Category Archives: SportsLizard

The New SportsLizard is FINALLY Done

Over the weekend I finally completed everything for the SportsLizard revamp I was working on.  Yesterday I made the official announcement on the blog and sent out a newsletter. Now that I’ve had a few days to calm down from everything, I’m not really sure how I feel about it.  Weird is the best word to describe it.  This wasn’t a “typical” project for me/us.  Usually there’s the hope that a project will hit it big and make us a ton of money.  While I’ve always thought this had the potential to be huge, that wasn’t really what I set … Continue reading

Posted on November 5, 2008 | 4 Comments

The Power of Programming

I’m in the middle of working on a major revamp for SportsLizard.  As of a few months ago this wasn’t in our plans, but the major failures of new sites by industry incumbents Beckett and Tuff Stuff, combined with the urging of a few SportsLizard “fans”, inspired us to reconsider the opportunity at hand to leverage the existing SL community to expand our presence and really take on the big boys.  I can honestly say I’ve never been more excited about a business opportunity.  It should only take me a few weeks to complete the programming, the marketing will all … Continue reading

Posted on September 25, 2008 | 5 Comments

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 handle customer service.  In my previous life I actually tackled a similar project as an engineer on a much larger scale and was able to significantly reduce customer contacts without impacting sales or satisfaction.  So naturally, we gave option A a shot. Before getting into … Continue reading

Posted on July 19, 2008 | 14 Comments

Averting a Customer Service Nightmare

I don’t much mention SportsLizard or the Price Guide anymore, but it is still alive and kicking.  I’ve got it down to a science where I probably only spend less than 5 hours a week to maintain the site.  The Price Guide is at about 30,000 users but – because of our inline help and FAQ – requires very little customer service.  Premium accounts are only a small fraction of that, but we still make over $1k/month on them for doing essentially nothing. However, this morning my biggest SL nightmare became reality – the Price Guide software mysteriously stopped working.  … Continue reading

Posted on March 15, 2008 | 2 Comments

My Problem With Online Advertising

There’s no one out there that loves the recent advances on the web more than I do. From a user standpoint, “Web 2.0″ is all about innovative technologies that push the boundaries of the web without costing a cent. From Flickr to MySpace/Facebook, Google Apps, and YouTube, one common denominator is that they are all free. And that’s awesome – if you are a user. But what about if you are a development company? Those rare successes have baited us into thinking that online advertising is a really viable business option. From my experiences, it’s as much fools gold as … Continue reading

Posted on September 25, 2007 | 10 Comments

PayPal Fixed, Price Guide Passes 15k!

Finally, five days later my inbox was flooded with the PayPal subscription payments. From what I can tell they’ve back-billed all of the customers from Thursday until this morning, and normalcy has returned to my world. Thankfully this fiasco is over. Now comes the questions: why did PayPal wait several days before acknowledging the problem? Why wasn’t their customer service team fully aware of the issue? Why did they wait until yesterday (4 days late) to post an announcement on their blog? Why wasn’t there an announcement on the homepage so everyone could immediately be aware of the issue? And … Continue reading

Posted on September 3, 2007 | Leave a comment