Simplicity Rules

The following three things, though I do them, still make me wary thanks to continual parental warnings during my childhood:

• Eating a lollipop while doing anything other than sitting still.
• Another choking hazard: eating a spoonful of peanut butter.
• Licking the top to an opened soup can.

Possibly inspired by the excellent 5ives.

Portland is a hipster sort of town. Because it is all around me, I sometimes have a hard time admitting that I like Miller High Life and ironic mustaches. But then there are moments like this morning…

I shared a bus ride with a young woman in chunky plastic-frame glasses and old school Vans. She was listening to music on a casette tape, not because it’s all she could afford or the only available media, but because she is just that hip. At one point she loudly opened the hatch of her Walkman and flipped the tape over with glee.

As a public service, I provide two additional portable music options for her fellow hipsters. If you would like to listen to MP3s, but not be found out as non-retro, consider hiding your iPod in a Walkman case. On the other hand, if casette tapes aren’t old enough for you, you can always get a portable record player.

I turn 26 this Friday. That is young, but I have roughly the maximum worthwhile experience with the graphical web. The stories I will tell my children involve dialup, abhorrent browser incompatibilities, and, yes, how Google changed the web.

Yet, up until recently, I had never ran a Google Ad campaign. I don’t have anything to sell yet, so I figured it was fruitless to pay for traffic. Then I decided I could learn a lot about how people behave online by sending them to Amazon, where I can essentially sell them anything and collect a small percentage through Amazon Associates.

This all came to me the Thursday before Mothers Day, so I decided to focus my mini campaign ($5 of clicks per day) around a couple items someone might purchase for Mom: chocolates and Oprah’s O Magazine. It turns out the first of these is much, much more popular.

The first day started off well, with commissions barely covering my costs, which I expected. I figured on a ten percent conversion rate and I was on target. The second day I kept the same conversion rate, but lost money. And the final two days were the nail in the coffin, as the graph and table below show.

Lessons learned

• The choice of popular keywords like chocolate, godiva, etc. meant I needed to choose something a bit more gourmet than the $10 box of candies. I never did sell the $70 spectacle to which I linked, but folks did settle on ~$30 items.
• I wasn’t too far off with my conversions the first half of the campaign, but the lower commisions were the culprit. I would have been better off figuring 5% conversion or expecting half the price.
• Also, I suspect that my 0% conversion on Sunday was due to shoppers being optimistic enough to click, but then realizing that they were really too late with their gift for mom.
• I might have been better off going for a small-but-sustainable long tail campaign than clamoring about with everyone else trying to capture those last minute shoppers.

From everything I saw in 2002, looking for programming work was tough. The years before that, folks were handing out jobs to those with even a seedling of coding talent.

Then came the economic U-turn. A recurring joke amongst programmers looking for work during 2002-2003 was that a position description would ask for the world, including ten years of Java experience. Then we would all chuckle, because Java is a new language, invented in 1995 (the joke ends when Java turns ten this month).

While the most superstar programmers have jobs now, there are still companies looking to hire the best (via Jason Kottke). It was with this in mind that I sat down Sunday afternoon to finally read Lucky or Smart? by the co-founder of Tripod.

I found out about this book from Brad Feld, whose review mostly just listed the table of contents:

1. Lucky or Smart?
2. Entrepreneurs Are Born, Not Made
3. Entrepreneurs are B-Students. Managers are A-Students.
4. Great Is the Enemy of Good
5. Start-Ups Attract Sociopaths
6. Practice Blind Faith
7. Learn to Love the Word “No”
8. Prepare to Be Powerless
9. The Best Defense Is a Gracious Offense
10. Don’t Believe Your Own Press. In Fact, Don’t Read.
11. Always Be Selling Your Stock
12. Know What You Don’t Know

And there it is, the title of the third chapter, the reason I wanted to read the book: Entrepreneurs are B-Students. Managers are A-Students.. Never have I been prouder of my three-point-oh. Managers certainly have their spot in the workplace, but to have an innovative company, it probably is a good idea to hire some of us slackers.