Blake and I are members of the EO Accelerator program. Yesterday we had our second session, and I wanted to post some of our thoughts from the session. The EO program reminds me a little of business school, and the goal of it is to give us the tools to take our company to a million dollars in revenue and beyond. We think we’re on our way, but we’ll take all the help we can get. The first quarterly session last fall focused on strategy, and yesterday’s focus was on the people in your oganization.

People is difficult topic to approach, we struggled to frame our discussion, but there were some management gems in the session. Here are some highlights:

On Culture & Leadership:

• When building your company determine what your core values are and build the organization around that. Behavior is driven by attitude and willingness which is shaped by a persons belief systems. Building a powerhouse organization starts with a team that shares values and belief systems. These are deep rooted in people and you won’t change them so make sure to understand them in people when you bring them on board.
• Strong organizations have a strong and unique culture. You can smell it when you walk in the door. You can hear it in their language.

On Management & Teams:

• Most of your management time is spent trying to get improved performance of D employees rather than rewarding and coaching your A employees. Don’t marginalize time spent with your good employees.
• Embrace conflict. Building an open and honest environment is the way to build trust within an organization. A great team should look like a dysfunctional family. Artificial harmony is the killer of teams.

On Employees & Hiring:

• The best employees are not well rounded people. We look for well roundedness on resumes when hiring, but this is the wrong approach. You want to find people who are “pointy” meaning specifically talented in one area. Then put them together on a team with people whose strengths complement their weaknesses. Build a team by finding “pointy” people who have talents in each others blind spots.
• Understand who an employee is when you hire him or her. Not everyone is driven the way an entrepreneur is. A lot of people just want to be workers which is OK and still a very important component of an organization. Don’t waste time trying to turn someone into something they are not, it won’t work.

We also created a great reading list through people’s suggestions throughout the day. Here’s a list of the books discussed:

• The Artist’s Way at Work: Riding the Dragon
• Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (2nd Edition)
• Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Field Guide for Leaders, Managers, and Facilitators
• Topgrading: How Leading Companies Win by Hiring, Coaching, and Keeping the Best People, Revised and Updated Edition
• First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently
• StrengthsFinder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup’s Now, Discover Your Strengths

Most of all, it was great to get together with other entrepreneurs in the EO Accelerator program here in New Orleans. Hopefully, some of you will end up reading this post. If you do, hit us with a comment below here to let us know you stopped by. And let us know what you thought.

If you’ve ever had a business relationship with Google (i.e. Google Adwords or Adsense), you may already know that it’s a little less than egalitarian. While the services they offer are innovative, and, if done right, lucrative, Google holds all the cards (I’ll pause here to say that I know that there are other contextual advertising services out there, but Google is undoubtedly the biggest and will get all of my attention today). If a problem arises where you question the quality of the Google services, you’ll probably end up having to accept whatever Google tells you (and that can range from “You’re right, let’s work something out” to “We don’t agree, sorry.”)

Quigo is changing this, and offering an alternative to Google domination. Now, no one will ever be able to infiltrate Adwords results that appear in the Google search engine, but contextual ads that appear on private sites are completely controlled by the site owner. This control is attractive, and some huge sites are already leveraging the Quigo way of life.

What is Quigo doing, exactly? Here’s how the NYTimes put it:

What Quigo offers is transparency and control in what can often be an opaque business: advertisers pay Yahoo and Google for contextual ad placement on a wide variety of Web pages, but get little say over where those ads run or even a list of sites where they do appear. (full article)

Transparent is the new opaque. Again, this is more of having to take Google’s word for it. If you are an advertiser and have a question about where your ads are running, good luck getting an answer. This isn’t to say that the Google technology isn’t advanced, and probably accurate most of the time, but there is a danger to Google being so large. They can’t possibly track everything, and since they can’t, you can’t either.

This probably isn’t news to everyone, and I’m sure there are companies out there that are completely aware of Google’s position and have chosen to stay out of the contextual advertising space for this very reason. Imagine how the market might grow now that there are alternatives to Ma Google.

Learn more about Quigo here and here.

siteMighty made it into the Museum of Modern Betas today.  We’re proud to be enshrined in the history of the web.  If you’re looking for a fun diversion, head over there and visit us.  Shhhh… please remember to keep your voice down.

With siteMighty recently launched into open beta, Blake and I are currently working through setting our goals for the growth of siteMighty. As excited as we are about the launch, all our focusup to now has been getting ourselves to this point. This means the point that we have a web app that works, can charge credit cards, and most importantly helps our customers run successful businesses.

Well, guess what, here we are! So pop the champagne right? Yeah, well, that’s what we did last week, and now it’s on to the customer acquisition process. In reality, we have reached the starting line.

So, this morning we set about planning the next phase of siteMighty: the growth phase.

We are working together to define what our success factors are. We are doing that by:

• Setting Goals – We built a pro-forma six months ago with projections for growth once we launched siteMighty. The truth is we know a lot more about it now, including everything we’ve learned from our beta users thus far. It’s time to revisit our pro-forma. We are setting stretch goals (attainable goals that you have to really strive to reach) for the next four months. Each month we will be measuring our success in hitting those goals.
• Defining Metrics – Our goals are tied to the metrics we are determining for ourselves. You can’t measure something unless you’ve defined it. We will be setting goals and measuring two things: 1) Number of signups 2) Number of paid accounts. We’re limiting ourselves to these two metrics for right now because we don’t have a feel for how our metrics will start to break down, so this early in the game we’re not going to worry about what account level those paid accounts are on. We are also going to be using the 5% conversion rule of thumb to start which is higher than what we extrapolated for Basecamp and Dropsend.
• Creating Rewards – The best way to motivate everyone to work towards the goals is to create an incentive system that aligns their compensation with the business goals of the company. That is exactly what we will be doing with siteMighty. This can be done through sales commissions, quarterly bonuses, etc. We are creating a reward system that will incentivize and reward growth based on the metrics that we have defined for ourselves.

As we deploy this system, we’ll keep you apprised of its success. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this system and any other ideas for creating incentive systems to drive growth. The important thing here is for us to understand that just having launched siteMighty gets us into the ballgame, now its time for us to hit the homerun!

This is somewhat breaking news. I heard this story this morning on a local NPR news update, but I can’t find anything online about it. So, I thought I would be something online about it. As soon as I find a story about it, and I will post and link from here. Stay tuned. bk

UPDATE: Finally some news from Bayou Buzz.

We are pleased to announce the open-beta release of siteMighty. We have been working incredibly hard to bring the latest version of siteMighty to you. siteMighty has just undergone its first major update based on the excellent feedback we received from our amazing Beta testers. We’d like to thank all of our Beta testers for taking part in our closed beta launch.

Today marks our public unveiling, so if you’re not already signed-up with siteMighty, don’t wait a minute longer… sign-up now.

So what’s new?

The major change you’ll see in the latest version of siteMighty is the design of the interface. We are firm believers in beautiful, intuitive design. We want the siteMighty interface to:

1. Set priorities: Important elements on the page should appear important. When we were designing the interface, on every page we would ask ourselves, “What is the most important task on this page?” The answer to that question should be the most prominent element on the page.
2. Flow: Just like you read a book from left to right, we want users to progress through the system the same way. Part of having users flow through the system is making it make sense. The Dashboard is home, and we’ve integrated a dynamic to do list where tasks appear for the user to complete. Once they’re completed, they simply disappear. Users flow from the Dashboard on the left, through to, for example, a new task. Managing that new task will happen somewhere in the middle, and previewing that task will happen somewhere on the right.
3. Be intuitive: We changed the primary navigation links from nouns to verbs. Our navigation became more than labels identifying a section. Instead, now the navigation helps the users know what they can do in each section by using verbs like “write,” “manage,” and “optimize.” And, again, the navigation flows from left to right.

If you’re just joining us…

…here’s a little background on siteMighty. The idea for a platform where everyday people could build affiliate marketing Web sites was conceived a couple of years ago, and development of the siteMighty you see today began in December, 2005. We’ve always believed in doing what we know (even though we’re not afraid to try something completely new), and what we’ve known for years is how to build and make money through affiliate marketing. We are experts at affiliate marketing, and decided to create a way for just about anybody to build a site of their own.

Build a Web site, yes, but not from scratch.

siteMighty does the hard work for you, and the amount of customization is entirely dependent upon you. If you are someone that is curious about siteMighty, or about affiliate marketing, but doesn’t have time to learn a few technical details, we’re for you. siteMighty makes decisions for you, which means that you can have a fully functioning site live in literally just a few clicks. On the other hand, if you are someone that wants to get in there, and completely pimp out your site, you can so do that in siteMighty. Beyond affiliate offers, you can create new pages, upload your own logo, browse site design templates, and even maintain a fully integrated blog.

siteMighty sites make you money

Remember, because this is affiliate marketing, you’re not just building a Web site, you’re building a business with siteMighty. Right now, siteMighty is only integrated with credit card affiliate offers, but development is already underway to integrate siteMighty with a multitude of affiliate marketing products.

Go get your own siteMighty account now!

I am a firm believer that the future of software is internet-based web applications. We will continue to move from software you buy and install on your computer to software that you rent and run over the internet. Vinny Lingham had a great post this week about the top 20 reasons web apps are better than desktop apps. Now, this is the shared vision for the future of software for many of us, and while the early adopters are moving online, we are still waiting for the masses to begin their migration towards web apps.

Back in microeconomics we studied switching costs, which loosely defined means the cost that a consumer incurs when switching from one supplier to another. The calculation of the switching cost to the consumer to move from desktop software to web applications is more complex than just the different pricing models of the two. In almost all cases, web applications are far cheaper than desktop applications, if not free. However, it is important to understand that price is not the only switching cost incurred by consumers.

Mitigating Consumer Switching Costs Incurred in Moving from Desktop to Web Applications

1. Pricing & Ownership - One of the first things people have to get familiar with is the idea of not owning the software they use. They no longer buy software, they rent it. If they stop paying, they no longer have access to it. This is inherent in shifting the idea of software from a product to a service. Shifting the consumer’s mindset is a key to success, but it is also important to realize that there is a cost to the consumer to move from desktop apps to web apps.
2. Free & Trial Subscriptions – Make it easy and free for your consumer to try out your software. Build a freemium business model. Make it just as easy to cancel as it is to upgrade. Keep in mind that your customer is not just trying out your software, but the idea of software as a service. Make it as easy and painless as possible. Which leads me to:
3. Painless Migration - Build open and compatible software. If you are building software that is about to disrupt the a certain segment of the desktop software industry, make sure you are compatible with it. Make it painless for people to upload their files to your web application. People are willing to try a new piece of software online, but there has to be a continuity with the way they’ve been working until now.

When We Feel a Switching Cost

In our office we are holding off on upgrades to the Microsoft Office 2007 in an attempt to continue to migrate our software usage online. We’re using Google Docs for our spreadsheets and word processing, and continue to use Basecamp. Next up is photo editing and graphic software. At each step we incur switching costs that reveal themselves in different ways:

• “Hey, how do you do this on here…” – learning curve
• “You mean this feature isn’t available?” – missing (or different) features
• “*&#$%… my browser crashed.” – the browser bugaboo

With each of these, we learn a little more about what switching costs really mean. Our goal is to make the transition to our web application as easy as possible and to minimize the switching cost to the consumer of moving to web apps.

Well, its that time of year again. Carnival season is upon us in New Orleans, and you can feel the energy in the air. It always feels good when Mardi Gras rolls around each year. And this year, a year and a half post-K, it will mark another mile along the road to recovery. I’m happy to report that the city is looking really good. For the past two weeks, cleanup crews have been out, potholes have been filled in, parade stands are up along St. Charles… New Orleans is ready.

One of the things that many people aren’t aware of about Mardi Gras is that it really is a very family friendly event. You wouldn’t know it from the shots from Bourbon St., but the parades along St. Charles for the next two weeks are really celebrations of culture and community for New Orleanians.

I am especially excited to report that I’ll be riding in a Mardi Gras parade for the first time. Some of my wife’s family and I will be riding in the Bacchus parade on Sunday Feb 18th. If you’re in New Orleans, look for me on the “Whale” float, I’ll be pelting beads at anyone yelling “thow me something Mister Voodoo.”

Happy Carnival to all our friends, family and readers. If you can’t make it to New Orleans, we’ll be thinking about you these next two weeks.

With three companies that are all set up separately, our accounting has started to get the best of me.  So, its time to acknowledge this, embrace it, and get the help we need.

We are looking for a part-time bookkeeper.  If you are in the New Orleans area and looking to expand your client base, we’re looking for you.  Here’s the lowdown:

• We need monthly bookkeeping and reporting for three separate (but interrelated) companies
• Everything is in Quickbooks – you must be proficient with Quickbooks 2007
• All of our transactions are downloaded from our bank accounts & credit cards, so reconciliation is pretty fast
• We prefer to have you come to our offices (on your own schedule) to work

If you, or anyone you know, is interested in this part-time contract position with Voodoo Ventures, please email me directly at cschultz (at) voodooventures.com.  Please include hourly rate, experience, and resume.

Our ad on Craigslist is here.