founder' role at roughly the speed of light, if I'm out of my depth.]

Q. Pages 2-20 of your business plan, after the bullet point introduction read 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy', over and over again, can you pass me an uncorrupted copy?

A. I don't want to do a business plan.

[I'm going to write the business plan after the business becomes clear and we have adapted to it in a Darwinian fashion - it'll make for a much better read. I don't think you can truly design things in advance, I don't believe in crap like Intelligent Design.]

Q. Here is our term sheet, its pretty standard, I think you'll agree?

A. I'd never sign that.

[Unless you remove the conditions on the pref shares I won;t be signing just so that I can tell people 'we have a term sheet' - I would rather have a one in ten chance of making $1M than a cats chance in hell of $100M, my risk isn't spread across a portfolio, and if it isn't going to be a billion dollar company I will still be trying to make it worth something.