“How do you know what to do?” is another one of my favorites. Like you said, the concept of actual accountability to someone other than a boss screaming out orders is foreign to most people. This mentality scares me about hiring people who have been in the “traditional” workforce for too long. I’m a big believer in everyone “owning” their projects (my boss when I was an engineer really harped upon this, one of the best lessons I’ve ever learned). For example, our part-time employee is about to go full-time and run our warehouse, and he’s going to “own” warehouse operations. He’ll have his metrics that he’ll have to hit and he’ll have to decide exactly what to do and when to do it. Granted, it’s in an environment where the choices are pretty simple (customer orders going out supersedes everything else), but he’ll learn how to make those decisions for himself instead of us making them for him. The feeling of ownership is really key for happy, motivated employees I believe. You certainly have to guide them, but they also have to feel as if new initiatives are “theirs” and not “yours”. He’s already changed a lot of things for the better with our day-to-day operations because he’s doing it every day. I want to encourage that attitude and environment where it’s OK to change things if you think it’s better, and it’s OK to experiment…even if something doesn’t quite work. I think if you do that, you avoid the employees who just do a task, return for new instructions, do another task, and then rinse and repeat for 30 years.

Along those lines, it’s also really nice to have lots of data from all of our sites. Simple questions like “what browsers do people use?” can be answered better by taking the sum of the data from all of our sites and not just SportsLizard or DI or this blog because each has their inherit technical biases.

Having moved to the south recently it’s become even more of a problem, I typically say I own a marketing company or I “do computer.” Unfortunately I live on a short road, about 1.5 miles long and the word spread quickly so I have become the IT guy for a lot of the locals, thankfully their problems are extremely simple and it makes me a hero… but it’s also the reason I’ve started using the marketing company explanation almost exclusively. I honestly don’t think my mother understands what I do, when I try to explain it I can tell she has not a clue what I am talking about.

That said, you cited a ton of technical, development overlap. But the one thing I think was brushed over here is the idea of general business experimentation. Having new, less popular sites, helps you test new ideas on the web without risking a proven business. Those ideas can ultimately feed back into DI, whether you use the actual code from them or not. What you’re essentially doing is diversifying your risk so that you can evolve as a business without testing the waters on your main product. And that, to me, is one of the most important reasons to do things the way you do.