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My biggest pet peeve with venues is that they don’t say on their website what time the acts come on at. At best all they give is the door time. Tonight I had a variety of conflicting plans and it would have been really helpful to know what time the Editors were playing at the Showbox.

In the past I’ve tried to do the math of figuring out when an act should come on only to miss them. The worst example of this was missing The Organ at the Crocodile a few years ago. Sadly, it was my one and only chance to see them in Seattle as the band is now no more.

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Worked 55+ hours before EOD Thursday then hit Whistler. Made it in less than 4 hours. Skied some sweet lines today. Then hit GLC then Merlins for apres ski. Merlins nachos are at least 6″ deep. Now drunk.

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What follows is a little story of how my car got caught drug trafficking…

My buddy needed some help with a few details for a trip he was organizing for 40 snowboarders from his school; I was more than happy to help and head up to Whistler for a weekend of partying with 20 year olds and be the old guy.

Originally my buddy was going to drive but recently his car had been in an accident and so we took my Cruiser (which while ‘mine’ is not registered in my name but in the name of a co-worker) and picked up two randoms from the group and headed to Whistler.

As part of this trip a few organizing emails went out with some warnings:

However, it is very important that all of us keep in mind that there will be a border crossing–making sure we have valid paperwork for entry into Canada and re-entry to the states and are abiding by any rules and regulations regarding transport of substances across the border will help ensure a quick and painless trip for everyone. Please guys, we want you to have fun, but no illicit substances at the border crossing, capice?

And later,

Be a bit careful with the transportation of meat or produce across the border.

And finally everyone signed a waiver saying NO DRUGS.

Waiting in line at the border I even joked about there being no need to smuggle drugs into BC because it’s BC, the home of “BC hydro.”

When we got to the front of the border line they asked the usual questions but then started to drill in on convictions. Any convictions? No. Any pending charges or arrests? Turns out that yes, someone in our car had a pending charge in Washington for marijuana possession. Well sure enough we get flagged as needed additional screening.

After much waiting they re-run our passports, spend a lot of time researching us and then head off to the car to begin the search. No more than five minutes later are they back and ask who owns the gray backpack. One of our riders (the one with the prior arrest) says its his and off he goes for additional screening. Then the next person gets additional screening and then its my turn. They ask if I know what’s going on and I don’t and they inform me that one of our riders is transporting some weed. I tell them I don’t even know the guy. Off they go and re-search the car this time they take it apart. Then they summon me and I put it back together. And then we wait. And wait. After some two odd hours we’re told how it’s going to go down. The weed was being confiscated, no one was being charged but the weed carrier and the car would have a record with the border guards (remember, it’s not my car.) Also the three Americans were denied entry to Canada and the vehicle was denied entry. As a Canadian I could proceed on foot. Sick of being with Mr.Idiot Drug Smuggler I opted to proceed on foot and had another friend pick me up and the Americans headed back to America after a total of at least three and half hours at the border. Now apparently the Americans were expecting them as they said without prompting “back so soon?” And apparently they then told them “Why would you bring weed to Canada?! That’s like bringing sand to the beach!” (we’re going to Whistler after all!) They were then search again and waited in line again to get back into Canada.

And sure enough once we all finally get to Whistler, some eleven hours after leaving Seattle, one of the other group members not riding with us has already purchased weed for less than the cost of Seattle weed.

Now while waiting at the border I was pretty relaxed but a little bummed I had taken an afternoon off work to sit at the border instead of drinking at the Longhorn. It didn’t even cross my mind that I might get into trouble or have a problem but looking back had we been going the other way we likely would have all been arrested and put in jail!

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Yesterday after a long day of meetings I decided to sit in on the Redfin card game which ended up with 31 players. Here is Dave’s, our tournament director, re-cap of the night:

Matt Goyer (pronounced “go-yay”, given his French Canadian heritage, eh?) took down the big prize in a stunning display of laissez faire poker. Scratching the felt several times in the early rounds, he made it to the final table with a solid chip stack, garnering the admiration of Alex Coon, who also made the final table and had witnessed Matt’s Lazarus-like return with awe. All those years in Boston (the last several years of Pro sports success notwithstanding) have trained Alex to identify and latch onto the underdog.

Steve Marcus defended his tournament victory crown with an impressive repeat performance, finishing 2nd after losing the heads-up duel (that only took 1 hand) with Matt.
The blinds were $600/$1200, with Steve in the Big Blind. Steve raised pre-flop, Matt called, and we got a flop. Steve checked, Matt bet $2,500 and Steve moved all in. Mat had him covered, though it would cost Matt about half his stack to make the call. After pondering (or not realizing it was his turn to act, it’s hard to tell sometimes), Matt said “It’s late. Why not.” (It was about 11:15). Having been called, Steve flips and has a straight draw and nut flush draw. Matt has a pair, gets a second pair on the Turn, and Steve comes up dry on the River. Nice call Matt.

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Say your house has been on the market and you’ve had no one through to see it. What might be wrong?

Well today one Redfin employee found this California listing where the listing agent accidentally added two extra zeros to the price. At a $1,490,000,000 (yes 1.5 BILLION dollars) I’m sure the number of online searches it showed up in was very few:

Being the nice company that we are we called the listing agent to let them know that for 107 days they had the wrong price. Not surprisingly, they updated the price.

First recommendation: Engaged owners should verify their listing on a few online real estate sites to make sure everything is correct!

Second recommendation: If you’re selling a 1.5 million dollar house you should have more than one photo!

(Yes the screenshot is from a Redfin test server, the price updated so quickly I couldn’t get a screenshot from our production servers.)

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I joked that I was going to buy my unknown sleepy neighbor a Sn?zNL?z - Wifi Donation Alarm Clock, “Connects via WiFi to your online bank account, and donates YOUR real money to an organization you HATE when you decide to snooze!” because they keep sleeping through their alarm which subsequently wakes me up. I remarked about this to my co-worker Adam noting that it’d be better if instead of making a donation it just paid me. I then sent him the link and he noticed this fine print:

Really Fine Print: ThinkGeek reserves the right to take up to a 50% commision on all donations made through the Sn?zNL?z. In fact the software supplied with the clock ensures such is the case. Yay!. However, we promise to only use the money for rockets and beach front property.

No wonder the clock is only $39.99!

Fortunately I’ve tracked down the sleepy neighbor (I originally accused #202 but they denied it and said it must be someone upstairs which lead me to #301) and hopefully his wife relocated his alarm clock tonight so it won’t wake me up. Yes, I find it absurd that his alarm clock won’t wake him but wakes me up and I’m in the unit below him! Ah the joys of urbnlivn.

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Because you can never be too busy, last night after work I went to the MIT Enterprise Forum (I also went to a show at the Crocodile later in the evening) and listened to a talk on Building a Scalable Business. It was given by Mark Mader of Smartsheet and Tim Porter of Madrona (one of Redfin’s VCs.)

After you go enough of these talks the content really is very similar but its good to hear the same themes over and over again. Its also good because sometimes you lose your focus of some of those key themes. For instance while I talk to a lot of Redfin users I don’t talk to a Redfin user every day. We also haven’t done much testing of first time users or people who have dropped off, both ideas that Mark touched on several times.

Here are my notes from the talk…

They started with a Smartsheet overview. They have about 25,000 customers and have spoken to about 200 of them.

Tim spoke about why Madrona invested:

• They had a good team already in place, had a product, and had a market.
• They liked the self service, automated, and UGC aspects of the business
• Felt the business is capital efficient; they feel the team doesn’t need to grow much beyond the 11 people they have now
• They had a solid v1 product
• Madrona thinks of their investments as 4-8 year commitments
• Traffic is going up but they’re working on conversion and upsell
• How you scale efficiently changes over time. Your 500 customer costs a different amount to acquire than your 50,000 or 5 millionth
• They feel like they have enough features and now are working on usability.
• They use Google Analytics to measure marketing costs. However there are a finite number of people who search on specific keywords and so you only have so much headroom in each segment. You should understand how much headroom you have and have a strategy for when you max it out.

Mark on why they took VC investment:

• Access to money wasn’t the important thing, but rather building brand trust by attaching to a VC because customers do a lot of research and likely wouldn’t trust an online service business that didn’t have any history.
• The VC’s network opens doors. Their example: they were able to be introduced to a design firm for branding that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to talk to.
• Raised $1.6 million in angel ($400k, $450k and a bridge) before their VC round
• Wanted product, paying customers, before raising their money
• 9-10 month courtship that really accelerated once they showed adoption of the service
• Founded June 05. Did a year on angel. Marketing director did consulting on the side to bring in revenue unrelated to their core business.
• Spent $15-20k on building an IP portfolio

Keys to effectively scaling your business:

• Talk to customers over the phone, not over email to understand their needs
• They’re doing account profiles not testimonials since enterprise customers can’t give testimonials
• You need to understand the customer you didn’t get though he didn’t elaborate on how they do this
• What Tim is looking for: What’s the user scenario, what’s the pain point and why will people pay for it?
• The process of building the product, acquiring users, monetizing and repeating can be serial or parallel or a blend. Mark said he talked to Andy from Judy’s Book who said he though they paralleled too much.
• Nose for the money: 100% focused on how we’ll make money on this. Very customer driven. Who will pay? How much? Always have it in your sights
• Mark: Fail early. Be flexible.
• Mark: Do landing page multi-variate testing
• Tim: Use data for prioritization. Have a short list of what you’re focusing on.

Keep burn rate low:

• Pay sub market rates in exchange for equity. Check point on this every 6 months to a year because employees perspectives will change.
• Paying $14 square foot now. It’s $32 square foot in Bellevue.
• Hinting at multi-variate testing spends
• Little stuff ads up. Using Windows Mobile instead of Blackberry because it’s cheaper.
• Using open source and free serivces like Google Analytics.
• Using hosted software like Quicken Online
• They’re using Exchange but thinking of switching to Gmail because they tinker with their server 3 days a quarter which costs them time.
• They don’t think of costs in terms of headcount but in how many leads it could generate
• Outsource but buy from top shelf providers. Two they use are Rackspace and Amazon Web Services (storage and computing power)

Hiring:

• People talk so put in place structure on options pool so there is some amount of transparency when they do.
• Make clear to people that salaries might not change when VC money comes in
• They have 5 full time developers
• Outsourced QA ‘tasks’ overseas
• Employees are a fixed cost be very careful on hiring
• Less is more
• They look for passion for business bit first skill sets second
• Do not settle on people. Wait for the best

Product development

• Find people who have done it before
• Developers should have passion for the whole product and not just the nuts and bolts
• Sometimes you have to say no to new features.
• Focus on what will convert the not yet captured client
• They do experience testing with people off the street who haven’t used the product
• Think about personnel issues when choosing a platform. How hard/easy will it be to hire developers for a particular platform?

Distribution strategy:

• They’re pursuing a single revenue stream (subscriptions)
• The purchase process has got to be frictionless
• You’re either a paying customer or not a customer, even though it’s initially free. Don’t let the users know they’re going to hit barriers in three months that will cause them to either drop off or start paying.
• How do you position yourself in the customers line of questioning? Be specific vs generic
• Started with paid then moved to organic web marketing
• Don’t focus too much on the homepage since users come in via landing pages. Optimize the landing pages.
• Do permission free partnering with no investment. Reminds me of how Zillow has an easy to use API that anyone can run with.

Interesting questions at the end:

• They have a horizontal tool that they’re able to position vertically. No one goes looking for task management online but they go online looking to solve and track HR tasks for insistence. This why they have a big database of templates.
• Looking for repeatable successes/sales you should avoid one offs to meet one quarters financial goals. He had an example of being approached by two big companies to provide their software in a box so it could be hosted in the customers data center. This would have been lucrative but distracting.
• Salesforce helped paved the way for hosted software and ease security concerns with customers

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My sister got engaged this weekend in San Francisco. We’re all very excited!

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I tried to setup all my bills to pay off my credit card because I never open my mail, however I recently received an email notification from Qwest with the subject, ‘Unable to process Qwest Paperless Billing’ and the body:

The following error occurred while trying to display property:

An error occurred while trying to find node by path /Email/eBill/Confirmation/templates/failure/ece_paperless_fail.html.

Ah yes, I know exactly what to do now to fix that problem!

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Rick Segal wants to give a musician $40. He tried talking to the RIAA, ASCAP, Amazon, his agent and his management company.

Sounds like he could have used Fairtunes (why did I let the domain name lapse??), a voluntary contribution system for music. You gave Fairtunes $5 or $40 and we’d track down the artist or their management company and cut them an old fashioned cheque and mail it to them. We ended up distributing tens of thousands of dollars but the site never really took off.

We flipped it to two crazy guys in a barn in upstate New York. We should have made off with hundreds of thousands but our lawyer made more on the deal than we did. I don’t know about John but I used my $3000 dividend cheque to buy my Neon. Sadly the boys in New York, while having co-founded About.com, ended up bankrupting themselves trying to make Fairtunes successful. Their first mistake was renaming the company to Musiclink, the second was re-writing the site and of course the third was screwing us.

Seven years later the idea is still a good one. My big regret was that instead of flipping it post-bubble we didn’t form a non-profit or non-for-profit to run the the site. I think the idea still has merit but there likely is not a good business case around it (we told investors that we were going to make interest off the float, how naive!)

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