There are soooo many instances where I want results from only within the last week or the last year. In particular, any time I have a programming question, I want an answer within the last year…not something similar from 2001 that doesn’t apply to today’s web. A solution that worked on PHP 4 a few years back, might not be the best/safest solution for a site running PHP 5 in 2009.

When I installed Ubuntu 9.10 a few weeks ago just after it had been released, I had an issue with Compiz Fusion graphics and only wanted answers from within the previous week (no sense in looking at resolutions from a previous version of Ubuntu). I also filtered by forums and by blogs to see what other type of results I could get. The most helpful results came from forums within the past week, which of course makes sense.

Previously I would have had no way of getting to those answers this quickly (or really at all). Thank you Google.

When I guest lectured at James Madison a few weeks back I was asked a couple of questions from students interested in learning how to program. I get those questions in various forms all the time. I decided to write a post about how I’d recommend going from nothing to programming a real live web site that can make you money. Well, that “post” became quite lengthy and I decided to start a new section on the blog. You’ll notice an “Essays” tab on the top nav now. I’ll probably put two types of posts in that section – how-to type of guides like this one that I’ll continuously update and maintain over time, and generic essays about entrepreneurship topics that have nothing to do with my current happenings. Essentially, any post that I plan on keeping relevant at all times will now become an “essay”.

The first such essay is Web Design & Development for Business. The table of contents is as follows:

• Who Should Read This?
• Getting Started – Just a Little Theory
  • Which Languages Should I Learn?
  • Wait…Why PHP & MySQL?
• How Much Should I Learn?
• How Long Will It Take?
• What You Need To Get Started
  • Software
  • Hosting and Domains
• The Programming Languages
  • HTML, XHTML, & CSS
  • Javascript
  • PHP & MySQL
  • AJAX
• Your First Commercial Site
• What’s Next?
• Feedback

Let me know what you guys think. Is there anything that you think I should add? Do you think this will be helpful for aspiring young entrepreneurs? Too long? Too short?

I think the next one I’ll tackle will be a re-write of the SEO/Web Marketing e-Book available for download on Faceup-Sites. That’s a bit out of date. Plus I’d like to open it up for everyone to read without a download. Then I can just take that entire site down and redirect it all to the article.

So you end up being on call 24 x 7 x 365.

This used to stress me out.  I think it stresses a lot of people who are used to working a corporate job.  It’s rare at large companies that problems exist that no one else can solve.  But that happens all the time in a small business.  It’s impractical to have everyone trained on everything that goes on in the company.  One way or another, you’ll probably have some unique knowledge that others don’t.

Today was supposed to be an off-day from the warehouse for me, but at 9 AM I got a call from Greg telling me that FedEx updated their Ship Manager software and something was preventing us from being able to process our orders.  We import a batch file from our system, print all the shipping labels for the day, and then export back out the tracking numbers to the system.  Nothing was working.

So I dropped what I was doing, hopped in the car, and a few hours later was able to get everything up and running.  All of our orders were able to ship out for the day.  No customers were affected.  It could have been much worse.

It was frustrating, it wasn’t something I had anticipated or hoped would happen today, but once it did it didn’t really bother me.  It’s part of the deal.  If you want to run a business and have all of the freedom and benefits when things go great, you’ve got to accept the fact that there are going to be a bunch of mini-crisis that occur on a semi-regular basis.  When the problems are critical to your business – like printing shipping labels or your server mysteriously displaying an error on New Years Eve – you have to drop what you’re doing and solve the problem.  No matter where you are or what you’re doing.

Because, if you don’t, no one else will.

After a couple of awesome presentations at Skidmore College, I was a bit bummed to hear that Professor Wales, my good friend and teacher of the class, had accepted a position at James Madison University in Virginia.  I had enjoyed going in to speak both semesters and thought that the two of us had a ton of future potential working together to grow young entrepreneurship in upstate New York.  Of course, I also understood that it was a great career move for him and that it didn’t signify the end of our potential collaboration.  JMU is a great school and he has a ton of great resources at his disposal. He originally asked if he could video Skype me in to guest lecture, but after some thought I decided that if I was going to do it I’d rather do it in person.  My girlfriend and I decided to turn the trip into a long weekend in Washington, DC.

This past Friday morning I gave guest lectures to both of Professor Wales’ Entrepreneurship classes.  Each talk lasted for 50 minutes and had about 25 students in attendance. He’s done a great job of improving the class each iteration.  This semester student groups are required to start a business that turns a profit of $200 by the end of the semester.  Extra points are awarded for eco-friendly projects.  You can read about all of the projects over on Prof. Wales’ blog.

As has been the case in the past, the Q&A portion of the lecture has been the best part.  I tried to tighten up my actual presentation, but next time I think I’ll shorten it a bit more.  20 minutes of presentation and 30 minutes of Q&A would probably work best.  This time it was closer to 30/20 the other way.  My goal for the presentation itself is to tell enough of my story to get them interested enough in asking me questions.  Rather than guess what they want to know, I’d rather answer it directly.

I like to do a sort of “guided” Q&A – my last slide has about 20 topics related to young entrepreneurship that they can ask me about.  It works well because it lets them know that I’m willing to answer just about anything.  The slide is below.  I’ve revised it each time based upon questions from the previous group.

Once we get rolling on the Q&A I generally tend to get questions about anything and everything, which is when I think both sides really are enjoying it the most.  I think it’s a great presentation strategy.  I sort of stumbled upon it because originally there were too many topics and I couldn’t decide what to cover and what not to.  Now that I’ve used it a few times I’m going to work it in to every presentation I do from here on out.

I was just so impressed with everything at JMU.  They were nice enough to pay for my hotel and dinner, although it was completely unnecessary.  The faculty that I met were just genuinely nice people.  I can see why Bill took the job. The town was a great college town.  And of course, the students were fantastic.  For being early on Friday morning, I was surprised how attentive they were and genuinely interested in what I had to say.  It’s hard to get up in front of a room of people you’ve never met before.  Seeing people really listening to what I was saying eased my nerves a ton. A handful of students even came up after class to discuss various things with me, which makes me feel like I didn’t totally bore them.  Everyone at JMU made me feel right at home.

Every time I get back from doing these types of things I’m all fired up. There are so many young passionate students out there that can start great businesses and change the world.  Not just in Silicon Valley, but at all the great institutions around the country (and the world for that matter).  In a lot of cases, I feel like they just need someone like Prof. Wales to come along and show them how to get started.  By taking a class like this they’re able to get a real taste of entrepreneurship and decide if it’s for them.  I wish every talented student had the same chance.   Hopefully as time goes on, that’s something I can help facilitate.

Thanks to everyone at JMU for the awesome experience.  I look forward to coming back soon!

In my continuing efforts to prepare for the holidays, I’ve spent the last few weeks reviewing and improving our product listings in our Amazon Seller Central account.  We sell on Amazon under the Tastefully Driven name. We list almost everything that’s up on the TD website, but the majority of what we actually sell is either fitness equipment or detailing supplies.

I automated a few of the mundane tasks, added new products (which involved building a bridge to easily migrate products from DI to TD and then to Amazon), and reviewed pricing.  There’s one other thing I’m really excited about that will make a huge difference, but it’s not quite ready to roll yet so I’ll refrain from hyping it up.

The more time I spend working within their marketplace, the more I realize that the system is absolutely brilliant…for them. We pay $39.99/month plus 15% of each sale.  They give us access to selling on the largest online shopping site.  It sounds simple, and seems like an equal trade-off.  But what Amazon does – and I can hardly blame them – is use the seller program to conduct market research on a massive scale, and then uses that data to obtain an even bigger advantage as a marketplace.

Let me explain.

Amazon.com has basically everything for sale.  If you can buy it online, there’s a good chance it’s for sale on Amazon, but not necessarily sold by Amazon. There are thousands of sellers like us that list their products for sale, products that Amazon does not stock or sell.  We make up the “long tail” of products in their marketplace. 

Most items are for sale by multiple sellers, all competing for every sale.  Amazon let’s us play a game of limbo with our competitors to see who can afford to lower their prices more.  When you factor in the 15% fee, we’re barely making money on those listings.  We do it because of the volume – we can steal sales directly from our competitors, gain access to new customers who buy our products, and get bigger discounts from our suppliers.

Eventually though, if the competition gets high and the sales volume becomes high, Amazon notices.

From my experiences, they do one of two things when they notice:

1. They stock the product. They offer Amazon Prime and Free Super Saver Shipping, and the total cost to the customer (product + shipping) is impossible to compete with.  Amazon gets all of the sales. Tough shit. Game over.
2. They harass the crap out of you to let them fulfill your orders with their FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) program. I’ve been contacted numerous times by several different reps trying to get us to let them fulfill our products.  They are persistent.  I generally say “thanks but no thanks” and they say “can we schedule a phone call for tomorrow?” or “how about sending us just one pallet of one item?” (the one item they list is inevitably always one of our best sellers).  To which I respond, “no thanks, I’ll contact you if I’m interested”.  And then a month later I’ll get contacted by a new rep.  Rinse and repeat.

Think about this from their perspective.  Why risk stocking a new product?  Why try to pick which model or which brand will sell best? Just let other online retailers pay you to list  all of the products on your site. Collect data on everything.  If the numbers look good, swoop in and start selling the product.  Use your size to get volume discounts on the product, warehouse space, and on shipping.  Take all of the sales away from the seller. If not, let the retailer continue to pay you for a sale here and there.  They actually get sellers to pay them to do their market research.  The data couldn’t be more perfect – it’s in their own marketplace!   It’s not just free data, we pay them the money for our sale and also give them the data.  I wonder which they value more?

So basically, the moral of the story is that Amazon always wins.  Sellers never really quite win, but also can’t afford not to participate on Amazon’s terms.

It’s damn near the most brilliant business model I’ve ever seen.  Can’t fault them for that.

Over the past few months I’ve begun working on our next web venture.  I’m really excited about it.  My partners are too, although the development hasn’t reached a point yet where everyone else is involved.  I’m not sure when it will be complete, probably sometime in mid 2010.  When it gets closer I’ll delve into details a bit.

Because we’re really busy gearing up for the holidays, I don’t have very much time to work on it.  I’ve been trying to keep my Tuesday nights free to work on it for a few hours, and most of the time I’ve been able to do so.  Otherwise it’s been an hour here or an hour there, mostly on the weekends.  I’ve probably averaged 4 hours per week for the past few months.  For arguments sake, let’s say I’ve worked 40 hours on it so far.

What can someone get done in 40 hours of work?  A lot.  A real lot.  A lot more than I thought I would.  If you told me when I was starting that I’d only have 4 hours per week, I might not have started because I wouldn’t have thought it to be enough time.  I was shooting for 5 – 10 hours each week.

My goal was a working demo to show my partners by the end of the year, and I’m well on my way to getting there despite the fact that I’m working less than half of the hours I thought I’d need.  At this point, I’m pretty good at estimating my development hours.  I almost never finish twice as fast as I thought I would.  Then again, I work on most of my projects straight through from start to finish.  I don’t break them up into little chunks.

I’ve been thinking lately:  what is the main advantage of breaking up the project into these tiny little 1 – 2 hour work windows?

• My mind is subconsciously thinking about the project in the background.  When I’m working, when I’m sleeping, when I’m relaxing, when I’m at the gym.  Ideas come to me at all sorts of times.  By having gaps of a few days between working on it, I allow my brain an adequate amount of time to process all of information from my previous session and begin to tackle the main issues for the next session.  If I was working nonstop through the project that wouldn’t happen.  Tom Kelly of IDEO talks about this during his Stanford lecture.  He claims that background thinking is better at problem solving than our cognitive problem solving skills.
• I talk about the project to my partners and to a few close business friends.  In turn, they’re always thinking about it and mentioning ideas to me.
• When I read all of my business/tech/web2.0 feeds in my Google Reader, I’m constantly thinking about how this new technology or that new API could be applied to the project.
• Most importantly, when I do get to work, I’m super motivated to make the most out of my hour or two.  I realize that if I’m lazy I won’t have another shot to work on it for another few days or maybe even a week.

Granted, while I’m starting to think that my per-hour productivity may be higher when I’m working on side projects, it’s not necessarily the desired way to develop anything. It has the really really big downside of taking more time.

But it works really well if you run a business with a core that takes up most of your time, whether it’s a client business like web design or SEO, or an e-commerce business like us.  This also works really well if you work a regular 9-5 type of job and only have a few nights per week to work on something.  You still have enough time to make it worth your while.  I know a lot of people who have profitable side businesses that started out with just a few hours of work per week.

But when I was contacted by a representative of Gary Vaynerchuk I had to think long and hard.  For those of you who don’t know who Gary is, he has quite a bio.  He took his family online wine business, Wine Library, from approximately $3 million in sales to $60 million.  Then he launched Wine Library TV, the business exploded, and has become an internet celebrity.  He has like a million followers on Twitter…literally. If you have the time to watch it, the keynote he gave at Big Omaha 2009 was awesome.

His new book Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion comes out today.  And while I would like to read and review the book, the realist in me knows that right now I have about 15 minutes every night to read and it’ll probably take me a while to get to the book.  After some thought, I decided to ask the publicist if he’d put together a video (he’s a video nut) specifically for this blog and the people who read it.  He’s a very successful young entrepreneur.  I knew I’d learn a lot more from having him answer some specific questions. And I thought you guys would get more out of it than just a typical book review.

He agreed.  Below are his answers to a few of my questions.  I asked a ton of questions, many of which aren’t included in the video due to Gary’s understandable time constraints.  In  particular, I asked him some in depth questions about chargebacks and his business, which he didn’t answer because it probably would have taken an hour. Enjoy!

One of my favorite parts about Food, Inc was at the end of the movie, after revealing just how bad things are, they give you specific steps that you can do to take action.  The list is up on the website.  I love the fact that they encouraged action.  How many documentaries, heck how many people in general, just whine and complain but don’t ever suggest a better alternative?

I do a pretty good job following those rules, but the ones that always get me are #6 & #7 – “Buy organic or sustainable food with little or no pesticides”  and “Protect family farms; visit your local farmer’s market”.  I actually do buy quite a bit of organic food.  My girlfriend and I shop farmers markets.  But, that stuff is expensive.  Really expensive.  So we pick and choose what we buy.  It’s important to me, but not so important to me that I sacrifice other things financially.  So in reality, I only somewhat value organic food and local farms.

Which brings me to my point.  Every day we vote with our actions.  We vote with the time we spend.  We vote with the money we spend.  That’s what’s important to us.

One of my favorite blog posts ever was Adam Gilbert’s post How to tell what someone really cares about (How to tell if someone is full of shit, Part Deuce):

A lot of people always talk about what they want to do, what they want to accomplish, what they meant to do, their intentions, how they want to change the world and on and on and on. It seems as though everyone has intentions of doing big things. Clearly, sadly and unfortunately, that’s not the case. Most people are talkers, rather than doers. Let’s face it. It’s a lot easier to talk than do.

In a world where people are moving a million miles per minute how can you actually tell what someone really cares about? Look at their calendar! It’s that simple. Your calendar never lies. All we have is our time. The way we spend our time is our priorities, is our strategy. Your calendar knows what you really care about.

What’s important to you is a very bottom line business:

• If you don’t spend time with your family, they aren’t that important to you.
• If you eat fast food routinely, you’re placing convenience ahead of your health.
• If you don’t exercise or eat right, losing weight isn’t that important to you.
• In business, if you don’t spend time interacting with your customers and understanding their needs, you don’t care about them.
• If your video games keep getting in the way of you starting a business, you’d rather play games than start a company.

And so on and so forth.  I could go for hours.

Now, there are always exceptions to the rule.  But mostly that’s how I see it.  It’s pretty black and white.

Ask yourself two questions: what do I spend my time on?  What do I spend my money on?  That’s what is important to you.  It is.  You might disagree, but you’re wrong.  If you want a different answer, you’ll have to change how you spend your time and/or how you spend your money.

It can be a humbling set of questions.  I’m constantly asking them myself.

For me, there are three really key things that I have control over that I think factor into my overall happiness and well being.

1. My work.  Am I striving for and accomplishing great things?  Am I having fun doing it?  Does it have an overall positive impact?
2. My relationships.  Do I actively strive to spend time with my girlfriend, friends, family, and business partners? When I’m with them, am I doing a good job of focusing on being with them and not on my work?
3. My personal well being.  Am I getting enough sleep?  Am I eating well and exercising enough?  Am I making sure that I get personal time to relax and reflect each day?

Everything else, for the most part, is just ancillary noise to me.   99% of the time, if something doesn’t fall into those three categories I don’t want to be doing it.  So I stop.  It’s not that important to me and I want my actions to reflect that.

Now, time allocation within those three is quite the challenge.  But that’s another story for another day.

There was a common gripe about the companies launching there: Not enough passion, not enough swinging for the fences, not enough trying to change the world. There were too many people building safe businesses, too many companies just trying to make existing things slightly better, and too many people wanting to be the next Mint.com, not the next Google. Nothing against Mint, but Silicon Valley wasn’t built on $170 million exits.

I completely disagree. Mint is an absurdly successful business.  Mint has changed the world.  They have fundamentally changed the way that a lot of people budget their personal finances.

There are a handful of problems in the world today that, if you solve, will make you rich and thoroughly change the way humans live.  Off the top of my head: low-cost carbon neutral building materials, curing cancer or AIDS, cost-effective energy storage and delivery to adequately utilize solar and wind power, and a system to enable us to affordably drive carbon neutral automobiles.  There are more I’m sure.  But those require a ton of technical expertise (probably a PhD in one particular type of science or engineering), a ton of funding, and a ton of time to even attempt to solve.

It’s a different world than it was during the dot com boom.  The web has matured to the point where the types of opportunities that created eBay or Amazon are fewer and farther between.  This isn’t a bad thing.  There seems to be this common misconception of what businesses should be doing.  The role of business has and always will be to profitably meet customer needs. Business is a win-win for both sides.

How Twitter continues to get funding without a dollar of revenue blows my mind.  The Twitter bubble will burst because it isn’t a viable business model. The crazy thing is that they know this!  They know that as soon as revenue is turned on they will be worth significantly less.  Their only hope is a large buyout pre-revenue.  A large buyout by some big company that can afford to lose a ton of money on the deal.  Is this what entrepreneurs should be shooting for?

Google didn’t just come from nowhere.  They took the relevancy algorithm of search results and improved upon Yahoo and AltaVista and all of the other initial search engines.  With AdWords they improved Overture.  With Gmail they improved upon Hotmail and Yahoo Mail.  None of those things came out of left field.  They were all built upon the previous innovations that paved the way for them.

Business is really simple: you have something I want, and I’m willing to pay for it.  In doing so, you turn a profit.  You hire more people and more jobs are created.  Eventually, if you’re doing a good job and customers are happy, there will be competition that will try to one-up you in some facet of the business.  That’s how the majority of sustainable innovation happens.  In tiny little increments by all sorts of regular people.  It might not be sexy, but “making things slightly better” is how the world improves.

Regardless of your thoughts on the war, I think you’ll admire his ability to focus on the customer.  He doesn’t hide behind his position – he gets his hands dirty and gets right out in the field and interacts with his customers, the Afghani people.

A lot of CEOs and business owners could learn from General McChrystal.  He risks his life to talk to these people.  It amazes me how many important people in business hide from their customers.  They don’t want to hear what is really important to them.  They don’t want to hear the problems that they have.  Problems = opportunities, so long as you make the effort to identify and quantify them.

If you’re not routinely asking your customers how you can better serve them, you’re doing both parties a disservice. No number on a spreadsheet can replace actually speaking one on one with a customer.

If you’re interested, I embedded the entire episode below.  This story is the first one in the show (I couldn’t find just the story itself to embed).