I’m lucky to be speaking tonight at IgniteTO so please stay the hell away from The Drake tonight. Failure to heed this will force you to endure my sweaty babbly nonesense about how you need to run your company more like an unconference.
If you choose to ignore me then come say hi after I’m done torturing you.
DemoCampGuelph 15 (skeery edition) is scheduled for October 25th, 2010. Maybe a chance to test drive that new costume? Hit up http://next.demoCampGuelph.com for details and to sign up to attend.
Invited speaker to be announced soon.
Spread the word, specifically get out there and talk a friend into submitting a demo!
Instead of sleeping last night I was mulling over the post I wrote yesterday about leveraging customer interactions. I then remembered an exchange I had last week around the current Brainpark job posting. I alluded to someone on twitter that they should apply. They direct messaged me saying they’d interviewed with us over a year ago and hadn’t heard back.
So after whining about chacos leaving me hanging for three days over something as trivial as a broken flip flop, I call bullshit on myself for leaving someone hanging about something as important as finding a place to work.
It’s easy to think of experiences I’ve had interviewing over the years and think “well that’s the reality of job hunting”. That’s garbage and it’s an example of a wasted opportunity. While every company can leave people hanging and take their damn time responding to people looking for jobs, it’s a terrible experience on the other side. As well, everyone who sets foot in your office immediately becomes a spokesperson, marketer, recruiter, etc for your company. Regardless what their experience with you is, they’re going to talk about it.
Ask yourself, what will that person you didn’t choose to hire say about your company? Will they tell their friends to apply or warn them to stay the hell away?
So, if you’ve interviewed with Brainpark in the past and we left you hanging, I personally apologize. It won’t happen again.
I’ve been reading Tony Hsieh’s book Delivering Happiness and really enjoying it. It’s nice to read a book written by a person, ie not a ghost writer. In reading it, I’m learning about Zappos and their customer service culture. While I’ve never ordered anything from them, I find myself craving their level of service when I interact with other companies. They place such high value on each and every interaction with their customer.
A recent example I went through. First I’ll say that I’ve had a pair of Chacos flips for a couple of years now and they’re the best flip flops I’ve ever owned. About a week ago one failed on me (see pic). Now I despise wearing shoes so I was initially stressed about having to go without my flips in the summer but I knew my chacos had a lifetime warranty so I’m good. Maybe.
Cut to the fine print. Ah yes, the lifetime warranty for a product where “lifetime” is the life of the product as determined by the company producing it. Lovely. I sent Chacos a photo of my broken flip flop for them to evaluate and decide if my flip flops were dead or simply injured.
So here’s the rub. After a day wearing shoes in this heat I couldn’t handle it any longer. While I’d love to buy a new pair of chacos, the combination of trying something different and the risk of having my chacos replaced or repaired, landing me with 2 pairs, led me to buy a pair of Birk’s. I switched and chacos lost me as a customer.
Sure enough three days later I received an email politely informing me…
“In this case we believe that the broken toe pole is a result of normal wear and tear and therefore we are sorry to inform you that Chaco will not be replacing the footwear. Although Chaco products are made to endure strong activity and made to last it is normal that after a couples of years of good use the footwear has to call it a day!
We are happy that you enjoyed our product for several years and we hope that you will continue to do so for the years to come.”
So what went wrong here?
First, assuming that I’m willing to wait 3 days for you to email me a short email informing me you aren’t going to do anything. It shouldn’t take three days for you to say no, sorry.
Second, I never asked for a full replacement. They failed to offer me a way to remain a chacos customer. In fact they offered me nothing, it was a dead end, a waste of time leaving a bad taste for a brand.
Now I’ll esteem Chacos USA because the irony is that they handled this well. You see, I started this whole thread with their US entity only to realize in the end that being in Canada, they had to pass me to their Canadian entity and I had to start the entire process over again. While dealing with the US rep, she immediately told me it’s doubtful my flips could either be repaired or replaced under warranty. She immediately offered me 20% off a new pair along with free shipping. I responded saying yes please, telling her what colour I’d like and my address. That’s when she hit me with the “oh you’re in canada, sorry.”
The key difference was immediacy and the feeling that they wanted to keep me as a customer. Had I been able to finish the path I started with chacos USA I would be a chacos customer today yammering on to everyone about my new sandals. Instead I’m wearing birks while writing a blog post.
Zappos (and chacos USA?) understands that customer interactions aren’t about interpreting your company rules for the public. Being polite doesn’t count as customer service, that’s just a base requirement of having a conversation with someone. Emailing someone a “no, go away” email, dripping in politeness, comes off as sarcasm or idiocy. Needless to say my reply to them about how much I was enjoying my new birk’s was very polite.
Zappos understands the value of leveraging that one interaction you are lucky to get with a customer over their lifetime and doing everything possible to deliver them a little happiness.
I spoke with a friend the other night about my original posting about whether we need a site for shared services for the local Guelph tech scene. In speaking with, it became clear that it wouldn’t hurt to clarify what I was suggesting.
I’m not talking about combining events and entities like DemoCampGuelph, Coffee and Code, diyode etc together. In fact it’s the opposite in that we need those efforts to have their own ‘brands’. Do they, however, need a way to be loosely coupled through some shared services?
What I’m suggesting is building shared services that we all need. I was using the analogy of the music scene. Every band has it’s own name, website, practice space etc. Where does someone go to find out what shows are playing or buy tickets and learn about new bands etc. Having to go to each individual band site for those tasks clearly doesn’t work. Those common services don’t need to be built by each and every band yet they all require them at some level.
This is simply to create shared services for our community events and entities. The only reason to do this is to strengthen our community by making it easier for individuals to participate. As well, running community efforts is work. If this would make the job of running current, and future, community efforts simpler then it’s worth considering.
I came across this Less 365 post today which is lovely and simple. I’m going to pitch to my wife and kids that we each try this on for a year.
The line that stuck out for me: “It’s one aspect of a larger goal to apply the philosophy of minimalist alpinism to everyday life: light, fast, with minimal protection—your wits, your experience and the strength of your companions.” This isn’t the first time I’ve compared climbing to startups and I’m sure not the last.
The idea of light, fast, with minimal protection is a powerful way to shape a startup. Reworking this for a tech startup, you have to build your team and products to be light and fast, with minimal protection. All that matters is your wits, your experience and the strength of your companions.
We’re hiring here at Brainpark Guelph, see details here. Email us immediately if you’re interested!!
I need help from you. We need a selection committee for our next DemoCampGuelph. The requirements are to meet with me next week, likely Thursday evening. At that meeting, this group will select who, of the applicants, gets a demo spot. Then on the night of DemoCampGuelph this group will select the demo of the night and recipient of The Crowie.
So I need three volunteers who meet the following qualifications:
If you’re interested in contributing to our event by taking this on, please contact me directly. We need three of you please.
I’ve been gently conspiring with Cory, of Guelph Coffee and Code fame, for a while now about a website for the Guelph technology community. The idea is straightforward, the various events and projects in Guelph should have their own web presence if they need it. It doesn’t, however, make sense for all those sites to replicate common features. We don’t need 10 event calendars, job boards, company indices, etc.
So the idea is for us to collaborate and build one presence or portal where we can work together and build the common spaces. Then the various sites like diyode and demoCampGuelph can focus on being all things democampy and diyodie.
So my first question is, do you feel we’re ready for this? I’ve always felt we’ll need this at some point, the question is are we at that point now.
Second, what related projects or codebases should we consider starting from? Ideally we can find something that we can eventually contribute back to. Ideas that come to mind are techstartup and startupindex. What others should be considered?
Third, do you want to help out?
Here’s the reason Facebook’s plan to allow individual user’s to share everything makes no sense and will ultimately fail. The simple answer is it’s not humanly possible.
When computers and software work well, they augment behaviour which humans are actually capable of in the offline world. That means they walk along side us and help us. A turn signal helps me. I don’t need to manually flick the lever up and down, up and down, etc. Cruise control helps me. Facebook allowing me to have thousands of ‘friends’ that I share my intimate life with doesn’t help me, because it’s not humanly possible for me to have thousands of friends. There’s a limiter and it’s called the human brain. There’s even a fancy term for this:
“Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.”
What happens when you try to go beyond Dunbar’s number?
“Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.”
The theory is that this is a physical limit imposed by MY BRAIN:
“the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained. On the periphery, the number also includes past colleagues such as high school friends with whom a person would want to reacquaint themselves if they met again”
So if Dunbar’s number is correct then facebook could help me with maintaining “more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms” once I go beyond my 150. That’s how facebook’s helping me right? Even if the number’s off by 100%, that’s 300. I don’t even consider myself an active user of facebook and I currently have 285 ‘friends’.
The reality is the opposite, that facebook and others makes it all but impossible for an individual NOT to smash through Dunbar’s number. Look, we’ve all done the equivalent of sticking our employer’s cheese up our nose. This isn’t a question of privacy or whether stupid acts exist in the world, or eliminating stupid acts. Do you honestly want to live in a world where people don’t do stupid stuff? This is about what’s humanly possible. Were it not for a myriad of tools facilitating the breaching of Dunbar’s number, then the close friends of these Domino’s staff would have laughed about the cheese in their nose until one finally said “that’s stupid, stop it, you’re being an ass” and they ‘d have stopped. Done.
I worry about a world where my kids can’t actively make mistakes and do stupid stuff, learn and move on. I was afforded that, and hopefully still am, and my character is likely far more built on the stupid stuff I lived through rather than the safe, acceptable stuff I managed to intersperse it with. If you agree our kids deserve that then you’d best quickly realize we’re all kids in some fashion and we all need this.
The clear answer is facebook isn’t helping with any of this and has no intention of it. In fact it’s quite the opposite, “The most important thing to understand about Facebook is that you are not Facebook’s customer, you are its inventory. You are the product Facebook is selling. Facebook’s real customers are advertisers.”
