To the Cuil Management Team: Earlier this week it was brought to my attention that you launched your new search engine. With an index of some 120 billion web pages, you claim to be the largest and most relevant search engine around. So I just took a spin over and executed a few queries. And [...]
Archive for July, 2008
Selling Push vs. Pull Products
One of our Tastefully Driven vendors recently contacted us to see if we were ready to re-order their products yet. We’ve placed one other re-order since the launch of the site, but overall their products haven’t sold very well compared to other brands. We don’t have a ton in stock, but they’re moving so slow [...]
FaceUp Web Marketing eBook Updated, Still Free
Quick post here guys. Just wanted to let everyone know that I’ve updated our free FaceUp Web Marketing eBook. It’s been over six months since the last update. The book still gets a decent amount of downloads so I want to be sure that the information conveyed is accurate. The biggest update has to do [...]
Productive Output Update
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my productive output post where I declared that I would never work more than 35 hours in a week again (see Productive Output: What the 9-5 Misses and Why I’m Done with a 40 Hour Workweek). It was only two months ago, but a lot has changed since [...]
How We Reduced Phone Calls by 94% AND Increased Sales
Earlier this year we were getting crushed with customer service contacts. Particularly with Detailed Image, but also to a lesser extent with SportsLizard. It became apparent that emails and phone calls were becoming a full time job and that we either needed to A) find a way to reduce contacts, or B) hire someone to [...]
Dynamic Banner Ads With PHP and Javascript
Last month we struck a deal for Detailed Image to sponsor Autopia.org, definitively the largest online community of auto detailers. Clearly our target market for DI – a community that can exponentially increase our foothold in the detailing community. The potential is very large. Part of the sponsorship agreement included a 120 x 600 banner [...]
Does This Happen to Anyone Else?
This is driving me nuts. So I’m on browsing stories on Digg, which I am now officially obsessed with and fascinated by from a user perspective, a community perspective, and a business perspective. I click on a story in Firefox (3.0, but also happened previously in versions 2.xx) and about 1/10th of the time a [...]
Sex vs. Changing the World
One of my huge pet peeves is when someone is in a difficult situation and they whine and complain about it, but proceed to do nothing to change the situation. Usually this comes in two flavors - relationships and jobs – although it really can apply to anything. It drives me nuts. If you don’t [...]
Book Review: Stall Points
Virtually all corporations stagnate at some point in their lifetime, and their stall typically follows the period of their highest growth. Why? That’s the question that Matthew Olson and Derek Van Bever of the Corporate Executive Board attempt to answer. I’m going to cut to the chase on this one so I can get to [...]
Pure Adapt Rocks The AMEX Plum Card
Have you seen the commercials for the AMEX Plum Card? It’s freaking unreal. Mike talked us in to applying for one earlier this year and it was one of the best financial decisions we’ve made. There’s no limit – we each carry a card around and we charge all of our purchases on it, with [...]
