Experimenting with business directions

Staying the course no matter what, to use a Bush pun, is never a great idea. One needs to learn, spend a little time getting feet wet with new aspects of a business, and also be prepared for a potential radical change. 

On the other hand, there’s such a thing as too much experimentation and it can be a major distraction. How do you test the waters enough to know you’re not missing out, without wasting valuable time and resources? I hope to touch on a few examples (no, I don’t have THE answer).

Spotting and admitting mistakes 

Unless you are a rock, you are bound to make mistakes. If you run a business, the decisions you make can affect not just you but your entire team. 

In my last post I mentioned some frustrations with respect to productivity inside our team. I think what I’ve yet to touch on is how much my own decisions on a macro scale can hold up productivity in vital areas.

Specifically I will touch on trying to bite off more than you should at the same time. Spreading resources too thin is one of the most dangerous things you can do and I hope I mostly learned the lessons by now.

Management styles and the results they may breed

To be too nice, too rude, too slow, too fast, too lax, or too Machiavellian? Okay I made that up, and it sounds too simplistic - but you know what I mean. 

What and how you ask others to do - along with how you measure progress in general- reflects the company’s bottom line. Again, this too I haven’t yet figured out but my ideas are changing over the years. I hope to touch on the tug of war between some styles.

OMG, the economy is tanking

Only if your head’s stuck in the 20th century should you be very afraid.  Among the doom and gloom come vast opportunities to build and succeed.

Downturns are some of the best times for new ideas to emerge, and the cheapest times to promote them while others pull back in fright. I hope to touch on why bad times shouldn’t dissuade or incapacitate you.

PayToAsk.com

It’s time to talk openly about my obsession (other than with domaining), and what all the delay with DI has been about. *Hopefully*, PayToAsk will finally see the light of day really soon.

I know I know… I’ve been neglecting your attention. I got very busy, and had to make some choices and put my attention on other things. I figured my rambling isn’t as important as the stuff that comes up daily.

To be totally honest, I find this space very cathartic even if it’s just a handful of people following it. Many of those people I know, or know of. Others I have yet to meet some day. And that’s what I really miss about blogging, getting my thoughts across and in the open.

There are other reasons I suppose. It’s easy to blog when things are going great, or there are good news to post. Lately we’ve been hearing doom and gloom around us. I dug in, had to concentrate, and it didn’t feel right spending time blogging while others are working away.

Well I will try and change that, and post more often. Even if it’s not nice, I think that may provide more insight anyway.

So what has been going on?

As you know, the bubble industrial economy is imploding a bit. And it is going to affect all of us directly, at some point if not right now.

At work I had to cut down some staff, something that I’ve never truly done before.

Here’s the thing, back around March I got some nice lines of credit from Citibank. I have used a lot of that cash, to hire more people than our revenue can account for. Times were okay, I was hoping the projects we were working on might come to some kind of fruition, or at least a promise of fruition. On top of that, I spent a lot of those loans on ahem, domaining.

So as the market started to collapse, it was clear that times are really changing. I let one guy go, who has been working for us for a few years remotely. He was a developer. Though he moved to a third world country (long story) and was “cheap”, it was very hard to work with him, and the work was mediocre. At times like this, there’s no room for even average, let alone mediocre. It was time to go.

Similarly we had another person working last 6 months here. Unfortunately, some of the stuff he was involved with was not going to start bringing in more revenue as I hoped. And the other stuff, well I just wasn’t impressed with the full list of skills that were supposed to be used. So that was another layoff.

On top of that, Duy and I were, and are, hard at work re-organizing and playing musical chairs with streaming servers to cut costs. Been emailing some vendors, asking for 20% discounts (it works), cutting out extra services we use, etc. Things add up, little by little.

Overall I think next month we’ll be back to mostly a proper burn rate. That is, we spend no more than what we make. Unfortunately I think advertising will start to slow down for us, I just hope that gets delayed enough for other stuff to come into play here.

The Team

Either way, I am more or less happy with the team we’ve got now. Well, I am very happy with the folks and they are top notch guys, but I think productivity can definitely be better. Many times I feel the productivity for some is nowhere near what it should be for people in a start-up. With others, productivity is not reliable or predictable, which causes other problems with planning and scaling responsibility. This is a post in itself for another day.

And I am really frustrated sometimes as guys don’t seem to “get it” or know how it is in other places. At most “start-ups”, people are hanging on by a hair, and that was even before hard times hit. Not doing enough means being on the street. It just pisses me off that so much time is spent on some things when it clearly shouldn’t. I hope that’s not too cryptic. I don’t need to start naming people, as it applies to probably everyone at some point or another - but a few more often than it should.

Anyway, I don’t want to make this bit longer. But I promise to try and let it all out bit by bit going forward. I don’t care if someone gets upset on my team as they read any of it. I hope people can look at things in a different way, or realize how it may look from a side. I’ll try and call things the way *I* see them, you know, the a**hole boss

Hard Times Are Actually Exciting

I want to leave you on a different note though. No doubt we’re entering tough times in the economy now. Most people are scaling back, some are panicking, others just have their mouths open in disbelief. With all the doom and gloom you hear - personally I am extremely excited and optimistic.

Don’t get me wrong. I am scaling to the basics too, but I will post in near future about why I am so excited. Tough times is when things actually start playing out, changing, and loosers start to go away. It’s a good time to push on and lean ahead.

I find McCain’s statements on the need to somehow buy back and bring housing values back up completely ludicrous. Because they won’t go back up as a result.

While I am on this topic, why is it that people “deserve” for their house values not to fall as much? What about all the other people who would LOVE to buy a house, if only it fell down to realistic levels? Nobody cares about those, let’s prop up the irresponsible instead of letting them eat their own risk.

I also don’t see Obama saying anything concrete, it’s a lot of good speaking, hitting the right notes for people who are sick of the current administration. I have no doubt that Obama understands many issues in the tech sector, for example, better than McCain.

However, there are too many grey areas for Obama that people don’t think are serious enough - which prevent me from giving him the nod. Aside from all the hate America preacher crap, how about the fact that he was involved in the very effort to lobby for loan standards to extend to more risky groups.

That is, he started making his name in an effort that would make entities like Freddie Mac take on even more risky loans - simply in the name of making housing more affordable for minorities in his area (read: higher risk group, and we see results of such now). So on one hand he keeps pointing the finger at the Bush administration, but this problem extends even from before Bush, and Obama himself doesn’t have a clear record. But it’s too involved for most people to grasp.

At any rate, everyone sucks and seems to be entirely missing the point about what’s going wrong now. It’s sad to see each side pandering their own party line with both missing what I understand to be the truth. Decent honest people can’t even run for President anymore. You can see I’ve become quite a cynic. We’re probably going to see Obama win barring a black swan event, so I am hoping he surprises me and doesn’t mess things up even worse.

I didn’t know Obama also marks the High Holy Days. Nice way to market, and they’ve excelled doing these things online compared to the competition.

As for me, I now know what being pandered to feels like, again.

After many weeks of building and preparing we just soft-launched Digitally Imported Magazine.

DI Magazine - http://mag.di.fm

As if I wasn’t short on time to blog already, now there’s an even bigger blog that needs attention Will be an interesting experiment for the DI community.

Hey folks. Enjoying the financial markets deflating and busting?

Last week, September 11 actually, I celebrated my 17 years in the USA. It’s also my wife’s birthday (and my friend Rob’s birthday). It’s a good day. Used to be an awesome day, untl 2001 when it became synonymous with the terror attacks, but I digress.

After 17 years now away from communist Soviet Union, I am sad to see the US government adopting socialism.  What has the world come to that I am forced to link to a NY Times article!

The financial gains of all the shenanigans that went on got privatized. Speculators and CEOs made their money. Now the risk and the tab is being socialized. We, the tax payers, are being forced to pick up the pieces. Bear Sterns, Freddie & Fannie, now AIG, and more to come…

This country is in a very sad state now, and even more so going forward. Here’s a historical fact. No debtor nation has ever been able to pay its debt off. Ours keeps rising as I type this. Point is this: it’s going to be ugly.

In the meantime, I say we need a new socialist Hymn for the USS of A, maybe a rip off of the old Soviet one. Just so we all know where we really stand now.