Howard Morgan, the Managing Partner of First Round Capital has a simple and practical view on evaluating Internet-based businesses:
If you have a business that’s based around the internet, basically only two numbers we need to know: What’s the cost to acquire a customer? What’s the lifetime customer value? If the lifetime customer value is higher the than cost to acquire, you’ve got a business. If it isn’t, you don’t.
All business owners – and not only those building Internet-based businesses – should follow this advice. Here’s Howard Morgan’s short video on this subject.
There are lot of benefits to owning your own car. Like not having to haul groceries a mile and then drag them up the stairs to your third floor walk up. Or not having to limp around town on a sprained ankle. And having the independence to go where you want to go, when you want to go there, not arrive to work 40 minutes late because the train was delayed. Yeah, I’m having a really great week, why do you ask? One of the benefits of owning a car is definitely not finding a mechanic when something goes wrong.
Until ThriftyWrench.com came along. Car repair services can sign up to have their name available on the site. Users then provide car information (make, year, problem, etc.) and businesses will submit estimates to the person who posted their car’s problem. After comparing estimates, users can then go with the garage that gives them the best price, but still skip the step of calling or meeting with people. Though ThriftyWrench is currently only available in western Wisconsin and the Minneapolis-St.Paul area, their ultimate goal is to have garages represented from all over the United States.
Co-founder, Jon, took some time to share these words with me:
How would you explain what you do to somebody’s grandmother?
Tough economic times have convinced many Americans to hold on to their cars longer. As a result the odometer on the average car has risen to 105,000 miles and many are in need of more expensive repairs and maintenance. If you don’t have a mechanic you can trust the mind boggling complexity of cars today makes it hard for you know if you’re being overcharged. ThriftyWrench.com is a free online referral service that solves this problem by connecting you with up to three reputable local repair shops so you can compare real car repair estimates. Our experience has shown that comparing estimates can save you up to 30% on almost any car repair.
What are some industry specific challenges you faced?
In the automotive repair industry there are over 80,000 repair shops. Creating a system to identify the shops that offer you the best service at a fair price has been challenging. We’ve spend countless hours screening and surveying repair shops in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area to make sure you are working with the best. To make our service even better, in the coming months we will be adding a repair shop review section where you will be able to see real ratings from verified customers to make this process even easier for you.
What was your biggest learning curve/experience?
Coming into this industry as a consumer my biggest learning curve has been identifying the places where some repair shops choose to cut corners or unfairly pad their profits. It was amazing to learn the how many different ways shops take money out of your pocket. A few of the most common we saw were pushing unnecessary repairs or maintenance, using inferior parts, and exaggerating the time it takes to make a repair. We were able to avoid shops that were using these practices by talking to honest auto repair experts that have decades of experience in the industry. Read the rest of this post »
Earlier this year, we announced that we would issue a monthly cS Award to honor quality work by designers and writers in the crowdSPRING community.
December cS Award
This month we want to celebrate the newcomers to crowdSPRING and will give a special cS award to a creative who joined our community in 2011!
So get your computer warmed up and submit your very best work this month; the award will go to the Creative who joined the site in 2011, and receives the highest average buyer score for the month. To be eligible, you must compete in at least 5 projects and submit at least 10 entries for the month.
Good luck everyone - we’re looking forward to seeing your entries!
I have written several times about customer service and how important it is for small businesses and startups to deliver it effectively. Great customer service is about several things: accuracy, honesty, fairness, efficiency, and – perhaps most important of all – speed of delivery. How many times have you sat on the phone listening to bad music and marketing messages while you wait for an agent to answer your question? How many times have you sent an email request and waited… and waited… and waited… sometimes for days just to get an answer to a simple query?
Two key indicators of customer service speed are what we refer to as “assign-time,” or the number of hours or minutes it takes for an agent to receive a request, and “solve-time,” which is the length of time it takes to resolve a support request. It took us several months in the beginning to figure it out, but at crowdSPRING we are proud of the fact that we have been able to successfully reduce the time it takes to respond to a request, and the time it takes us to both assign a support request and find a resolution for the customer. The chart at the left show how we have been able to reduce these key times, in the face of significant growth is user requests.
Your customer service structure should be built to deliver that speed and this means designing support systems with three things in mind: contact methods, support cycles, and capacity planning.
1. Contact methods
Contact methods should be designed so that your customers can contact you the way they want to. Email, phone, social media, and chat are the most common methods of contact; our surveys show that the vast majority of our users prefer to contact us by email, but many still like the phone and more and more contact us via Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ to request help. Make the contact methods as easy to access as possible – every page on your site should have a ‘contact us’ link, your phone number should be as visible as possible and should clearly indicate what the phone support hours are, your social media accounts should also be displayed prominently so users can easily click through to Facebook or Twitter. Of critical importance is how you route these touchpoints; I recommend that you have a central repository for support contacts and many of the leading support and help desk software packages allow you to do this. Keep a log of calls, organize email or tickets by groups or agent, funnel your SM requests into your help software to create tickets there and forward miscellaneous email contacts into your help desk where you can track time and performance data.
2. Support cycles
Support cycles are simply the days of the week and the times of day that customers are likely to want help. Look closely at your own data to understand when customers want support. For instance if you find that 50% of all requests come into your customer service team between the hours of 10am and 3pm, then make sure you have enough agents working during those hours to handle the additional volume. The same goes for days of the week: if you know that Monday-Wednesday are your busiest days for support requests, then be sure that your agent’s schedules reflect the volume.
3. Capacity planning
Capacity management is crucial to providing high-quality and speedy support to your customers. Look closely at trends and plan for increases and growth. The time to hire and train a new customer service agent is not after you are swamped but rather when your data indicates that you will need the extra capacity in the future. For instance, if it will take you 3 months to fully train a new agent, means that you want to hire that person three months before the next crunch. The same goes for day-to-day planning – if your data tells you that weekends do not see the same volume of requests as on a weekday, plan for lighter coverage on those days. If on the other hand weekends are a busy time for you and your customers demand support on Saturday and Sunday, then the answer is simple – staff up!
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
The image above is an for Red Bull. More fun ads in the Social Media & Marketing section below.
Remember those lotion commercials from a few years back that featured an alligator roaming around, showing us all how dry, cracked, and just overall unappealing our skin can look because winter is so desolate? And, apparently, this year so snowless.
Well, Green Envee Organics can help fix that. Your moisture-sapped skin, that is, not Chicago’s snow deficiency. Their body care products are all natural and all organic. If that weren’t enough, they’re also all fair trade. Personally, I’m eyeing up their Nature Cares Shea Body Lotion (pictured above) for this winter because shea butter is King. They’ve made a name for themselves in the natural spa industry, so if you feel like indulging yourself or someone you care about this holiday season, this might be one way to go. For Chicago citizens, they have a shop located just off the Grand Red Line station. For the rest of you fine folk, you can order their products online.
Co-founder, Bob, talked about breaking into the body care business:
How would you explain what you do to somebody’s grandmother?
Green Envee Organics is 100% truly plant based Body and Skin Care Company. We make products such as hand & body lotion, body scrubs, bar and liquid soap, as well as professional spa products. Green Envee Organics believes in making products for our minds, bodies, and spirits utilizing ingredients that only nature can provide.
What made you use crowdSPRING?
After working with a few local independent designers we found that it was hard to get the look we were going for. We had spent large amounts of money trying to obtain the desired look and feel for our website and logo. We learned that every designer has their own style and it is not always easy to get them to conform to your companies particular style. This is when we turned to crowdSPRING. Leaning that we could have many designs to choose from was just what we were looking for. It is great that you can work with many designers simultaneously through the process to get the results we needed.
What are some industry specific challenges you faced?
One of our major challenges in the natural body care arena is that there are a lot of large companies with very appealing websites and marketing material. It is tough to compete without an upscale look and its tougher to get an upscale look without spending an arm and a leg. Price point on our products are another challenge that we face. We wanted to create a product line that has quality ingredients that actually heal the body. Our products are competitively priced with higher end products but, we need the look to be able to do that. Thanks to crowdSPRING we are able to overcome these challenges.
What was your biggest learning curve/experience?
Our largest learning curve was to find the correct marketing strategy for our product line. We have spent the last few years trying to find the correct niche industry and learning how to market to that industry. We have tried everything from straight retail to wholesale gift shows. We have finally landed on an industry that suits us well. The natural spa industry has welcomed our products with open arms. Read the rest of this post »
Distractions abound. Every day we start work and spend a great part of the day battling the noise that surrounds any small business owner or entrepreneur. The email, the Facebook, the Twitter, the cell phone, the landline, the snail mail, the deliveries, the lunch orders, the radio,the text messages, the television, the newspapers, the YouTube videos – all conspire to dilute our focus, stifle our creativity, and distract from what is really important: growing our business in a productive, efficient environment. Finding ways to tune it out is important; sometimes a lack of noise helps you to think creatively, focus on what you need to accomplish, and reflect on what is working with your business and what is not. Great ideas can come in ways that surprise you, but rarely come amid the hubbub of everyday distraction. So… here are 5 ideas of practical steps you can take to reduce the noise.
1. Turn off the apps. Try to limit your time with email, twitter, Facebook and the rest to specific times of the day. The constant ding-ding of alerts can greatly diminish your ability to get other work done. I find that if I can ignore the incoming messages (whatever source the come from) I can think more clearly about what I am working on, accomplish goals in a shorter time, and complete my other tasks more efficiently and effectively. Productivity is only measured by what you actually accomplish, not by how many emails you read, tweets you send, or blogs you read, so my recommendation is that you literally turn off those programs and feeds at certain times of the day and only turn them back on when you are ready to focus on them.
2. Work from home. The office can be a dark, bubbling tar-pit of conversations, jokes, music, and a multitude of other interruptions, all conspiring to keep you from your work and to hamper your ideas. Working from home allows you to pro-actively tune out the distractions and the commotion that come with working around a larger group of people.
3. Unsubscribe. I suspect that I have subscriptions to 80 or 100 different blogs, newsletters, and email lists. These tend to pile up over time, many going unread and many others providing time-killing content, much of which I could do without. Purge, purge, purge – take the time to unsubscribe and cut these lists down to the ones that provide you real value and information that you actually use.
4. Make a list. Keep there clamor down by tuning it out with lists of the important things you are trying to accomplish on any given day, week, or month. I am a huge believer in using checklists to manage time, but they also serve to quiet the din that accompanies you everyday work.
5. Schedule yourself. A schedule can also help to reduce the interruptions that come with work. Scheduled meetings can cut down on the impromptu conversations, emails, and IM’s that accompany any project-in-progress by formalizing the conversation and questions that necessarily accompany a team effort. Scheduled phone calls will help to offhand calls that people make just because the “need to ask one quick question.” By scheduling time that is specifically devoted to a project or effort, you can reduce the number of unplanned, spontaneous interruptions that often dominate our days.
Entrepreneurs can learn a great deal from the world of sport, and in particular we can learn from the professional athletes themselves. In the past year, I have written a number of posts about ways we can learn from others and from the world around us; I wrote about how much we can learn from kids, about what dogs can teach us, and about what we can learn from musicians. This morning I was thinking about ways I could improve my own focus and productivity and it occurred to me that athletes provide a great model for this; here is a group of professionals whose very careers are dependent on their ability to focus and produce. A relatively small subset of workers within a larger industry, athletes are not only there to entertain us. but to motivate and inspire us. In business we are constantly bombarded with sports analogies and metaphors and as a society, we tend to lionize athletes and their achievements. I believe that this esteem is appropriate, especially in the contact of business. Professional athletes strive every day to perfect their skills, to promote their teams, and to win. Entrepreneurs stand to gain greatly by doing these things, too.
1. Athletes train. Athletes prepare themselves both before and during their season through constant training and conditioning. Strengthening exercises, stretching, endurance training; all are part of a regimen that top athletes carry out throughout their careers to ensure they are in top shape to perform their job. The best entrepreneurs enact their own version of this; we work out by constantly studying new business ideas and innovation, by strategizing, by analyzing, and by planning. The best entrepreneurs make sure that their minds are well trained and properly conditioned to adjust to an ever-changing competitive and business environment.
2. Athletes focus. When a batter is in their stance, standing at home plate, and closely watching the opposing pitcher, they are a picture of intense focus and concentration. In business we rarely have someone throw an object towards our bodies at 100+ miles per hour (not that it doesn’t happen on occasion). The extraordinary focus required in sports is a quality that athletes develop over time and that good coaching and training encourage and enable. Entrepreneurs can learns much from athletes about keeping their eye on the ball and concentrating on what’s most important in any given moment.
3. Athletes practice. Different from the every day conditioning that athletes do to keep their bodies strong, practice is the repetition of a motion or activity over and over. Kicking, dribbling, swinging, and throwing are physical activities that, when repeated endlessly, allow the body to develop a ‘sense memory.’ This sense memory is how athlete’s bodies are able respond in fractions of a second to the fast-moving action in the game around them. Entrepreneurs, too, must develop their own version of sense memory in order to respond quickly to the data and other information continuously presented to them. And just as athletes practice that shot over and over and over, entrepreneurs can execute their own version of this by continuously learning and practicing new skills.
4. Athletes take coaching. The strongest relationship in sports is between a great athlete and their coach. Coaches provide guidance, structure, context, and discipline which players can utilize every day. In business we look for mentors, teachers, and coaches of our own to teach us, to provide direction, and to give feedback. The very best entrepreneurs actively seek out their own coaches and fully leverage the knowledge and strengths they provide.
5. Athletes work together. There are plenty of examples of athletes who compete in non-team sports, but entrepreneurs stand to learn the most from teams. The most successful sports teams are those that depend completely upon one another. Great teams often have great stars, standouts who provide leadership and skills which give a team an extra advantage. Michael Jordan said, “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.” Entrepreneurs, too, can be all-stars, but their companies rarely succeed in a meaningful way without a great team surrounding them. Aristotle’s quote about, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” is as true in business as it is in sports.
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
The video above is a fun look at the obsession people have with cats in online videos and advertising.
All of us are smarter than one of us. And those of us with “crowd” in the name are best. #notsohumblebrag.
But in all seriousness, today we bring you another crowdsourcing site: Crowdegy. If you’ve ever wished you could troubleshoot problems your business is having with people who have something of value to say, you have found your web service. It’s an open call to the world for advice. Crowdegy will help you organize your questions– and the answers you receive– to help you make the best decision for your company. All answers are kept anonymous, so you know you’re getting honest feedback… for better or for worse.
Co-founder, Jon, chatted with me a little bit about harnessing the power of many:
How would you explain what you do to somebody’s grandmother?
We help organizations/groups to evaluate how they are doing and to make better decisions about their strategic direction – conveniently and affordably.
There’s an old adage: “all of us are smarter than one of us.” Most organizations aren’t fully taking advantage of what their individual members know because it takes a lot of time to sit down with each individual and ask them for their perspective. Our software lets bosses and group leaders to tap the wisdom of their employees, coworkers, and customers more efficiently than ever before.
What made you use crowdSPRING?
It didn’t hurt that you had the word “crowd” in your name. Your UI is also very clean, which I appreciate. Plus you offer a wide variety of services, including industrial design.
What are some industry specific challenges you faced?
People aren’t used to thinking about strategic planning this way. They assume strategic planning has to be a manual process that takes a lot of time, money and meetings. Until now, they were right. If the planning process wasn’t expensive and painful, you weren’t doing a very thorough job. Our software upends that, but changing a paradigm is always a challenge.
What was your biggest learning curve/experience?
Good UI is so hard and so %^&#$! important. Going it alone is also hard. Carefully chosen business partner(s) helps a lot.
What’s the craziest story you have from starting your own business?
One night in 2007 during a time when I was struggling with a particularly difficult section of code (multiple nested recursive calls, aka rabbit holes within rabbit holes) a Black Widow spider crawled into my bed and bit me near my navel. How it got there or where it went I have no idea. After jumping online and realizing that it probably wasn’t fatal, my next thought was that I simply couldn’t die before finishing this part of the software. So instead of going to the emergency room like a sensible person, I spent the rest of the night in front of the computer doing involuntary stomach crunches while regularly crashing the server with infinite loops. I finally perfected the code around 4am and went to [a different] bed. I suppose the story would have been better if I had expired while uploading the final code, but then who would have told the tale?
If you could go back, would you do anything differently? If so, what and why?
I would have gone to the emergency room. I also would have spent more time and money on the UI early on.
How do you see your company growing in the future?
Our software isn’t just for companies that want to a do-it-yourself product. Our software eliminates a lot of the rote work in strategic planning, but many people are still intimidated by the strategic planning process. Consultants and other specialists can bring knowledge, experience and reassurance to the table, and our software can make their lives easier too. Partnering with strategic planning consultants will be important for our growth.
Six words of advice to those looking to start their own company.
crowdSPRING is the world's #1 marketplace for entrepreneurs, small businesses, nonprofits and agencies who need custom logo design, web design, a new company name or other writing and design services. Over 110,000 designers and writers work on crowdSPRING. We are trusted by more than 27,000 happy clients around the world.
Distractions abound. Every day we start work and spend a great part of the day battling the noise that surrounds any small business owner or entrepreneur. The email, the Facebook, the Twitter, the cell phone, the landline, the snail mail, the deliveries, the lunch orders, the radio,the text messages, the television, the newspapers, the YouTube videos – all conspire to dilute our focus, stifle our creativity, and distract from what is really important: growing our business in a productive, efficient environment. Finding ways to tune it out is important; sometimes a lack of noise helps you to think creatively, focus on what you need to accomplish, and reflect on what is working with your business and what is not. Great ideas can come in ways that surprise you, but rarely come amid the hubbub of everyday distraction. So… here are 5 ideas of practical steps you can take to reduce the noise.
Entrepreneurs can learn a great deal from the world of sport, and in particular we can learn from the professional athletes themselves. In the past year, I have written a number of posts about ways we can learn from others and from the world around us; I wrote about how much we can 
Your UI is also very clean, which I appreciate. Plus you offer a wide variety of services, including industrial design.
