In research by Dan Ariely and others it appears that higher incentives, actually reduce performance. That’s a perverse and counter-intuitive result, but in several different kinds of experiments, groups that were promised the largest amount of money as a reward for doing a task performed that task more slowly, and completed the tasks less often.
This post actually lays out a pretty convincing argument for eliminating sales commissions.
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This is actually kind of a neat look at how the Ruby interpreter treats strings of different lengths.
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Following up seems to be one of the most important aspects of business, but it’s also something that suffers a lot without a significant amount of systemization. I think there are a lot of opportunities that pass by for companies, especially smaller businesses, because they open doorways and then for various (good) reasons they don’t end up walking all the way through.
Of course there are different types of businesses and there are different types of follow up. So let’s see if we can categorize some of the kinds of people you would follow up with:
Out of this list, I think we already pay a lot of attention to potential customers, be they consumers or other businesses. There are whole lot of SaaS systems dedicated to tracking leads, bringing leads in to a “funnel,” and assigning various follow up to the right staff.
In this sense, the system of lead generation and follow up is a very “solved” problem, and the issue facing many small businesses in this space is a lack of adherence to any given system.
These systems are also readily used for the business development deals where the end goal may not be a sale, but certainly an agreement of some kind.
That leaves follow up with a consumer or business customer who has already bought your product.
This people are really the most likely people to be customers for you again. In the b2b world, a “lead” doesn’t get thrown away once they’ve bought something once, they get pushed up the priority list and hopefully become a long term regular customer.
In some consumer industries, especially where (like in the b2b market) the sales process is competitive and the final product is extremely expensive — like automobiles and houses — there is already a standard practice for customer follow up and retention.
Car dealerships maintain a relationship with you not only through maintenance but in some cases through drivers club memberships, magazines, and other regular mailings. I’ve only bought one house, but the follow up has been very good so far, and it’s definitely going to keep the agent top-of-mind when it comes time to sell the house I’m currently in and find a new one.
Even though the costs of having this kind of follow up in place could be large (staff dedicated to the process, printing and mailing materials, database management, and so on), it’s well worth it if a returning customer brings in, per purchase, several thousand dollars or more.
What if this process could be made more efficient for smaller, consumer facing companies, or for companies with less expensive products, but for whom the returning customer is an essential part of the package? Essentially, what if there was a resource-poor way to increase the lifetime value of each of your customers?
For all I know these services already exist (in fact, it looks like followup.com offers something in this vein, but only for auto dealerships, and a bit ham-handed), but I imagine that being able to sign up for a company that will manage this process for you would be a great advantage. Hand off the contact info, exclusively to be used for these very limited purposes, and allow the company to send various follow-up materials on your behalf that will encourage customers to become repeat customers and even real devoted fans.
How noticeable would it be if you signed up for an online service and received an actual physical thank-you in the mail? What if you got a free ticket to a movie? What if you got something on your birthday?
I can think of a lot of businesses that could benefit from a service like that.
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Mark Suster’s take on riding subways vs taking taxis:
I lived in London for nearly a decade. For the first few years I took the Underground everywhere. Over time as I became more senior at Andersen Consulting I had more resources to take taxis everywhere. For a few years I found myself constantly in taxis.
It was certainly more private. I probably caught less colds. But it was colder. After I started my first company I find myself back on the Underground. I love that feeling of being amongst random people. I love the people watching. I love imagining what all of their lives are like. What they do. Where they live. Who they are.
When I’m in New York City I almost always find myself taking the subway where possible. I feel more connected. I feel more at one with the city. I feel more Haimish.
I too love riding the subway when I’m in New York (or frankly, most places on the east coast), and what I love about the transit systems there is that everybody uses them. I even liked the buses while I lived in Brighton, because everybody uses them.
Public transit can be an awesome way to feel connected to the people around you, but I think a city kind of has to be built for it, but culturally and physically.
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New startup ideas are all around you, in the improvised behaviors of people you know. It takes a keen product eye, however, to notice these improvisational behaviors and recognize which ones are worthy of being developed into standalone products.
I’ve referred to this kind of behavior in the past as linespotting, and it’s something I think a lot of very successful entrepreneurs seem to have in common.
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Just spent a few minutes looking up Stripe, an API that promises to finally offer a payments API that works the way a payment API should work: easy to hook up, and the only fees are transaction fees. Pay when you get paid. Thanks, Stripe.
Time to poke around a little more with Potluk again.
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From The Verge, via and in reference to Daring Fireball and MG Siegler preferring the iPhone:
It gets under my skin because it is a pompous, privileged, insulting, and myopic viewpoint which reeks of class warfare — and it is indicative of a growing sentiment I see amongst people in the tech community.
and
“It’s probably hard for a Mercedes owner to describe to a Honda owner how attention to detail makes their driving experience better.” Or rather, it’s hard for a rich person to explain to a middle- or low-income person why expensive things are empirically better.
Nevermind, of course, that the iPhone 3GS is free.
Fascinating and many-faceted answer on Quora:
A theoretical physicist friend likes to say that there should be books titled “______ for Mathematicians”, where _____ is something generally believed to be difficult (quantum chemistry, general relativity, pricing of derivatives, formal epistemology). Those books would be short and pithy. That’s because the key ideas in those hard fields boil down to a few abstract ideas that mathematicians already understand or are well equipped to understand using their toolbox of concepts.
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Fantastic set of posters advertising BFAs and MFAs. Found on Twitter via gapingvoid.
The Las Vegas Weekly with a profile of Teller and the “floating red ball trick” – of which there does not appear to be any video online. Written with care and shows real appreciation for the art of the magical illusion.
What Teller loves about the trick is the same thing that made Abbott so reluctant to reveal the secret: its beauty. But unlike Abbott, Teller is anxious to expose the secret in the hope of allowing a fuller appreciation of that beauty.
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Almost of two decades of this environment of “permissionless innovation” has led to the creation of a huge new industry, which is global in nature, but unquestionably led by the US. Almost every young person I meet coming out of college these days wants to work in this industry.
I agree with Fred Wilson on SOPA. Contact your representative today and let them know that SOPA is a problem.
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There’s a whole lot of “white noise” information that gets passed around with an in-person interaction that doesn’t get passed over the phone or the internet. Everything from the color of your shirt to whether or not you’re tapping your feet — while kind of “irrelevant” — is really in my opinion some of the most important stuff of human relationships.
Kevin Purdy argues for more third place interactions, and I think it’s a good idea. Kind of makes me want to start my own regular morning meet up group.
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I am continually amazed with what can be accomplished with CSS & HTML5.
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The largest collection of Isaac Newton’s papers has gone digital, committing to open-access posterity the works of one of history’s greatest scientist.
A brilliant but apparently weird dude. I really like looking at notebook scans like this. Someone should turn that handwriting into a font called “Newton.”
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Another neat idea for a computer that (apparently) passes the Turing test?
(DeepQA is the name of the “operating system” that drives Watson)
Once you fill DeepQA up, it will answer questions all day long. You might be a little terrified the first time you pick up your phone to hear dulcet but unmistakably-computerized tones of Watson saying “Hello, can I interest you in cheap home insurance?”, but when you realize that you’re dealing with a computer that can answer all of your questions, and in a neutral way without emotional blackmail, you’ll probably warm to the idea.
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This information will be doubly useful because many of the compounds come from older patents that have expired, meaning science institutes around the world now have unprecedented access to data that was previously very hard (or expensive) to obtain.
Extreme tech points out that chemical compounds is just the first in a long list of extremely huge data sets that Watson could be set after. Maybe the WHOLE collection of patents next, for example:
It’s that utopian ideal of standing on the shoulders of giants; an enterprising individual should be able to build a company based on the work of his forebears, and then create or discover his own novel invention to perpetuate the cycle. In reality, that’s impossible because of the time, money, and effort required to pore through thousands or millions of patents and journals. Watson could change all that.
I don’t yet understand why Watson is better suited to parsing large data sets than, say, Google’s servers, or Facebook’s, or distributed computing networks in general, but you have to admit it’s really cool to just have a big room of machinery and be able to name it something like “Watson.”
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That’s the title of the project by 17-year old Angela Zhang:
Zhang managed to develop a nanoparticle that can be delivered to the site of a tumor through the drug salinomycin. Once there it kills the cancer stem cells.
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When Path first launched I was instantly on board with their concept of a fifty-friend limit. As Facebook has grown it has become a place where I no longer feel that it is a personal place to share things, rather it is a semi-public forum where people transact the business of social interaction.
There are plenty of people who use it primarily to stay close with family, I know, but this is the world it has grown to be for me.
Path, then, offers an artificial restraint on the common business-use case: get as many connections as you can. If you force people to limit the number of connections they make, you remove at least some of the incentives that have driven Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Google+, and others to the brand-driven experience that they currently have.
I also like the idea (perhaps it is foolish to think it’s possible) of creating a non-geographical small group of friends tied together by frequent communication of minutia.
At SXSW in 2011, I loved the fact that a spontaneous “Seattleites” Beluga (group messaging) “pod” showed up and filled in with a good group of us Seattleites in Austin. It was endlessly entertaining to be connected to the Seattle back-channel while we all roamed around SXSW, checked lines at parties, reported on the interestingness of sessions, and cracked jokes at everyone’s expense. I miss that experience, it was great.
I can see Path filling that gap with a persistent group of close friends, where I am comfortable sharing my home address, or when my entire family is on vacation.
The first version of Path was, I think, iPhone only, and unfortunately a lot of my family and really close friends “in real life” are not iPhone users, and so I found it harder to put together a really good list of “friends” on Path. I ultimately deleted the app from my phone.
This new version of Path is, firstly, extremely pretty, and a pleasure to use. I’ve been playing with it for about a week, and I love the interfaces for posting where you are, who you’re with, and (of course) whether you’re awake or asleep.
If you looked at Path before and set it aside, I’d recommend taking another look now.
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An eloquent essay on why everyone should learn to program, from the intro web page to the The Bastards Book of Ruby.
Ever since I started dabbling with Ruby on Rails about a year ago, I’ve been convinced that programming is not as arcane as most people think it is, and in fact it may turn out to be the backbone of a new American economy (as Mark Suster says).
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