From Small by Choice, Whether Clients Like It or Not, a New York Times article about a successful small Chicago pizza shop that only opens 4 days a week, doesn’t do deliveries, has an owner that makes every pizza by hand, and refuses to allow customers to customize their own pie (emphasis is mine):
Q. In [...]
From Rand Fishkin’s post about his long, expensive, and ultimately unsuccessful journey trying to raise VC money for his company SEOmoz (emphasis is mine):
I tell this story about our VC experience to a lot of people – it seems to be a subject that attracts great curiosity and I, of course, love to share. Most [...]
Graceful error handling is something that all good web developers pay attention to. There are too many weird scenarios out there for everything to work perfectly. Too many browsers, too many flavors of operating systems, and too many people that will do things that you never could have dreamed of.
When we were developing the new [...]
This weekend we’re running a 20% off coupon code on Detailed Image. Coupled with our free shipping on orders over $150 for the rest of the year, it’s a pretty enticing pre-holiday sale.
Apparently it’s not quite good enough for one customer.
Said customer decided that he was going to outsmart our system by buying a [...]
I saw a fantastic piece about General Stanley McChrystal on 60 Minutes this past weekend. McChrystal is the new commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan. He’s absolutely brilliant. He is completely changing the approach to winning the war. He understands that the goal isn’t to beat the Taliban, it’s to free the Afghani people. Understanding [...]
I always jot down notes when I get the idea for a new post. This week I’ve had quite a few ideas, none of which are enough for a full post really. Too big for Twitter. Too tiny for a full blog post.
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Two final thoughts on funding your first business and generating your first cash [...]
In Part 1 I took a look at some of the more obvious improvements on the major pages of the site. I think some of the subtleties are even more interesting. Things that might go unrecognized at first, but make a small positive impact on your business.
Banner System
One time during one of our sales a [...]
A while back I signed up for a KODAK Gallery Account to view a friends photos. Otherwise though, I’ve never used it. Then the other day there was an email in my inbox entitled “Important: From the Gallery’s General Manager”. Curious, I opened it. In part, it read (bolding is my emphasis):
Let’s put [...]
I made two really unique online purchases recently, and neither had anything to do with the actual online experience. In both cases it was what came with my item that really separated these retailers apart from the norm.
The first was a pair of shoes I bought from Piperlime. Instead of a crumpled up invoice [...]
Shipping is a total pain in the ass. If you require your customers sign for their packages, they complain because they aren’t home to sign. If you don’t make them sign, they claim packages were never delivered and you have no recourse. If you let them choose (which is what we plan on doing with [...]
