Shanti’s Dispatches

I get a lot of LinkedIn spam. Perhaps its because I leave my email address on my profile.

I believe that’s a good idea, generally - I’ve made some pretty good contacts who just emailed me out of the blue from this.

It’s nice, though, if you’re going to use this technique, to at least:

1) Read up on my profile, and send a nice customized (could be just 2 sentences long) message, instead of one of the generic LinkedIn ones.

2) Perhaps Googled me to find out a bit more about me (i.e. perhaps this blog), and mentioned that in the request (this is not required, I know people are busy)

Introducing the LinkedIn Flip

Instead of ignoring or deleting spam from LinkedIn users — try selling them on one of your own products or services (do this *before* you accept their connection invitation).

If they doth protest (which I just had one person do), explain that you don’t know them, that they spent a grand total of 10seconds sending a form-letter template, and that you only connect with people who you have a working or personal relationship of some kind.

The Pushy-salesman Flip

This technique works equally well on pushy salespeople who have not buttered me up appropriately yet. You see, I have a rudimentary understanding of Psychology, so I know that if you at least butter me up first by being more personable, or perhaps give me something of value for free (with no expectation of reciprocation), then I’m a lot more likely to say Yes when the time comes for me to buy your product/service.

But I’ve had a few instances where I was approached by someone (either online or off) who was rather pushy or very forward — In retrospect I would have loved to sell them on one of my products/services instead of just blowing them off.

“Coffee’s for closers” - Alec Baldwin’s character in Glengarry Glen Ross

Coffee’s for closers (direct link)

Found this via del.icio.us/popular:

Not to take it too seriously, but my personal take on being a Ruby programmer, well, more of a Ruby + Rails programmer, is not so much about it being a superior language or considering myself superior to developers of any other languages, but rather that I’ve just found a “secret” (not so much lately) way of getting things done faster.

If suddenly a new framework for Erlang, VBScript, or heck, Blub, appeared that would make development incredibly efficient on that platform, many Rubyists would definitely take a look (that’s how 99% of us came to Ruby in the first place).

Mythical (but possible) blog post:

Hey — have you checked out the new VBScript on Rollerblades framework? I know it’s hard to believe, but I get about 10x as much done!

When All Else is Commoditized, Optimize for Time

I remember when a professor back in school first introduced the appeal of commoditization of complimentary services to your own. IBM and Linux is the quintessential example. Why would IBM want to commoditize the OS market (by investing heavily in Linux), when they already make a few of their own?

Now it seems normal, with Sun GPLing Java, but a few years ago many analysts were scratching their heads as to why IBM would want to invest $1 billion in Linux and open source.

Because now IBM can sell consulting services @ $250 per hour, while the cost of their OS and server software (used to deploy production systems), remains virtually nil. A $1 bln investment is pretty cheap for a rock-solid OS, especially when you’ve got $20 billion a quarter in revenues.

If you have any doubts about this, talk to a small business owner who’s buying SQL Server and Windows 2003 Server licenses because they decided to build out their platform on MS. (I had the pleasure of doing this recently - business owners are not happy about paying more for a licensing fee than the actual hardware!)

With servers and bandwidth being incredibly inexpensive these days, while OSes, database software and web framworks remain free (that is, if you use the right one *wink*), the only thing left to optimize for is developer time.*

* I do have a vested interest here. But I challenge you to try out an inexpensive Indian outsourcing firm (commoditized developer time) and report back your results. I haven’t heard too many success stories yet.

Who invented the term “blog” anyway?

By now, it sounds normal. But remember when you first heard it? It sounded like someone had something caught in their throat.

I registered the domain sablog.com over 4 years ago now. Back when it was trendy and cool to be a blog.

Sometime around when Apple started suing bloggers, it stopped being so cool. It became better to just be an online magazine. That way, you enjoyed the same freedoms & protections as the press. (which a blog is, in a sense. a very inexpensive online printing press)

I’m also a huge fan of Joel Spolsky, Paul Graham and the like.

So, with that in mind I registered onwebapps.com and will be blogging there from time to time now, with a focus on longer and better posts. (posted less frequently)

While there are many blogs who cover “Web 2.0″ and post about (it seems like for the majority, at least) all the startups that have raised millions of dollars without having seen a penny of revenue, I happen to have more personal experience in bootstrapping ventures & webapps.

Hence the tagline How to Start and Grow a Profitable Webapp. That should be the goal of any sound venture — not to simply Get Big Fast and sell out to an Even Greater Fool.

BTW - Don’t get me wrong, we’d love to raise some Venture Capital. (and probably will) But you can’t sit around waiting for someone to drop a $2.5M check in your lap.

When all else fails, go out there and build a kickass product, attract an audience/clients, and you will succeed, regardless of big name financial backing. Fred Wilson writes about some of the things he looks for in a company that can survive another bursting of a bubble.

note - no need to subscribe to both feeds, I should eventually auto-merge subscriptions to sablog over to onwebapps.com, and just use sablog.com as a dumping ground for random links n such.

Why do you read this blog?

I’d love to hear from you. There are about 300 RSS subscribers but I swear there couldn’t really be that many!

Do you like reading about:
A) Technology and/or Ruby on Rails related things
B) The business of starting startups & my experiences in that realm
C) Pictures of my cat (disclaimer: I don’t have a cat)
D) Random links I find on the interweb (have tried to cut that down lately)

??? Please drop a line in the comments with your thoughts, or hit me up at: shantibraford @ gmail

A lot of people still don’t get the Google/YouTube deal. This article makes a few good points, the best of which is:

…a reallocation of the $67 billion that advertisers spent on TV in the US last year.

Now, for many of us in the web advertising world, it’s crazy to think that all these BigCos spend so much money on television ads.

Especially when you factor in the direct accountability and measurability of online systems like AdWords.

But I think the sexy world of television advertising & bloated Madison Ave. budgets will be the next industry to take a major hit.

Why does Coca-Cola need to spend billions on fancy tv ad budgets, when a few kids in a garage somewhere can bang out a viral Coke ad for $0, spend $0 on hosting, and have it watched possibly tens of millions of times.

AND — this is a big and — they are watching the ad intentially! When you sit down to watch Heroes, if you’re lucky, you have a Tivo or DVR and the ads are just a 200mph blur. Maybe you catch a Nissan logo in the blink of an eye, but other than that, brands aren’t getting much exposure that way. And if you don’t have a Tivo-esque device, then the ads are just a major annoyance.

When you sit down at your computer and pull up an email from your friend, that contains a link to some hilarious new viral Coca-Cola video (I’m not even talking about the mentos thing, but maybe something like that), of course you’re going to check it out, and it’ll have your 100% undivided attention until you decide it’s either lame or cool. (and if cool, you’ll pass it along to even more friends!)

That, in a nutshell, is why the GooTube deal went down, imho.

Amazon is now using RoR in production code (for an admittedly non-core area of their business):

UnSpun - Community Opionions … Ranked!

Still, I wonder what kind of traffic a link on the Amazon.com homepage drives! (I’m guessing quite a bit)

Via: Signal vs. Noise

Sidenote

Amazon seems like they are really cool with their developers when it comes to letting them choose their technologies. Very Starfishy (just picked this up the other day).

From some of Stevey’s stories, it sounds like they even have some LISP code powering some backend processes there!

The true deficit of the US government is running close to $3.5 trillion.

The good news is, I just saved a ton of money by switching to GEICO!

Let’s say you have a method that looks like this:

 def foo
   if !params[:id] || params[:id].blank?
     render(:text => ‘400 An ID is required for this method. ‘, :status => 400) and return
   end
   … # real action goes here
 end

But you start seeing that same pattern in many different actions, for the same parameters. (:id, usually)

You can instead add this to the top of your controller:

class FooController < ApplicationController
  verify :params => ‘id’, : only => [ :foo, :bar  ],
         :render => {:text => ‘400 An ID is required.’, :status => 400}

  def foo
    … # just do the action, secure in the fact that a
        # params[:id] will be there if it gets to this point.
  end

  def bar
    … # ditto
  end
end

Note: i had to change it to “: only” otherwise a would appear there. =) The method also takes :except and a whole host of other options.

The verify method is also used (much more commonly) to require POST, etc. For example:

  verify :method => :post, : only => [ :foo, :bar ],
         :render => {:text => ‘405 HTTP POST required.’, :status => 405, :add_headers => {’Allow’ => ‘POST’}}

Hope that saves you a few extra lines of crufty ‘once-of-prevention’ code =)

Seth Godin at Gel 2006 (direct link)

John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing has a new book coming out (of the same name) in January ‘07.

I’ve stumpled across Duct Tape Marketing many a times over the years through Google searches, etc.

What impresses me about John is he knows a ton about each of the different ways you can market your business or website, whereas most marketing experts tend to specialize in just one area (i.e. blogging, SEO, AdWords, etc).

Within marketing (and Internet marketing) you have:
- brand building (even though branding is dead) - but y’know, name/identity recognition aka The Artist Formerly Known As Branding
- SEO
- pay per click
- blogging
- press releases & PR
- referral marketing
- affiliate marketing
- sales letters
- etc

It’s tough for a business to be effective in all these different areas, but I think it helps to experiment a bit in each and find out what works best for your business.

It looks like you also get a bunch of bonuses if you pre-order.