“The project I am working on will be more successful than twitter within a year. When I sell the project for 40 million dollars I will ignore any emails from you begging to be a part of it and will send you a postcard from my yaght (sic). Ciao.”

This piece is brilliant. There are far too many “entrepreneurs” out there that confuse “being enterprising” with “not paying people for their work.” This page made me laugh out loud knowing how many folks (including myself) have had similar experiences when interacting with self-styled Internet entrepreneurs who are completely dependent on others for execution — but can’t afford to pay for it.

To paraphrase the author: Yes. I can write a web site for you in a weekend. But I spent 15 years working on web projects so that I can do that. If you’re not going to pay me to do it, why shouldn’t I just spend the weekend building a site for myself, or learning how to do it better for the folks that do pay me? And how come your time is so valuable that you’re not willing to learn to do it, if your idea is so fantastic?

Don’t get me wrong. I love entrepreneurs and I love when they discuss their projects with me. I’m just annoyed by the guys who think that 90% of the value is coming up with the idea, but at the same time haven’t the slightest idea what execution will actually entail. It’s the other way around: an idea is worth maybe 10-20% at most, and execution (both business and technical) is where you win or lose.

Read It’s like twittter. Except we charge for it.

My single-serving web site, IsAlternateSideParkingInEffect.com was featured in the New York Times Blog this morning.

Alternate side of the street parking, which was introduced by the city in 1952 to facilitate street cleaning, is one of the more burdensome rituals of New York City life…

So how to keep track of the state of the parking regulations, especially since so many of the holidays are set by a lunar calendar, and thus vary each year?

I worked on the Rails Wiki earlier this year, but I didn’t realize until now that I’d been credited as part of the Rails Wiki team. I have to say it’s a nice surprise to find out it’s there.

(This is an extended version of an email I wrote to one of the local tech mailing lists here in New York, in response to a developer's question. It seemed generally useful enough that I'm reposting it here.)

A very common design problem in web services project these days is the issue of user search. Most web services now involve pools of data that are far too large to be entirely "browseable", even if we're only talking about finding another user on the service. Very quickly you start to see a specification develop of increasing complexity, involving boolean ("AND/OR") concepts, keywords, and all kinds of other demands targeted at extremely precise results tailored very exactly to the knowledge domain or data set. What's the best way to go about building this user experience?

If you own or manage a small-to-medium-sized business with a somewhat web-savvy customer base, you’ve probably already thought about using Twitter to promote your offerings. I’ve talked with a number of small business owners who started Twitter accounts for their companies but were disappointed with the results. Here’s a few suggestions on how to improve your success with Twitter, and some issues you should consider before putting time into Twittering.

Old-school Customer Acquistion in Times Square, originally uploaded by karlo.

(This is a continuation of my series on understanding and analyzing web service and software businesses. If you'd like to start from the beginning, go to part one, "Core Value Proposition.")

User Acquisition

For a web services business, user acquisition is the "input" to the machine you've built by creating appropriate value proposition for users and monetization for the business. I'm covering acquisition last for a number of reasons:

• Without value for users and monetization, how many users you can acquire is irrelevant
• Acquiring traffic is easy, assuming you can spend money on marketing -- it's converting those leads into revenue that can then drive further traffic acquisition that's difficult

(This is a continuation of my series on understanding and analyzing web service and software businesses. If you'd like to start from the beginning, go to part one, "Core Value Proposition.")

Monetization

If you've created a service that has a compelling value proposition, and delivers on that promise for its end users, you've succeeded at the most difficult part of building a growing online business. Turning it into a profitable online business, however, takes more than simply making users happy. You have to find a way to generate revenues from your users that doesn't unnecessarily compromise that core value proposition.

There are two primary ways of generating revenue from an online service:

• Direct service charges
• Advertising revenue

This is an extension of an earlier post, which covered how one goes about calculating customer lifetime value (CLV). In this series, I'll be examining the key levers you use to maximize your business, seen through the perspective of CLV.

In my previous post around customer value, I reduced the CLV equation down to two key components:

• How much profit you make off each transaction with the customer - i.e. monetization
• How many transactions you get with the average customer - essentially, retention

To transition this a bit more to a customer-centric, rather than monetization-centric, view, your typical business has three key components:

1. The core value proposition to customers - what do they expect to get out of interacting with the company, service or product
2. The monetization of that interaction - how does the company make money off of delivering the core value proposition?
3. Customer acquisition - how does the company find and acquire new customers that find its value proposition compelling?

I'd argue that for most web businesses, it's all about these three components. Everything else is a support function. Any successful business will have to necessarily address all three of these, at least implicitly - you may not have an active acquisition strategy, for example, but that just means you're implicitly depending on word of mouth or another passive method. If you don't have a value proposition, well, that's somewhat more troubling.

I'll cover these each in separate posts. I'm going to start with value proposition, because not only is it the heart of the business, but it's also the one component you can't take a passive approach to, whereas there is at least (some) argument that you can leave the mechanics of acquisition or monetization until after you've solved the central value proposition question.

A week ago I posted about trying to jump completely over from client-based email to only using Gmail's web interface. In particular, this was prompted by the recent availability of offline mail reading for that interface, which made it unnecessary to have Thunderbird downloading copies of all my email so I could work on reading and answering messages when not connected to the net.