I thought I was busy while working at Bronto...and then I thought I was busy while at MBA student at UNC Kenan-Flagler.

Then Adam and I started Argyle...and then Kelly and I had a baby.  And a few weeks ago, we bought a 1957 fixer-upper house in Durham.  

So I've got a lot going on these days - enough to truly qualify as "busy".

And I get more email than I can possibly process - a fair amount of which includes pitches, introductions, and solicitations to "pick my brain".  In part to be somewhat less irritating than the people that often email me and in part to save myself some time, I'm trying to build new email habits:

- I often include the entire message in the subject line, noting "EOM" in the subject line.  The recipient can process what I'm saying without even opening the message. 

- I often begin emails with "No need to reply to this message".  The recipient can read without having the pressure to chime in or actually process the thought.  

- I sometimes send emails to process and clarify my own thoughts - I ALWAYS pre-empt these emails with a "no reply necessary" blurb.

- Unless I solicited the intro, I ignore intro emails until the other half of the intro responds to me.

- I ruthlessly archive without reading.  And I respond with a quick "no" more often than comes naturally.

- I write short sentences/paragraphs and use bullet points.  Note this blog post.

Additional thoughts from the comments and Twitter:
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- I use Twitter.  ~Erika @ Start-Up America.

- I add my standard mobile signature to a short note if I want to be brief without appearing rude.  ~Doug @ Twitter.

I was employee #1 at an email marketing start-up earlier in my career.  I spent four years with the company and learned a thing or two about email marketing along the way.

Here are a few email marketing tips to keep in mind for your early-stage company:

Email Early, Email Often.  At Argyle, our email list was most important marketing asset for the first year.  (Our Twitter following is quickly catching up today.)  We collected addresses at every customer touchpoint and sent very frequent emails - usually weekly.  We fired out a message every time we had something remotely interesting to say - new product features, new blog post, whatever.  Momentum is important early on, so any glimmer of hope is worth celebrating and sharing.

Be Entertaining.  Our product was pretty weak for the first year, so we had to manufacture reasons for people to like us.  So I resorted to entertainment.  Our early emails had subject lines like "Hold On To Your Butts" and pictures from awkwardfamilyphotos.com to illustrate new features.  It was all about getting attention, sharing our personality, and making friends.  

Invest In Automation.  We used MailChimp for a long time because it is by far the best bang for the buck - great features and a strong API for peanuts.  And we hacked together some very basic hooks into Salesforce and a few auto-responders.  As soon as we had a full-time marketer and a few sales guys, we dumped MailChimp and moved our email marketing (and landing pages) to Pardot - a very specialized B2B marketing automation platform that integrates deeply with Salesforce.com.  (We also gave very strong consideration to Marketo - it is more powerful, but also more expensive.)  Today our email marketing programs are incredibly complex.

Email Like An Executive.  It is obvious that you should use email to keep in touch with your customers.  It is less obvious that you should use email to keep in touch with prospective investors, prospective partners, and strategic prospects.  I have a couple email lists that I email ~monthly with company updates and strategic content.  I do it all through Pardot and track the responses very carefully - just like we track our customer marketing emails.

• A prospect tweets about their experience evaluating Argyle.  Or a blogger mentions Argyle in a post.
• A competitor swoops into the conversation saying "Hey - you should check out our product!".

I don't have a problem with this whatsoever.  Social is an amazing competitve equalizer.  There are no protected markets - most customers are highly visible and often talking about their business problems and buying process.  At any given time, it is pretty easy to track down someone that is evaluating one of our competitors or one of our customers talking about Argyle.

However, stuff like this crosses the line:
 

(Sendible is a tangential competitor to Argyle based in the UK.)

As the CEO at Argyle, I have unique insight into the claim that "lots of users" are leaving Argyle for Sendible.  Turns out that this claim is false. 

We are building *very* aggressive customer acquisition machine at Argyle.  We win business with great products that solve meaningful problems and a transparent, consultative, and affable sales team.  While we're happy to highlight differences between Argyle and other offerings, we never disparage or flat-out lie about our competitors.

We're overly transparent because it is good business and the right thing to do.  And because the market is always watching.

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I first visited Downtown Durham to take a tour of the American Tobacco Campus, which was still very much a work in progress at the time.  It was 2005 I think.  There was an 8 foot barbed wire fence around the property and there were trees growing inside of the buildings.  I was a Sales Associate at Bronto Software, which had 7 or 8 employees at the time.  Bronto moved to the American Tobacco several months after my tour of the campus yet-to-be and my love affair with Downtown Durham was born.

In December 2009, when my business partner Adam Covati and I pinched our respective noses and decided to take the plunge with Argyle, we knew that we wanted to move into a Durham office as quickly as possible.  After several months working anonymously in our respective home offices, we developed enough traction and raised enough money to move into a tiny office in the Snow Building at 331 W. Main St, right above Beyu Caffe.

I knew that we made the right decision the day we moved in.  Adam and I were struggling to move a couch (that we bought from UNC surplus for $20) into our building and Jud Bowman, the Founder and CEO at Appia and Durham start-up veteran, happened to walk by and hold the door for us.  We were bumping into guys like us on the street before we had even moved into our office.

Fast forward to today - Argyle has 21 employees and has carved out its own niche in Durham on Rigsbee Avenue, right around the corner from Rue Cler.  The city is our 22nd employee.  It helps us recruit, it keeps us entertained, and it inspires us to keep looking forward.

Durham is a momentum story - the culinary, artistic, and (of course!) start-up scenes have grown by leaps and bounds over the past several years.  There is a palpable sense of forward movement in Downtown Durham that makes it a great place to launch and grow a start-up.  I'm excited to see Triangle Start-Up Factory accelerate more good things in the Bull City.

So I thought I would jot down some notes for posterity.

In short - different jobs require different skills that require different incentives. Selling and coding are incredibly different tasks and thus shouldn't be comped the same.

For our purpose at Argyle, sales reps execute a process over and over. Unit-based incentives work incredibly well for these tasks.  The best sales people are coin operated - if you create a properly aligned commission plan, they'll do exactly the things that earn them the most money...which are hopefully the things that create value for the company.

Software developers solve complex problems over time.  Unit incentives are demotivating when tied to these tasks.  Check out this great talk from Dan Pink about the surprising impact that incentives can have on motivation.

A commission-less sales comp plan doesn't take away any of the realties of the sales role.  There is still a quota and intense pressure to hit it.  Just without the upside for performance beyond quota.

When done well, sales commission compensation rocks.  I loved getting it as a sales rep.  And I LOVE paying it as a CEO.  I'll write another post about how we've evolved our commission plan over time at Argyle.

2007 Edition
2008 Edition
2009 Edition
2010 Edition

Interestingly, all of the following links point to Spotify whereas the previous editions pointed to YouTube, Amazon, iTunes, and elsewhere.  Spotify definitely changed the way I jammed in 2011.

Other than Big Boi (AKA Sir Lucious Left Foot AKA Daddy Fat Sacks AKA Chico Dusty) in January, I can't remember going to a single concert in 2011.  You see!  This is what happens!  This is what happens when you run a start-up and have a kid!

How Far We've Come - Dawes

Such a fun, bouncy tune!  A friend recommended Dawes to me and I listened to the record non-stop for several weeks.

Who? - The Sheepdogs

This would be a fun song to cover.  Very cool harmonies and a hard-hitting bridge.  Evidently the Sheepdogs are kind of a big deal.

Less of Me - Glen Campbell

I read an article about Glen Campbell's struggle with Alzheimer's and the record that he released - "Ghost on the Canvas" - as a goodbye note of sorts.  So I decided that I would like Glen Campbell.  And it didn't take very long. This song is particularly special because I like to sing it to Thomas.

Piggy Jig - Kindermusick

Speaking of Thomas - I have a kid now.  Which means I have to listen to songs like this.  Piggy Jig is actually pretty cool.  Could be a lot worse...and I suspect that it will be sooner rather than later.

Black Tongue - Mastodon

I have a kid, but I still like to kick @ss.

Whole Love - Wilco

At this point, Wilco is like a worn-out pair of shoes that fit familiarly and perfectly every time.  I thought "The Whole Love" was a strong effort.

Fanfare for the Common Man - Copland

I remember blasting this jam in January when we would close a deal at Argyle HQ #1, 331 W Main St, Suite 403, Durham.  We weren't closing many customers earlier this year, so it was always a big deal when we got one!  Luckily, we're closing much more business these days.  And we have way too many employees to distract with deafening Copland.

Judas - Gaga

Not ashamed that I love this song, even though many Argylers made fun of me for listening to it so frequently after it released.

Delineating between churn and froth makes it easier to more accurately pinpoint and address the reasons behind lost customers.  Churn represents customers that cancel their subscription 3 months (or more) after signing up.  Froth represents customers that cancel their subscription within 3 months of signing up.  These are simple definitions, there are many other ways to define the metrics.

A high churn rate more likely indicates a product problem.  Churned customers bought into the value prop and stuck around, but didn't get long term value from your product.  This might suggest that certain features might be lacking or that the scope of your product is too broad.

A high froth rate more likely indicates a marketing problem or, to a lesser extent, an on-boarding problem.  Your marketing programs might be generating leads outside of your sweet spot.  Or your sales team may not be properly qualifying opportunities.  Or your services programs might be under-resourced such that new customers don't get the proper resources/training to ensure that they properly use your product from the outset. 

Both metrics are important and inform different strategic decisions for SaaS companies.  Identifying the characteristics of churny and frothy customers and pro-actively addressing the issues will pay off in the long term.

And I just skimmed this blog post via Hacker News - I'm turning 30 and I've produced no amazing art.

And I've had a few conversations with a friend that is wrestling with long-term career decisions.

Which got me in a reflective mood.

I'm still MILES away from the entrepreneurial finish line, but I've learned enough and have spent time with enough successful entrepreneurs to recognize that the recipe for big success is a mysterious cocktail of risk, focus, and time.  It takes all three ingredients...with a few incredibly rare exceptions to the rule.  And you're not gauranteed anything even if all of the ingredients are present.

The 30 year old that hasn't produced amazing art hasn't put in the time, nor has he focused his efforts.  My friend that is wrestling with the direction of her career is confused by risk - she is looking for the "certain" path to big money and a great life, which obviously doesn't exist.  Both stand to see enormous entpreneurial success in their careers, but only after they come to terms with the recipe.

It has taken Adam and me 2 years, incredible focus, and multiple leaps of faith to get Argyle this far.  And we still have light years to go.

1.)  Just as I do with all new hires - I spent a couple hours with the new folks sharing the history behind Argyle and our mission/purpose/values.  I'm a big believer in mapping the day-to-day to the bigger picture as much as possible, so I like to make sure that new team members get a very clear picture of who we are and what we believe at Argyle.

2.)  The reps earn small wins every day based on their performance and level of activity.  The first rep to complete an assessment call earned a $50 AMZN gift card.  The first rep to complete 5 assessment calls earns a $50 AMZN gift card.  And so on.  Our Dir of Sales Vimal Patel is great at using games and/or small incentives to encourage the right behavior.

3.)  The reps level-up based on performance.  We have a few lead sprinklers that assign leads to sales associates.  Reps earn access to the "better" sprinklers based on their performance.   Reps start out cold calling and dumpster diving in Salesforce.  They will eventually (hopefully!) earn their way to the most desirable sprinkler, which allocates the "I'd like a demo of Argyle, please!" leads.  These leads close more quickly and more frequently, so the they have a very strong incentive to work up the food chain as quickly as possible.  This idea came from Tristan, our Dir of Ops. 

I bought fresh collard greens from Elder Bond and his mother Lela on my way home from work. I asked if I could take a picture. Mr. Bond said yes and asked me if I would put the picture on the Internet for him. So here it is!

Happy Thanksgiving!