David Hauser

Anyone that knows me will tell you I like messing around with AV equipment but I don’t really know what I am doing. I have setup and used many different systems including a whole home system from Russound with intercoms, Sonos, HDMI over Ethernet, iRule for making iPhones into universal remotes and much more. For the past 3 years I have stayed away from using cable company provided hardware by utilizing a CableCard and Moxi boxes and while not perfect it was a great option out of the box and something I recommended to many. Moxi worked a lot like Tivo but had no subscription fees and could play media from my media server where all movies are in MKV format.

Last week I went to purchase another Moxi and Moxi mate and found out they are not longer selling the device and might even stop supporting TV lineup data in the near future. This was disappointing and even more so when I found there are no good alternatives. After much research the only out of the box solution I found is Tivo and of course requires you to pay a monthly subscription or one-time fee for a lifetime access for that purchase. I was about 15 minutes away from purchasing a Tivo when I thought, let’s see if I can build this.

Here is how I built a system for under $700 that replaces a Tivo Premiere Elite ($499) and monthly service of $19.99 or $499 for lifetime. There are a few missing features and I have not run this long so I can say how perfect it is but it works and I can control it. Disclaimer, this is not a great option for anyone not familiar with computers and networking as there will be problems you have to fix.

Starting with a very small computer to power the HDMI signal and Microsoft Windows Media Center I purchased an EeeBox PC EB1501P from Amazon for $431.99 including shipping cause I have Amazon Prime. I looked at a number of small form factor PCs and really like this as it included the Windows 7 license I needed, had a DVD drive and good graphics to power HDMI signal to a Samsung 55 inch TV. Setup was very easy, ran all the system updates, removed all other installed software that was not needed and configured Windows Media Center. As a Mac user I tried very hard to see how this could be done on Mac and it could if you ran Windows but it would double the price if not more.
Time: 2 hours / Cost: $432

Next I needed something to handle the CableCard as I wanted more than standard digital cable. I found tons of options that could take digital cable and make it a stream for Windows Media Center but not many options for CableCard access. Came down to InfiniTV 4 USB from Ceton and HDHomeRun Prime. I decided on the HDHomeRun Prime for $209.99 from Amazon, as it was an external device that would offload the processing of the media compared with a USB device that used the same PC as the media center. The downside of this is the media has to stream over the network and wireless is not an option for HD. Maybe I will test the Ceton device later.
Time: 1 hour / Cost: $210

The final part was a controller and I did not find many options that were made for Windows Media Center and also did IR. I also found that there was a remote that came with the EeeBox PC but does not seem to work well when the PC is in a cabinet. I went with what was available on Amazon for $28.89. It would be nice to add some Media Extenders to this setup in the near future but it seems that all but the Xbox 360 have been discontinued by manufacturers.

So far things are working well, Windows Media Center has lost the connection with HDHomeRun Prime a few times but I am not sure if that is a network issue or an issue with the device. Maybe this would be corrected with using the Ceton device. I am very impressed with Windows Media Center and all the functions it has as well as how the interface looks. Would not expect this from Microsoft, maybe they should focus on this more and less on things they are not good at.

Here is my final setup with the EeeBox, HDHomeRun Prime and Motorola cable modem that also does Wi-Fi, again no reason to rent a modem from the cable provider.

Total Time: 3 hours and Cost: $671

My friends Dan and Ethan over at Flowtown created Timely, a great application for posting messages to Twitter at the time you will get the most engagement from your followers and I started using it a few months ago. Truthfully when I first saw the application I did not care about the scheduling part based around engagement, I just wanted a place to keep tweets and links that I wanted to share at some point.

Previous to using Timely I used a note in Outlook where I would store tweets to things I found interesting and as I remembered each day at some random point I would tweet out this interesting tidbit. That worked fine other than the days I forgot to do it.

While Timely has all sorts of cool features and even more if you want to pay, which at this point I do not pay for the application, I just use it as a replacement for my notepad in Outlook. This use case works perfectly other than the day you run a marathon and in the middle of your run there is a tweet that goes out, so for a few days after that I got asked if I stopped on the course to send out that tweet.

I am still not sure if my Twitter engagement has gone up because of using Timely, right now I sort of feel like it might have gone down a little since the posts are clearly automated if you are look at the app that posted them. Either way I like using Timely as it replaced a crappy method of keeping track of things I found interesting and wanted to share.

I really love Starwood Hotels and I’ve stayed at many of their properties around the world, and enjoyed the benefits of the Starwood Preferred Guest Program. Having spent many nights with them, I was expecting a good experience when we decided to stay local for the Grasshopper yearly off-site planning session, and visit the Le Meridien property in Cambridge, MA.

Even if you pay for 24 nights and a conference room, the hotel’s “free WiFi” is going to cost you

In addition to paying for food, beverages and eight hotel rooms for three nights, we rented a conference room for our sessions. When we arrived early in the morning, I wasn’t expecting my room to be ready (and it was not) so I went right to the 3rd floor where our meetings would be held for the duration of our stay. After I grabbed a bottle of water and something to eat, a few others from the Grasshopper team joined me and we started getting ready to settle in with our laptops. Just as we did so, we discovered that the “free WiFi” that was available in all of the guest rooms and the lobby was blocked. Easy fix right? Wrong.

When we asked the conference manager if we could have the password to access the internet in the conference room, he came by a few minutes later and casually asked if we could sign something. Upon further inspection, that “something” was an agreement to pay $250/day for internet. That’s right: After paying for eight hotel rooms for three nights, for a total of 24 nights at an otherwise empty hotel (with free internet in the rooms) we were being asked to pay for using the internet in the conference room. I gave the hotel the benefit of the doubt and spoke with the hotel manager who referred me to the events and catering manager.

Making excuses never makes a customer feel better

After getting passed off to the events and catering manager, and listening to her many excuses as to why the $250/day price tag for WiFi was justified, and how she couldn’t do anything about it for us, she then told me, “All of the other hotels in this area charge the same or more and we call them every month to verify our pricing is fair.” I was at a loss for words. Looking past all of the problems—that the hotel manager did not care, could not help and just passed blame—I couldn’t believe that the events manager even admitted it was an actual policy to charge this access fee. Worst of all, she actually admitted spending time each month “calling other hotels” to “verify” their pricing!

So, what lessons did this experience reinforce? Here they are:

Lesson #1: Just because your competitors do something does not make it right.

If your competitors apply a ridiculous fee for conference room WiFi, you’re getting an opportunity to be different, so stand out and do the right thing. Don’t do what Starwood did and justify fees by saying that they make you “just like everybody else.” Instead, use the opportunity to differentiate yourself; offer a substantially lower price to use the internet in the conference rooms, or better yet, make it free, just like all of the WiFi in the hotel rooms!

Once giving the hotel and the management a chance to make things right, I turned to Twitter and voiced my frustration with these two tweets to test the Starwood Hotels social media team.

The social media team did respond and ultimately sent me an email and tried to work with the hotel. After explaining my issue, the person from their social media team called the hotel and spoke to “management”—probably the same staff members with whom I’d spoken initially. After all of this, here was the email I got from the social media representative on Twitter:

“Our role is to act as mediators between our properties and our guests, so that we can bring our guests concerns to the hotel level and encourage them to provide the highest level of service possible. Your concern that the hotel charges an exorbitant amount for meeting room internet, while offering the same amenity free of charge for guests in their rooms, is valid.”

Perfect setup for bad news, and the bad news was to come…

“I have spoken with Andrea, the Front Office Manager at the hotel, and explained your concerns. I mentioned that we appreciated the way in which you contacted us online without immediately blasting the hotel, the reasonable nature of your concerns, as well as the potential impact of a negative resolution. She did consult the hotel sales team regarding your comments, and the hotel has made their decision. In the end, their prices are competitive within the region, they will maintain the stance that their charges for meeting room internet use are justified.”

Lesson #2: Having a social media team is useless when they have no power to fix things. Just give them the ability to give $500 courtesy credit at minimum.

I totally appreciate that the social media team tried to make this situation right, and that the hotel had the final say, but the experience did point out some great lessons for any business or entrepreneur trying to understand how social media can help their brand.

If you’re going to go social, make it a serious component of your business, not simply a front that is completely disempowered to make any decisions. What’s the point of interacting with your customers on Twitter if in the end you can’t do anything for them? Make sure that your social efforts match up with those of your business—otherwise, social media won’t do anything for you. People will see right through it.

Lesson #3: Ask a frustrated customer what would make them happy, and you’ll make them a brand evangelist.

The hotel never asked me what would make me a happy customer (all I wanted was free internet, like in the lobby and hotel rooms). Worst of all, everyone I dealt with at Le Meridien in Cambridge seemed totally disinterested in helping me or making their hotel stand out among a sea of options in the Boston area. If they’d just taken the time to find out what would resolve the situation quickly and efficiently, I wouldn’t be writing this post. They also had other options: could have given a $50 discount, given the next day’s internet for free, maybe even tossed some free meals our way, almost anything to show they at least listened.

Final thoughts

So, it’s pretty clear I won’t be raving about the experience I had at Starwood’s Le Meridien property anytime soon, but these are still some excellent (and very basic) lessons for entrepreneurs about creating brand loyalty and respecting your customer. If nothing else, we can take this bad experience and turn it into an enlightening one.

Everyone knows that the week after Christmas (and before the new year) is pretty slow; at Grasshopper alone, I think at least half of our office is on vacation. Certainly a good time for a break, but if you’re like the folks at Moosejaw, it’s also a great time to experiment with some fun (and slightly bizarre) marketing. Case in point is the online retailer’s promotional email sent out today, cleverly titled, “New Year’s Eve Frenching Service.”

Frenching service?! Right away I’m interested, since this is not the typical “10% off today only!” email. Why would a retailer who sells The North Face and skiing gear send this out? Curiosity piqued, I open the email and find this:

So, what is this? This is a stellar example of the kind of creative marketing that everyone is looking for, and can’t figure out. Even though the email had nothing to do with the products they sell, here’s why it worked:

1. Amazing copywriting that grabs you. Groupon’s got over 100 writers. Why? Because they understand that they key to hooking people is with great, lively copy. Moosejaw’s email succeeds because the writing is hilarious, engaging, and completely irreverent. Most brands fail at emails like this because they play it safe with stiff, formal copy. Don’t. If you want to get noticed, include copy that grabs a reader’s attention.
2. Timely messaging. This fun “promotion” would only work at New Year’s or Valentine’s Day so the timing was perfect. Even better that this is a historically “slow” week for email, so I might actually read an email from an online retailer versus sending it to the trash.
3. Brand personality. Anyone can send an email with a deal, but this email is actually in line with the Moosejaw brand (which, if you know anything about their brand, is a little quirky, definitely different, yet still polished). When you get a box from Moosejaw, it is most likely reused (not recycled), the wrong size, and has lots of stickers on it. These people understand how to make their individuality work for them, and they attract customers who appreciate that level of quirkiness.
4. Trust in team members. I doubt this came from some marketing genius at Moosejaw, but instead, a team member that had a fun idea and was allowed to run with it. In a typical company you could never send an email like that to your valuable mailing list, but at Moosejaw, you can do it. Guess what? It works—after all, here I am writing this blog post about Moosejaw.com.

This is creative email marketing done right. Nice job, Moosejaw.

Sitting in the Virgin Atlantic London Heathrow lounge for more than 8 hours today gave me a chance to see the operation from busy to slow, and then back to busy again. While waiting to depart for South Africa, I was lucky enough to enjoy some food, a quick rest and an entire movie on my laptop. Here are a few observations about the Virgin Lounge, created by a company I love.

All about the experience. As a flagship location for Virgin, the London Heathrow lounge is pretty big, but from the minute you enter it’s all about the experience. Case in point? Two greeters (not behind an impersonal window) welcome you, then you step inside to an entirely different universe. Fun, modern design, plenty to eat for free, friendly staff and the unmistakable “kid in a candy shop” mentality make it easier to forget you’re in an airport. Don’t want to talk to anyone? Make your own snacks and just kick back.

Branding without logos. In the Virgin Lounge, everything is branded: the color of the LED lights in the ceiling, the leather couches, the menus and even the table numbers. Everywhere you look it just oozes Virgin Atlantic without having a single logo anywhere. But how do they do that? By selecting a “look and feel” and letting that carry over into every dimension of their brand both in the air (just look at the seats, the flight attendants’ uniforms, and the bar area) and on the ground inside of the lounge. It may be James Bond meets Austin Powers, and a little off-beat, but they don’t do anything half-way, which results in an extremely memorable brand that doesn’t rely on a logo as its only means of identifying itself.

Give the feeling of “free.” Inside of the Virgin Lounge, everything is “free,” from the martinis you order while you wait to the upscale deli where they’ll make you a sandwich exactly how you want it. Need internet access? That’s free, too. How about a service from the on-site spa? Yup, one service per visitor is free as well. With all of these amazing amenities, it’s fun watching Virgin Lounge newbies’ faces; they’ll look at the menu (which has no prices but also does not say it is free) and then ask a server just for confirmation that everything before them is in fact, free of charge. At the Virgin Lounge, they make you feel like a rock star, even though, who are we kidding though, none of this is free since you’ve paid (or used American Express points like I did) for an Upper Class ticket. Somehow, though, it doesn’t matter—by purchasing a ticket, Virgin makes you feel like you’ve purchased a lifestyle.

Hidden process improvements. When you sit back and think about it, it makes a lot of sense to serve full dinners to passengers in a lounge where you have staff and a kitchen compared with on a plane. I am sure it saves on food costs, makes the staff on the plan happier and the best bonus of all:it feels exclusive to the customer.

Double duty. Spending so much time in the lounge, you get to see all the uses of it and it is for more than just passengers. There were a number of Virgin staff having meetings, talking with clients, and making use of the space. I might have expected to see flight staff, but there were none, however a group of at least ten staff had a meeting for an hour upstairs. Greatway to use the space you already have.

Turn a cost center into revenue. For a number of years, Virgin has offered the Bumble and Bumble salon at the lounge and even on planes at one point I think and it use to be all free with the limit of one service. Now you can get as many services as you want, but the first one is free and there are upgrades to all the free services. Nothing is too expensive but what a great way to turn a cost center into a revenue center; I have no idea if it’s profitable or not, but same staff and resources are generating some revenue now.

It was a very pleasant day in the lounge and I am sure I will visit again, just hoping some day (though doubtful) I will run in to Sir Richard Branson here.

This past season I completed four sprint triathlons after a friend completed his Ironman journey. Beyond finding a sport made for entrepreneurs that I enjoy, I now know why all entrepreneurs should cycle.

• Unknown roads with hills
  Even with GPS, you will end up on roads you have never been on and turn corners to see hills that just hurt to go up, which is very similar to the entrepreneurial journey. You might even expect the hill that is coming, but on that day, for some reason, it is just more difficult than the last. You might find the next week that you fly up that hill. As entrepreneurs we travel down roads all the time that we have never been down and need to figure out when to turn to get back on course or when to push further away from the course. The experience on a bike is just like this because it forces you to confront physical limitations that translate into the same kinds you face in business.
• Flat tires and limited tools
  Shit happens, but then you need to figure out how to adapt quickly with limited or the wrong types of tools. It could be a flat tire or a shifter breaking and you are 30 miles away from your start—whatever the situation, you need to figure it out and get going again. This happens all the time as entrepreneurs, from servers going down to customers leaving; no matter what the obstacles, you figure it out and keep going.
• Unpredictable drivers
  Until you are on a bike, you never realize how stupid and careless drivers can be to cyclists. From turning in front of you to beeping when they pass, it is nothing you can plan for or expect, it can throw you for a loop. Sound familiar as an entrepreneur? Competitors make changes that effect you, market conditions change without warning, and lots more.
• Focused time
  The disease that is entrepreneurship (and yes, it’s a disease) makes for very busy lives; I know from experience that it is impossible to get focused time other than in the shower. Riding a bike for 40 miles gives you the opportunity to put down the phone and email and concentrate on riding. When you get away from these time- and energy-sucking activities, that’s when you’ll get the great big ideas that change the world and all that good stuff.

The rest is all a bonus: get outdoors, see amazing things that would pass you by in a car, and great exercise. Go get a bike today, venture out to places you might not otherwise and enjoy life.

As entrepreneurs and human beings, we make mistakes everyday in our business, but most of the time the mistakes are small enough so that it doesn’t land us in the press for all the wrong reasons. On Monday, October 11th, Chargify made a massive mistake in making the announcement about a change in pricing; as far as mistakes go, this one was pretty gargantuan. Plain and simple, we did a horrible job of communicating a change that wasn’t driven by greed or stupidity, but was part of our desire to better support our customers that are really trying to grow viable businesses.  I could sit here all day and try to convince you that our change in pricing really was part of a plan to provide better service, but really, does it matter? When it comes to matters like these, the intentions do not matter as much as perceptions, emotions and how we treated the community.

Having spent the last two days focused on what we did wrong, and responding to the numerous inquiries and complaints from customers, I’ve had a great opportunity to identify where we screwed up. If that reflection were not enough, I also watched as two (1,2) posts about the Chargify price change made it to the top of Hacker News with over 180 comments (mostly negative). Then, of course, there was the article on TechCrunch, and a blog post on Inc. pointing out our blunder, too.  To put it simply, the last twenty-four hours have sucked, and they should never have happened, but they did, and now we need to learn something and try to earn back our customers’ trust.

Communicate early and often
Just one of the huge mistakes we made was sending one email, without any warning, notifying all customers of a large price increase. This broke a trust that we had developed with our customers over a long period of time, and will take much to repair. We should have communicated our need and desire to remove free plans and provided more information about how this would happen, and over a period of time leading up to the change. Maybe this could have been as simple as starting the communication three months ago, or as difficult as calling every single customer and talking to them on the phone to notify them of the change. Bottom line is that we should’ve done it better. It just wasn’t right.

Perceptions matter, so be open with information
As a result of our horrible communication, the perception of the pricing change was that it was because we just wanted more money, but that wasn’t the case. We should have shared the data we collected for over a year that demonstrated quite clearly to us that only 0.9% of customers were paying us at all, and that there was a direct correlation between those that did not pay anything and a high volume of support requests. Even though this informed our decision to make a change in Chargify pricing, we didn’t bother to share that with you. Mistakes like these are important lessons and we learned that we should’ve told you a long time ago what we ourselves were finding in the data collected.

Free customers go out of business or never launch
Many of you have asked why we don’t just go back to offering some kind of free service. A year ago, we here at Chargify thought it made sense to offer a free plan—after all, wouldn’t it just allow more people to start and grow their business to the point where they’d be paying customers anyway? It’s a good idea, but as it turns out, that’s not what happens. In the past year, we discovered that those businesses that we thought would initially pay nothing and then grow into paying customers just never ever did; for the most part, launches never happened and they went out of business.  The hard truth is that many, many people try to turn hobbies into businesses and it just doesn’t work. While everyone deserves a shot to start a business, our theory that non-paying customers would eventually turn into paying ones just didn’t pass the test when it was put into practice. Although we should’ve shared this with you so that our decision didn’t seem out of the blue, we simply can’t support free accounts and provide the kind of service we want, plain and simple.

“What bleeds, leads”
Everyone knows this phrase from our media-obsessed culture, and it holds true for tech blogs and the related community when a company makes a gargantuan error. Chargify’s price change hit the top of Hacker News twice, garnered almost 200 comments, and then the icing on the cake for a shitty day were a couple of articles on TechCrunch and Inc.com. Like other web app startups, we had tried to get TechCrunch coverage for a long time, and although they loved covering one of our competitors, they never covered Chargify until it was time to report something negative. We can argue about the merits of even wanting to be on TechCrunch, as my friend Paras Chopra did in his post, “Demystifying the TechCrunch Effect,” but we did actually get the coverage we wanted, and had very high signup days. So, while we should issue a big thank you to TechCrunch for the press, we don’t plan to screw up as royally as this again, which means we probably won’t ever be covered by them in the future. That’s fine; we’d rather have happy customers instead.

Free customers have the time to complain
There is a big difference between bootstrapping a business, which I have done a number of times, and trying to test a hobby to see if it is viable as a business.
Over the past year, we discovered that the customer that never paid had the highest support load. Once we made the announcement about the price change, the same applied to complaining about Chargify across multiple public channels. Those customers that were working on a hobby business, or just something they were not investing in significantly, seemed to have the time to tweet all day long, post multiple negative comments on every possible channel available, and shout the loudest. This is not to say we did not get valid complaints from great customers—boy, did we ever—but their complaints were well considered, included real information and were mostly in private forums.

Freemium gets a lot of talk; thankfully few use it
Everyone’s always talking about freemium, but very few people actually use it, and we discovered this in looking at our customers for the past year. The reality was that less than 0.4% of customers had any sizeable number of free customers on their accounts. For the small amount who did, Chargify has taken care of them and will not charge them. We should have communicated why the pricing was simplified to include just customers with no distention and handled the few edge cases better. Freemium is a hot topic these days, but far less people are actually using it than is widely reported.

Stand firm, but listen
Making a big decision that may change the direction of a business is not easy and you must stand firm in that decision, but be open to listening to and engaging the community. We will not offer a totally free option as that is not good for our business or for our customers, but we did make a $39 plan available to those that supported us during our growth.  Should we have offered this option before our major announcement? Yes. Would we love to go back and do it over again? Yes, but the reality is that’s not happening, so we need to do the next best thing and support those who have supported us with a $39 plan.

Grandfathering
This is a huge and unsettled topic about which we are still getting feedback on each day. Maybe we should have offered a grandfathering option, maybe we should have given a grandfathering option to those that already integrated, maybe we will do all of this, but at this point we have not. The issue here is that it really depends on the business, the pricing change and how dramatic it is for each customer. Looking back, the best option would have been a grandfathering option which allowed the previous pricing but only included community support. Still an open topic.

After personally replying to more than one hundred tickets, tons of comments across multiple publications and on Twitter, threads on Hacker News and many other channels, it was important to look back on all of this feedback and see what went wrong so our team (and others) can learn from it. Regardless, we broke your  trust, trust that took a massive amounts of time to build, and now we may never get it back. I don’t have any neat solutions for you and I don’t want to feed you crap. All I can say is that we have learned more from this mistake than from anything before and will use that knowledge to change the way we think about everything related to Chargify. That might not seem like enough of a mea culpa from me, but our desire has always been to empower entrepreneurs to succeed with real tools and solutions for growing business, and that mission hasn’t changed.  That was the driving force behind this pricing change, and whether you believe that or not is your call; we will show you our commitment to you, our customers, with our actions now.

Big Omaha 2010 was a great experience, thanks to Jeff, Dusty and their entire team.

After seeing the Shepard Fairey Supply & Demand show at the ICA Boston last year I wanted an original piece and after much searching and time I got this amazing one. It is an AP (artist proof) on metal in a great matching frame. Information about the piece can be found at zarts, a pretty cool site for art information.

“Never buy if you can rent, never rent if you can borrow”
- Anonymous

As an entrepreneur, you often find yourself with a jumble of different business ideas floating around in your head at any given point in time. If you settle on pursuing one of those ideas and start shaping it into a solid vision for a business, the next step is articulating all of the fundamental concepts that support your idea (e.g., a business plan). This can be really difficult for a lot of entrepreneurs—we’re so excited to jump right into something new that we forget that sometimes it’s important to be methodical.

A few months back when GotVMail was engaging in an executive level strategy session and crystallizing our core values, I had lots of ideas floating around in my head—but this time it wasn’t about which business idea I wanted to pursue, it was about the amazing things still in store for the company. Despite the fact that my company is past its infancy and well into its childhood, as a team we wanted to ensure our collective focus was aligned, and actually effective when executed. We also wanted to nurture our identity from the inside out, to lay the foundation for the future, but it was difficult with so many opinions on the table.

Two weeks earlier I attended a talk given by Cameron Herold for EO Boston during which Collective Next produced an amazing graphic representation of the ideas discussed at his presentation. The way the facilitator visually deconstructed the ideas about creating a world class “work culture” struck me as incredibly useful and very productive. The even more amazing part was that Cameron and the facilitator never met before the event, or prepared any graphics in advance; they didn’t require any interaction during the process, they just produced an amazing visual on-the-spot. (It’s unfortunate there’s no video of this, since the process is fascinating.) Since I’m a visual learner, “seeing the ideas” as we discussed them really helped me retain the overarching principles of the topic at hand. At that point, I knew that in order to drive the executive level strategy session, we had to do a series of graphic facilitation exercises.

This is how it worked for us: a really talented graphic facilitator we obtained through Collective Next came to our strategy sessions. With very little coaching or knowledge of the topics, she was able to create—in real time—a visual representation of all our discussion points, in one easy-to-share visual. As a result of the graphic facilitation, we were able to come up with lively and informative visual notes for the sessions. Individuals were able to review the documents at their leisure outside of the sessions, too, since we had the representations disseminated to key players via email.

Planning, strategizing, and articulating your core ideologies and goals isn’t the sexiest way to spend your time as an entrepreneur, but if you don’t do that in the beginning of your business, trust me, in order to grow, you will need to do it at some point. Our graphic facilitation exercises really helped us take that next step in growing GotVMail, and it helped us formulate our core values as a company.

We’re now considering using graphic facilitation in a number of different areas. I recently discovered The Grove, a company that offers pre-packaged solutions as well as training in the graphic facilitation skill set. If you feel like you need a little help getting to that next level, I highly recommend using a process such as this.

Update: Kristen Schaefer of Grove was nice enough to provide a great resource for finding a local graphic record, Visual Practitioners Association.

Back in February we opened the Austin outpost of GotVMail. Besides being an awesome city with tons to do, Austin has an amazing—and growing—talent pool from which we were able to draw some very strong team members. But having a group located thousands of miles away from us presented some unique challenges, like finding a way to communicate in real time that still made the Austin office feel like a part of GotVMail, and not some far-flung satellite location.

We’d used email, IM, and GoToMeeting in the past to communicate with mobile members of the GotVMail team, but the Austin office was a whole group of people, not just one person, and they’d need to feel like they were a part of the teams in Boston because, well, they actually were. If that interaction felt awkward or one dimensional, it might impact productivity. And we didn’t want that.

After a bit of searching, I came upon LifeSize, a company that was, coincidentally, based out of Austin, Texas. LifeSize allows people to teleconference remotely with any device—Macs, PolyCom, Tandem, all the way through free clients available via IM and similar applications. You might think, “Video conferencing is not new—why is LifeSize so special?” It’s special because it is ridiculously easy to set-up and outputs in high definition, yet it’s sold for less than standard definition systems. In other words, it wouldn’t make sense to choose anything but LifeSize if you were looking for outstanding visuals. As an added bonus, it crosses over all of the aforementioned platforms.

We use LifeSize regularly to talk to our Austin people, and even set it up at our company meeting in Boston so that we could include our Austin office in the gathering. Our Engineering team meets every day with their counterparts in Austin using LifeSize. LifeSize’s website describes the system as being as “natural as being in someone’s office,” and it’s actually true. Even the sound quality is amazing because of the high end base station that uses about twenty microphones and noise cancellation. I don’t really think there’s any way we could be happier with our Life Size stuff—except maybe if they came out with a teleporting feature. ;-)

(And yes, that is a Nintendo Wii in the first picture that is connected to the 52-inch Sharp Aquos LCD televison. The local Austin team has gotten very good at tennis and golf. On my next trip to the office I will have to challenge them to a game of Mario Kart racing.)

Over the past few quarters we’ve made a serious effort with the entire executive team at GotVMail to crystallize the core values that unite us as a company. After three weeks of discussion and writing (and re-writing), we arrived at an acronym that represented the core values of our company: GARY (the name of our cartoon mascot): “Go Above and Beyond”, “Always Entrepreneurial”, “Radically Passionate”, and “Your Team.”

We also combined our core values with our core purpose to “Empower Entrepreneurs to Succeed,” and we created what we believed was a very powerful message that speaks to our work culture. In addition to representing us as a company, we also thought it helped inspire both current and prospective employees, as well as partners.

Defining the core values of your company is a serious endeavor, but we certainly didn’t want them to turn out to be this lofty set of ideas that were too mighty for practical application. We also wanted to disseminate our core values in a fun, lighthearted way—in other words, we didn’t want people to be afraid of using them. But how would we get people talking about them?

The answer came one night when I was flipping around tv channels and landed on an episode of The Tonight Show. The featured guest was Gary Busey, of reality tv and (some) film fame. For someone who appeared to have been through the ringer in more ways than one, Gary had an uncanny knack for making acronyms from regular words (that actually made sense). That night on Leno, Busey dazzled with an acronym for the word “team”: Together Everyone Achieves More. I’m still surprised both Gary Busey and late-night tv watching could be so darn inspiring, but that night, the idea for the Gary Busey videos was born.

After putting the finishing touches on our core values and going over various ideas, the Gary Busey videos went into production. The result was our core values video, starring Busey, which debuted during our Q3 company meeting. Shortly thereafter, the videos were up on YouTube along with the rest of the viral ad campaign we’d produced.

The response to the videos has been amazing: the musician John Mayer blogged about them and the Daily News talked up the campaign on Page Six. People “got” the humor of doing these videos with a guy like Gary Busey, and I think also appreciated that we, as a company, could take ourselves a little less seriously than others. As a result of the immensely positive response, we decided that the videos would be an effective recruiting and marketing tool—it would help people understand what working at GotVMail is like: fun, unusual, and without a doubt, never predictable.

With all of the strife people are experiencing due to the economy, it’s only natural that we’re seeing the resurgence of news stories offering ways to save money on everything from gas to your daily lunch. IMAGE We’d probably rather forget the circumstances causing us to search for ways to save money, but stories like the one that ran in the Wall Street Journal last week—”Bagging Lunch: The Inflation Effect“—highlight the ways in which employers can step up and help mitigate the effects of the rising cost of living for their employees.

One of the companies featured in the WSJ article was my company, GotVMail. We started GotLunch, a program that gives every employee a $5 daily credit for use towards lunch from a variety of local sandwich shops and delis. Since we don’t have a cafeteria in our building and lunch often entails getting in a car and driving to find food, we thought it would make more sense (and save people gas) if employees could just get their lunch close to home and for a lower cost, too.

We get all of this done via our VMeals interface, through which people order their meal for either one or two days or the entire week. The keys to success have been simple:

1. Easy - Online interface accepts credit cards (if employees go over their $5 allowance each day) and is automated, so no manual processing is required. Also, whether you order in the morning or order in advance, lunch is always there.
2. Lots of selection - Hot and cold options in addition to standard salads and sandwiches and from multiple vendors.
3. Free delivery - GotVMail’s lunches are individually labeled and dropped off in our kitchen. GotVMail People never pay a delivery fee.

GotVMail’s GotLunch program helps in the following ways (besides the obvious benefit of lower cost lunches):

• Lets people use their time how they want to. GotVMail People no longer have to go out to get lunch, and those who get their lunch delivered now have more time to do other stuff like take a walk, catch up with coworkers, or nap on one of the GotVMail couches or chairs (they’re really comfortable).
• Gives people more flexible lunch options. Cuts down on the amount of brown bag lunches people have to bring, and offers those who normally bring their own the choice of additional hot lunch options.
• Supports local businesses. GotVMail People choose their lunches from menus offered by local delis and sandwich shops, so we’re helping to drive business to other small businesses in the area (many of which are family owned and operated).
• Gives GotVMail People a chance to socialize. Since many people order lunch at the same time and pick it up in the same spot when it is delivered to GotVMail, it always turns into an opportunity to socialize and meet people from many different departments in the company. We’ve always felt strongly that GotVMail People need this sort of social release to be the productive.

Overall, the response has been extremely positive, and we’re proud of the ripple effect it has had on team member morale and local businesses.

When people talk about entrepreneurship, they almost always use the word ‘risk’. It’s often said that entrepreneurs are “risk-takers,” and as a result, they’re often characterized as risk-lovers. It’s true that you’ll probably find some entrepreneurs who wholeheartedly enjoy that thrilling facet of the process, however, characterizing entrepreneurs as a group as people who only enjoy a thrill would be pretty narrow-minded, and also false.

Exploration of the concepts of entrepreneurship and risk (and the relationship between the two) was the central task of a working paper published in 2005 by Brian Wu, of The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and Anne Marie Knott, of the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Virginia. Wu and Knott’s paper, entitled “Entrepreneurial Risk and Market Entry,” discussed the work of F.H. Knight, who elaborated on earlier discussions of the matter by identifying entrepreneurs as important economic players, not as thrill-seeking risk-takers.

Wu and Knott pointed out that as the market developed, entrepreneurs served a crucial role as “undertakers” of important tasks at all levels of society. But perhaps the most striking observation the authors make is that entrepreneurs were (and continue to be) those individuals that are willing to take risks in order to innovate new and better ways of doing things. Entrepreneurs are those that, faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles, take the risk because the reward is a better way of life not just for the entrepreneur, but society as a whole.

This brings me to the subject of social entrepreneurship, which is a huge topic to cover in one post (which is why I won’t). Does it seem a bit redundant to anyone else to use the term “social entrepreneurship”? It seems to me that the root of entrepreneurship is social— that is, it’s based on interaction and social life. It’s one person identifying the need of a group of people, the available resources and the desired outcome and trying to reach that goal with whatever tools/resources he or she has available. In this way, entrepreneurship is less about risk taking than it is about vision building. For whatever reason, the social experiences entrepreneurs combine with the intellectual skills they possess and produce an ability to visualize the desired innovation or outcome.

It’s probably true that we’ve come to think of entrepreneurs a little differently than how they began—as the “undertaker class” outlined in Wu and Knott’s article, people like farmers, merchants, and craftspeople. But, as with anything, there is an evolution of terminology that is based on history, society, and the market. The excess of the 1980’s and the explosion (and implosion) of start-ups in the late 1990’s have made the roots of entrepreneurship worthy of further evaluation, particular how their skills can be best utilized during tough economic times.

Today my company, GotVMail, launched the Gary Busey on Business viral campaign. The Busey on Business series features the actor’s musings on everything from cultural clich

It’s kind of unusual to have an epiphany while foraging for a snack. But that’s what happened to me in GotVMail’s kitchen one afternoon. After surveying the snacks—a smorgasbord of items that were either high in fat, sugar, preservatives or both—I realized it didn’t have to be this way! I knew we could easily find healthier alternatives to greasy chips or provide protein bars instead of candy bars to GotVMail team members in need of something to snack on. The easiest way to do this? A vending machine, but not any old vending machine, it would be free for GotVMail team members and would consist entirely of healthier snacks.

Since I’d already been trying to find foods with fewer processed ingredients for myself at home, I was familiar with a lot of brands that offered healthier versions of favorite items like chips, popcorn, and candy bars. I decided to buy items like Cascadian Farms Organic, LesserEvil, Luna, and Robert’s American Gourmet in large quantities on Amazon.com and stock the vending machine with those items and then see the response of GotVMail employees. Naturally, overhauling our snack offerings was a big change, but I had a feeling it would be a really positive change that would enhance our productivity. To make the new system easier to swallow, we decided to offer the healthier snacks in the machine for free, permanently. It just made more sense to supply our employees with snacks that could potentially provide the energy we all needed to get through our projects every day.

Since setting up the new, healthier vending machines, the response from GotVMail team members has been largely positive. Obviously, every now and again people just want a candy bar, and nothing else will substitute, but in terms of providing healthier alternatives to fill that daily, 3pm post-lunch void, the healthier vending machine has made a huge difference. And in addition to food in our vending machines, we continue to offer free drinks (the non-alcoholic kind!), coffee and espresso. Fresh fruit deliveries have also been added to the roster of healthier snack items at GotVMail.

The vending machine project at GotVMail launched around the same time as another initiative of ours, the GotVMail Lunch Program, GotLunch. Look for a post in the coming days about this innovative employee benefit.

SlideShare is great for sharing presentations, getting feedback from invited users, or the SlideShare community as a whole. With a smart little embeddable player and easy tools, anyone can take a PowerPoint presentation and make it into a Flash based presentation that everyone can access. So with all these user-centered features—within a culture increasingly high on user generated content—why would anyone dare suggest there could be a problem with the way it works?

Not long ago I was looking for an easy way to post our Q3 company presenation to our company wiki, and SlideShare came to mind. Since there had been so many recent privacy upgrades, like being able to make some presentations private yet still share your content, we thought it was the solution to our slide sharing problem. But in the process of uploading our quarterly company presentation, we encountered some obstacles that underscore SlideShare’s true lack of substantial privacy options. Here’s what I noticed:

1. During the uploading process, a user cannot set the presentation to private, so you need to remember to do this immediately after uploading.
2. Enabling links or embedding a SlideShare presentation still allows others to forward (share) this content, even if it’s private.
3. Posting company information or other sensitive data on SlideShare’s non-enterprise network means you have very little control over where that data eventually ends up.

#3 really threw us for a loop, and it should really any user of a site that gathers and retains sensitive or personal data (think about it: MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and many other social networking sites do the same thing—you may never truly know how and where your information could be accessed by a third party). It’s a problem SlideShare and many other sites similar to it all face, yet because everyone’s so eager to jump on the social media/user generated content bandwagon, the issue doesn’t get much attention.

After thinking about these questions I set out to find a secure solution that would allow us to control the data storage and access. Did a few quick Google searches and found two sets of products: applications made at least 5 years ago that had horrible players and interfaces, and at the other end of the spectrum, complex PowerPoint replacements with audio, and tons of useless features. A minute or two of despair was followed by a bit more searching, and I eventually found iSpring and their slideboom . With a free conversion tool I was able to convert the presentation quickly and easily and upload the Flash file to our wiki behind our firewall.

SlideShare is a great tool for non-sensitive information, but if you’re a company (or a person) interested in privacy and data security, you’ll probably prefer a tool like iSpring, which offers total user control on a platform that’s very similar to SlideShare.