Simplicity Rules

I received six copies of this spam from yesterday evening to now:

Hits 52 Week High and Still Climbing Strong.
We saw DKDY at $1.31 on Wednesday and we feel its going to $5.00 on unexpexted news.

“Unexpexted,” indeed. The stock had its IPO recently, so “52 week high” is true, though misleading. Nevertheless, the stock is at $1.87 today.

It’s possible the stock got there on its own merit, but it’s a little fishy that the company’s website looks like this:

I’m not saying the company itself did this. I can’t imagine this having long-term viability worth the time and money of an IPO. But someone is driving up demand by sending spam. And with only 600,000 shares, it seems like this wouldn’t be that tough with access to millions of email addresses. You only need a handful of schmucks.

If it weren’t so sleazy, it might be brilliant

As a baseball fan, I’ve been waiting for First Inning to officially launch their site. In the meantime, I’ve wondered… how the heck did they get firstinning.com in 2005?

The answer is simple: it was available.

Anytime I get in a fit of domain name curiosity, I am surprised–either by what is available or what is taken. In this case, there are a lot of available baseball innings: thirdinning.com, fourthinning.com, fifthinning.com, sixthinning.com, and eighthinning.com. If you want a .net, only seventhinning.net is taken. If your thing is .org, you can have anything but ninthinning.org.

Football or basketball fan? You could have thirdquarter.com (or firstquarter.org, or secondquarter.net/.org). If you’re into college basketball, firsthalf.org is still available. Hockey has three periods, right? You could register them all.

Then there’s the other side of the coin, when I am amazed by how many domains are taken. I’ve mentioned this before in my riff on secrecy… MonkeyDonkey.com and DonkeyMonkey.com are both taken! Huh?

Google smartly grabbed the typo domain, gooogle.com (extra O), but they missed goooogle.com (two extra Os). Believe it or not, most .com domains for google.com with extra Os are taken. If you don’t mind having over fifty Os in your domain, you could get the only ones left:
goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com (52 extra Os)
gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com (53)
goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com (54).

But why would you? After all, wouldn’t you rather have gooooogle.biz (3 extra Os)?

Boostrapping has been on my mind lately, as I alluded to with number two in my long weekend lessons. The basic idea of bootstrapping is to spend little money and start a business/project by pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. If you don’t wear boots, that’s okay–it’s an analogy.

Derek Sivers, who created the idea equation, said this recently in a Venture Voice Podcast:

Just give yourself a ten day deadline and just launch it. Just whip it up in ten days and just do it with almost no features. Don’t do a coming soon that sits there for a year while you try to perfect this thing. Just whip up something quick and ugly in a week or two with no money and just start doing it even if you only have just one client and one customer and then just improve upon it from there.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? I think it really can be that simple. Of course, I’ve whipped up plenty of quick and ugly things in my time that have just sat there.

Bootstrapping your business talks a lot about how a business begins with customers. The quickest way to get there is to release something. And the quickest way to release something is to trim the offerings. From the book:

Don’t attempt to boil the ocean. If your initial concept is so grandiose that you can’t deliver, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Taking the incremental approach means that your initial offering might be a “featurette,” a component of a service that you can deliver today, with more tomorrow.

Since Thanksgiving weekend, I’ve been spending some precious spare time focusing on a very simple project. I’m trying to take both of these quotes to heart and in that spirit, I’ll be sharing very soon.

GMail unveiled a new feature: vacation messages.

I used to have this feature back in my university days and I might have even used it a few times. I certainly helped a whole bunch of folks use it when I worked at the help desk, so I know some people like it. While Google did add the feature of only letting current contacts know you’re away, it mostly left me unimpressed.

Is this because I’ve caught onto the Google backlash? Maybe a little. Most likely, it’s because I rarely am away from email. In 2005, there were only eight non-weekend days that I didn’t send an email. And two of those days I was in Phoenix within typing distance of my laptop.

Then again, many have such constant access to email. Perhaps as internet ubiquity becomes expected, features like this will befome more useful for those rare occasions when we’re disconnected?

This morning Mike Duffy sent along this wacky traffic scheme:

My friend who became a multi-millionaire from internet marketing bet me $1 Million dollars that I couldn’t send 2 million visitors to an individual website by his birthday, April 18th 2006.

Seth Godin see it as a poker site’s obviously transparent ploy for traffic. It seems to be working. The counter was at 30,000 this morning, now it’s at 67,000. I witnessed it go up at about 200 visits per minute.

I, too, was a little skeptical, given the guy felt the need to hide affiliate links. Everywhere that his page mentions PokerRoom.com, he links to to http://www.pokerroom.com/?ref=####. I don’t have a problem with affiliate programs, but you have to wonder why he is hiding it.

Google doesn’t list any page with his affiliate code, meaning it’s probably new. The affiliate code makes me think this might not be a poker site. It could be a real guy.

Now, whether he really bet his finger is another question. But I’ve watched me a little bit of poker on TV (during SNL commercials) and those players might just be crazy enough to do something like this. Another meaning of “all in,” I suppose. Someone should tell his friend that life is not a zero sum game.

This week, tech portal CNet bought a tiny dating website, Consumating. The site was created by two guys who’ve been around the Web for awhile. One is an Internet rockstar and the other created the Google bomb (and now works for Google).

Contrast that with Yahoo!’s purchase of a social bookmark site. While del.icio.us started as a personal side project, too, it was VC-funded in April.

Comparing these two is sort of apples and oranges, but that’s my point. Though terms weren’t disclosed for either deal (both tiny for their buyers), one would assume that del.icio.us went for millions and Consumating did not. I’m an avid user of del.icio.us and have never touched Consumating, but I can’t help but think CNet got the best deal here. CNet went outside of the bounds of what we’d expect from a big company.

Enter Moneyball, the 2003 book about baseball, the Oakland A’s, and “The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.” Using simple baseball statistics, General Manager Billy Beane was able to field a competitive team with a relatively small payroll. Many have noticed the similarity to venture capital.

So, CNet took a Beane/VC approach. Invest in something good that no one else has. It’s cheap and could have just as positive an outcome.

In July I sent direct mail postcards to businesses listed on my free Portland WiFi website. In November, I sent another round of postcards. To all that replied on either of those occasions, I am now sending a “Free WiFi” placard.

This is a slightly more complicated mailing, since it contains multiple pieces. As Joel Spolsky mentioned recently in his DVD venture run-down, keeping portions in the same order is important. I only had about thirty recipients, but it was still important to have a process.

The pieces of my mailing:

1. Big envelope
2. Labels with mailing addresses
3. “Free WiFi” placard
4. Letter from me
5. A few WifiPDX business cards
6. Stamps!

First I placed the labels on each envelope, keeping them in the correct order. Then, I checked that the names matched the letter as I stuffed each envelope with the placard, letter, and cards. Finally, I added the stamp and set the whole package aside.

Lesson one. Triple-check the details. Unfortunately, after I had completed twenty of these, I realized I hadn’t signed the letters. Details are important.

Lesson two. Invest in a return address stamp. I had hoped to print directly onto the envelopes, but my printer wouldn’t handle the size. I had to use two sets of labels, which didn’t look as good.

Lesson three. Have a teammate. The process would have been easier with a true assembly line. Plus, it would have meant another set of eyes to catch the details, and someone with whom to chat.

All in all, a success so far. I’ll look forward to seeing more of those placards at my favorite free wireless internet hotspots.

My office is directly above a Borders book store. I recently went down to buy a book. As I walked out and looked at these identical prices side by side it hit me. For the first time in a long time, I had paid full price for a book.

This got me thinking about convenience, which seems to play a big role in pricing. Examples like the brick and mortar full price sales are pretty easy to come by–ever bought a beer at a professional sporting event? Convenience obviously goes beyond location. We hire accountants not only for their expertise, but to save us time. Ditto the landscaping company for those of us who have a lawn and don’t mow it ourselves.

Netflix makes a big deal about having no late fees. That’s one type of convenience, but I think many of their customers are equally jazzed by receiving DVDs in the mail. Then again, Hollywood and Blockbuster are still around because sometimes we don’t want to think ahead to what we’ll want to watch a couple days from now.

It’s strange that so much on the Internet is free given convenience is such a large selling point for online services. It’s safe to say that Wrigley Field charges as much as possible for refreshments. Why do so many on the Internet leave money on the table?

My buddy Monkey Mike has corralled us Webmonkeys together for the somewhat annual Webmonkey Wishlist. My choices weren’t particularly gadgety, but they were still filled with appropriate technerdery.

The hands-down best item? Grappling hook.

Three reasons why web developers are natural entrepreneurs:

1. Web developers and entrepreneurs focus on specific criteria and ignore impulses to do otherwise. Avoiding feature creep is marketing to your niche.
2. They both can think like a customer. “For what will someone pay me?” asks the marketer. “What did a visitor come here to do?” asks the web developer.
3. And both are able to think ahead to all possible outcomes… and plan for them. Programmers use logic to chase down bugs in software. Entrepreneurs are ready for “unforeseen circumstances.”

Got any more?