Serving your ass like John McEnroe since 2001!
Steve Mallett,
About Inevitable
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New Sister Company: RUMAnalytics.com
Our Joints:
Our Flagship!: OSDir.com >10,000 most visited websites world-wide. (tech support & news)
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Big Data site:
yellow pages (big data - yellow pages & what is happening where - gbiz.org
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And:
Twollow (Twitter follow management)
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Contact: email
I came across this Techcrunch article last night when a good friend mentioned it on Twitter.
I have a really hard time absorbing this at face value. Here’s the relevant quote from the article: (emphasis mine)
…Alright, so if you’re looking to evaluate a startup’s chances of success,…
twitter has killed the blog as we know it. you may want to follow @inevitablecorp instead of, or in addition to, this.
The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!
Why? Because if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for. It’s hard to describe the level of energy in the Zappos culture—which means, by definition, it’s not for everybody. Zappos wants to learn if there’s a bad fit between what makes the organization tick and what makes individual employees tick—and it’s willing to pay to learn sooner rather than later. (About ten percent of new call-center employees take the money and run.)
The Giffen good is a strange beast from economic theory. For most goods, demand decreases as price increases. A Giffen good defies this normal market behavior — the demand for it increases even as its price increases.
Giffen goods have a very interesting history. They were postulated originally by Alfred Marshall in his 1895 book The Principles of Economics. The classic example is staple foods such as rice, wheat, and potatoes. As their price goes up, poor people on a tight budget actually consume more of them, because they are forced to cut back on luxuries such as meat, but still need the same number of calories to survive. Until recently, Giffen goods remained a theoretical beast, with no real documented examples — until 2007, when two Harvard economists demonstrated that rice and noodles behave as Giffen goods in certain poor parts of China.
Google’s recent results raise the possibility that search advertising might be a Giffen good. Here’s a simple model. Company X spends marketing dollars on two channels: search advertising and brand advertising (on the web or on TV and magazines). Search advertising drives customers directly to their site, resulting in immediate sales. Brand advertising drives organic traffic, albeit in a more unmeasurable way.
In otherwords if you aren’t wealthy or come from wealth, find someone who is successful & mine them for advice. Listen to their advice. Follow their advice.
My dad has worked for himself forever. I try to learn from his success and failures. I also absorb as much advice from people I emulate as I can. These folks are my mentors-by-proxy. It also helps to acknowledge that you don’t know shit. Everyone is smarter than you. Ok, well not everyone…. but people you’d like to emulate are.
So, as a percentage of the time you spend at work, what percent would you say qualifies as “marketing”?…I know some well-paid people who used to be world-class marketers who are now down in the single digits (less than 10%).
Ouch.
It doesn’t take a marketing guru to figure out that your Return on Marketing is paramount, but why does it take anyone to remind you of it?
What’s your ROI on filling out endless forms for various gov’t agencies, redecorating, chatting with pals, writing blog posts (ehem!), surfing the interwebs, etc…? Though all important what percentage of time are spent doing this vs marketing?
I get the nicest email sometimes:
You mean you’re going to…. That’s very decent of you. This is always a painful exercise, and I’ve been through hell with….
You are my hero. I notice you’re in facebook, when i checked my contacts earlier. Mind if I send you an invite?
Why? People ask me nicely to do things for them & I’m small enough to be able to take 5 minutes out of my day to oblige. Small, baby. Think and stay small. It is a state of mind.
This is a site for large data sets and the people who love them: the scrapers and crawlers who collect them, the academics and geeks who process them, the designers and artists who visualize them. It’s a place where they can exchange tips and tricks, develop and share tools together, and begin to integrate their particular projects.
This sort of activity was my major R&D project last year & will be a major theme this year.
Something I suspect some of the newly interested players in this space haven’t realized is how time and hardware intense some of this work is… they’re gonna need a bigger boat.
Running a startup is NOT about revenue anymore—it’s about critical mass. It’s about scale. When you’re playing in the big leagues with unlimited access to capital you shouldn’t worry about revenue BEFORE you have critical mass.*
* Note: if you’re not a player like Ev, and you don’t have unlimited access to capital do not take this advice and focus on building revenue streams.
*Ev is Evan Williams of Blogger fame & now Twitter.
This is also a pointer to those of us outside of the Silicon Valley “Moneysphere”. Typically we’re playing a different, non-sexy game. Adjust & deal with it.
My name is Steve Mallett. I’m best known for owning, running, blogging, and running OSDir.com (est. 2001-ish), a +10000! world-wide, Alexa world-wide traffic ranked website about open source & linux. OSDir is in fact the main reason for the creation of Inevitable really.
I’m foocamp alumni. (04-05) I think. Here’s a pic of the board from one of those years. My session was Open Data (right bottom middle).
I’m the caretaker for opensource.org, was a blog editor and ‘sort of all round idea guy’ at O’ReillyNet for a while, OSDir.com was a affiliate site of the O’Reilly Network, and inadvertently had digg.com create the bury feature after being sport-humped in their first ever lynch-mobbing (wrongly I should add) & subsequent kiss and make up sesssion.
I co-ordinated the creation of the Google/O’Reilly Open Source Awards with Chris DiBona (google) which turned into an annual thing.
If I hadn’t just sold it in Dec ‘07 I’d be telling you that one of my pet projects, and shit storms, de.lirio.us was a part of Inevitable. de.lirio.us was not a total miserable failure at making a point about community built (“Web 2.0”) websites and who gets to keep all the goodies. Modeled site del.icio.us did end up permitting what is now called data portablity, or datalibre as I called it. blah blah…
So… I’ve been around a little while, seen a few things, learned a few lessons the hard way, and will move forward with one success for every ten failures. Quickly though, I hope.
Our kiva page. Kiva helps entrepreneurs loan funds to other entrepreneurs in the developing world. We’re pleased to be successful enough to help out.
I also have a BBA from the University of New Brunswick.
Our logo/mascot Apple Seed.
I’m posting this so I can upload it and use ‘Seed permanently on the sidebar.
