Dropping Keys

Most people involved in software in some capacity are familiar with 37 Signals, the software company that is as famous for its’ outspoken founders as it is for the products that it releases.

The founders, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, have released two books: Getting Real and Rework, both of which I’ve enjoyed immensely.

Rework has a chapter called Speed Changes Everything, but it is not speed of product development they’re talking about - it’s speed of customer service.

Getting back to people quickly is probably the most important thing you can do when it comes to customer service. It’s amazing how much that can defuse a bad situation and turn it into a good one.

This is very true; there is nothing that enrages customers more than having to sit on hold on the phone, or having their emails disappear into some customer service black hole.

Having said that, I think the real gold in this chapter comes at the end:

Once you answer quickly, they shift 180 degrees. They light up. They become extra polite. Often they thank you profusely.
It’s especially true if you offer a personal response. Customers are so used to canned answers, you can really differentiate yourself by answering thoughtfully and showing that you’re listening. And even if you don’t have a perfect answer, say something.”

I can’t emphasize enough how true this is. On the support management side of things, I have been in many many (did I mention many?) situations where customers were quite rightly upset about something or other, but they ended up hanging up the phone happy (or at least talked off the ledge).

Why? We talked to them as a normal person to a normal person. No scripts, no canned answers, no nonsense. We also took a lot of pride in trying to get to know our customers as people and built relationships with them. Believe it or not, this is actually possible in software support.

We’ve all had experience talking to customer service reps that do it the “wrong way”, but have you ever had an experience where you contacted customer service and they actually treated you like a person?

Photo: markhillary

It will come as a surprise to absolutely no one that I used to be a pretty hardcore Star Wars (and Star Trek, if you can be both) fan.

Of course I watched the movies over and over, but I also read many of the Star Wars books that you see when you walk past the sci-fi rack of your local bookstore.

Many of the novels are written by the author Kevin J. Anderson, and this post is not about my hatred of midi-chlorians or where Darmok and Jalad were (at Tanagra, of course), but about a blog post he did entitled Olympics and Writing.

It turns out that bestselling authors get people coming up to them all the time with this:

I’ve had many people tell me, “Oh, writing is easy. Anybody can do it if they just sit down and put their minds to it.” Here’s how the conversation goes: Somebody at a book-signing: “I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I could write a novel.”
Me: “Oh? Why haven’t you?”
Person: “I just don’t have the time.”

How many times have you heard people at the office saying that they wish they could do XYZ “if only they had the time”? I know I certainly have said it.

As with most things that are worth doing, it all comes down to hustle. If you are really committed and passionate about doing something, no matter what it is, you will make the time. Otherwise, talk is all it will ever be.

Me: “Hmm. Nobody gives me the time, either. I have to make the time, set priorities, discipline myself to get my writing done each day, no matter how tired I am. I worked a full-time regular job while I wrote my first novels, scraping out an hour here or there in evenings and weekends. That’s how I’ve become a successful author.”

What are you doing to make time for your passion?

Pretty clever of VRBO here.  They (obviously) knew I was inquiring for vacation rentals in London, so they’re targeting the subject line of the email and trying to pimp their insurance.  Good way to get the email opened.

For years and years my RSS reader has probably been my most-used application, or top three at least.

I started with Bloglines, then Rojo, then NetNewsWire, and finally (like most people) ended up using Google Reader to consume my RSS feeds.

However, over the past year or two I have found myself spending less and less time in Google Reader.

Why? I have found keeping up with my feeds more and more of a chore, and frankly Twitter has been replacing it - if something is interesting enough, I’ll probably come across it via retweets on Twitter or Likes on Facebook.

The problem with that attitude is that it has made me informationally lazy. I have started only reading stuff that people who are already in my circle are posting, and I haven’t been discovering stuff on my own as much as I had in the past.

Ed Dale Strikes Again

Back in 2007 I participated in something called the Thirty Day Challenge, which is now just called The Challenge. It’s a free Internet marketing training course run by (among other people) a guy named Ed Dale.

Whatever you think of Internet marketing in general or Ed Dale specifically, there is one common theme with him: he always has killer recommendations for hardware and software to improve your workflow.

Both in the Challenge and on the Internet Marketing This Week podcast, Ed has been recommending two applications for consuming content: Reeder and Instapaper.

I have been using Instapaper for quite some time, but the combination of Reeder and Instapaper is absolutely killer.

Reeder

Reeder is an iPhone, iPad, or Mac application that interfaces with Google Reader. It downloads/syncs all your feeds so that you can read them on the go.

I have it on my iPod Touch (sadly, I have no iPhone yet) and it turns out that touch and gestures is a fantastic way to quickly fly through RSS feeds.

Now I quickly scan through the headlines, tap something that looks interesting, and check it out.

Because it is synced with my iPod Touch, I am able to scan my feeds whenever I have a few minutes here and there: in the line at the store, on Skytrain, wherever.

Sharing Is Caring

The best part of Reeder is that it has a ton of sharing features built in. So, if during my feed scanning I come across something I want to read in-depth, I hit the Share button and send it to Instapaper.

Instapaper

Given the amount of interfaces we have to consume content, it’s pretty amazing how such a simple application has become so popular. It’s a testament to the “do one thing and do it well” mantra.

If you haven’t used Instapaper before, it is a free service that takes things you want to read later, stores them, and provides an interface for you to read it when you have time.

To get information into Instapaper, you can either use an application that has Instapaper support built in like Reeder or Hootsuite, or you can use a bookmarklet in your browser. When you are reading something that you want to read later, you hit Read Later. Done.

I don’t know the stats, but I’d guess that most people do their Instapaper reading on a mobile device like an iPhone or an iPad. I do mine exclusively on my iPod Touch.

Again, it allows me to read things when I have time whereever I am, and has all my “to read” stuff together in one place.

For me, I’ve found that the combination of Reeder and Instapaper has totally revolutionized how I consume content, and I can’t say enough good things about them.

(Photo: stylianosm)

Anyone who has ever worked for a software company has probably experienced this: sales and marketing don’t understand why the developers make the product a certain way, and the developers are building things based on a spec (or even worse, a hallway conversation) that is open to interpretation.

Half the time, the developers don’t even know what it is they are building or why.

In the middle of all this is the customer who is not getting what he or she was promised.

I call this the Software Yell Cycle, which you can see here with my grade 2 level drawing skills (clearly I am not a Technical Writer).

I bring all this up because I really liked the quote that Dave Friend, the CEO of Carbonite, had in the September issue of Inc. magazine:

Before you build the product, write the ad.

In case you are wondering what on earth he is talking about there, he followed it up with a blog post on the Carbonite blog.

Unfortunately, a lot of products get built before their inventors really stop to think about who’s going to buy them, or even why anyone would buy them. My mantra to engineers - “Write the ad!” forces them to think about who we’re going to sell our product to, what problem the product solves, and why someone would want to buy it.

I absolutely love this. If everyone (and I mean everyone) is forced to think about the actual use of the product, it will go a long way to solving a lot of problems in the Yell Cycle.

Of course, I can see it causing a bit of discomfort for some people, but in my opinion it is good discomfort. Great quote.

(Photo: MShades)

Back when I was a manager, I tried (and hopefully succeeded more often than not) to communicate positively with my team, be encouraging, and generally be helpful. I took the “remove obstacles so they could get the job done” approach.

I also did a lot of reading and tried to model my behaviour on good management examples that I came across.

Boy do I wish I had come across Edward “Tiger Mike” Davis at the time. He was the CEO of Tiger Oil Company back in the 70’s, and his memos to staff are absolutely epic.

Letters Of Note has the whole set so I recommend you checking them out, but here are a few highlights:

Idle conversation and gossip in this office among employees will result in immediate termination.
Don’t talk about other people and other things in this office.
DO YOUR JOBS AND KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT!

I swear, but since I am the owner of this company, that is my privilege, and this privilege is not to be interpreted as the same for any employee. That differentiates me from you, and I want to keep it that way. There will be absolutely no swearing, by any employee, male or female, in this office, ever.

We do not pay starvation wages, and there are some people left in this world who want to work. I am not fond of hippies, long-hairs, dope fiends or alcoholics. I suggest each and every person in a supervisory category (from driller up to me) eliminate these people.

Do not speak to me when you see me. If I want to to speak to you, I will do so. I want to save my throat. I don’t want to ruin it by saying hello to all of you sons-of-bitches.

Any employee who does not want to adhere to the items mentioned above can quit. If any of you think I will go out of business because I can’t hire help, get out, and I will hire the people to do the work. I don’t need a job - you people are the ones who need to get with it.
There is one thing that differentiates me from my employees. I am a known son-of-a-bitch, and I care to remain that way.

I think you get the idea. Definitely go read the whole collection of memos. I think we can all learn a lot from this great man.

You know how the usual story goes. Overpaid, spoiled professional athletes play for a while, then retire and either go sit on a beach, start a Chevy dealership, or end up broke and sleeping in their car under the overpass.

Or there’s the other version that we hear all the time: NFL player retires and then becomes a Wordpress theme designer.

Wait, what?

I’m always interested in stories of people who change paths in the middle of their career and go off to do something completely different.

The story doesn’t get much better than The last 3 years by Drew Strojny, formerly of the St. Louis Rams and now founder of The Theme Foundry.

During my football career technology and design were my hobbies. I even designed my first theme in 2006, it was called Mint Chocolate Chip. OK, you can stop laughing now. I did it under my full name, Andrew Strojny, to keep it separate from my football life.

There is so much I love about this story I don’t even know where to start, but here are a few personal highlights:

It’s hard to give up what defines you

When you are known as “the guy” in a certain area, it’s hard both for other people to see you differently, and it’s hard to lose such a big piece of yourself.

There is a “now what?” feeling that many people struggle with.

Making a conscious choice where to live

Drew and his wife could have just stayed wherever they were when his football career ended, but they specifically chose a place to live that matched the lifestyle that they wanted first, and worried about income second.

I love this and am a big believer in it (despite the fact that I am living in one of the most expensive cities in the world housing-wise…).

Asking customers “Is there anything else you need?”

I once worked for a company that got its start because the founders asked one of their existing customers “is there anything else you need?”. It turns out this customer was having a problem in a specific financial area, and the founders saw it as an opportunity and built a business.

Drew did the same by listening to his table-top ad customers when they were asking about websites.

Giving the customers what they need, not going for quick money

As a web designer, I am sure it was tempting to steer his clients away from using a Content Management System. After all, then they wouldn’t need to pay him for most future updates.

Instead, he put their needs first and set them up with Wordpress. I am sure he got a lot of repeat customers and referrals out of that move.

Doubling down on what is winning

I am sure the table-top ad business was fine, but when he saw the web stuff taking off, he doubled down on it and phased out the old business. Smart move.

Passion + scale = win

When Drew found himself loving the theme business more than the web design business, that was a pretty big sign which way he should lean.

The fact that creating themes is infinitely more scaleable than project-based web design is an even bigger sign.

The combination of the two is a no-brainer, although I am sure it didn’t seem that way at the time.

Experimenting with new pricing and memberships

Instead of setting prices and forgetting it, the company did quite a bit of experimenting with different packages, pricing, etc. Even though some of the changes were risky, they did it anyways to see what would happen.

Not screwing existing customers

When Theme Foundry changed their packages, they made sure that existing users were grandfathered instead of looking for some loophole or focussing only on getting new business.

So, as you can tell, Drew’s story is an inspiring one to me. I hope everything works out well with the Theme Foundry. It’ll be interesting to watch how it develops.

Photo: Duke Yearlook