Category: Business

Traffic. Get some.

I started Moodlemonthly.com late November 2009.  I thought of it while I was running (there are many benefits to a solo jog).

While working for GlobalClassroom.us I was collecting a vast repository of information (and tracking new information) on a daily basis.  Unfortunately, a huge majority of topics, sources and subjects were unusable (after all, why would a corporate blog trying to advance it’s own agenda talk about the great things that other companies and organizations were doing?).  Anyways, I didn’t want to sit on the data so I spend 15 bucks on 2 domains and 80 bucks on a hosting account with Bluehost.com (I am not at all disappointed).

I mapped the RSS to Twitter using Twitterfeed (great service), included some #tags in every post and was off to the races.  Literally.  Traffic the first month was up something crazy like 1500%.  After a predicted leveling off growth is still +100% month over month and this week was the biggest ever.

Here’s a taste of how things are rolling:

The jump this week (which was +1000 hits) was caused exclusively by the leaked photos of a Mobile app for Moodle (the first ever of it’s kind to be this crisp and well received.  Things will dip again a bit, but I’m thinking sustained growth will continue (albeit at a lesser clip).

Up and to the right!

Welcome to Straighterline.com

A few months ago (Sept 09, “All you can learn for 99 bucks a month”) I wrote about Straighterline.com after reading about them in the Washington Monthly.  I was floored by the concept (floored=positive).  It was everything I thought about higher education rolled up into a company.  A working, growing business.  On a whim, I wrote the CEO and basically said,

Hi, I really love your company and believe that you’re what’s next in higher education.  I don’t care if it’s mopping or sweeping, I think that I should be working for/with you.  Let me know if we can work something out.

Cheers,

Joe

And that’s the short version of how I found myself newly employed at Straighterline.com as course manager.  Am I stoked?  You have no idea.

To borrow from my previous post, the win here is “efficiency + quality + freedom = a better way for motivated learners to get degrees“. Having looked through the courses already I can attest to the quality (and guarantee that the quality is going to improve based on student feedback and will be updated as we grow as a company).  Additionally the LMS integration with tutoring and a real course advisor leaves very small chance that a learner will feel isolated online.  Paired with real feedback on assignments submission (writing) and instant feedback from tests it creates a very efficient learning environment for the student.

Here’s some recent coverage we got by a local DC news outlet:

Quote – Chris Anderson

Now, working within a company often imposes higher transaction costs than running a project online.  Why turn to the person who happens to be in the next cubicle when it’s just as easy to turn to an online community member from a global marketplace of talent?  Companies are full of bureaucracy, procedures, and approval processes, a structure designed to defend the integrity of the organization.  Communities form around shared interests and needs and have no more process than they require.  The community exists for the project, not to support the company in which the project resides.

Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine – “Atoms are the new bits” (pg 105)

Seriously?  Why get hampered by an inept CEO with no concept of customer wants/needs when you can just collaborate with a friend/online colleague to accomplish the same thing.  It’s faster, better and you own it.  OWN IT.

How Apple Effed up the iPad unveiling

Yeah, the iPad looks cool.  It’s “new” and “cutting edge” and “beautiful”.  But the product launch could have been better, and Steve, in all of his holiness dropped the ball.  Here’s why:

During the unveiling lots of sites ran live blogs and some (Huffington Post) even live streamed Job’s presentation to the masses (probably using their iPhones).  On one such channel there were almost 90,000 viewers.  But the quality was terrible.

Images were grainy, washed out, the audio was shit and any of those superlatives used to describe the new product were lost in translation, quite simply because there was zero production value for those that were transferring information from the live session to the millions of waiting fanboys and -girls across the US (and a fair number of moderately interested tech junkies as well).  All I could see was a skinny dude in a black turtle neck walking around on the stage in front of a huge blurry back drop.  I’m guessing that it was Steve.

For a man, company and culture which pride themselves so much on aesthetics, why the hell would they limit a nice crystal view of the unveiling to a few 1000 (if that), then invite the masses to watch sub-par documentation via camera phones and live streaming with additional (annoying) unofficial commentary?  And if the answer is “people covered the event with our own technologies (e.g. the iPhone with live streaming capabilities)”.  Well, then your products suck too.

I expect more, Steve.

The iPad in it’s glory:

How most of the world first saw the iPad:

Quote – Gary Vaynerchuk

By 2001, we were doing about 20 million. Not bad. Not bad at all. Life was good and business was booming. Most guys my age would have thought they had it made.

Then, on my thirtieth birthday, November 14, 2005, I was driving along the New Jersey Turnpike on my way to work thinking about my day, and I realized that as perfect as life seemed, I wasn’t entirely happy. I knew deep in my soul that there was no way I was ever going to buy the Jets if I stayed on the retail path. It was time to go big.

Gary Vaynerchuk – Crush It! (free on Dailylit.com)

Dear HBO: Tell Cable to Suck It.

I love HBO.  And when I have it, it dominates my Sunday night.  The programming is just awesome.  HBO rarely pilots a crap show (Flight of the Concords, True Blood, Entourage, The Life and Times of Tim and even Hung are all great).  Not to mention Real Sports and all of the great HBO original series and specials like Band of Brothers and Generation Kill which, after watching, have prompted me to read the books and buy the DVDs.

The content is just that good.  But what pains me, is that if I want HBO, I have to pay for 100 crap stations just to get it.  I can’t just get HBO (which is a product of the more general issues with cable station bundling).  I am obliged to support and sustain crappy reality TV, Fox News and other television based disasters that shouldn’t even be on the air.  It pains me that some of my money is going to these stations.

If HBO were to offer a web-only streaming service to paying customers, I would totally pay 10 or 20 dollars a month directly to HBO for the content.  I know there are all sorts of pitfalls (sharing of usernames, cost of development, etc.) but really they could start cutting out the middle men (like Comcast and Verizon) and offer the programming directly to paying customers.  They could even buy the distribution channel from a company from Hulu (which arguably is the best TV on the internet viewing experience).

They’d probably make a boat load more money.

As an alternative option, they could go to a company like Roku and offer it as a premium channel through the Roku player (which is what Netflix does for their users who have the set top box).

If it’s all about $ and sustaining the brand, why limit your customer base?  This is what I imagine (though the people that want HBO is probably too big of a circle):

hbo

Why wouldn’t HBO try to get the entire green circle?  Seems like a “duh” situation to me.  Do you hear me HBO?

What I do as a non-programmer

A few weeks ago Spencer Fry (Carbonmade) posted a nice article about what he does as a non-technical/non-programmer employee/executive at a web-based company. I had already been playing around with a post discussing the same (his is very good) but it inadvertently fell to the wayside while I was…well…doing those things I wrote on my list.

The life of non-programmer at a web-based shop is interesting to say the least. A lot of time is spent either mulling the things that absolutely are necessary to keep the business on an upward trajectory and battling with myself as to whether that thing is actually necessary. That is to say, battling over what to contribute and what not to contribute (I believe the latter is more important than the former in the long run). Additionally, it’s not a rare moment when I’m questioning whether or not I can stay as valuable to the company as our code-contributing staff (who are literally the architects of our future/potential success).

I started in 07 as 50% of our non-programming staff (but 1/3 of our startup). In the early days it was easy to pick up the slack. I was eager to contribute ideas and copy and brainstorming sessions where we laid all of our future successes out like a road map. As soon as I understood the business well enough though, I resigned to do my best to pull my own weight since I was unable to contribute to the code.

Here’s my short list of 9 (but maybe more…) aspects of my non-programming position. Which I might also title my “start up job description”.

1. Test
2. Draw diagrams (but not imaginary screen shots – relational diagrams can help a lot more than “I want this button right here”)
3. find non-technical solutions to user problems
4. be a buffer
5. Build the business: go sell something, find customers, make $
6. Refrain from complexity (don’t spend time asking for additional features, just because you’re not busy doesn’t mean programming staff isn’t chipping away at the most recent revisions, enhancements, bug fixes)
7. write FAQs, site copy, user guide books, make tutorials
8. never use a bug as the basis to add an enhancement
9. PUBLICIZE
  1. Test – never a day goes by when I’m not on the system. I’m a power user. Be it Moodle, proprietary systems or just a home page. No link goes un-clicked, no combination of variables goes untested and no bug is left unearthed. When our programmers think the code is “perfect” it’s my job to point out where things break down or usability becomes confusing or some other practical/common process has been disrupted. I check from different browsers, different operating systems and with different end results in mind. Then I ticket and follow up and repeat. Testing, to me, is really synonymous to providing customer support and it’s either proactive or reactive (so might as well start testing now before you’re trying to test to find out a certain nuance that a user submits later).
  2. Draw diagrams (but not imaginary screen shots – relational diagrams can help a lot more than “I want this button right here”).
  3. find non-technical solutions to user problems. You might also call these “hacks”. If there’s a crazy bug or usability issue, I’ll ticket it. But I’ll also find a way around to ensure it’s not a blocker. Doesn’t load right in IE? Try FF. Doesn’t display in my profile. Unenroll and re-enroll. Blockers get highest priority, so when there’s a back log of those it’s my job to find (and disseminate) workarounds for the non-blocker (but critical) issues. This often means that I’m elbows deep in user interaction, guiding them through ways to fix the issue themselves or fixing this issues remotely to give them the smoothest user experience.
  4. be a buffer: I mentioned earlier that programmers are extremely valuable; that’s why I focus on keeping them out of the focus. The programming staff I’ve worked with is efficient and creates excellent applications for our clients. But they shouldn’t be changing passwords or trouble shooting for specific user issues. This goes the same for the executive/programmer line of communication (if you happen to be at a bigger company). Distractions are costly. If there’s a road map that is worth following, it’s only a matter of time before a client need 0r CEO idea brings you off course. Creating a buffer can help your app “stay the course”.
  5. Build the business: go sell something, find customers, make $, organize paperwork, manage finances (this stuff is the simplest when you’re getting started but it grows and grows in proportion to success).
  6. Refrain from complexity: don’t spend time asking for additional features, just because you’re not busy doesn’t mean programming staff isn’t chipping away at the most recent revisions, enhancements, bug fixes.
  7. write FAQs, site copy, user guide books, make tutorials. I would say that this is probably the 2nd most important role, besides customer support and satisfaction.
  8. never use a bug as the basis to add an enhancement.
  9. publicize/socialize: manage twitter, blog about the business, do the presentation circuit. Whatever you can do to spread the word about your business should be done and done well.