Given that we each only come in two days per week (everyone on Monday, one person each of the other four days), there was a big need for someone to “own” the growing warehouse responsibilities on a consistent day to day basis. We envision him being the person who trains and manages all of the other part-time (and maybe full-time) warehouse employees as we grow.

We’re super excited to have him on full-time.

Internally, what we had to get done to make the hire happen was very interesting. We had to bulk up our company policies documentation. We had to define his role. We had to decide on a benefits package – we’re covering the full cost of health insurance, something we plan to do for all of our employees. We had to get him a key to the building. We had to set up a laptop for him. We had to set him up on Google Apps and give him the appropriate access levels to various features. And that’s probably just the tip of the iceberg. It’s been an ongoing process for several months, one that will hopefully set us up to hire full-time employees for years to come.

We’ll begin to reap the benefits of having him around right away. Already today he was responsible for opening the warehouse before we got there, and shutting it down after we left. For now, we’ll be keeping our schedules, but long term this opens up the possibility for us to get together during business hours – say for a meeting, collaborative work, or even a meeting with our lawyer (something that we previously have had trouble scheduling) – while still knowing that the warehouse is being taken care of by someone we trust.

The other immediate benefit of having Charlie around will be to “cut the cord” on some of the communication between Greg and the rest of us. Greg handles customer service and inventory ordering, both of which require him to be in constant contact with the warehouse. Sometimes it can get tricky when he needs to talk to me on Tuesday, George on Wednesday, and Mike on Thursday. Now he can communicate directly with Charlie all of the time. This should really help simplify things and eliminate some communication mishaps.

In the big picture, it just feels good to create a job, hopefully a good job that can provide a good life to Charlie for a long time. And given that we bootstrapped our way to profitability, this isn’t a job where we’re spending our angel investment to hire a bunch of people in hopes that we’ll eventually make enough money to be able to justify keeping them on. It’s a real live job that isn’t going anywhere. It’s one of the most important roles that small business owners play in helping the local region that they do business in, and the economy as a whole.

Name aside, this Café Grumpy is not a cafe. It is, unmistakably, a coffee bar.

“I don’t think I’d ever do a bigger space with tables and chairs again,” Ms. Bell said. “I appreciate the idea of when you go someplace and it feels like a home away from home, but I don’t think it should be a home office away from home.”

Hers is one of a growing number of coffee bars that have opened recently around the country, particularly in New York. Instead of idling at a chair, customers at these establishments stand or perch on a stool to down a cappuccino or an iced coffee at the counter. By doing away with the comfy seats, roomy tables and working outlets that many customers now seem to believe are included in the price of a macchiato, the new coffee bars challenge the archetypal American cafe.

And:

Earlier this summer, the Bluebird Coffee Shop in the East Village replaced half its tables and most of the chairs with two counters and a few stools.

“A coffee shop should be a place to meet your friends and hold conversations and cultivate ideas instead of — I’m going to get in trouble for saying this, so I have to be careful — instead of sticking your head in a laptop,” said Mark Connell (who owns Bluebird with his wife, Jessica), before adding that computers are always welcome at the few remaining LP-size tables.

I’ve noticed this trend myself – about a year ago one of my favorite local coffee shops, Uncommon Grounds, (that also has great salads and sandwiches), decided to ditch wi-fi during lunch hours after the owner noticed that there weren’t enough tables available for patrons coming in for lunch. As much as I love Uncommon Grounds, I haven’t been back there since because I don’t feel completely welcome walking in and working for a few hours, even if it’s not during lunch and I spend $10 or $15 on food and drink.

Interestingly enough, Starbucks is going in the opposite direction. They’re now offering free wi-fi all day long in hopes of encouraging people to sit there all day and buy lots of food and drink.

I’m not sure where I come out on this. On one side, I completely understand where the business owners are coming from and respect their right to mold and shape their business however they want. However, as more and more people work remotely, there’s also clearly a need for somewhere for people to go where they can work, hold small meetings, and get something to drink/eat. I think the problems discussed in the article all come down to expectations – Starbucks has led us to expect that every coffee shop be a secondary office, and that’s not fair. Still, those of us who don’t work from an office sometimes need somewhere other than home to work.

Coffee shops have played a big role in my life the past few years. I can’t even begin to tabulate how much of our productive work as a company has been done while at a coffee shop, particularly our collaborative projects and our meetings. I definitely work remotely less now, but that’s because I’ve got a nice big quiet office in my apartment. When I lived with my parents after I left my job, or at my next apartment where I only had a small bedroom, that wasn’t the case. I probably would have gone insane if I didn’t have coffee shops to escape to and throw my headphones on and zone in to my work. Obviously I’m not alone when it comes to this. There are all sorts of students and professionals who get their best work done remotely. I’d hate to see that taken away from them, especially those in difficult living situations that really rely on the escape to be productive.

With that said, it seems to me like there’s a huge opportunity here. As much as I love Starbucks, they’re all kind of small and over-crowded and there aren’t many outlets available. There needs to be something that’s a blend between co-working spaces, the coffee shop, and the library. My partners and I have discussed over and over again how big of an opportunity this could be, and with the trend of coffee shops going the way it seems to be going, and the ever-increasing number of people telecommuting, the opportunity is just getting bigger.

This helped pulling speed immensely, but it didn’t solve all of our problems.  Our packing slips didn’t actually say which zone the product was in so it was still hard sometimes to find a product in a brand that encompassed five shelving units.  The idea of snaking the puller through the warehouse, while making sense in theory, didn’t play out on the average order and just served to confuse people by ordering products in reverse order for half of the rows.  And most importantly, as us owners removed ourselves almost entirely from the pulling process, errors climbed above our acceptable level.

So we decided to start over.  Today we unveiled our new system, one that should be a marked improvement.  Throughout the entire process everyone was involved, particularly our employees who actually do the pulling.  I made sure to run everything by the guys in the warehouse at each step of the way to make sure it passed the common sense check.

Anyway, here’s what we did.  We now have a “three-dimensional zone” where every product is categorized by it’s row, shelving unit, and shelf.  This is the image that’s in our Admin system for whomever might be working in the warehouse and entering new product locations in the future:

The packing slip now shows the zone in the first column.  We also bolded any quantity of two or more, which has been a common mistake for us to make.

We all pulled some orders today to test it out.  My initial thoughts were that it sped up my pulling time quite a bit.  I was able to see which row to start at and just go right to it, rather than thinking “I’m pulling a Meguiar’s product, which row is that in again?”  If there’s anything we might change, I could see us getting rid of the letters from the zones (so R1-U-7-S3 would just be 1-7-3).  We’ll play that by ear and solicit feedback from everyone who tries it out and then go from there.  Like with anything new, it’s good to give it some time and see how it plays out over the course of a few weeks before tweaking it too much.

After I completed work on the packing slips, I tried to estimate how much time was spent on this project, from conception to reality.  I came up with about 10 hours total.  There was probably an hour of discussion. I probably spent 2 hours programming it. Charlie probably spent 7 hours total logging all of the products into our new system and then marking all of the rows/units/shelves with large magnets. Not bad at all.

The other nice thing about this is that while it will almost certainly speed up pulling and reduce errors, it will also make training a new employee much easier.  You can literally give a new person one of our packing slips and it will tell them what box size to use and the exact location of each and every product.  While they’ll probably be slow at first, they’ll also probably be pretty accurate right from the start, which is what’s most important to us (I mean, if I told you the exact product name and the exact shelf it was on, it would be hard for you to pick up the wrong one, even if you knew nothing about our products).

All in all, this should be a big gain for us, especially considering the minimal time spent.  I think it’s also significant in that it’s the last major warehouse procedure change that I see us making in the near future.  We’ve built the processes that we’re going to be scaling with, and there’s still plenty of scaling left before those processes will need to be revisited.  Aside from minor tweaks, we can turn almost all of our focus to the stuff that makes us money on the front end.

Here’s what pops into my head:

• Are we moving toward an app world where the browser becomes less relevant?  Are we already there?
• How do closed apps affect search and the “link economy”, the primary infrastructure in which our modern day web is built?
• As a new developer, would it be more intelligent to skip the web all together and start learning a more “traditional” programming language like Java or C++?
• Are we going to keep seeing more and more app stores for more and more devices?
• If so, how does this divergence effect businesses and users?  Right now you already need to make an app for Android, Blackberry, and iPhone/iPad. What happens when WebOS becomes big? Or any of the many other proposed app stores. Can developers keep up?  Should they try to?
• How do HTML5 and CSS3 play a role in all of this? HTML5 can interact with the desktop in ways that browsers couldn’t do previously (geo-location, desktop notifications, etc).
• Does this whole thing swing back full circle and result in app stores becoming the walled gardens that no one wants to partake in, similar to CD Roms and desktop software (an idea planted in my head by Leo Laporte and Jeff Jarvis during various TwiT podcasts)?
• And then does the web and mobile web end up being what we’re all using in 5 years? And is it then actually a long term competitive advantage for small web development companies with limited resources to not spend time and money developing mobile apps?

Now keep in mind, I’m asking these questions in the context of thinking about LockerPulse, a web app that depends very much on the “link economy” of Google and therefore the browser, as outlined in my last post, and DetailedImage, an e-commerce store that might actually be less dependent on the browser, but in general e-commerce is still more of a browser thing than an app thing, at least compared to things like Twitter and Facebook and email.

Then the other day Wired declared the browser dead, as they also (wrongly) did in 1997:

Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen).

Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunsh, fired back with When Wrong, Call Yourself Prescient Instead. Sometimes I totally agree with Arrington, other times I couldn’t agree less, however I have enormous respect for him because he isn’t afraid to speak his mind. In this case, I think I actually agree with him, although I’m clearly biased towards the web browser:

The browser isn’t dead. Web pages aren’t dead. HTML works really, really well. Check out Facebook’s iPad “app,” for example. You don’t download it from an app store, you just point your browser to touch.facebook.com. Not only does it work really well, Steve Jobs doesn’t get to have a veto right over people using it. It’s no wonder that we’re seeing a surge of traffic from the iPad to our site, via a browser.

Apps are great on mobile phones with small screens. But they are a pain to install and keep synchronized. Eventually having less local software will make sense on phones, too. All you really need is that browser virtual machine and you can pull everything else from the cloud. This is obvious. Only a bunch of hipster tech journalists checking email on their iPads all day* would think otherwise, and then make up a bunch of data to support their argument.

*Wired, not us.

Fascinating to ponder. What do you think?

In my eyes, we’re doing things right. For all practical purposes, we’re simply a RSS reader, albeit one with an editorial team that selects RSS feeds for you to chose from…because most people don’t know how to or don’t want to…which is the whole point of the project. We aren’t doing any scraping of their content, which has been getting some iPad apps in trouble lately (see: Is Flipboard Legal?). We only display the content that they willingly provide for syndication (and have access to control/change on their end), and we only display full posts in the actual app itself. None of the story archives that are permanently available on our site show anything more than a quick text summary (it wasn’t always like this, more below). And of course we always provide a straight HTML link to the original source, which again, has been getting some iPad apps in trouble because linking in an app doesn’t cast a vote to the search engines like linking on the web does. We also don’t do BS links inside of an iframe like some similar sites do, which also doesn’t pass along any “google juice” to the content provider.

I personally think we’re doing no wrong. In fact, I think we’re doing those sites a service. Aside from the links, we’re sending them visitors. Anyone who reads LockerPulse regularly is constantly clicking through to articles. We also don’t block ads from our feeds, so if the content providers put ads in their feeds, the ads show in our feed reader. Win-win: we provide users with a better way to discover sports news, and by our users discovering new stories the content providers get more readers.

That said, internally we were somewhat gearing up for a shit storm (or, at least, I was). I thought for sure that very few sites would agree with my line of thinking. Especially large sites, where there’s a strategical/philosophical disconnect between the CEO, the lawyers hunting for “content theft” without fully understanding RSS, and the programmer who put RSS on the site in the first place.

So what happened? Well, it didn’t start off good. Our content providers fall in to four categories: newspapers republishing their headlines, newspaper beat writer blogs, fan blogs, and large sports blog networks. One of the larger blog networks contacted us and didn’t like our usage of their full posts, particularly in our archives, particularly with their images that they pay to license in our archives. So we adjusted and changed all archives to be the aforementioned text summaries. Live and learn. Since then we had one fan blog request that we take down their content, and we acquiesced.

However, the amount of site owners contacting us requesting that we start indexing their content has been overwhelming. I get a few per day. It’s mostly from small fan blogs, some of which are diamonds in the rough and some of which are not. Then, last week, I got this from a major newspaper and almost fell out of my seat:

We are restarting {NFL team} coverage [for the season] at {major newspaper site}. We’d really appreciate it if you could add us to your {NFL team} feed. Thanks. Here is our blog address {url}

I wrote back, told them that we’d add all of their blogs, and gave their staff free Premium Accounts. I couldn’t believe that a newspaper would think like that. I’ve become so conditioned to the old-school-media mentality from newspapers that I’ve constantly feared the worst. Really, really encouraging.

Then today, I received this from a blog network:

My name is {name}, founder of {url} and its blog network. We have blogs for every NFL team, a majority of the MLB and are working to build of NBA and NHL networks. I would like to get our sites indexed on LockerPulse. Would it be possible to send over a list of our sites and feeds?

Freaking awesome. It’s great to see the momentum going in this direction. Instead of fighting the content providers, I really want to be able to work with them. Like I said, it’s a win-win so we might as well act like we’re on the same side. Instead of arguing, I’d rather spend my time focusing on improving the overall sports reading experience for both our users, who happen to be one in the same. A few months ago I would have said that while I want to work with them, it’s probably an unrealistic thought. Now, the future is looking very bright. There’s potential for exclusive content or advertising share deals or lots of other stuff that previously we didn’t consider because we thought it to be unrealistic. To help even further with all of this, we will shortly be adding a “publishers” page to the site listing the benefits of being on LockerPulse, how to request your site be added, and also how to request your site be removed.

Big picture, we’re a few weeks away from adding a massive number of new sources, and maybe a month away from rolling out our polished version of the site that we’re going to start aggressively marketing (i.e. taking it out of our “public beta that we’re not calling a beta“). Exciting times ahead.

One study cited in the article that really caught my eye was The Whitehall Study. The study, performed by professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London, Michael Marmot, has tracked 28,000+ British civil servants of various positions in the hierarchical government structure. His findings are particularly interesting, and go a long way in explaining why the stresses of some jobs, like those faced by a small business owner or a CEO who work long hours, don’t appear to have adverse health effects of anywhere near the same magnitude of those working more menial jobs. In a nutshell, it all boils down to doing work that you find purposeful, that you have a vested interest in. In other words, work that you can control.

At the bottom [of the hierarchy] are messengers, porters, and security guards. Just above them are the clerical officers, followed by staff scientists and other professionals. This last group implements the policies dictated by powerful administrators who run the governmental agencies. Marmot wanted to investigate how differences in status “in people who are neither very poor nor very rich” might lead to measurable differences in health.

The differences are dramatic. After tracking thousands of civil servants for decades, Marmot was able to demonstrate that between the ages of 40 and 64, workers at the bottom of the hierarchy had a mortality rate four times higher than that of people at the top. Even after accounting for genetic risks and behaviors like smoking and binge drinking, civil servants at the bottom of the pecking order still had nearly double the mortality rate of those at the top.

What, then, determines our health? Why were people in the lower ranks of Whitehall dying at a younger age? Marmot was forced to conclude that the significant majority of health variation is caused by psychosocial factors, most notably stress. People of lower status in the Whitehall study experienced more negative stress, and this stress was deadly. (To take but one data point: Fully two-thirds of an individual’s risk of stroke was attributable to the person’s socioeconomic status.) In fact, we’re so sensitive to the effects of status that getting promoted from the lowest level in the British civil service reduced the probability of heart disease by up to 13 percentage points. Climbing the social ladder makes us live longer.

However, the Whitehall results aren’t a straightforward analysis of stress, at least not as it’s usually defined. After all, people in leadership positions often describe their jobs as extremely stressful. They work longer hours and have more responsibilities than those at the bottom of the bureaucratic hierarchy. Consider the self-report of Nigel, a high-status administrator: “There were 2,000 people, and I was responsible for all the personnel aspects, contracts, and all the common services … It had every sort of challenge that you could ever wish to meet. A very active job and a lot of stress, but a very enjoyable job, and you got a tremendous amount of satisfaction from doing a good job.”

Notice the reference to stress; undoubtedly Nigel thought of himself as a person under lots of pressure. In contrast, here’s the self-report of Marjorie, a lowly typist: “I went to the typing pool and sat there typing documents. Which was absolutely soul-destroying … The fact that we could eat sweets and smoke was absolute heaven, but we were not allowed to talk.”

The recurring theme in the self-reports of people like Marjorie isn’t the sheer amount of stress – it’s the total absence of control. Researchers call it the “demand-control” model of stress, in which the damage caused by chronic stress depends not just on the demands of the job but on the extent to which we can control our response to those demands. “The man or woman with all the emails, the city lawyer who works through the night has high demands,” Marmot writes. “But if he or she has a high degree of control over work, it is less stressful and will have less impact on health.” (This helps explain why the women with mean bosses and menial work showed the highest incidence of heart disease.) The Whitehall data backs up this model of workplace stress: While a relentlessly intense job like a senior executive position leads to a slightly increased risk of heart disease and death, a job with no control is significantly more dangerous.

The same effect applies even to the rich and famous. A few years ago, Donald Redelmeier, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, led a study of Academy Award-winning actors. His hypothesis was that having an Oscar gave people more control over their stressful careers. Instead of being forced to accept bad roles or work on mediocre movies just for the money, these stars could pick and choose their parts. This creative control, in turn, would lead to improved health outcomes. Redelmeier compared the award winners to two groups: (1) actors who had appeared in the same film as a nominated actor and didn’t get a nomination and (2) actors who had been nominated for an Academy Award but never won. The results were clear: People with Oscars lived, on average, four years longer than their less-successful peers, which represented a 28 percent reduction in death rate. As Redelmeier notes, this longevity boost is roughly equal to the effect that would come from “curing all cancers in all people for all time.”

The moral is that the most dangerous kinds of stress don’t feel that stressful. It’s not the late night at the office that’s going to kill us; it’s the feeling that nothing can be done. The person most at risk for heart disease isn’t the high-powered executive anxious about their endless to-do list – it’s the frustrated janitor stuck with existential despair.

When I first designed the blog, I included my shiny dome in the header as a way to lighten the mood and differentiate me from all of the more “serious” business blogs out there. I never knew that announcing to the world that I was balding would be such a big deal. People want to know when I first realized I was going bald (around 21), if I tried any drugs like Rogaine (I didn’t – just some hair thickening shampoo that did nothing), and if it was a hard decision to decide to start shaving my head (it wasn’t – just picked up some clippers one day and never looked back). Personally, I now prefer the clean-shaven head look to when I had hair, but I know a lot of people who understandably don’t want to give up on their hair in their twenties.

So when the folks at Bosley, the famous hair restoration firm, contacted me about doing a blog post a few weeks back, I decided I’d be fun to do an interview with one of their hair loss experts and post it for everyone*. My questions are in bold, with the answers listed out below. This is officially my first post in the balding category. Enjoy! There’s certainly a TON of good info in their replies. If anyone has any other questions I’d be happy to follow up with them. I just asked what I thought would be the most common balding questions that people would have.

What factors contribute to who goes bald and who doesn’t? Is it 100% genetics, or are there some controllable factors that come in to play, such as stress level, weight, diet, exercise, etc?

Hair loss or baldness is a genetic trait, but how much of it is genetic, varies from one individual to another. Hair loss with genetic predisposition is called “androgenetic alopecia” or “male pattern baldness”.

Factors such as a person’s activities, diet, medications, natural hormones, pregnancy and childbirth, use of birth control pills, improper hair care and certain diseases can contribute to hair loss, but these factors may affect an individual more than another. While chemical treatments, pollution, hair-styling products and blow-drying have not been found to directly cause hair loss, they can dry and weaken hair, increasing breakage and perpetuating hair loss.

The lack of good blood circulation to the scalp may also contribute to hair loss. When the hair root is well supplied with blood it is stronger and less susceptible to the shrinking effects caused by hormone DHT (dihydrotestosterone). Good blood flow strengthens and rejuvenates the small blood vessels in the scalp. Stronger blood vessels Increases the longevity of the hair follicles specially in thinning areas and encourages hair growth. Finally, you cannot fight the effects of aging. As you age, your hairs tend to break more easily, and hair follicles do not grow as much hair.

I first noticed my hair thinning and my hairline receding around age 21. Is there an average age that most people start balding? Does it generally happen at the same rate, or does it take 10 years for some and 6 months for others? Again, are there any controllable factors or is this all genetics at play?

People start balding or suffering from hair loss at different ages, and at different rates from one another. So there are no set rules in balding. According to Medem Medical Library’s website, male pattern baldness affects roughly 40 million men in the United States. Approximately 25 percent of men begin balding by age 30; two-thirds begin balding by age 60. There is a 4 in 7 chance of getting the baldness gene. But there are rare cases where men start losing hair in their early 20s, and even before they turn 20.

In women, hair loss usually begins at menopause. Although hair loss in females normally occurs after the age of 50 or even later when it does not follow events like pregnancy, chronic illness, crash diets, and stress among others, there has been rare cases reported, in which hair loss affects women as young as 15 or 16.

The balding process and rate vary with each person. Whether it is slow or rapid, the individual would usually notice. Hair loss tends not to be something people ignore.

Factors such as a person’s activities, diet, medications, natural hormones, pregnancy and childbirth, use of birth control pills, improper hair care and certain diseases can contribute to hair loss, but these factors may affect an individual more than another. While chemical treatments, pollution, hair-styling products and blow-drying have not been found to directly cause hair loss, they can dry and weaken hair, increasing breakage and perpetuating hair loss.The lack of good blood circulation to the scalp may also contribute to hair loss. When the hair root is well supplied with blood it is stronger and less susceptible to the shrinking effects caused by hormone DHT (dihydrotestosterone). Good blood flow strengthens and rejuvenates the small blood vessels in the scalp. Stronger blood vessels Increases the longevity of the hair follicles specially in thinning areas and encourages hair growth. Finally, you cannot fight the effects of aging. As you age, your hairs tend to break more easily, and hair follicles do not grow as much hair.

What solutions are out there (besides shaving your head like I do)? How does Bosley hair restoration compare with drug solutions like Rogaine? Does the best solution depend on how far along one is in the balding process (just losing a few hairs vs. fully bald for years)?

Bosley offers the only permanent and the most cosmetically significant solution to hair loss- surgical hair transplantation. For those who are not ready or suitable for hair transplantation, Bosley also offers other solutions that can help in your fight against hair loss.

One non-surgical approach is the Bosley LaserComb. It is the only FDA-approved medical device that emits controlled laser energy to stimulate hair follicles and promote re-growth. Treatment with a Bosley LaserComb is most effective on individuals with very early-stage hair loss where hair restoration surgery is not indicated.

Another is the Bosley Professional Strength- It is a complete system to help prevent hair loss and restore thinning hair – in 5 simple daily steps. Offered in Men’s and Women’s formulations, Bosley Professional Strength contains ingredients that nourish and invigorate the scalp and hair, creating the perfect environment for the growth of thick, healthy hair.

Bosley also offers Propecia- an FDA-approved tablet taken once a day, available by prescription only. Propecia works to inhibit the formation of the DHT hormone that weakens hair and halts its growth. It is not approved for use by women and must be taken on an on-going basis to maintain its benefit. Propecia may be purchased from the Bosley Store with the appropriate prescription which you can get during a Bosley consultation.

Finally, one can achieve an instant cosmetic fix to hair loss, through hairpieces and toupees. Bosley does not offer this. The cost varies according to type and quality, and the price of a high-quality hair system and maintenance may often be greater over time than both surgical and non-surgical options.

Rogaine is best used to slow balding and retain what hair is left on the head – but Rogain is not considered a viable solution for those looking to restore hair on the top of the head or at the hairline. It does not cure baldness; while it can delay the loss of additional hair due to androgenic alopecia, any hair retained or regrown with Rogaine will be lost within a few months after the drug is stopped. The manufacturer Johnson & Johnson would tell you that their product is not effective in the frontal area, which is the area of most concern to most patients, especially the frontal hairline. They claim that approximately 8-10% of users achieve cosmetically effective growth and another 20% get vellus (or peach fuzz) growth.

Bosley hair restoration is a permanent and relatively simple procedure that actually restores hair. It achieves a natural look. The Bosley hair transplant procedure takes hair follicles from the very back and sides of the head and artfully transplants them to thinning or balding areas. So we can take hair from where you have more than you need (the back of head) and put it where you need it more (front of head). It’s the ideal solution to baldness because it uses your own hair.

Bosley hair transplants can help people experiencing virtually every level of hair loss, at any age (over 21) depending on whether the patient has enough hair in the donor area. First we would determine which class of hair loss a patient is in. Class 2 is characterized by the beginning of a receding hairline and a “widow’s peak” on the forehead. Class 3 patients exhibit a more significant decline in hair above the temples as well as receding from the forehead. In Class 3 Vertex, hair loss is starting to become significant on the crown. Class 4 hair loss may become more noticeable on the crown or patients may have significant hair loss above the temples and/or front anterior areas. Class 5 hair loss approaches significant levels with most hair loss occurring on the top of the vertex and crown. Hair transplantation for this Class and higher Class levels may require more grafts to provide coverage and density. Class 6 patients show major hair loss, but still have areas with donor hair available. Transplanting this hair can still have excellent results. Class 7 patients show the most significant loss of hair. There may still be sufficient donor hair for transplantation; however, results may be limited.

Hair restoration at Bosley is a relatively simple outpatient procedure. Many of our patients go to work the very next day. And side effects of hair transplantation are almost minor. Infection occurrences after a hair transplant procedure are rare. In the very few cases where infection does occur, it is often due to the patient’s failure to fully follow post-operative instructions. Even when infection occurs, it generally is easily treatable with antibiotics, which can be prescribed by the physician.

Any more details you’d like to add about Bosley?

Why choose Bosley Medical for hair restoration, you may ask. Bosley distinguishes itself with two key factors: Experience and Natural Results. Bosley has been a full-time hair restoration practice since 1974. Bosley has performed more hair transplants than any other medical group in the world, more than 200,000 procedures to be exact. Bosley has restored hair for patients from all 50 states and more than 67 foreign countries.

Every Bosley physician is required to be actively licensed in the state in which he/she practices, and a member of one or more professional associations. Before joining Bosley, all of Bosley’s physicians have had years of training and experience in their field. Finally, Bosley follicular-unit techniques result in a hair restoration so natural that we challenge you to tell the transplanted hair from the non-transplanted hair.

*The folks at Bosley kindly asked that I include the following disclaimer: Please keep in mind that hair loss and its treatments are medical considerations. And with everything of the medical nature, you and your readers should seek the opinions of your qualified physicians.

Anyway, a DI customer had a technical issue that I hadn’t seen before. After a few emails back and forth I was able to identify the issue and fix something on our end to solve the problem. Then this morning I awoke to this in my inbox:

Guys like you is what America needs right about now..good,smart young and vibrant leadership that truly cares about customer service to the masses, specially us car nuts!

Makes it all worth it.

We’ve been working hard on LockerPulse, but I haven’t posted about it much since we revamped the home page a few weeks after launch in response to some of the initial feedback we received. I’ve got a lot of small updates, none of which constitute enough for an entire post so I figured I’d just lump them all together into one:

Server: Stable

As I mentioned in June, obscurity is your friend. It took over a month to get right, but by seeing the true technical demands of the live site we were able to tweak it and get it right without the whole world witnessing our screw up. Everything has been more than stable since then, which gives me confidence that our site is as scalable as we’ll need it to be for the foreseeable future.

Launch Fast

I can’t overemphasize how important it was that we launched in May. With Mike heading to China for June, I strongly considered recommending to the guys that we wait until he got back. In retrospect, I’m so glad I didn’t. We didn’t need extra time to build more features – we needed immediate feedback from the real world on what we did build.

Our Marketing = Twitter

I’m impressed at the steady increase in search engine traffic, particularly because we aren’t doing any active link building. The site is as SEO friendly as it can be from an on-site perspective. This makes me think that we’ll be getting a ton of SE traffic in a year or two once we’ve established the site a bit.

The only real marketing initiative that we’ve done is promoting our Twitter accounts. We have one for all 122 teams. We use Twitterfeed to pipe our RSS feed directly to Twitter, although I’ll be working with their API to do this on our end to speed up the updates. We’ve hired a part-time social media manager to manage all of these accounts because it’s just too much for any of us to keep up with consistently. As of yesterday, we’ve got just under 15,000 followers for all of our teams combined. Again, give that a year or two and we’ll have a really gigantic number.

Data Driven Revamp

One of my largest fears with any new site is that it just stalls upon launch and you never get that initial wave of traffic beyond your immediate friends/family (at least without paying a lot for it). If that happens, you don’t get any “real” users and you can’t begin to evaluate what’s working and what isn’t.

Between Twitter and SE traffic, we’re getting plenty of data to work with. About a month ago we reviewed everything as a team and were able to find several pitfalls in the way we were doing things. I’m working on a wave of improvements, which I’ll do a separate post about once they’re live, hopefully by 9/1.

People Will Pay

Speaking of data, one of the most exciting things is that people are signing up and paying. A lot of people told me that this wouldn’t happen. I myself wasn’t so sure it would. The only thing we had in our corner was that for years people have been paying $4.99/mo for SportsLizard’s Premium Price Guide when we offer the majority of the functionality for free. Our conversion rates have been decent given the level of traffic, which is very encouraging considering that the traffic should go way up in the future and we’ll continue to tweak the site to be better and better at converting.

One of the improvements we’re making involves giving the 30 day trial without forcing users to sign up for a PayPal subscription. They’ll sign up on day 31 if they want, not on day 1 for a subscription that charges them on day 31. An astonishing amount of people bail at that portion of the sign up process. We just want them using the site, the mobile site, and getting the daily newsletter for a month. At least some percentage of those people will get hooked and start paying.

Not to over-generalize, but from my experiences with iPrioritize, SportsLizard, and now LockerPulse, people will pay for subscription based web services if you provide them something of value. It’s a potentially very profitable business model.

I’m addicted

By the way, I’m hooked. LockerPulse has completely changed the way I consume sports. Most of the time I’m on it I’m using it as a fan and I almost forget I’ve developed it. When I have a down moment, I always pull out my phone and use the mobile site to catch up on what’s going on. If I am on my computer or my phone, and I want a quick score, or I want to know if one of my teams is playing today, or what time they’re playing, the simplest and fastest way to get it is to just pull it up on LockerPulse. A lot of people tell me they’re addicted to the daily newsletter, which aggregates all of their news (and now scores) into one email.

Even though all of the signs point in the right direction, this is the one that really makes me certain that this will work. It’s inherently a very addicting product to a subset of sports fans.

More News Sources Coming

People have told me that they love the site because we have great sources that they’ve never heard of before. It’s a new way to follow the teams they’ve been following for years. Still, we are missing a lot. We’re currently in the process of roughly doubling our sources to include every single local newspaper beat writer for every team, and even more great fan blogs.

1,000 true fans

Moving forward, once we finish the revamp of the site and adding the new sources, we’ll really turn up the heat on marketing. I’ve read (and re-read several times) a great essay called 1,000 True Fans, recommended by Tim Ferriss on his blog. That’s what we’re looking for – those 1,000 true fans who are so addicted to the service that they tell everyone they know about it. I know they’re out there, it’s just a matter of getting them. That’s what I consider to be the next big hurdle now that we’ve cleared the launch hurdle.

Should be fun!

While I was waiting though, I noticed that one of the ladies helping people was really good at her job. I mean really good. She worked about as fast as a human being could work, she knew every single form that everyone needed for every situation (of the 8-10 people in front of me that she helped, it seemed like everyone was there for a different reason), and she still managed to greet people nicely and smile at everyone. When a mother brought her 16 year old son up to sign up for his permit test and announced that it was his birthday today, she wished him a happy birthday…and then two seconds later jumped over to another line because she overheard the conversation and needed to correct something that the photo/eye-exam lady said to a customer. I was sort of in awe just watching her kick ass at a stressful job that most people would despise.

She turned a generally miserable experience into a not-so-bad experience. I was able to get in and out of there in 15 minutes, when a less experienced, less interested person doing the same job could have turned it into a chaotic 45 minute mess. If I had to guess, she probably does that same thing all day long, 5 days a week, 52 weeks per year. She makes that DMV tolerable, which is quite a feat. Most people probably don’t notice…I’m sure there would be plenty of times where I wouldn’t have noticed.

People like her make the world a better place, and they often don’t get enough credit for doing so.

Update – To clarify, I actually got called up to a different line so I did not interact with her directly. She was, however, the person most responsible for me having a quick experience – without her the line would have likely been backed up for a very long time. Anyway, given the general sentiment of this post, I do think it’s appropriate that I try to give her some more appreciation for a job well done than an anonymous blog post that doesn’t even mention the location of the DMV. I’m penning a letter to the DMV as we speak…