It always interests me to hear how other companies do things, especially because we’re starting to learn that we do things different than most.  It’s not that our way is necessarily better or worse, but just that we solved the problem our way, which happens to be different.

The other day I read Jason Fried’s post recapping the first two months of 37Signals new development workflow.  A little background:

Instead of working individually in isolation as we had in the past, we’re breaking into small teams of three (two programmers, one designer). We’re keeping the teams intact for two months at a time. During those two months, the teams will work on four separate iterations, two weeks each. The goal is to drastically cut down scope, set short fixed deadlines, and focus on improving our products.

This is a really interesting concept, albeit one that won’t apply directly to us for a while. As the post goes on to explain though, certain aspects have worked well and certain aspects haven’t. One of the issues was that the development team was waiting around to get started while the design team finished the interface:

Lesson: Design needs a head start
Since we believe in designing the interface first, we ultimately found it made sense for the programmers to take on a few small tasks or bug fixes on the first Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of an iteration while the designer was working on the UI for the first big feature of the iteration. This way no one was sitting around waiting for design to be ready before they could begin. With short two-week iterations there’s no time for anyone to sit around waiting for step one before they can start on step two.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. We do that a little differently. It isn’t that the interface is done first and then the programmer comes along and programs the features into the interface. It’s not two rigidly separate events. To us, the interface is a much more fluid thing that is integral to each step of the design and development. We design the interface first, but we don’t actually build it first. We build a basic interface structure as we program, and then complete the full aesthetically functional interface only after the programming is complete.

Whew that was verbose. Maybe this explains it better: on any new site or feature, our process goes something like this:

1. Mike and I meet and create the user interface and wireframe the site structure. This usually is done on paper, but we’ve also done simple HTML mock-ups or Photoshop mock-ups. The goal isn’t to build anything that will actually be used, it’s to quickly (within a few hours) reach an agreement on a uniformed vision of the UI. We do a lot of talking, pointing at examples of other sites on our monitors, drawing quick sketches, and using Firebug to quickly hack up existing sites and see how ideas might turn out.
2. I go off and program the feature. As I program, I lay out the basic interface and create the basic styles in the stylesheet, using our interface sketches as my guide. My focus is on creating something that works.
3. Mike then creates the graphics and finishes off the design. His focus is to take something that works and make it as visually pleasing and as user-friendly as possible on every single browser.

So in our situation, it’s the designer who is always tailing the programmer, and not the other way around.

I really started thinking about WHY we do this and why it works?  Here’s what I came up with: functionality is not dependent on design as much as design is dependent upon functionality.  In other words, the design can only be it’s very best when there’s a functional site for it to work with.  Whereas, the functional site can still be at it’s very best with almost no design whatsoever (hence the basic interface framework that I put in place).

Does that actually make sense? I think it does…

Mike sees how it works and how it functions and can try it for real instead of speculating.  As long as we have a basic interface and structure agreed upon, I don’t benefit from having design done first. But Mike definitely does benefit from having the functional development complete.

I guess this only works given a few assumptions:

• Both the designer and programmer are web-savvy enough to create user interfaces (in my opinion, both have to be capable of doing so to be good at their jobs)
• Your programmer is reasonably proficient in HTML and CSS, enough so to build the basic interface to test their work before passing it along (I am not nearly as good at CSS as Mike is, but I’m getting better and I know enough to set things up in a way that saves him time once he starts designing and expanding upon it).
• The programmer does both the client-side and server-side programming. For instance, I do all of our Javascript and XML, in addition to the PHP. To me, this makes sense because I’m making AJAX calls and it seems simpler to have me doing that entire process.
• The programmer is experienced enough to notice any interface flaws or feature flaws early on, and if necessary stops and starts the planning process again (occasionally this happens to us and it just takes one more meeting to straighten things out, although it’s becoming more rare the longer we do this)

I’m not really trying to prove a point here. Just that what works for 37Signals and other companies isn’t what works for us, which is interesting to me. For any small team of two I think our process definitely warrants some strong consideration.

For the last year I’ve been working on developing a fairly large scale web project, not an Amazon, Twitter, Facebook or eBay caliber project but with good planning and a little luck it could conceivably attract any of those web all-stars to acquire our site down the road. I’ve known Adam for several years and we’ve become friends and a good source of advice and guidance for each other in entrepreneurial decisions and experiences. Please understand it is very difficult to sum up an 11 month project like this in a single blog post, but I will do my best to hit key points at the sacrifice of some key data.

The key data I will not include is who I am, what my site is, who I used for outsourcing and who my business partner is. I am doing it this way for a few reasons but primarily to keep things simpler for this post and we have some potential partnerships we are working on and we will be making significant changes to our site if they go through so we don’t want to push or create any extra buzz at the moment. Additionally I will be painfully honest at times and do not want to insult or hurt anyone’s feelings.

• It seems obvious, even foolish, to mention this but the first thing you need is a viable project to outsource, in my case it was the programming for a fairly complicated website. Protect yourself, but remember NDA’s and CA’s are only as good as the people signing them, if someone is going to breach the contract are you prepared to take legal action against them? Chances are slim that you are, so be careful who you approach when obtaining estimates. Don’t allow this to scare you away from contacting programmers for estimates, just don’t broadcast the details of your project to the world blindly. I hope if you are planning a project like this you bring something to the equation that no one else can, this makes you a valuable asset to the project – also remember that programmers as a whole are not entrepreneurs and have little desire in stealing your business or business model.
• Shop wisely, we ended up using a larger firm in India for our programming, but we contacted various companies from all over the globe and our estimates reflected this. Our highest bids came from US based companies(which we’ve come to find they typically outsource the programming themselves and function as a liaison between the companies abroad and you the client and charge you a premium for this service). There was over a $100k spread from our highest to lowest bid. There are many things to consider when looking at bids.
  • Look at other work they’ve done, make sure it doesn’t all look and feel the same. Contact webmasters and ask them about their experience.
  • The size of the company, is it a one man show or if your project lead gets hit by a car will someone else be able to take over. This happened to us, our project lead was hit by a car and was out of work for over 2 weeks – thankfully he was OK and someone was able to continue this project, things could have been worse, but it only turned into a week or so delay.
  • Ask to interview the project lead, this is a mistake we made. Moving forward I will demand this before I go through with the deal. Both my business partner and I feel if we had a different project lead our site would have been completed months quicker and with fewer headaches. We think the scope of our project was over our lead programmers head and as the client we paid for it in many ways.
  • Clarify the price and create a schedule with accountability, the main reason people outsource is to maximize the usable hours in a day(India is 8.5-9.5 hours ahead, depending on the time of year, in EST which is where I live) and save a small fortune in the process. Create a very firm contract and terms with deadlines and ensure that everyone understands completely.
• There are many myths with outsourcing, this became very apparent in a short amount of time. Some are quite humorous when I look back at our misconception of outsourcing, others are lessons learned.
  • Even with highly detailed project specifications you will need to hold their hand every step of the way and constantly test and check their work. The projects specifications for our site is over a 120 page document. We were very specific in what we were asking for and were very clear in needing the ability to grow and in which areas. Many people think you simply send your 2-3 page project specifications and they drive the project home, that is not my experience at all. I acknowledge that our site is far more complicated then most sites, but I cannot imagine letting them have free reign, the results would be nothing short of a disaster. In other words you are the project lead, they are the programmers.
  • Those of us in America and Canada take for granted our infrastructure, same is true of all advanced nations. Power failures and the internet going down is extremely common in India. Additionally bandwidth between India and the USA is weak during peak use hours and there are constant delays and breaks in communication because of this.
  • They are humans just like us and have the same human problems that we all do. They get sick, they need to eat, sleep and have a life. This sounds so foolish to say, but it seems most people view outsourced labor as a form of robot, this is NOT the case. They have families, good and bad days and they take off our holidays and their holidays. This leads me into my next big point.
• Things will go wrong, they will make mistakes and it will be frustrating beyond words. To this end, you will have to pay for all of these things not just in a loss and delay of potential revenue but in additional fees from the programing company. There is probably one of those catchy laws to explain this web development phenomenon, as with any system, the more complexity there is in the system the greater the chances of things getting screwed up and it costing you more time and money – both directly and indirectly.
• The language barrier is a very real problem. At some point everyone has had a problem with a call center based in India, not understanding what they say and/or is offended by their tone of talking to you. This is not intentional and frustrates them as much as it does us. Most of us have heavy European and Christian values instilled upon us and find it difficult when faced with a value system or habit that is unlike what we know and understand. Be patient and work hard to understand them, they will genuinely appreciate your effort and as with all human relations they will work harder knowing that you have respect for them as an individual and their values. With that said there will be misunderstandings, miscommunication and other painfully frustrating times that would probably not exist if you both spoke English as your first language.
• I cannot stress this enough, they are humans and peers despite living 7,000 miles away, treat them with respect and as a human being and it will make the whole experience more pleasurable and effective.
• You will learn a lot dealing with a foreign culture, I remember vividly the first time I heard them laugh at a joke. I tend to make constant jokes out of all things all day everyday, it keeps the mood light and people happy. My business partner uploaded a photo onto the site for testing and the photo was him next to a dead and mounted bear, one of the Indians on the call asked if that was my business partner in the picture and I jumped in and said “yes, he’s the one on the right” which was the bear, my business partner was on the left and the Indians on the call laughed until near tears at that remark. At other random times throughout the project they would totally lose it, typically over what we would find as a fairly insignificant thing, sometimes I couldn’t figure out what triggered it even with replaying the call.
• The timezone difference was confusing at first, now it’s fairly simple and extremely effective in getting more out of a day. We would have nearly daily updates and my business partner and I would test during our day and get notes out to them for their morning. I am on the east coast(EST) and India does not use Day Light Savings Time and further they are not a standard time, so depending on the time of the year they are 8 ½ or 9 ½ hours ahead of me. I set up a clock widget with their timezone so I can discern what time it is for them in seconds with no additional thought, in fact I do that with all timezones I deal with now and it has made my life surrounding time zones much simpler.
• Communication was mentioned in several capacities above but I feel it is worth stressing this point by itself. With all communications be very specific, do not leave room for interpretation or you will not be happy with the results. Be accurate with your information and what tasks you assign to them. Be curt, not rude but do not allow them to control the project, you lead it and being a leader means you sometimes have to make decisions that will not leave you popular. I’m not sure if it’s just the team we worked with but it is my experience that any specific detail or item that cannot be explained in two or fewer sentences needs a picture outlining the problem. As the details started to mount and our corrections were becoming more pointed it required us to take screen shots or web-image grabbing software with a brief explanation or simply use red arrows and lines to get our point across. This may have been a case where all of the Indians we dealt with were A.D.D and could not grasp paragraphs or complex theories in word, or it’s a trait of those who don’t speak English as their first language. What was most frustrating, was until we realized this they simply skipped or ignored our detailed explanations, often if there was an important detail in the second sentence it would frequently be missed.

Overall I enjoyed the experience and learned more then I could have imagined. At times I had regrets and if I could go back I would do things differently, but I would still outsource and probably go with the same company. We saved a small fortune, which was the difference between us creating this site or not. We’ve all heard tales of outsourcing, though it’s rare to encounter someone who’s actually done it. I hope my brief outline has helped to debunk some of the misconceptions and share some of my hard learned lessons when outsourcing so you can decide if it’s the right path to pursue down the road.

A few months ago I received a request to review a new book.  For the most part, I’ve stopped accepting books to review, but this one was different.  Not only did the author himself email me (as opposed to the typical PR firm), but the topic was actually pretty interesting and something that I haven’t seen covered previously:  assuming you work 8 hours and sleep another 8, the premise of the book is that a large part of your success and happiness come from (or don’t come from) the other 8 hours in the day.  Hence, The Other 8 Hours: Maximize Your Free Time to Create New Wealth and Purpose by Robert Pagliarini.

Let’s get this out of the way first:  I’m not the target market for this book.  I can, however, empathize with the intended audience.  In college or during my short engineering career, I would have been.  This book is for the person who is stuck in a rut – either because they don’t have enough time or money or a satisfying job – and wants to change things.  Pagliarini has a financial services background, which I think puts an interesting twist on the book because he talks with knowledge about traditional financial planning and how it fails.

One of my favorite parts was early on where he lists 24 “lifeleeches” – things that waste time and suck the life out of you (TV, gossip, porn, etc). Then it actually gets pretty in depth on how to start your own part time business…if that’s how you choose to spend your other 8 hours.  Overall the book is a really good supplement/compliment to The Four Hour Workweek.  I’d read both around the same time in life – you’re sure you don’t want to work your current job and that you kind of want to start a business, but don’t know where to get started.

Anyway, for me, the measure of any book is whether or not I learned something.  There are two really interesting concepts that I picked up from this book.

Boosting

I’ve always suggested getting a non career job to fund your first business.  I usually suggested something simple that can be done on off hours, like bartending. However, this book takes it another level and advocates getting a “boost job where you get paid to show up and do absolutely nothing”.  It has to be:

• Brainless and action-less
• Accommodate your schedule
• Flexible hours
• Pays $8 – $15 per hour
• Is close to home
• Has internet access

Sounds great right?  I’m sure you’re thinking what I was thinking:  how many jobs like this actually exist?  More than I suspected:

• Babysitting
• Security guard
• Dispatch operator
• Computer lab attendant
• Toll-booth attendant
• Gym front desk clerk
• Kiosk worker
• Hotel front desk clerk
• If you’re in college, almost all work-study jobs (this one is mine…at least where I went to school all work-study jobs were brainless and paid $10/hr+)

These jobs are perfect because you get paid AND have time to work on starting a business or learning a new skill.

Chunking

Chunking is the correct way to “multitask”.  Multitasking as most people do it (you know, IM + text messaging + email + trying to work or study) doesn’t work because you’re using your brain to try to do several things at once.  You jump back and forth and get far less done than you would with a singular focus.  Chunking is different – you’re doing two things at once but one is using your brain and one is using your body.  For example, my new habit of listening to podcasts while I drive combines my brain (listening) with my body (driving), and it works.  I never really thought of it this way, but this is something that all successful people I know do well. They don’t waste time.

The book recommends making a list of things you do where you feel like you have dead time (taking out the garbage, cooking, jogging, riding the train, etc) and then make a list of all the things you want to do more (learn a new language, talk to your friends, etc).  Then look for opportunities to pair a head activity with a body activity.  A few examples from the book:

• Learn a language or listen to audio books while exercising
• Go for walks when talking on the phone
• Have meetings while going for a hike
• Keep a book/iPhone/Kindle handy for whenever you have down-time at the doctors office, on public transportation, or while your car is getting serviced.

You get the idea.  The possibilities are limitless.  I just like how Pagliarini made the connection.  There’s really no reason not to chunk your time like this.

I’ve always wondered if I could take it a step further and do my morning email check and day to day tasks while exercising.  I see these people who build laptop trays on their treadmills and bikes.  Imagine starting every day with an hour long brisk walk on a treadmill while you bang out your email.  I certainly couldn’t/wouldn’t program this way, but I think it’s possible to get a good set up where you can read the news and answer email.  It wouldn’t replace any exercise I currently do, but it’d be a great supplement.  I always want to be more active.  It probably won’t happen until I have a more permanent living space, plus can justify the spending on a decent secondary laptop and a nice treadmill.  But it’s kind of always been on my mind and this just re-emphasized how good of an idea that could be for me.

I’ve written before about how I handle my email. I still think that the majority of people leave their inbox open all day long with little alerts popping up every time new mail arrives, and I still think that doing so is a very very bad thing for productivity. Unless your job is customer service, you’ve got other projects to work on that need your undivided attention, and keeping your inbox open is a constant distraction that kills your focus.

Here are my rules for email, 2010 style:

Check it as infrequently as you possibly can

I check my email once in the morning before 9 AM (that’s when we ship orders), and once in the evening at or after 5 PM. On warehouse days I check it again at noon (we ship orders again at noon), and on weekends I check it only once per day at whatever time is most convenient for me.

In my case, no important email ever goes 24 hours without a reply. On business days, most emails are answered in less than 8 hours, and all emails that fall before 5 PM get answered on the same day. That’s pretty good considering how little my inbox is open.

The only email that is more time sensitive is our website monitoring service. If our server goes down, I need to know about it ASAP. For that, I configured my email to forward a text message to my cell phone.

Use Google Apps for Business

Even if you think your mail server does everything you need, there are several advantages of moving your email hosting over to Google:

• The ability to log into Gmail from anywhere and review your email
• Gmail search, which might be the best email search I’ve used
• Gmail SPAM filtering, which might be the best SPAM filtering I’ve ever used
• Your email is up even if your server is down
• A Google IP address for your sent mail (my feeling  is that a Google IP address is less likely to trigger SPAM in someone’s email folder when you send a message…)
• Powerful filtering options
• IMAP functionality
• POP3 support (I use this to access my Hotmail account that I’ve had for years.  I don’t want to close the account because of how long I’ve had the address, but I also want it accessible and backed up with the rest of my email)
• You can also integrate Google Docs and other Google services into one company intranet.

You can then use your favorite IMAP client to check your mail. Especially if you use multiple computers or devices, IMAP is a must. It’s also great for when you switch computers or have a hardware failure – you can literally be back up and running in minutes, whereas POP3 backups and restores can be a pain.

Receive all of your work email in one spot

This might not apply to many people. I have probably 50 email accounts that I get mail for. Several accounts for all of our sites. A site might have an address for questions (info@), payment (payments@), me (adam@), and more. All of which are forwarded to my one adam [at] pureadapt [dot] com account.

There’s simplicity in opening one inbox. There’s also practicality in that once you have Google Apps set up and your IMAP clients set up, there’s no tweaking involved other than forwarding the new email address to your main one.

I then use Thunderbird identities to tie multiple identities to that account. For example, most people see my name as “Adam McFarland”, but if I reply to a SportsLizard email, the customer will see my name as “Adam @ SportsLizard”, if I reply to a Detailed Image email, the customer will see my name as “Adam @ Detailed Image”, and so on.

Filter, filter, and filter some more: not all email is created equal

By having all of your email in one spot, you can create this ultra-efficient tool that sorts through all of your emails and only shows you the important stuff…which was the long-winded point of this post. There are some emails that you need to see all the time. Other emails you only need to see once per week. Others you don’t need to see at all, but need to have a record of in case they need to be accessed. Gmail’s filters are powerful enough to do pretty much anything that you want them to do.

Here’s the breakdown of the types of emails I get, and how I prioritize them (ordered approximately by the magnitude that I get):

• SPAM - auto filtered into SPAM folder, reviewed once per week, deleted after review
• Cron jobs (automated processes that run on our servers) – auto filtered to skip the inbox, no answer required, saved for 1 week  and then deleted
• Sales receipts for Detailed Image – auto filtered to skip the inbox, no answer required, saved permanently in folder to search
• SportsLizard Price Guide subscription emails – auto filtered to skip the inbox, reviewed once per week, saved permanently to search
• Newsletters – auto filtered to skip the inbox, reviewed once per week, deleted after review
• Emails from customers – straight to the inbox, answered immediately, saved permanently in folder based upon site
• Emails from my blog – straight to the inbox, answered within 48 hours, saved permanently in Young Entrepreneur folder
• Emails from my partners or important services that we use (banks, hosting, etc) – straight to inbox, answered immediately if necessary, saved permanently in Pure Adapt folder

There’s a VERY big different between a weekly LinkedIn update and an email from a customer who is having issues checking out.  By de-cluttering my inbox, I never see the LinkedIn email come through.  I don’t see it until I do my weekly newsletter review on Tuesday.  But the customer email is in my inbox along with other important emails.  Having 90 of my 100 emails get filtered out because I don’t need to see them, ensures that I focus on the 10 that are important.  It also ensures that I don’t accidentally look past an important email because it gets accidentally deleted when I’m deleting 25 cron jobs or accidentally archived when I’m archiving 30 Detailed Image receipts.

When you do email, do email

Email is just like any other task for me.  I want to get it done as quickly as possible and then move on to the next.  I don’t have a million other things going on when I open my inbox.  I glance quickly at each email and how much work it will involve, and then glance at the clock and determine my goal for closing Thunderbird and getting on with my day.  I tend to spend between 5 minutes and 30 minutes answering email, with the average probably around 10 minutes.  If all you’re focusing on is email, it really doesn’t take all that long, even if your customer replies require a little investigation.

I try to apply this rule to everything I’m doing. If I’m working on a blog post, I close everything else and just focus on the blog post. Other than music, I tend not to have anything else running. Multitasking is really inefficient – you get more done if you just rip through one single task at a time as opposed to trying to do 3 or 4 at once.

Clear the entire inbox every time

No questions asked. If something doesn’t need a reply, it goes in a folder. If it does, I reply right then and there. If I need to wait to get back to them, I still reply telling them it might be a few days before I get them an answer (a common courtesy) and then add an action item to my to do list…and then file it away in a folder. There’s almost no scenario I’ve encountered where I can’t clear my inbox immediately.

—

At the end of the day, not all of these techniques will work in your situation. It’s important that you have a system that really works for you. That does however mean that you actually put some thought into what will really be best for you and your business, instead of just accepting that email will distract you all day long because that’s what it does to everyone else.

We reply with something to the extent of “our team built the platform in-house for solely our own use”. If I get the question, I also tend to then suggest Shopify and Magento as solutions that might work for them.

I enjoy the question because it really validates the hard work that we all put into it. I often wonder how much more interested people would be if they could see just how effective our back end is at improving our warehouse operations.

However, I’ve noticed that a good portion of people reply with a semi-snotty remark along the lines of “well I’m not as lucky to have a team of expert web developers” or, my personal favorite, “I don’t have the resources that you have so I’d never be able to do that”.

I know that they don’t necessarily know the history of our company, but from my perspective those comments sound ABSURD. We had no resources when we got started. If you go back 5 years, we all had no web experience and were in the process of graduating college. We didn’t have a lot of money. We didn’t have a lot of experience doing much of anything. You know what we did have? Work ethic.

Everything we’ve done is stuff that anyone could have done. Aside from a few hundred dollars on books, I didn’t spend anything to learn how to program. PHP and MySQL are free and open source. So are Linux and Apache. Web hosting and domains are dirt cheap (less than $100/year to get started with a site).

It was just a shear matter of building a site, learning something new, improving the site, and then doing that over and over again for years. While I was finishing school, and while I had a full time job. It wasn’t always the easy choice or the convenient choice, but I made sure I found time to work at it because it was something I truly wanted to be good at.

We have a “team of experts” with a lot of “resources” because we worked hard to achieve that (although I’m not sure either of those things is completely true…). We have advantages that they don’t only because we value those skills enough to have made them a priority and have worked at improving them for years and years.

I made it a priority. I worked hard. People don’t like to hear that. They like to hear the easy solution, the solution that doesn’t require any effort on their part. That’s why the majority of people aren’t very good at much of anything. Putting in hours upon hours of hard work over the course of weeks/months/years is a lost art.

In the past several months a lot has changed about the way I do things, all for the better in my opinion.

I’m getting a lot less customer service emails since we changed the way we handle errors on Detailed Image and are in the process of getting rid of Amazon and Tastefully Driven.  In terms of customer service, I used to handle all DI technical emails, all of Amazon, all of Tastefully Driven, all of SportsLizard, and then the other misc emails that trickle in now and again (Music-Alerts, Z.ips.ME, iPrioritize).  Knocking the first two off of my list has decreased my emails by about 65% (educated guess).  Don’t get me wrong – I love handling customer service issues. I love hearing the feedback.  It makes me an infinitely better developer.  But in these cases, the emails I was getting were repetitive and adding little or no value to the business.  Those are the types of emails I dislike, and therefore am really happy to rid myself of.

For the past ~6 weeks I have only been doing two warehouse days per week. That will probably go back to three once volume picks up in the Spring, but two is where I’d like to be back to by the end of Summer.  Hopefully we’ll have our full-time warehouse manager in place by then. We should each be able to do Monday + one other day, with a part time employee and the manager giving us 3 people per day.  The extra day off makes all the difference.  At least one day off is always primarily an errand day.  I go to the bank, visit my parents, grocery shop, shave my head, etc etc.  So by going from one additional day off to two, I can get a lot more of my project work done.

Speaking of which, I’ve really taken to batch processing my tasks based upon where I’ll be for the day.  For example, on my two legit days at home, I’m trying to do nothing but develop LockerPulse.  Those days I can go long stretches without being interrupted, which is really what you need to “get in the zone” and program effectively.  I try to save everything else for my warehouse days or my errand day.  Those days I often only get 15 or 20 minutes at a time to do stuff.  Especially on warehouse days.  There are interruptions left and right.  So when I add something to my to-do list that will take less than 30 minutes, I make sure I add it to one of those days and keep my days off totally free.

I’ve really taken to listening to podcasts when I’m in the car. It started when I listened to the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders and has kind of blossomed into a routine for me.  I really look forward to getting in the car now by myself.  I’ve got it to a point where the podcasts I listen to come out at roughly the same pace that I drive.   Originally I tried using my old iPod, but found it a pain to carry around, keep charged, and plug into my car, so instead I’ve just been burning a new MP3 CD every few weeks and just leaving that in my car.  When I start the car it picks up right where I left off.  In addition to the Stanford talks, I’m subscribed to the 37Signals Podcast, This Week in Google, TechStuff, Diggnation, and Business Week’s Behind This Week’s Cover Story.  If you have any suggestions for me I’d love to hear them in the comments.

Last but not least, I’ve changed my sleep schedule to get up an hour later.  Sleep has been one of my favorite topics on this blog, mostly because 1) it’s really really important for health and productivity, and 2) everyone I know (myself included) pretty much sucks at it.  Check out the sleep category if you want the full run down, but basically in Jan of 2008 I decided I was going to become an early riser and stop getting up late and sleeping erratically as I had for my entire life.  I worked my ass off and was disciplined as hell and after several months got my body on an awesome 10 PM – 6 AM schedule.  I didn’t realize how tired I always was previously until I did this.  One or two good nights sleep just don’t leave you feeling as rested, happy, and productive as months upon months of great sleep do.

Anyway, 10 – 6 worked great for a while.  It enabled me to get to the gym before coming to the warehouse.  Back then we also had clients, so it let me get a few hours of work done before they started harassing me with phone calls.  The past six months or so, I kept finding myself in more social situations that kept me out later.  The only way I could keep getting up at 6 was to nap a lot.  I love napping, it can be a great supplement if done right, but I didn’t want it to be an every day routine.  Napping is horribly inefficient when you factor in the time it takes to wind down and wind back up afterward.  I also found myself going to the gym on non-warehouse days after doing some work  (9 or 10 AM), so the need to be up at 6 wasn’t really there.  The last straw was when my girlfriend got a new job that will have her at the office most days until around 7 PM. I want to make sure we have some time at night to spend together. I finally decided to start getting up at 7 AM about three weeks ago.  This really wouldn’t be a big deal for most people, but I always thought I’d stick to my 6 AM forever and ever because of how much I liked it.  Since the change though, I’ve realized that it’s a much better lifestyle fit for me now.  I haven’t napped since.  I’ve never been tired at all during the day.  I just feel more relaxed and less stressed overall.

The story behind how LockerPulse has unfolded is an interesting one.

For years, I’ve had a rather unique way of tracking my favorite sports teams using Google Reader, RSS feeds, and some creative tagging. It isn’t so much about the tools involved, but the process of researching the proper amount of news for a serious fan without being overwhelmed: this mix of official team and league sites, big sports sites like ESPN, fan blogs, newspaper blogs, and more. About a year ago I had the thought “how come other people don’t do this?” and the answer was that most people have no clue what Google Reader is, what RSS is, or how to research and find the unique sources of information that will improve their experience as a fan. That night I bought a domain name (not LockerPulse) and decided that it would be one of my side projects. I planned to spend a few weekends on it and release it around when I released Z.ips.ME. I figured it would be a small side project that might gain some traction and generate a small amount of revenue, similar to Music-Alerts or maybe even SportsLizard.

But then I started really researching the project and all of the great sources of information out there. I gave Mike a custom RSS feed to test in the fall for his favorite teams. A few days later he came back and he couldn’t stop talking about how awesome it was. He said something along the lines of “this is amazing, how did you find all of these sources?” That’s when I knew I was on to something. So I kept digging and meticulously researched all 122 professional US sports teams (NBA, NHL, MLB, and NFL).

I built a demo application that I showed my partners in December. At our annual meeting we really finalized that this no longer was a “side project”, but a full fledged business venture, with the opportunity to make money selling a premium version of our software and serving ultra-targeted ads through our own in-house ad platform. I might normally be a little bit skeptical about such a model…except for that it’s the same model as we’ve had great success with on SportsLizard with a far worse product (not to say that SL is a poor product, just that this is that much better). I also got the “freemium” model to work pretty well on iPrioritize for a while. Not that it made a ton of money, but it did have a steady flow of customers paying $10/month. Considering that it wasn’t really that innovative, and that the free version gave away too much, and that the premium version wasn’t even that good…well, it gives me confidence that if we build a great product that the business model will work.

We’re really going to pour as much as we can into this project. Even with Tastefully Driven we had to back out and couldn’t really give it our full effort because we needed Detailed Image to carry us into consistent profitability, as I sort of touched upon when we decided to close it. This is the first project that we’ve been able to approach as a long term venture that we don’t *need* to profit from immediately.

Greg has been using the demo for the past few months. He came to me the other day and said “Adam, I’m officially addicted to LockerPulse. I can’t stop checking it. I don’t check any other sports site on the web”. And trust me, the version he’s using isn’t even 10% as good as what we’re planning on launching with. The version I’m working on currently is already leaps and bounds better than anything I’ve ever used on the web for this type of stuff, and there’s still a long way to go.

Essentially, we’re building out my vision of what the perfect tool for sports fans is. The fact that the early feedback has been so good has really elevated my expectations for the whole thing. Even if it doesn’t catch on, I’m going to be extremely satisfied because we’re building something that I’ll use and that will make my life better. I am my own target market. Mike has already been working on some killer designs (I personally love the splash page design) and the other guys are starting to get involved in the planning and marketing, so it’s becoming more of a team effort and less of something I’m just working on developing on the side. I don’t think I’ve ever been more excited to work on a project.

Oh, one more little thing: from a web business standpoint, it’s really important to get a splash page like this up as soon as possible. As soon as you have your domain purchased and server configured, just get something up and find a way to get it indexed. I talk about this in the SEO & Web Marketing Essay, but it’s important to know long before your launch that your site has been crawled and indexed by all of the major search engines. How easy is it? I had planned for this post to be what got it indexed, but just by adding a link to the Pure Adapt site yesterday and tweeting about it last night I noticed that it had already been indexed by this morning. Just one less thing to worry about…plus, for whatever it’s worth, you want to get that “domain age” clock ticking as soon as possible since the age of your site has some (probably minor) impact on where you rank.

In terms of interaction, I’ve met tons of great young business owners from around the world online using this blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and through all of our sites. Example – I have a direct link to Gary Vaynerchuk because I sort of interviewed him. If I went to a conference, I might be able to speak to him…or maybe not. But now I can sure email my contact at his company and get through to him if I really want to.

In terms of offline interaction, I’m lucky enough to live in a city where there is enough academia and tech business that it isn’t all that hard to meet people that do the types of stuff I’m interested in. I have a handful of friends locally who run businesses, both online and off. I also know several people in NYC, which is a 2 hour 30 minute train ride away. That’s good enough for me.

Of course, the other reason that people attend conferences is for the speakers. You get to hear some of the best people in their respective professions give talks about the things that they’re passionate about. You can learn a ton by listening to successful people speak. Luckily, all of these conferences post every single talk online. Want to go to TED? LeWeb? BigOmaha? Sit at your monitor and watch the entire conference at home for free. Want to have access to Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Though Leaders class? Just download the podcasts and listen on your way to work.

It’s really pretty amazing if you think about it. 15 years ago the thought of what I just described would have been laughable. I’ve been meaning to do a post about this for a while. There are so many great talks I’ve seen recently that I wasn’t sure how to organize it all. I may double back down the road and do something more extensive, but for now these are the two talks that really stand out in my mind as being absolute must watches.

In both cases, the videos are extremely entertaining and extremely educational. They both preach the type of entrepreneurship that I (try to) advocate:

• Do something you are passionate about
• Have a great product or service
• Fund it yourself
• Have an actual revenue model
• Grow slowly and organically
• Listen to and interact with your customers
• Work hard
• Create a lifestyle that works for you from the beginning
• Build a business for the long term

Gary and David are both ultra passionate, ultra opinionated, and ultra outspoken, so there’s some (OK, a lot of) dirty language.

Anyway, here are the videos:

David Heinemeier Hansson from 37Signals at Startup School ‘08

Gary Vaynerchuk at LeWeb ‘09

Enjoy!

Last night I finally went on to the CBS website and watched the first episode of Undercover Boss. The premise of the show is pretty interesting – presidents/CEOs of large companies go “undercover” and work as front-line employees for their own organizations. The assumption being that they’ll see things completely differently if they work in the positions that directly interact with their customers.

And of course that’s what happened in the first episode. It featured president and COO of Waste Management Larry O’Donnell. WM is a great first company because 1) they are huge 2) Larry was really really excited to learn from the experience, and 3) they have the shittiest possible jobs to do…literally. The episode can be watched in full online. Unlike 99.99% of the shows on television, this may actually make be worth watching on a regular basis.

In this instance, O’Donnell made it a point to correct some of the injustices that his employees encountered. Which was awesome. It was nice to see him take action. But it was even better to see him connect this to the big picture. Several times he said how his cost cutting initiatives to make the company more efficient were backfiring in ways that he couldn’t have imagined.

In a large organization like WM, this is a huge problem. The people making the policies are often several levels away from those enacting them. It seems like total common sense, but even in a large company like WM, you have to have some connection to your front line employees that are actually doing the day to day work and interacting directly with your customer base. Larry and his board really didn’t understand their own business.

The answer for most businesses isn’t going on a reality show. But that doesn’t mean that whomever is putting a new process in place shouldn’t actually do it themselves for a day or two. You can learn so much more than any amount of data can give you by just doing it and talking to those who do it on a daily basis. It seems like a waste of time but – as this show is probably going to prove every single week – it’s often the best use of an executive’s time.

There absolutely has to be a regular feedback loop where management solicits information from the people who are doing the actual work. If you empower them at their own job they’ll be much happier and more productive, and you’ll develop more efficient processes as a result of it (and in the end make more money and be more profitable). Again, seems like common sense, but how many businesses actually do it?

Now, in a small business like ours this is much easier but still not impossible to screw up. We’re at the point where the owners are all trying to remove ourselves from the day to day operations of our warehouse. By the end of the year it’s a pretty safe assumption to say that we’ll have a full time warehouse manager and 1-3 part time employees reporting to him.

All of a sudden we’ll be a step removed from our part time employees. It’s not too hard to see how we could lose touch with them while we “focus on more important things”. But the most important thing is always how your existing business operates on a day to day basis. If customers aren’t being taken care of in a way that meets our standards, nothing else really matters.

One of the reasons that our systems have worked so well is that we’ve designed them for us to use. We build it, we try it, and we tweak it, based upon our own feedback (and now the feedback of Charlie and John). We won’t always be the ones pulling the orders or stocking the shelves on a daily basis (in fact, we rarely do that stuff now), but we have to make a commitment to do it somewhat regularly…especially when we make a change to our processes. And we need to make sure our employees feel empowered to tell us what works, what doesn’t, and their ideas for improvement.

I think for the most part we’ve done that so far. Each of our employees has made several suggestions that have been implemented and made the system as a whole better, which I think is a good measuring stick for this kind of stuff – their willingness to speak up, and our willingness to implement. But as we grow it will take more of a concerned effort to achieve.

Today I was in the warehouse by myself (Mike was sick, the other guys all had stuff going on). It was the first time since the holidays that I pulled orders. It was a good thing. It reminded me what the job was like. It got my mind off of some of the other projects I was on and for one day got me thinking about the things that our employees think about. It was a very good use of my time, which is something I’ll hopefully always keep in the back of my mind.

If I don’t, I’m sure I’d end up like the millions of other business owners who make decisions based upon numbers on a screen without being able to consider the true impact that it will have on their employees, their customers, and inevitably their bottom line.