Learning not to care about what other people think

If you go back and read some of my blog posts from 2005 you'll see a different kind of fire and passion. I wrote a lot about how the older generation at my former job treated me like a little kid and didn't treat me as an equal. I was reminded of this today when I read David's post about older entrepreneurs.

Honestly, this stuff used to really bother me. It used to really bother me when my friends/family/co-workers/fellow YE's questioned my entrepreneurial decisions. I'd usually get defensive and try to justify myself. I knew I didn't have to, but I felt this innate need to justify myself to everyone. Being at the top of my class in high school, going to a great college and getting great internships, I was used to everyone singing my praise...and never being criticized because everything came easy to me and every choice turned out great.

Now I really could care less. Don't get me wrong, when people talk I listen. I just don't always act. One of the great things about being human is that we have free will to think and believe what we want to believe. I can't control your thoughts, and you can't control mine. The only thing that really matters to me is that I can look in the mirror everyday and know that I'm doing what I believe is right. I've never walked in someone else's shoes, and no one has ever walked in mine.

So constructive (and non constructive) criticism doesn't really get to me. It gets processed and then I forget about it. I never consciously made a decision to become like this, I think it's part of my maturing process. Nonetheless, I'm much happier not worrying about what other people think. The beauty of life and business, is that there are infinite paths to success and happiness, and my path might not be appealing to you, but that's not my problem.

It's also not my problem if you're taking out your lack of happiness on me and trying to put me down to bring yourself up - I'm not playing that game. One of the saddest things a human can do is let other people's thoughts paralyze you. You may never be good enough for them - it doesn't matter.

The free book all entrepreneurs/web developers should read

One of the poster-boys for the Web2.0 world is 37Signals, a Chicago based software development firm. Their products are famous for being simple and easy to use, and as a company they've shown that you can grow mainstream while staying private with a small number of people (many of whom collaborate remotely).

They're also very adept at giving back to the web development community. They released Ruby on Rails, the hottest new open-source development framework, and they wrote Getting Real, a book about what it takes to build successful web applications. It costs money to buy or download the book, but you can read it FREE online.

I just finished reading it for the second or third time. Like their products, it's a simple, easy, to-the point read that doesn't waste a word of space or a second of your time. As a company they've managed to challenge conventional wisdom and create a brilliant philosophy of really only doing what's necessary and nothing more.

I especially like giving it a read-through while I'm in development and deployment of something new (the price guide) to make sure that I'm only doing and including what's truly necessary and nothing more.

I can't imagine a better way to spend your time as a YE than to read Getting Real - you'll save yourself more headaches and stress than you can imagine.

Are all Entrepreneurs as lazy as me?

I've noticed lately that at times I'm the laziest human being alive. If a task isn't directly part of one of my passions, I find myself saying "I don't feel like doing it" and bailing...or if it's business-related saying "let's just pay someone to do it for us".

When it comes to trivial tasks like straightening up the house or taking my car in for maintenance, I'm horrible at doing simple things that normal people handle regularly. You might think it's a sign of being overworked, but I'm going to go ahead and disagree - I've ALWAYS been like this. Unless something strikes a fancy with me, I don't feel like doing it and I usually don't.

I'm not sure how this looks to other people, but I'm beginning to think that some people are really perplexed by me because from the outside I look like some kid who sits on his computer all day but neglects/blocks out everything else. At other times if I've been more focused on working out or playing basketball or a girlfriend, and those things looked important to me along with my job, so it's not just work.

Maybe my perceived laziness is a byproduct of my ability to dial in and accomplish the task at hand and maybe it's really a good thing.

All I know, is I'm the last guy in the world who feels like re-painting a room on the weekend (it's fine the way it is) or shoveling the drive way (the snow will melt eventually on its own) or rake the leaves (could anything be a bigger waste of human time?).

OR maybe I'm just discovering that a lot of things people do are a huge waste of time and that I only get one life so I'm not going to waste time doing things that I fail to see a purpose in...

The Price Guide Mini-Business Plan

Last night around 2 AM I finished off the programming for the SportsLizard Price Guide...well you never really "finish" so I suppose I should say I got it to the point where I'm comfortable launching the site. I'm pretty sure it was Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn who said something along the lines of "if you aren't embarrassed when you look back at the site you launched, you launched too late". I realize this is only the beginning, but nonetheless it's the end of an important chapter in the deployment of my latest project, one that I really think will define the ultimate success of SportsLizard and possibly my entrepreneurial success.

Here's my plan...all of it.

Why a Price Guide?

I think I've gotten a bit ahead of myself in my explanations as to WHY this is such a big deal. Everyone in the cards and collectibles industry uses price guides to determine the value of their card/collectible. This is important to know for selling, trading, and bragging rights about who has the most valuable card. They also subscribe to price guides for the news and articles about the hobby, but that is a distinctly secondary purpose.

For my entire life there have been two main players: FW Publications (which makes Tuff Stuff and Sports Collectors Digest) and Beckett. Both have made online versions of their price guides, but they are essentially the exact same as the print versions that come out monthly. As a collector, many times you have to rely on speculation and rumor to determine the value of something for a month or two until pricing comes out. Both have used email newsletters to release "first pricing" so you don't have to wait, but not for all products.

They both fail to take advantage of the ever changing internet. We've come to rely on "live" stock market updates, so why not a "live" price guide? They also both use questionable methods to determine their prices (surveying card shop owners and looking at eBay...and then adjusting as they see fit) which helps them "inflate" the value of a card to the point where it's NEVER worth even 75% of what they say it is.

I've known about this opportunity for a while, but never really had a solution. Oh, and to top it off, in doing my SEO keyword research I uncovered that "free price guide" is searched more than almost any other collectibles related phrase! And there are NO relevant results.

Our Solution

I had about 10 different ways I wanted to approach this, but I knew we'd need access to millions of data points, which could be problematic for a small company like Pure Adapt. Could our database store massive data like that? Could we efficiently query a database that large? Those questions were a bit out of my league and I wasn't really going to risk launching a product that had a chance of crashing when 25 people were using it.

The solution came with the Google Base API - Google Base (Froogle...or now Google Product Search) stores products from eBay, Beckett, and about 50 other cards/collectibles sites that makes up the majority of online collectibles sales (the only "huge" site that I know of that's factored out is Naxcom). By querying the API and mixing the data with SportsLizard's own data, we've got ourselves a pretty sweet and unique mashup that gives you a price based upon what it's really selling for.

In all honesty, I'm a much better programmer than I've ever been before and the technical capabilities of this app absolutely crush anything else I've ever done, including iPrioritize (although if you try it out you'll see I borrowed heavily from the iPrioritize infrastructure as a starting point).

Here are the highlights of it:

• You search for a collectible by entering the collectible name and "negative" words that you don't want factored into the search. The output is SL's price, our confidence in that value (low/med/high based on standard deviation and sample size), advanced stats, and the individual items factored in (so you can refine your search with more negative phrases). It sounds like a lot, but when you see it presented to you it's very simple and not overwhelming at all.
• There are two account types - free and premium. A free account gives you 3 searches per day and that's it. A premium account is free for 7 days, and then $4.99/month (in line with Beckett's online pricing).
• A premium account gives you unlimited searches and lets you save items to your collection so that you can track trends, see the total worth of what you own, and export to PDF or Excel.

This was a very well thought out business model. It's similar to iPrioritize, except I picked up on a few things I've learned...primarily the importance of a free trial period. The 3 search/day limit is borrowed from SEOmoz.org and works well for their SEO tools so I "stole" it from them.

Marketing Plan

So just how are we going to spread the word about this bad boy? Well the existing SportsLizard infrastructure is going to be huge. Success for the price guide FEEDS the monster of SportsLizard - more advertisers, more people reading our content, more people searching for collectibles in our marketplace, etc. Here's the crux of what we'll be doing:

• PR - this includes a well-written online press release, but more importantly will consist of me giving away premium accounts to influential people in the industry (many of which I already know). Getting forum owners, bloggers, and other key people on board is huge. I need them to be my marketing staff for me and spread the word.
• Box Breaks - this one is going to be huge for us also I think. I mentioned it before, but the basic idea is we video tape us opening a box of cards (called a box break) and post the video on YouTube (1) and on our site. Other people do this and there's a huge cult following - people like to see what other people get out of a box. We'll also post the breakdown of cards on the blog (2), sell the best cards on eBay (3) and include an ad for SL in the auction text (4), and give the rest to local charities as a part of a "cards for kids program" (5). That's FIVE things that each box of cards will contribute to help grow SL.
• PPC - I've never been immensely successful with Pay Per Click advertising, but remember how I said that "free price guide" is searched more than almost any other collectibles related phrase? Well since no one has a free price guide, no one has purchased these ads. They are dirt cheap and extremely relevant. Wohoo!
• Continuing to write articles, contact potential sellers, and contact potential advertisers. SportsLizard's content is the main source of SE traffic and how I generally get to meet and interact with the community.

Why this will Succeed or Fail

I don't think anyone will disagree that this is a bad idea and something that there isn't a market for. The question is whether or not I can EXECUTE and turn this into a success. And if I don't, I'm going to have to look in the mirror long and hard at myself. This project encompasses everything I know well:

• Stats. When people hear that I was an engineer, they think of a mechanical/civil/electrical engineer. I was an industrial engineer - one that uses data to optimize a process to make it as efficient and effective as possible. With that, I used to do fun things in college like use calculus to figure out the optimal layout of a manufacturing facility. But the same data analysis techniques can be borrowed and applied to ANYTHING (the reason I majored in it). This enables me to really dig into the data and understand sampling, distributions, and the impact (and validity) of what we're presenting to a user.
• The web. Secondary to stats, I'd say the thing I know best is web design/web marketing/SEO/web development.
• Sports Collectibles. Something I've been involved in my entire life - if there's an industry I know and understand how to exploit the flaws, this is it.

I think I am one of the only people in the world that has the background to make this happen, and that's an exciting thing to me. With the backing of my team, we are going to give this idea 100% and do everything in our power to make it work.

How could it fail? I only see two possibilities: we don't give it 100% and bail too soon (something I've done too much in my life) or the industry just doesn't want it/isn't ready for it. I don't believe that's the case, but the collectibles industry is archaic and anything is possible.

Why did I write this?

As you can tell, I picture this as a defining moment for me. It's the culmination of what I know best (come on, how else could you combine statistical analysis, web development, and sports into one) and if I can't make this work with the backing of my Pure Adapt teammates I'll have to take a step back and really evaluate the past 24 years of my life.

I want to look back at this as the beginning of something special, and I want to document the entire ride, so this is that start of that. Hopefully you'll learn something that will help you in your life or career.

Back in crazy programming mode

I apologize for the relative lack of posts. Once we realized that we could in fact launch a web based sports cards/collectibles price guide to compete with print publications, I've been tasked with building this monster of a program. I've been working around the clock to finish this bad boy off, and I should be done by Monday.

At that point I think this blog should get interesting again. Programming is by and large a boring as shit topic to write about and you probably won't get much out of my programming struggles...but come launch next week I'll chronicle our marketing of SportsLizard and our price guide.

This price guide is the best swing I've taken thus far. We like to relate all of our businesses back to baseball, and I think you guys realize that I'm not a singles hitter like Ichiro, I like to swing for the fences. I call myself Jeremy Burnitz - I take 3 good hacks at a pitch and then walk over and sit on the bench. ANYWAY - collectibles is the industry I know best, my experiences and our search data suggests that there's a huge market for a price guide, and I'm much more experienced than I was when I launched SL the first time around or even with iPrioritize (which by the way, may have some unexpectedly exciting news coming) so this is the best looking swing I've taken.

I suppose you can consider this a "teaser" post for what's to come. Marketing is a roller coaster ride and I'll let you in to my world in the next few weeks.

Firing a client

On the outside it's easy - we all know that some customers or clients aren't meant for us. They take up too much time for what they're worth, and in the end of the day they drag our spirits and our businesses down. So just identify them and fire them right? Well each of those steps isn't too easy and I'm learning that the hard way.

Like most of you, I consider myself a pretty good judge of character. I've had a handful of conversations with potential SEO clients that I immediately turned down because I had that "gut" feeling that it wouldn't work out. But the majority of people come to you in need and don't always show their true colors right away.

I have one particular client that has been dragging Pure Adapt down from day 1. He came to us from a very reputable referral so we figured he would be good to work with. It started out great, but slowly deteriorated - the project took longer than expected and yielded much worse results than it should have, primarily (in my opinion) because of him. He nagged and called incessantly, and most of the time those calls were about something we'd already discussed or we had no control over and he knew we had no control over (would you call your SEO guy if your web host wasn't doing their job?). He also had a habit of contacting us at ALL hours of the day, even on holidays and weekends, to follow up on things that could have easily waited a week or two (they were that minuscule).

George and I had also engaged him in several arguments. Each time we were ready to step away, but he smoothed things over and apologized enough for us to stay. We justified it because we wanted the few thousand dollars he owed us. But the more it dragged on, we realized we were stressed out to the extent that it was taking us away from other responsibilities (phones and emails 3 times/day from someone who should be contacting you 3 times/month will do that do a man).

We recently fired this client. We gave him a list of about 15 reasons why, and he actually went along with it and agreed with the split. It ultimately came down to trust - he didn't trust us and our abilities so he nagged all day long...and I think he knew that because he didn't put up a fight when we canned him.

Now that it's over, I wish I had done it sooner. Just like in Quality Control, the best way to eliminate defects is to prevent them from occurring in the first place. And just like in QC you need a process to make that happen. Even the best six-sigma manufacturing process can't eliminate ALL defects, but it can come pretty damn close.

Here's what I'm going to do from now on:

• Almost exclusively only deal with people I receive via a referral from someone I know and trust.
• Interview references & customers - that's right, taking on a long term client is just like taking on an employee and I'm willing to check up on them.
  
• Look for signs early on in the quoting process. Quoting a client is a "mini project" that you work on collaboratively. The most important thing to me is trust - trust me to do my job and I will do it. If I see an inability to trust me and the desire to over-question everything I do, my time isn't worth it. If you hire an expert, trust that the expert knows what they're doing. Otherwise do it yourself.
  
• Collect more money upfront. It might not be fair, but a lot of the pressure I had from this bad apple was because of the payment structure I set up. If I get pre-paid for work (at least in the beginning...say for 6 months) then I can always draw a line and say that you've used up what you paid for...much better than worrying that if you don't do this extra task you won't get paid for what you've already done.

Despite my desire to work on SportsLizard, I think I always want to do SOME client work. I like the mix, and it keeps me in check. Experiences with my sites help with clients, and research I do for clients helps with my sites. I just don't NEED clients because we've got a mix of revenue streams and there's always something for me to be doing that'll bring money to Pure Adapt that doesn't involve client work.

Even if I did NEED clients (or if you need clients), they will want to work with you much more if they know you have a thorough evaluation process and don't just work with anyone throwing money at you. Exclusivity both protects you and makes you more desirable - two very good things.

The other thing...

I read Dave's post on Mind Petals about marrying your passion and I'd be remissed if I didn't emphatically state that the reason WHY I fight so hard to see SportsLizard succeed and don't just continue down the path of becoming a successful SEO: it's what I love, it's what I'm passionate about, and it's what gets me motivated to work so hard every day.

SEO work and other projects within Pure Adapt don't do that for me, and therefore in a round-a-bout way are no better to me than working as an engineer - they both fail to meet that innate need that I have to do what I'm passionate about. My passions evolve and change, but as long as I'm always chasing them with a fire under my ass I'll be happy. Right or wrong, that's how I'm wired and that's me.

And yes, I'm still awake and it's 3PM :)

My craziest 24 hours as a YE

The Background
Despite what I wrote the other day about the 3 keys to SportsLizard's success, there's more to it. You and I both know that it'll be tough to be profitable relying solely on advertising. I've sort of glazed over it previously, but that plan is just a stall until we can launch an online price guide (which will have a free and premium version). That would make advertising a secondary revenue stream, something I'm very comfortable with.

Anyone in the collectibles industry knows that the incumbent way of pricing is bad. Not only is the data from an extremely small and old sample, it tends to be artificially inflated either intentionally or unintentionally - you NEVER get book value for an item - and price guides pretty much serve as a barometer and are not nearly as exact as they could be. Online price guides are essentially print versions of their counterparts.

The plan with SL was to increase the number of sellers and items listed until they grew from 10k to at least 200k and then use that 200k to create a live price guide. There are several problems with this:

• 200k is too small of a sampling of the 10-20 million collectibles available online. A stats dork like me is obsessed with sample size and will do anything he can to get it. It just won't be accurate with such a minuscule sampling.
  
• I realized that no matter how hard I try I'll only get 10% of the small/mid-size stores to participate. That's great for the marketplace (that'll be a shit ton of items) but not so good for accurate pricing
• It neglects eBay, Beckett, and Naxcom - three sites that in my estimation account for ~70% of the sales of cards and collectibles online

My First Stab
With that, I decided earlier this week to try to figure out a way to get my hands on some more data. I had a few different options, but I came up with the idea of crawling all of the collectibles sites on the web and having the data dumped into the database...similar to how Google crawls the web. I found Web Scraper Plus, a PHENOMENAL piece of software that allows you to crawl sites and insert their data into your database just as I was looking for.

After toying with the software for a few days, I got it to do exactly what I wanted it to do....except there were a ton of problems:

• It would probably take my desktop a few days to do a crawl of these immense sites
  
• Our database would fill up with millions of items...pushing storage space and possibly killing the server when running queries
• There would need to be a lot of quality checks for all this data. If eBay made one change to their site, for example, our crawling might get messed up and the data be invalid.
  

For those reasons, last night we ditched the idea, which essentially (in my mind) killed the long term "domination" plans of SportsLizard. We decided I'd keep working on it half-time and work on another new project for the other half...not really what I want to do, but it would be in the best interest of the company and would allow SL some time to grow it's advertising revenue. Eh.

My Night
I went to bed a bit deflated. All of my sites have been successful sites, but not so successful businesses. With the exception of SEO work I haven't had a hell of a lot of luck making money as an entrepreneur. I couldn't bear to have another realization that I should switch directions. I know the collectibles industry better than I know anything else, and I think the plan we had this time around was so solid that it was killing me to think it wouldn't even be feasible.

My "Morning"
Back pain from my still sore lower back woke me up around 2:45 AM. As I drifted in and out of sleep, I thought of a possible way to make the price guide work and solve all of the aforementioned problems. I decided to get up and give it a shot. 6 hours later I had a working demo for my partners to wake up to!

I used Google's API to get the data I needed. Beckett, eBay, and many other large collectible sites list their items on Froogle, and that data is therefore made available. When the user submits a search on my demo, it queries Froogle's data and returns a feed with the results to me, which I then parse and can do whatever I want with. We don't need to store millions of products on our server, and we shouldn't need to worry about queries crashing our server - the heavy work is done on Google's end.

Over the next few days I'll develop an algorithm to incorporate SportsLizard's search and purchase data, previous price guide queries, and Yahoo's search data to measure supply and demand of a collectible. The "report" a user gets will be both simple and complex - they can just take our "final price" and run with it, or see all of the factors and how they contribute. And oh yea, it will be free to run 3 queries/day and cost $4.99/month to be able to run unlimited queries and save "my collection" among other things.

It's now 11:20 AM and I'm still wide awake...partly from the Red Bull's...but mostly from the elation of getting this to work. From the low of all lows and the feeling that I was a failure to the high of all highs and the feeling that SL is primed to explode. God I love what I do. Look for the price guide to launch in a week or two. I'm going to go relax and get some well deserved rest.

The 3 things that will determine SportsLizard's success

Now that the site is launched and I've had a few weeks to work out the kinks, it's time to see some substantial growth. SportsLizard is already a very successful website in my eyes (I think the traffic, emails from collectors, and press I've gotten validates that) but it has yet to be proven a successful business - something that Pure Adapt can rely on for substantial revenue and can count on as a building block for it's future.

SportsLizard's business model is simple (I think) and therefore there are 3 things that we need to do well to succeed. If any of these 3 fall short, SportsLizard will fall short.

#1 - Get sellers to sell their stuff on SportsLizard
This is probably the easiest of the three, and therefore the one I'm least worried about. I've only contacted a handful of sellers thus far and we've already got over 10k items listed. It's not too hard of a sell - we list your products for free and take no cut when there's a sale. I get a lot of "why is this free" from people, but I explain our mission and that we make our revenue from advertising, and people usually are willing to give it a shot. Considering I've contacted 30 out of thousands of sellers, I'm not too concerned that we can't push Beckett.com (200k listings) by the end of the year.

#2 - Drive more traffic to SportsLizard
In order for sellers to be happy, we need to sell their items. For that (and in order to increase our ad/sponsorship revenue) we'll need more traffic. Right now SL get's ~1000 visitors a day. Not a bad start, but not even close to what the industry leaders get...and to be honest we already have as good as (if not better) of a site depending on what you are looking to accomplish.

I'm also not too worried about this one because when I put my mind to it I've ALWAYS found ways to increase traffic for my sites and client's sites. Among the things we're doing (in no particular order):

• Advertising in some smaller publications and on a weekly live vodcast.
• Continuing to publish great/controversial articles on the blog. For SEO purposes and viral purposes, this has been my best method of growth in the past and probably will continue to be. This also lends itself to social bookmarking, article syndication, etc.
  
• Do "box break" videos (where you open a box of cards on camera) and throw them up on YouTube. You'd be surprised how popular these types of videos are in the cards industry. These also give me an article to write (about what cards were pulled) and we'll sell the good cards on eBay (and advertise for SL in the listing) and give the rest to charities like local Boys and Girls clubs...all for the price of a box of cards.
  
• A well run Pay-Per Click campaign. I had success with SL in the past, but had a tough time converting the traffic once it got here....something I'm much, much better at now.
• As I'm doing all of this, natural search traffic will continue to grow as we add content and increase backlinks. Most of the new traffic now comes from search, and I hope to see steady growth in that area as well.
  

#3 Get Advertisers
This is the one I'm most worried about. First, it's our only source of revenue for the site right now, and second, I've never solicited people for advertising before. I *think* it's an easy sell to contact people who advertise on my competitors and sell them less expensive advertising to the same audience, but who knows. I'm selling by impressions on purpose like Beckett does so they can make an apples to apples comparison. I'm also contacting fantasy sports sites, sports betting sites, and ticket broker sites - all who want my audience and all who have HUGE margins so hopefully have more $ to spend (than say, collectibles sites).

If this fails, we're screwed because advertising networks can't generate the revenue we need for the traffic we get. By selling advertising directly, I'm expecting to get 3-5 times the revenue than what we get now with AdSense (or what you could get with a comparable advertising network).

-----

Once we see success on these three fronts, we can start building the online price guide and offering premium services. But I don't want to get ahead of myself too much.
This week most of my time is going to be spent contacting potential advertisers, so I'll know quickly whether or not this is going to be easy, hard, or next to impossible.

The one thing that really, really makes me feel good is that my partners seem to have more confidence in SL than I do. I'm a bit jaded because I've re-launched the site like 80 times and it's never quite worked all the way...which leads me into a "I'll believe it when I see it" attitude. But there supreme confidence and unwavering doubt that SL will be a huge success gives me a ton of confidence.

The Pure Adapt double shift - how I max my productivity

Every young entrepreneur has the odds stacked against them: we all have less money, less experience, and less resources than a seasoned business veteran. We tend to make up for all of those things by working VERY hard. 99.9999% of the ideas that anyone has for a business are not unique or revolutionary in and of themselves, so success lies in the execution (and many ideas that are unique and revolutionary are horrible business ideas...just do a patent search on USPTO.gov sometime).

And like the rest of you, I am human. Averaging 12 hour work days over an extended period of time (I'm talking 6 months, not 6 years) may be necessary for success, but it's damn near impossible for me to sit in my home office for that long and be at peak productivity. My partners at Pure Adapt all are in the same boat - we all work hard and need ways to increase productivity without burning ourselves out. My biggest problem is that after 5 or 6 PM my productivity drops because I just worked a long day...but I WANT to work more and accomplish more, so I keep going at a reduced speed. At the end of the day I'm worn out, and I haven't actually seen another human being.

Our unique solution is something I call the "double shift". This is something we sort of stumbled upon, but are now making somewhat official for 2-3 days of the week. Here's how an "ideal" double shift day goes:

7 AM: Wake up, work out, eat breakfast, watch Sports Center
9 AM - 4:30 PM: Work from home, taking breaks every few hours for food. I need my time to myself to really get stuff done - I crank up the music and just rip through work
5 PM - 6 PM: Pure Adapt dinner. All (or most) of us get together and grab a beer and food, usually at a pretty nice place. The type of place that's a step up from a chain restaurant like Chilis but not too nice that you feel out of place drinking a beer and wearing jeans. We talk business and brainstorm ideas, but it's a relaxing a rejuvenating time.
6 PM - 10:30 PM: Work remotely as a team. Albany is a relative hotbed for the arts, so there are several great cafe's with free wi-fi (we use Wi-Fi Free Spot to scout locations). We usually grab a coffee (or tea in my case...not a coffee fan, and a wanna be tea connoisseur) and the caffeine serves well to counteract the beer and also wake me up a bit. I usually get a TON of work done on this "second shift" and it works real well for the projects we need to collaborate on.
11 PM - 11:59 PM: Read, watch TV, grab a snack, and go to bed

Now, I couldn't do this every day, but the reality is that this day is FAR more interesting/exciting/relaxing because I accomplish a lot and still get out in a social/business atmosphere. I also crave the motivation and encouragement of my peers - sometimes even though you know you're doing the right thing you need someone to look you in the eye and tell you to stay on track and stop questioning yourself.

So that's how I get shit done. What's your productivity secret?

Feedburner you rock

Who says that big and important companies don't listen to their customers? A few hours after this post about my frustrations with Feedburner's email subscriptions, I received this comment:

Hi Adam -

Thanks for the love! Regarding the limit on subscriber import, the rationale behind it is that we need to take rather strong measures to ensure that every e-mail on our service is verified; if a spammer started bringing in lots of unverified addresses, we'd have issues with e-mail deliverability. By keeping our service "clean", it helps ensure that we'll retain our high deliverability performance for all of our publishers.

Drop me a note (rickk@feedburner.com) and I'll see if I can figure out a way to help you out.

In the meantime, feel free to let us know if you ever have any other questions about our service.

Keep in touch!

Regards,

Rick Klau
VP, Publisher Services
FeedBurner

And as of today, my email subscriber list is imported into my Feedburner account! This is huge because I'm turning what was a monthly newsletter into a several-times-a-week newsletter, and using Feedburner's system is perfect. They turn all of my posts for the day into an email and send it out to my subscribers - for FREE. And as I mentioned in the previous post, the newsletter is fully customizable and the quality is great: it comes from SL's email address, it has SL's logo, and it uses SL's color scheme.

That puts me in a good mood heading into the weekend :)

I'm on the DL

According to WebMD, " four of five adults experience significant back or neck pain during their lives". Considering I'm 24 and I eat healthy and exercise and stretch regularly, one would think I'd not be too susceptible to that pain. Well, back in 7th grade basketball when some kid intentionally shoved me in the back as I went up for a layup on a break away, I should have known that I would most definitely be one of those four adults. That was the first time I threw my back out, and it's continued to happen regularly for years.

It happens less now (I'd like to think that all of those things I do to take care of myself play a large part in that), but Sunday night I felt a stabbing pain in my back and I knew I was done. I've gone to the doctors several times, and read a ton on the topic, so I know how to take care of myself...and unless something is extremely wrong I understand that there isn't much a trip to the doctors office will do to me (other than more damage from sitting in the waiting room for two hours).

So I've spent the past two days working from my bed. One of the things about back pain is that too much rest is bad for it - one of the best cures and preventions is regular activity and exercise. That said, I know my back needs a few days off. I'll be up and active by the end of the week, but for the meantime the farthest I'm going is the five foot walk to my bathroom.

It's always interesting when I throw my back out - I start to think about all the 70 year olds out there who are outside exercising while I'm stuck in bed. I couldn't run or jump if my life depended on it - hell I couldn't sit in a chair for 2 hours and watch a movie or a basketball game. I start thinking about how much fun it will be just to get on an exercise bike and do some light exercise. It always makes me grateful for everything I have and realize that it all can be taken away at any time.

I guess you could say that my back pain grounds me. I start to remember that the amount of revenue that SportsLizard makes in April is NOT the only important thing in my life. I work hard and I always will, but I want to be sure that I'm not working as long as I do now. I want to make sure that my body and my bank account are both healthy enough to allow me to enjoy life when I'm 30 or 40, but if I had the choice I'd much rather have a healthy back than a ton of money. All the money in the world is worthless if I can't actively enjoy it with the people that are important to me.

A great YE story

A friend of mine from college had a great idea for an enterprise software application. He called me up and asked me if I wanted to help him make it happen. At the time, I was about 6 months into my engineering career, SportsLizard wasn't anything special, and I actually saw this as my best entrepreneurial chance.

I said yes, and the very next weekend I was in Boston pitching the idea to a potential investor. After a few weeks of working with him, I backed out because I didn't think I could give him the time commitment he needed, and he partnered with another one of our friends from college (who is, in fact, a waaaaay better programmer than me....he graduated with a comp-sci degree at age 19 and was making an ungodly amount of money by his 21st birthday).

Anyway, fast forward to a few weeks ago. The first person that my friend and I had met with way back in 2005 had referred him to a potential large buyer of his software in Denver. So he hopped on a plane and went out there to make a pitch. Well, the investor blew him off and sent his VP instead, who just ended up telling him that they were going with someone else. What a waste of a trip!

At the airport on the way back, delays getting through airport security made him miss his flight. Could the trip get any worse? Well, they put him on a direct flight back to Boston (instead of his flight which had a connecting flight) and bumped him to first class, where he struck up a conversation with a lady who just happened to be married to a huge real estate investor in Boston. My friend spoke to the investor (who is also partnered with a famous athlete which is really cool to me) and now they have a tentative deal to use their software to help manage their properties.

What an amazing story. Some would chalk it up to fate and luck, and those certainly played a part, but I give a lot of the credit to my friend. He is the type of person who knows EVERYONE because he talks to EVERYONE...he's the kind of guy who regularly strikes up conversations at a gas station with middle aged women just because he likes to meet and talk to new people. Every time I'm around him we end up meeting all sorts of new people, whether we're at a bar, a diner, a sporting event, or a gas station. He always greets them with a smile, and always ends up joking around with them - whether they're an 80 year old nun or a 30 year old construction worker.

Because of his innate social ability, he's able to meet far more people than the rest of us, and in turn get far more opportunities than the rest of us. Let's be honest - the majority of us wouldn't have stuck up a conversation on a plane with the person next to us (unless they were a hot member of the opposite sex), and most of us never would have had the opportunity my friend has.