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General, Marketing Improving the effectiveness of partnerships
So, I’ve been attending a lot of weddings lately, and one thing I’ve noticed is a lot of half-emptly-wasted-drinks. Usually very expensive drinks paid for by someone else. And being a young person in Columbus, I’m frequently at bars and restaurants where I never find waste. While some places probably pick up abandonments quickly, I think the bigger issue is that people take care of things that they’ve paid for. And they don’t take care of things that are free.
For many, this behavior falls into the shocking-but-obvious-in-retrospect category like greed, selfishness, or the Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel duet.
Like many professional firms, Innova spends time doing things that we give away (i.e., no cash changes hands). And while rewarding in some ways, these relationships can be among the most unproductive that we maintain. Relationships may start via business development, civic engagements, long-shot gambles, or friend and family commitments. What unites these no-cash efforts is that they usually undervalue the time spent by the side doing professional design and development, and grossly overvalue the ideas generated by the side that doesn’t commit to follow-on work after an idea-exchange between the two parties. So for no cash deals, a new requirement is time commitment for the non-development party. And lest I sound hostile, I’ve been on both sides.
Put another way, while folks should be happy to engage in no cash work they shouldn’t touch no cost work.
This should work well for everyone. By raising the activation-energy of ideas, we’ll all make sure we’re working on stuff that is important to everyone.
Thanks for reading. 20 GOTO 10, then contact us.
Marketing How Having An Awesome Blog Is Really Cool
Many, many people keep blogs. Few, few people read them. Even this blog, which is part of a surprisingly successful business, has a readership that struggles to stay in single figures.
My new blog, on the other hand, is astonishingly successful. If I have fewer than 30 000 uniques in a day then I feel bad; the record so far is around 130K. I’ve been linked from boingboing, neatorama, gawker, all the cool well-edited places. I’ve been #1 on digg and #1 on reddit. Possibly at the same time, I’m not sure because I am constantly distracted by how awesome my blog is.
Success of this magnitude obligates me to convey some part of the genius involved to you, the less-successful bloggers. Here are my secrets.
Culture, Marketing Tips on hiring any developer, not just Rails guys!
Recently Ruby Inside published a list of 11 tips on hiring a Rails developer. Since I’m slowly getting into Rails I thought, “Here’s going to be a list of awesome Rails-specific things I’d need to pick up on!”
Wrong.
Marketing Looong webpages
Over the past three years, I’ve become convinced that long webpages are better than short ones. Even Nielsen says that scrolling is now allowed (as long as it’s not horizontally); and long, honest copywriting beats vague marketing-speak, even if it is above the fold. Today, Seth Godin said:
It’s okay to be long, if you’re chunky. The great lesson of direct mail was that long letters always do better than short ones. That’s because once you’ve sold me, I’ll stop reading. But if I’m not sold and I get to the end, you lose. The web is infinitely expandable. So go ahead and tell your story.I’d just add that it’s important to make sure users know what to do when they’re done with your content-and they may be done with your content before they get to the bottom of the page. Make sure that Back isn’t the easiest button to hit when they’re ready to move on.
Marketing A Guide to Hiring Programmers: The Low Cost of Low Quality
The guys over at Revolution Systems have a nice posting about the high costs of hiring low-quality programmers. Now, I don’t disagree with anything specifically that they’re saying, which essentially boils down to “hire a small group of expert coders, pay them really well, and give them awesome perks so they stay with you.”
Let me stress, this is quality advice, such that we practice here at Innova already. But sometimes you don’t need to build your core team of coders. Sometimes you have too much work for five experts to handle, and you need to supplement your crack team of experts with some lower-quality talent.