Discoverers
Normally I write about things related to my company LandlordMax Property Management Software, be it how to run a business, about real estate, about what’s happening behind the scenes within the company itself, etc. However today I’m going to make an exception and suggest an excellent book that I’ve just finished reading. It’s not the first book I’ve recommended here, it’s just that it’s the first one that’s a little off-topic.In any case, the book is called “The Discoverers” and it was written by Daniel J. Boorstin about 20 years ago. It’s a great book in that I don’t think I’ve ever learned so many new things about the world at large from any one single book before! In essence it’s a history book, but it’s “a history of man’s search to know his world and himself”. It’s not a history book that’s all about memorizing the dates of events, it’s about how past events in our history affect our world today. It explains a lot of why a lot of things are the way they are.
Before you go out and buy this book, I’ll tell you it’s not the lightest read I’ve ever had, far from it. This particular book is four books in one, for all of 768 pages. Not a small read by any means. It’s divided into four books: “Time”, “The Earth and the Seas”, “Nature”, and finally “Society”. All four books are excellent, and each has some very interesting material. That being said, no book that size can be a continual page turner, and you will find some sections are a little longer than you may want. However if you push through these few longer sections, you’ll find it’s really worth it. For example for me I personally found the beginning of the fourth book pretty long, and I almost stopped. However I’m very glad I pushed on, it got to be very good. I eventually personally found the fourth book to be the most interesting.
As well, you’ll find that Daniel’s writing style is not the simplest. He does not write like John Grisham or Stephen King, so be prepared to take a bit longer reading the book. And don’t think that because he’s more verbose and wordy that his writing style is not exciting, it is. Its just that it might take you a while to work through the book.
Now that I’ve said my negatives about the book, seeing as I’m taking to write about it and strongly recommend it, it should say something about how much I appreciate and value it! This book is well worth the read, and I’m definitely looking forward to reading another one of Daniel’s books. I can’t say how enough how much I learned from this one book, how many things in the world I didn’t fully understand that I now do. Almost everything we do as a society is for a reason, and often we don’t really know why or how, we just accept it. After reading Daniel’s book The Discoverers, you understand a lot more about why and how the world works, and that’s extremely powerful!
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A Large Monitor is Actually Cheaper Than a Small Monitor
No matter where I go, I always see it. Every company that I know of, with the exception of a few companies, are more focused on saving pennies by getting their employees the smallest monitors possible that they can get away with. Why? Because they don’t believe that a larger monitor is worth the investment. But then again I also see many of these same companies skimping out on hardware for the same reasons. The bad news for them, good for me, is that studies have shown that larger monitors do significantly increase productivity as shown here, here, and here.
The reality is that the extra costs to invest in a better monitor, or better hardware, will generally be returned to you in multiples. I personally work on the Dell 24 inch widescreen LCD monitor right now, and I can’t rave enough about it. The only complaint I have is that it’s not the new 30 inch LCD widescreen monitors that Dell now has available!
But really, the reality is that I’m so much more efficient on the larger monitor that the time saved makes incredible sense for me. Comparing the price of a 17 inch, or even 19 inch monitor, yes I’m paying substantially more. But you know what, I’m also a many more times more effective!
But the real question is just how much more effective? Well let’s break down the numbers, there’s no better way to determine the value than looking at the bottom line. At this time of writing, a 24 inch Dell wide screen costs $800. An equivalent quality 17 inch monitor can be had for as little as $150-200, so let’s use the smaller number of $150. Therefore the price difference is $650. All I need to do to justify the extra cost is find $650 of value over the lifetime of the monitor, which we’ll assume is at least 3 years (probably more). Breaking it down even more, all I need to do is increase my value by $650 / 3 years, or approximately $213/year. That shouldn’t be too difficult! In reality, I’ll get a LOT more value than $213/year, not counting the joy of using it!
Ok, so let’s look at the value. Below this paragraph you can find three screenshots of the Jakarta Struts project in Eclipse. The first at 1920×1200 resolution from my 24 inch widescreen monitor. The next one with the same screen settings showing the coding section truncated, and the last one how it would normally be displayed at 1024×768. As you can quickly see there’s a huge difference in screen real estate space! If I was just using Outlook, Word, or even an internet browser, it wouldn’t make that big of a difference, but for programming purposes it’s a very large difference.
For those of you would aren’t as familiar, let me walk you through the screenshots to give you a better idea of the real estate value. On the left we have our project structure (almost like Windows Explorer). When programming, you separate the code out into logical files to make your life a LOT easier. Therefore you’re always referencing this panel all the time. And sometimes it can get quite deep, with many nodes on the trees as you can see in the screenshots), so it can take some space (much like if you have many directories within directories on your computer).
After that you have your console on the bottom panel. This panel is also use a LOT! This is where information from your program is outputted. This can range from debugging (sending out diagnostic information to the panel while the program is running to give an idea of what’s going on), to bigger things like displaying program error message, etc. The more space you have here, the more diagnostic information you can display, otherwise you just end up scrolling the panel a lot.
Next we have the optional Outline display on the right. On smaller screens this is often omitted because there just isn’t enough space, even though it’s very handy and helpful. What it does is give you a succinct list of all the methods, properties, etc. of the class (or classes) within the file you’re currently editing. This might not seem like much, but imagine if you have several hundred lines of code (best of luck if it’s thousands) and you’re looking for a particular method? Instead of always having to scroll through the code or doing a search for the text, you can quickly see the list and just double-click on it to move your cursor there in a second.
Lastly, and by far most importantly, is the main panel in the center. This is your programming code! This is where you will spend most of your time and where you want to see as much as you can. Often an algorithm will be spread across a decent amount of lines, possibly over several pages (multiple methods, etc.). The bigger this space is the better! I can’t stress this enough. Think of it as a working piece of paper when drawing plans for a house. The more you can see at once, the better off you are!
As you can quickly see from the screenshots above, with a smaller screen you have to start sacrificing space right away to be able to see everything at once. And don’t think that you mainly use one panel at a time, you generally move around between the different panels very frequently as I’ve just described. It’s much like driving, you look out your windshield, then your rear view mirror, your speedometer, and so on. Always moving your eyes around as you need to get more information. The same is true when developing.
That being said, if you look at the amount of real estate space on the smaller monitor, you have to make a lot of sacrifices. Going back to the car analogy, you don’t have the dashboard space to see everything at once, so you have to cut into some of the information. So for example, you can only see half of your speedometer (showing only the most common speeds in that window). You can only 1/4 of your rear view mirror, so pick the most advantageous spot. You can only see out 1/4 of your windshield, so definitely pick the area directly in front of the driver’s side, near the center preferably.
So right away, you’re limited in information, you can’t drive or program at nearly the same speed. The good thing though is that you can resize any of these windows as need be, but each time it costs you time and you have to sacrifice another panel. So for example, if you want to see out of your complete windshield, you can’t see any of the other windows (rear mirrors, speedometer, etc.). You can also just partially increase the size of any one window but you must also relatively decrease the size of the other(s) to compensate. As well, each time you adjust the size of a window, it costs you time. For programming, this means you have to move your hand to the mouse, adjust the size, etc. It might only be 2-3 seconds, but do this hundreds to thousands of times a day and it quickly ads up; 400 seconds to 4000 seconds – 6 minutes to a full hour!
Each time you make an adjustment, you lose other information, so if you need to move back and forth a lot, you’ll probably lose a little bit of the context. If you spend 1/2 your time adjusting the sizes of the windows, it’s easy to quickly forget simple details such as the speed you’re driving at, which means another adjustment, lookup, etc. This ads up.
Assuming your programming pretty consistently (ignoring things like attending meetings, being tired on Monday, etc.), I’ll use the one hour metric for our calculations, and then I’ll follow up with the 6 minutes to show that even that’s worth the return on investment!
Ok, so getting back to our calculations, assuming about 200 workdays, and assuming 1 hour is lost each day, that represents 200 lost hours of labor. But before I go on, I’ll just take a minute to talk about the cost figure I’m going to use for a developer hour. In a previous article I used $1000/day per developer, which caused some people to comment that this was too high. The reality is that this isn’t too high from the businesses perspective, this is the cost of a developer. The developer won’t receive $1000 in salary, they’ll just receive a portion of that. What you have to remember is that the business also has to pay for the employees benefits, real estate (for example IBM saved $700 million in real estate costs by having workers work from home), hardware, software, etc. All these things quickly add up!
Anyways, assuming a $1000/day cost for a developer (or $125/hour) , giving that they lose 200 hours a year because of the size of their monitors, that’s a $25,000 difference in cost. So you just lost $25,000 in productivity to save $800! If you like those kind of deals give me a holler, I’m sure I can provide you with other similar great deal!
Now what if I grossely overestimated my numbers, which I didn’t but what if, then that’s 200 days * (6 minutes/day at $125/day) = $2,500. So even at 6 minutes a day, we spend $2,500 to save $800! Wow!
To add on top of this, in the above calculations we assumed our monitor would last just one year (200 working days). So multiply the above numbers by 2-3 times since most monitors will easily last longer than that! You can quickly see how valuable a larger monitor becomes!
To add to this, getting a larger monitor will also make programming much more pleasant to your developers, which means they’ll be more efficient. No you can’t really measure the benefits here directly, but rest assured that they do exist. If you go with high quality monitor, your employees will be less tired (it’s less hard on the eyes), and so on. With LCD’s I also found that it significantly reduced the number of headaches I personally got, so that’s another measurable benefit in terms of productivity.
All in all, as you can quickly see, a large monitor is actually much cheaper than a small monitor when you consider the total value of your purchase. If you only use it to surf the internet, send emails, etc. then you’re absolutely right, there’s no real benefit in terms of dollars. But if you program on it, the return on investment is incredible!
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Domains For Sale!
I’ve come to the conclusion in the last while that my time is getting extremely limited, more so than I like to admit. Based on this, I’ve decided to liquidate some of my domain name portfolio for the simple fact that I just don’t have the proper time to dedicate to it. I’d love to spend more time on it, but at this time my company LandlordMax and this blog are just consuming all of my time, and they are my best growth vehicles.
That being said, I’m going to start selling several domains on dnforum.com this weekend to the highest bidders. However, before I do that, I wanted to give you guys a chance to buy them before I put them up for public auction there. I’ve already started to sell some of them on my other blog LearningCentre.com (which is itself seriously falling behind) with some success in it’s forum community (which is pretty active). So far I’ve sold the great domain InfoWorkShop.com (a Google PR4 website), including all the original content, to someone I personally know who’s going to really build off of it’s previous success. This blog already has 1500 unique visitors a month and I know the person who purchased it will be able to quickly increase that!
So right now I’m looking to sell 3 more domains. If someone offers me a reasonable price, I’ll let them go without putting them up on dnforum.com for public auction. And if not, you can have a second chance there because they WILL go to the highest bidder, there will be no reserve bid! So if you’re interested let me know before it goes for public auction later this weekend.
The 3 domains are:
PluggedInGeneration.com
– Content comes with the domain if you want it (except for the discussion forum). All content is 100% unique!
– Averages about 500+ unique visitors a month.
– Started the blog with another person but they’re no longer available. The demographic is the hot teen and young adults market.
– No idea on the revenue. Most of it comes from Amazon if I remember right…
DataLost.com
– I haven’t looked at this domain in 2 years… It’s just been sitting idle with a placeholder until I had a chance to develop it. Very good paying keyword though!
– Averages 300-400 unique a month.
– No idea on the revenue. It’s part of a larger channel and I never bothered to separate it.
XmasPresentIdeas.com
– I’ve never actually done anything with it, I’ve never had the time. It has a very marketable name.
So if you’re interested in purchasing any of these domains from me, feel free to contact me either in the comments of this article or by email at: steph@followsteph.com
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What are they Thinking?
I just don’t get spammers… What are they thinking? Today I received over 2000+ spams of virtually the same email to the same email address box! The only thing they did to change the spam emails was change the sender the information once in a while. What are the odds that if I don’t open an email entitled “Extra!!!” from “see bucky” after 10-20 exact same emails that I’ll open it from “nydia avrom”, or from “benoite lizbeth”, and so on. For over 2000+ spam emails in one day (less than 10 hours actually)!
I just don’t get it. What are they thinking? What a waste of my time and their time. First they waste a lot of bandwidth, cpu cycles, etc., but they also force me to sift through a barrage of this garbage. Why? How can it possible be effective? After seeing 100 or so, it was pretty obvious what was going on.
I can’t wait until someone finds a good solution to this problem. SpamBayes, an open source software that was suggested to me in a previous article is really helping, but I’ll tell you, I’m opening up more and more to the idea of a small toll on emails. Even something as simple as 1 cent per email would be worth it. For most people, that’s under $10/year, which is worth it. That’s also cheaper than buying software to deal with this issue, not counting the time lost! And for spammers who send millions of emails, that’s a real good economic dissentive!
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Record Day!
I thought Tuesday this week (October 24, 2006) was a great day, but it turns out to be greater than I initially thought! We broke and tied many records that day, both LandlordMax and FollowSteph:
- Broke our sales record for the most units sold in a single month (and there’s still a week left).
- Broke our sales record for the most revenue in a single month (with upgrades, etc., the number of units doesn’t always directly correspond with total revenue).
- Tied our one day sales record for the most units sold.
- Broke our one day sales record for the most revenue.
- Broke the record for the most unique visitors in a single month (and there’s still a week left).
All in all a great day. I initially knew we broke the sales record for the month but I hadn’t realized we also hit the daily sales records too. Not to mention FollowSteph’s traffic growth which has been growing at a pretty consistent 20-30% a month average for the last year almost. Tuesday was a great day!
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How to Deal With Email Spam?
Since I already touched the topic of email spam this week, let me send out a question to all of you. How do you deal with overwhelming email spam? Not even counting any of the spam my company LandlordMax receives each day, which I can assure you is an order of magnitude more, I personally get several thousands of spam emails a day! Yes, that’s each and every day. I know some fo you get a fraction of that and others get orders of magnitude more! I can’t imagine being Bill Gates (most spammed person in the world) and dealing with his spam levels (4 million spam emails a day).
What I’m starting to notice is that this is becoming a losing battle. I generally let my email client classify most of the emails as spam and throw them in the bulk/junk/spam (depending on which email client you use this will be named differently) folder. However at least a few hundred don’t get caught, and worse, several do get marked as spam when they aren’t (false positives). This therefore means, because I’m running a business and many of the emails are very important and not just personal correspondences, that I need to sift through the junk folder each and every day. I need to double check thousands of spam emails each day. Talk about boring, and especially error prone! It appears that I miss the odd email here and there (not many but a few a month), which is perfectly understandable from my perspective, but not from those who sent the email (which is also perfectly understandable from their perspective). So what are my options?
I do have several options, and I’ve also been suggested several others, but to be honest I haven’t found a solution that I really like yet. So far the best options I’ve seen are:
Continue the same way
This is where I’m at now but I’m looking for a better solution. This is getting more and more time consuming.
Use Spam Assassin
I’m afraid of false positives! Those are the absolute worse. At least with my current solution I can manually filter them and the blame is on me.
Purchase a commercial email spam filter
Which one? And what about false positives?
I forget the term of this type of product, but it basically sends out an email to everyone who emails you to validate who they are. Then it only allows emails through to you from those that responded to your validation email. So basically its a way of validating the emails you’re getting are from someone and not a bot.
Frank Neville from Surfulater (great product by the way) suggested this option a while back to me (thank you Frank) but I’m not too keen on it (this is probably the only time we respectfully had a difference of opinion on a business related item so far that I know of). I understand it’s working great for him, but I’m still hesitant because of the risks of not having people respond. I believe that the onus should be on you, not the person trying to contact you. If someone is trying to reach you to initiate a business deal, or respond to your request, the less trouble they have to go through the more likely things will work out for you. Much like the easier you make the purchasing process the higher your sales conversions are likely to be.
Just delete all the emails in the spam folder
No way, I know for a fact that I’d be deleting many important emails!
Add senders to my “safe list” (or similar terminology depending on your email client).
Yes, but this takes time. This does alleviate the issue, but only from people who’ve already writtent to you. Initial contacts will still have the same issue, which means you still have to sift through all the junk emails.
So what’s the solution? I don’t know. I’d love to hear your suggestions so fire away!
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LearningCenter.com Forums Open to the Public
For those of you who are fairly new to this blog, I’m also the co-author (with Glenn Scott) of another related blog called LearningCentre.com. On this blog we post all the latest and greatest information on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), website monetization, and website promotion that we learned through both of our respective businesses. For example, I’ve learned a lot through this blog, through my company LandlordMax Property Management Software, and through LearningCentre.com. Glenn also has a number of online businesses and websites that he’s learned a lot from that have made him financially independent. Based on our combined information and knowledge sharing, we decided almost 2 months ago to start LearningCentre.com.
Today’s great news is that we’ve decided to open up the Forums section of LearningCentre.com for free. In the past we charged a one-time $100 fee for a lifetime membership, but we’ve decided to go another route for now. For more details, I’ll refer you to my latest LearningCentre.com blog post. In any case, you’ll find the LearningCentre.com forum full of SEO, website promotion, and website monetization information. Both me and Glenn are big posters, we’re actually now using the forum as our main source of information and idea sharing (it’s easier and keeps a recorded history for us). As well, many of the people from our seminar are posting in the forum, sharing what they’ve learned since they took our seminar!
There’s lots of great information for those of you interested in these domains, so check the LearningCentre.com forums when you have chance.
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Commenting
Today someone posted a full article as a comment on my blog, including the “About the Author” with multiple links to their website. I’d ask that you please not do this. You can post a link to a relevant article you’d like to refer to in your comment, or even send me an email suggesting it for an article, but do not post the full article as a comment, especially not with the “About the Author”!
Also, what brought up my warning flags that this was a new form of comment spamming is that the entry in which this person posted their comment was that the entry wasn’t exactly related to the comment. It was in the same general area (real estate), but it didn’t fit with the post they commented on.
In any case, I’m going to give the person the benefit of the doubt and assume this was an honest mistake, even though I suspect otherwise. Today’s entry is also to let you all know that any such comment spam in the future will be automatically deleted.
UPDATE: For those of you who are interested, I posted the potential implications in more detail of this in my other SEO related blog (LearningCentre.com).
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Ideas are a Dime a Dozen
I don’t know if I’ve posted about this before, but it keeps coming up over and over again with people I talk who want to start a businesses, invest in real estate, start new projects, etc. Either they don’t have a new novel idea to start with, or if they do, they think the idea is worth a mint. The reality is that both of these preconceptions are dead wrong! Ideas are worth very little, it’s the execution that’s worth it’s weight in gold!
Let’s think about this a little… How many times have you heard someone say something like “I thought of that years ago. I should be a millionaire”. I know I’ve heard it a lot. The reality is that 99.99% of the general population doesn’t follow through with their ideas, at least not much past the first few months. Most people aren’t willing to put in the effort it takes to get an idea off the ground. And make no mistake about it, it takes effort. By the way, health gyms are notorious for using this to their advantage. They get you to buy a year membership, with an initiation fee, knowing full well that the majority of their members will stop using the facilities within a few months. Are you one of these people?
I can also tell you that I come up with potentially successful business ideas every day. The problem is that I can’t try them all out. You need to focus on one idea and push through it because it will take time for it to come to fruition. If you decide to invest in real estate, than expect it to take you many properties and deals before you can retire, you won’t retire on one golden deal (also you probably won’t have the experience to know what a golden deal is without some experience). In business the same is true, it takes time for a business to gain momentum and get off the ground. Don’t keep moving from project to project, which is easy to do as soon as you hit a speed bump or when you think of something new and exciting. If you study psychology at all (or probably through common sense), you’ll know that people like novelty more than repetition, so it’s very easy to get sidetracked.
On the other side of the coin, you have those who think they need to come up with a golden idea to make it. They think that everything’s done and there’s nothing they can do. Guess again, there’s lots of things everyone can do, you just need to put your mind to it. And please don’t ask me what you can do, that’s what you have to come up with yourself. Make that your first goal! Come up with an idea. Now don’t think it has to be original, it doesn’t. Just look at what’s happening in your area of interest, see what others are doing, look at who’s succeeding, and see if there’s more room in the market for you. How many grocery chains are there, movie rental chains, real estate investors, software companies, chocolate bar producers, tv shows, etc. You don’t need to be original, you just need to look at it from a slightly different angle. Maybe a higher quality, cheaper price, best locally, fastest, better service, etc.
The next major obstacle I often hear is that I don’t have enough money to get going. The reality is that if you think too big to start, than absolutely you don’t have the money. You might need to start smaller and grow from there. If you’re a real estate investor, start with a single resident home instead of with an apartment complex. Maybe one in a more affordable community. If it’s a business, look at something that can be started with your current capital. It can be as simple as a web service, a blog, a software application. You could even sell cookies, a lot of large companies have started this way.
Who’s familiar with the purple dinosaur Barney? How many of you know it was started by a mother (Sheryl Leach) in 1987 as home videos she wrote and filmed herself because she was dissatisfied with the selection of home videos on the market to amuse her own son? She produced three “Barney and the Backyard Gang” videos and marketed then to day-care centers and video stores until they were finally discovered by a PBS director in 1991. And the rest, to quote a cliche, is history.
So what are the steps to success?
1. Get started! That means now! We all have things happening in our lives, it’s just a matter of priorities. If you can find the time to watch any TV, then you can find the time to get started. I can tell you right now that for me it’s 11:15pm right now (actually I’m now revising this entry, minus some LandlordMax related sidetracks, and it’s 12:35am now) and I’ll be up on the computer for at least another hour or two working (as I’ve just confirmed). I live by the principle of work extremely hard for 5 or so years and then completely relax for the rest of my life rather than work moderatly for my whole life. So get started, find the time, it’s there.
2. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. That is, stay the course. Yes, you’re all pumped and the first 2-3 weeks go flying by. You get some work done but suddenly its your friends wedding on the weekend. One weekend isn’t so bad. But the next thing you know you have a party you just have to attend, a supper, a celebration, a birthday. And then there’s the bbq the weekend afterwards at your parents. And not to mention the fact that it’s SuperBowl weekend right after and everyone meets up for that. Suddenly a month goes by and nothing gets done, so you stop working. The project pitters to a dead stop. This is exactly how health gyms make their money! Stay the course. Push yourself. Set your priorities. Know what’s important to you and live accordingly.
3. Educate yourself. This means spend time AND money on educating yourself. I think I’ve read every book there is on real estate, business, marketing, sales, software development, etc. I try to read one book a week that’s related to what I’m trying to do. Yes I still read the odd novel, but again, base your priorities on what you want. A novel to me is like going to the movies, so I read them when I need a break. Not all my books are interesting, actually I can tell you many are really pretty boring and hard to read, but the content is worth the effort. Try to read a lot of what will help you succeed. The unfortunate side is that it’s not always the most interesting material.
Also attend seminars, talk to people in your industry, join like minded groups. For example, I belong to several local groups, the latest of which was just formed. This last one is a group focused on generating passive income here in Ottawa that meets once a month to discuss any and all passive income opportunities available out there (stocks, real estate, automated businesses, web sites, etc.) Take the time to educate yourself, you’re worth it.
4. Spend on yourself. Most people think that they can start a business, invest in real estate, and so on, with just time. It’s possible, but don’t be afraid to invest money on yourself. I can’t tell you how many people get flustered when I start to share my expenses in regards to LandlordMax and FollowSteph. They’re all pumped to get started, but as soon as I suggest they look at investing $500-$1000 on themselves and their idea, WAIT A MINUTE!!! “I don’t know, that’s seems like an aweful lot of money.” Well let me put it another way, if you don’t even believe in yourself and your idea enough to put down a little money on it, do you think anyone else will? Why are so many people afraid to invest in themselves? I don’t understand it. Don’t they realize that their employers are doing just that, they expect to make more money from their labour and skills than they pay them (that’s how business works)? I can’t imagine a world in which I wouldn’t be willing to invest in myself and my ideas. I do it all the time. Actually, I’ve been known to be a little trigger happy in this regard. I’m willing to take the chance sooner than later as I’m a big fan of trying rather than theorizing. After all you can’t debate with results, right or wrong (and I’ve proven myself both right and wrong many times).
5. Stay focused. I can’t even count any more how many people have asked me to co-venture with them… From small to larger projects. In the past I would generally hear everyone out, consider their ideas, and possibly be interested, in the least I’d offer some guidance. Today I have a different perspective. After having gone through it so many times, I now tell people that if they have an idea they’d like me to consider as a co-venture, come talk to me again about it in 6-12 months, whether or not they’re succeeding. Why 6-12 months? Simply because I want to see if they’re going to stick with their projects. Again, it all comes down to the fact that the vast majority of people, good intentions or not, will for some reason or another, start to lose interest in their projects within a few months. All I’m trying to do is weed these people out. So far I only know of a very small select few people who’ve gone beyond this! I don’t care whether their succeeding after this time, everyone has different areas of expertise and maybe its something simple their missing, maybe it’s not the great idea it seemed, maybe its an amazing success I missed an opportunity on, it doesn’t matter. I’m personally not interested in any co-ventures unless the person has put in at least 6-12 months of effort, to show me that they’re going to stay the course, that they’re focused, that they’re not just another health gym statistic.
6. Stick to your idea, test it. Lastly, don’t run away as soon as you hit a road block. Get past it. Go around it. Go in a slightly different direction. But keep moving. I can’t tell you how many people hit a road block and stop. If I did that with LandlordMax, well I wouldn’t be here. It’s now been over 3 years now, 4 if you count the year in which I created the initial version. If you think there weren’t some brutal road blocks, think again! To use one of my favorite quotes from I can’t remember who: “It took me 10 years to become an overnight success!“.
And with that, let me just say, you can’t make a journey around the world without first taking a step, so take it! Henry Ford put it another way: “You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.” Or as a fellow business owner and investor of mine, Glenn Scott put it: “I would rather see a stupid do’er than a brillant dreamer“.
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Customer Service How Not To
Before I begin, let me just say that this example is taken from GoDaddy.com. I’ve used them in the past, I will use them again in the future, but this particular incident did put some heavy doubts into my mind as to what type of company they are.
At least a year or two ago, maybe more, I tried the GoDaddy’s domain name backordering service. It’s a pretty simple service, it allows you to try to pick up domains that are about to expire (that is domains that were once registered and that are now about to come back on the free market). At the time, I knew that the big services for picking up expired/deleted domains were Pool.com, NameWinner.com, and another one that I can’t offhand recall. In any case, GoDaddy’s domain backordering service uses one registrar to try to pick up expiring domains whereas these other services use many different registrars combined together to keep pounding away hoping to get the domain at just the second it expires (it’s first come first serve). As you can imagine, the success rate of highly sought after expired domains is much more likely with services like Pool or NameWinner than with GoDaddy.
So why did I decide to use GoDaddy? Because the other services start auctions if more than one person tries to get the name, with the domain eventually going to the highest bidder. As you can imagine, some highly sought after domains can quickly go for large sums of money. What GoDaddy offers is you get it or you don’t (no auctions), but for one low price, under $20. So the odds are very low, but the so is the price. Almost like buying a lotery ticket. So I figured why not try it out.
As well, they advertise on their website:
“If you don’t get the name, you don’t lose – just re-assign to another name.”
Not a bad deal. So if they can’t get it, you just keep trying with other domains. Well after several unsuccessful expired domain attempts, this got rather tedious and annoying. It could very well be that I was trying to constantly pick up popular expiring domain names. But either way this got annoying after a while. So what do you think your next reaction is going to be? Let’s get a refund since they can’t deliver the service they promised. Rather than keep trying for other domains that they don’t seem to be able to get, let’s just get our cash and move on. After all, they seem to offer a very nice guarantee: “If you don’t get the name, you don’t lose – just re-assign to another name.” suggesting that they would offer a refund.
But wait, there’s no mention of a refund… Actually if you look on their website, there’s no mention of any type of refund anywhere. It turns out this is a non-refundable service! But here’s the kicker, no where is it mentioned that this is a non-refundable purchase. On the contrary it seems to suggest that they have the best intentions for you by their guarantee, but the reality is that it’s a non-refundable purchase with no notification. I even took the time recently to try to dig up this non-refundable condition. I couldn’t find it anywhere. I looked in the FAQ, the Help sections, everywhere. Nothing. No mention of it anywhere. I’m sure it’s there somewhere, but it’s obviously not easy to find by any means! If any of you find it, please let me know in the comments, I’d be very appreciative.
Moving on, why is this bad customer service? Because they intentionally give their customer the perception that they’re out looking for their best interest by offering a great guarantee, but with the exception that if they can’t deliver their service it’s non-refundable. So now what am I to do with this money I spent? I know it’s not a lot of money, but it can quickly add up. Now the only way I can use this money is to buy an already expired domain (one that no one is interested in) for $20 where it should have only cost me $9, almost double the price of purchasing a regular domain because they couldn’t deliver what they promised!
This really annoys me. This is not a way to treat your customers. If it wasn’t for the fact that they are one of the largest registrars, if not the largest, and that I have many domains already setup there, I would have seriously considered moving. Actually I seriously did! It’s amazing how simple small interactions with your customers can have such large ripple affects. For a measly $20 they almost lost thousands of dollars of business! I can’t ever imagining taking this type of gamble with my LandlordMax customers. It just doesn’t make business sense to me…
And yes I’ve registered that many domains over the last few years as I tried and learned many things.
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