Sebastian Arciszewski

Ok, so maybe debacle is a bit of an overstatement, but the tech press is certainly having a field day with this one, and for once I have to agree. Apple maps in iOS6, in their current form are downright terrible. And maybe it’s because I’ve gotten used to using Google maps for so many years, I actually don’t really like the way it looks very much either. But of-course, this is not the meat of the problem. The key problem is that after many years of feasting on the data rich information that Google maps has built over nearly a decade, this feels like we’ve time warped back five years. About the only good thing to say about Apple’s maps at the moment is that the turn-by-turn navigation seems quite nice.

Of-course, there is a way Apple can solve, or at least quiet the uproar of bad publicity about this:

1) Immediately allow Google to add a stand-alone Google Maps app and ignore their own rules about competing core functionality. The caveat here of-course is that  despite some rumours floating around, nobody outside of Google is quite sure if an app like this even exists or if it’s even being submitted into Apple’s app store.

2) Work their asses off and throw some of those extra millions and billions at kicking Google’s ass at mobile apps. This will be a tall order, but if any one can do it, Apple can.

Last week I posted a freelancing, part-time job on the local Craigslist job board. In under a week I’ve received over 128 applications. This is what you’re up against if you’re applying for even a part-time gig. Some tips:

• A sentence or two introduction is not enough. You have to do something special to impress me, even if it’s just a joke or a clever phrase (especially for a writing gig), or a resume that doesn’t look like everyone else’s. Remember, people are visual creatures, we like shiny, pretty things that are not just black text on a white page.
• 80% of the applications reeked of major laziness.
• With the endless and incredible resources at people’s fingertips regarding both resume writing and presentation, I cannot believe how bad most resumes are. It’s truly mind-boggling. Do these people actually want a job?
• 5% caught my attention but were not a good fit
• 5% caught my attention and were a good fit.

The meteoric rise of crowd-funding is changing a lot of things. I don’t think it would be hyperbole to say that places like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo to name just a few are creating a massive shift in the way small businesses are getting funded. I haven’t fully examined all the ways in which this is happening, but as a marketer there is an obvious question that I feel a bit of research should be able to answer. How does the existing combined social reach of your current facebook page likes + twitter followers + tumblr followers + google+ followers + etc etc translate to the overall amount of money you are potentially able to raise?

I understand that there are other factors that play a significant role in the ability to, by way of crowd-funding, raise substantial amounts for any given project. The main factor likely being the overall “awesomeness” of the project. However, I can’t help think that there is a significant direct correlation between X amount of followers and X amount of money fundraised. Some ambitious soul should do this research and report back their findings! It’s no coincidence that The Oatmeal with a combined social reach of  nearly 1 million people was just able to raise nearly half a million dollars in one day to “Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum!“.

Thoughtful post by Chris Dixon today about the current state of E-Commerce and most likely where it’s headed.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and these two paragraphs sum up my thoughts fairly well on where things are going:

The bull case is that startups neglected e-commerce and are now waking up to the opportunity. The key equation driving e-commerce is: profit = lifetime customer value minus customer acquisition costs. New marketing strategies (“content plus commerce”, social commerce, etc) lower acquisition costs enough to make startups competitive with incumbents.

The bear case is that scale and brand effects make e-commerce incumbents nearly unbeatable. As one entrepreneur said, “If it has a UPC code, Amazon will beat you.” A lower price is just one search away. The only way to compete is to sell used stuff or make your own products (or provide a marketplace for those things). The fat head (large incumbents) and the long tail (artisanal shops) will thrive, but the middle of the distribution will suffer. (The public markets seem to agree with this assessment, e.g. Overstock trades at 0.2x revenues.)

What’s strange is that I’m with both the bulls and bears on this one. New marketing strategies are making it easier for startups and mid-sized E-Commerce companies to make inroads on the bigger guys. I suspect that the recent tidal wave of VC money and the nimble nature of smaller companies has something to do with that as well. The bear case is a little bit scary for that middle-ground. E-commerce has matured and even once untouched niche markets have become saturated. Those guys are going to get squeezed out one way or another, i.e. unless they find some other value outside of the immediacy or shopping experience.

So the question is, what value is left to compete on outside of those two things? Let’s look at a few options:

Customer service – Unlikely. The most you can hope for is to draw even with the bigger guys who will always have more money to provide a superior customer service.  Gaining fame for incredible customer service is played out. Zappos beat everyone to it and they certainly reaped the benefits from that. Now that the bar has been raised so high, you might go broke trying to raise it even further.

Product offering / selection – Unless you’re offering products no-one else is, also unlikely. Product manufacturing is getting cheaper across the board, so it becomes a more viable option if you’ve got the time, talent, money and creative energy to put into product development. Successful online retailers are using this as a major part of their marketing strategy. Just look at ThinkGeek. I bet their most successful and profitable marketing platform is the unique products that they manufacture. They are innately viral.

Price – Nope. Don’t even try.

Promos – Nope. You’ll promo yourself right into the ground.

Partnerships with like-minded companies – Yes, to an extent. Though this generally requires a sales force of some sort and as e-commerce matures and third party providers make the business of selling online much easier for practically anyone, the inherent value that e-commerce and the ability to do fulfillment has dropped somewhat.

Community - I think this is the big one that most online retailers are still missing out on. While content marketing is a part of this, it’s only part of the whole picture. I’ve always thought that if you want to sum up in one sentence the so-called magical formula (and I cringe at having actually put those two words together), to succeeding with any online business it’s this: Build an audience, then sell them something. Most online retailers have attempted to this backwards. Sell them something, then build an audience. Unless you were lucky enough to start your online store before the turn of the millenium, building a database of paying customers has always been more expensive and generally more difficult than building a non-paying audience and then converting them into paying customers. Now I think most e-commerce companies are realizing that driving customer loyalty needs to go beyond customer service, price, and overall shopping experience. They need to build a community around their brand or online store. Over the next few years, a passionate and loyal community is where many online retailers should look to in an effort to significantly impact both top and bottom line growth.

Much has been said in the last little while about the hints that Twitter is giving to developers. I think loosely translated it’s something along the line of “Stop making twitter clients”. Although somewhat purposefully vague in their blog posts about this, Twitter is starting to telegraph its intentions to the world that Twitter API access is about to undergo a major constriction.

While many think this might be a mistake for Twitter, I can understand their thinking on this. Twitter’s made it. They’re huge. They’ve seemingly just passed 500 million user accounts. (Though it’s questionable how many of those are active). They’re in the middle of trying to figure out how to make money and it seems that their preferred method for doing this is advertising. (Though I wish they had gone the pro-accounts route.) The advertising method is most likely to bring them profitability. That said, why would they want the value of their company (their massive user base) using anything other than Twitter.com or any twitter clients, in particular in the mobile space, that are not their own? If Twitter is to be successful with the advertising model, one of the absolute pre-requisites is that they own the content of their massive stream and don’t simply allow any developer to tap into it using a 3rd party app or desktop client. I think they know this, and the days of tapping into the Twitter firehose are coming to an end.

I should also mention that this recent analysis of where tweets are coming from by Benjamin Mayo shows that only about 23% of tweets come from 3rd party sources. While that may not seem like a lot to you and me, I bet the bottom line guys at Twitter are looking at that number and thinking it is way too high.

That said, developers are generally a bad group to piss off. It was the development of 3rd party apps that brought a lot of innovation and growth to Twitter. So it all comes down to the execution doesn’t it? I have a feeling that the mid-to-large sized Twitter clients will get some sort of reprieve in the form of being grandfathered in, but don’t expect to see any new Twitter clients coming on board. If you’re thinking of building something that relies on Twitter offering that data, you should probably re-consider. The new Twitter hotel will be about one-way integration. Tweets check in, but they don’t check-out.

A lot of entrepreneurs will tell you that it’s important to “keep your eye on the prize” and relay other cliched motivational platitudes about the importance of focusing on your intended goals with your business. While it’s true that it’s important to stay focused, many entrepreneurs often times forget to keep an eye on the shore. The metaphor is this: Most times when you start a business, especially a bootstrapped one, you start at the shoreline. The moment you start to spend your capital savings or indulge in debt financing to fund your business, you enter the water and start to drift away from that shore. The further you drift from the shore, the riskier the entire proposition becomes.

Have you ever seen the movie Gattaca? Remember that scene where the two brothers play chicken by seeing who can swim further out into the ocean before one of them chickens out and turns around? Being an entrepreneur is a little like that. Do you save anything for the swim back or do you employ some level of self-preservation in how you manage your personal and business risks? How far are you willing to swim from shore before you realize there is no hope in hell of ever making it back to land. Often times, not minding how far you’ve swam from shore can be a fatal mistake and unfortunately most entrepreneurs only learn this by finding themselves in the middle of the ocean, with little to no hope of staying alive. So yes, be passionate, charge forward, but always keep one eye on the shoreline, it could be the difference between failure and success.

Running your own business, especially when it’s a one-man-operation, can be pretty isolating. Any entrepreneur can attest to this. You don’t have colleagues to be, well, collegial with, and with the exception of a few friends, trusted contacts and the occasional cat that wanders in to your home office, you don’t have anyone to bounce your ideas off of. Overall, it can be a fairly isolating and monotonous experience . When I work, there are times I prefer silence but most times I actually prefer some level of background noise, chatter or music. My preferred isolation buster is Podcasts. Here’s the ones I listen to:

Back to Work | Build and Analyze | Hypercritical | Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe | The Talk Show | This Week in Startups | The Vergecast

Here’s a crazy stat: 53.5% of all users that open the newsletters from 604Republic do it on an iPhone first. What does this tell me? 1) A lot of my customers have iPhones. 2) Mobile email is insanely important. 3) I should probably be selling iPhone cases featuring some of the designs at 604Republic. 4) If you’re an email marketer, you should probably make sure that  your newsletters, transactional emails and any other correspondence / promo emails you send to your customers look good on an iPhone.

For years, parts of the t-shirt industry have been involved in a psychotic race to the bottom. $10 t-shirts, $9 t-shirts, $8 t-shirts! I’ve even seen a site try to do $1 t-shirts (they promptly went out of business). Here’s the crazy part, both cotton and printing costs have been rising steadily for at least the last five years, and with the exception of a fairly dramatic slump in cotton prices (after a meteoric rise) last March, the general cost of manufacturing a t-shirt has been on a steady rise.

Now it would appear that one of the giants in the industry is realizing that perhaps profit margins do matter! Shirt.woot recently raised their price from $10 to $12, and the totally insane part is that their forums exploded with equal parts praise, and equal parts rage. Some customers are educated enough to understand things like cost pressures and inflation. Others are not, and no amount of explaining it to them will appease their outrage. What it really comes down to is this: When running your business, would you rather be Apple or would you rather be Nokia? In other words, would you prefer to have a smaller market share with significantly higher profits, or a larger market share and be losing money or have razor thin margins because you’re dredging the bottom of the ocean for the lowest common denominator? You know another funny thing? I recently raised the price on a few t-shirts fairly significantly (+25%), and guess what happened? The sales of those t-shirts actually went up. Margins matter. Quality matters, and perceived value also matters… apparently a lot.

I’m always disappointed by email. Not by the medium itself, but about the fact that even in today’s hyper-connected, and hyper-competitive business world, some people still believe it’s ok to not respond to email. I understand that some businesses, or websites become victims of their own success. Suddenly their Inboxes more closely resemble some grotesque version of  a cluster-fuck, rather than an organized, manageable system for dealing with email. This however, is still no excuse for poor email etiquette.

Even when I’m swamped with email (which happens a lot), even if I’m not interested in what you’re peddling on any particular day, I’ll almost always respond with a short but courteous “No thank you, thanks for reaching out”. If the amount of effort that went into the solicitation is clearly above and beyond your standard copy-and-paste drive-by, and isn’t obvious, entirely unrelated spam, I make sure that my reply has a bit more substance explaining why I’m saying no. This is proper e-mail etiquette and to not do this simply sends a message of disrespect and signals either an arrogance or laziness that diminishes your business.