I’ve Moved
After a nearly six-month hiatus, I’ve started blogging again, but I’ve moved – you can now find me at danlee.co.
Entrepreneur Profile: Angie’s List
[This post originally appeared on the AxialMarket blog]
This post is part of a series on successful entrepreneurs and business owners and how they meet the many challenges related to financing, building, and exiting their companies successfully.
Angie Hicks wanted to make it easier for everyday consumers to discover and share information about local services companies. So with the help of a former boss from a college internship, she started Angie’s List, a review service based in Columbus, Ohio.
Members of Angie’s List pay for access to reports and reviews about local professional service companies. Whether you’re looking for a plumber, a mechanic, or a dentist, Angie’s List can help you research and evaluate professional services before paying for them. In addition to its website, Angie’s List publishes a consumer magazine and employs Neighborhood Specialists who are available to help you via phone.
Since launching in 1995 with just a thousand members, the company today boasts more than a million members nationwide. Angie’s List has attracted $81.5 million in funding from investors, and it expects to generate $60 million in revenue from membership fees and advertising this year.
In a recent interview, Hicks discusses some of the challenges she faced in starting the company and imparts some words of wisdom for her fellow entrepreneurs. We encourage you to read the article in full, but here are some lessons she shares in her interview that we wanted to highlight:
- Learn to overcome rejection. For the first year, Hicks worked by herself and went door-to-door to sell memberships. It was “one of the hardest things” she had ever done, and she faced plenty of rejection. Instead of focusing on how many “no’s” she got, however, Hicks kept her mind on the big picture and resolved not to quit. Hicks went from selling a membership a day for the first four months to having a thousand members by the end of the first year.
- You don’t have to raise venture funding to start a business. Although Angie’s List has raised multiple rounds of funding over the years, it was started on just $50,000 of capital from friends. We’ve previously highlighted in our weekly series of top private business articles ways in which small business owners can raise smaller amounts of capital from friends and family. Hicks was able to raise enough money on an as-needed basis, and it was only when the company was doing well enough to be noticed that it met with several venture capital firms.
- Building a sustainable company requires solving a real problem. As the internet empowered consumers with easy and free access to information, Angie’s List began to face a new competitive challenge. The company has overcome this by continuing to create real value for customers through the quality of its information – as Hicks says herself, “consumers are willing to pay for good information.” We’ve discussed in a previous post some of the elements of building a sustainable company, and we think Angie’s List has endured because it embodies many of these elements: clarity of purpose, a large market, focus, and, of course, being a “pain killer.”
Hicks says she’s having fun with continuing to grow Angie’s List, and while she is looking at exit opportunities along the way, it doesn’t look like she will be selling the company anytime soon. When she does, though, we’re confident that she’ll face no shortage of interested buyers.
Verizon Wireless: Be Less Useless. Really.
I haven’t written in a while because I haven’t had enough time recently to write a meaningful post. But I absolutely had to get this off my chest.
After some deliberation about what phone to get after my contract with AT&T expired at the end of September, I settled on a Droid X. I didn’t want to stick with AT&T’s network, and by most accounts, the Droid X is one of the best Android phones out there.
I have to agree, the Droid X is pretty sweet. But so far, its battery life hasn’t come close to my expectations based on reviews I’ve read.
For example, this past weekend, I charged my phone fully for the first time. Great. But the next day, I had had my phone for only twelve hours when I checked and the battery life had shriveled to 20%. This was after less than one hour of total web usage (no music, no video), data sync for a Twitter and Facebook app set at half-hour intervals, and NO CALLS. Zip.
Now at this point, I’ve done all of the research I can on the Droid X’s battery life and what’s going on, and from what I can tell I’m not the only Droid X customer who is confused. Google “Droid X battery life problems” and you’ll come across pages and pages of complaints, questions, and general confusion about why certain DX batteries are severely underperforming.
After reading through some tips and suggestions, I tweaked my settings, and today I had a better performance: at the end of the day, I’m at 30% after using the phone a bit more for music and video. But honestly, why should I have to dim the brightness on my screen to as low as possible to enjoy it for longer – what’s the point of having a brightness adjuster at all, then?
That’s not my biggest gripe, though, as you might be able to tell from the title of my post. My biggest disappointment is with Verizon Wireless. I’ve heard anecdotes about their terrible overall attitude with customers before, but I thought little of them.
Before I launch into my personal story, one thing immediately struck me as odd: for a company that lives and breathes mobile, whose users are highly and increasingly more engaged with social media, it really sucks at social media marketing. And by marketing, I don’t just mean clever YouTube ads or Facebook pages – I mean responding to and having discussions with bloggers and others who are on the scores of Android and Droid forums I found online.
Take a look again at the Google search results for “Droid X battery life problems” and you’ll not only see that the top results are Android and Droid forums (in which Verizon Wireless representation is conspicuously low), but that the one result that is officially Verizon’s – a discussion topic on its Facebook page – wasn’t even responded to by Verizon itself.
This is pretty disconcerting. The fact that Verizon makes little attempt to address its core audience and userbase online is pretty embarrassing, actually.
Ok, so now my part of the story: fed up with the battery issues, I tweeted to the Verizon Wireless account my issue with the battery life and linked them to a Facebook discussion I started on their page. This is the conversation that ensued (along with my commentary):
Me: @VZWSupport having issues with my battery for DX. Please look at my post here on VZW FB page: http://goo.gl/W2IM. Can you help?
Verizon: @danieljlee Are you charging your phone by usb or with the outlet charger & do you have the phone powered off while charging?*SR
Reasonable so far, besides the fact that it took them three hours to get back to me.
Me: @VZWSupport charging by outlet charger and phone is on while charging (should that second part matter though?)
Verizon: @danieljlee Yes charging the phone being powered off helps the battery to last longer. *SR
Keep the phone off while charging? On a phone whose alarm doesn’t work if the phone is off? Are you kidding me? I need to wake up to get to work in the morning.
Me: @VZWSupport That can’t be the only thing though, battery barely lasts me 12 hours with 1hr of web use. Also I charge ovrnight and need alarm
Verizon: @danieljlee Do you have task killer app running on your device? *SR
Me: @VZWSupport no I read that it was actually bad for battery life…
Verizon: @danieljlee The Task Killer closes out applications not being used. The Droid has upto 480 mins 220 standby time.
Courtsey of VerizonSucksAss.com
Yes, that is what a task killer does. I’m not illiterate. I can read its description in the app store, and I can read about it online. However, if you did some research, you’d find that Android handles multitasking quite well on its own and that actually killing apps when they’re not doing much in the background in the first place uses more battery life. Also, don’t just parrot me stock Droid X sales information. I wasn’t asking about standby time, either. Jesus.
Me: @VZWSupport Plz don’t tweet me DX stats I can find in the manual. Most forums agree task killers are useless. Can you suggest anything else
Verizon: @danieljlee I called Motorola advised average battery life is around 8 hours recommended Task Killer also to save on battery life.
First, did Motorola really recommend the task killer? I find that hard to believe – makes me think that the rep you spoke to doesn’t understand the Android OS. Second, average battery life is NOT 8 hours – you can find post after post on forums about people who are able to use their phones for a couple of days at a time with WAY more usage than I can even cram in a day.
Verizon, I’m not asking for replacement phone here. I just want an honest answer: either tell me that the battery life is less than what is advertised and let me move on (i.e. adjust my expectations so I don’t think something’s wrong with my phone), or really help me figure out if and what is actually wrong with the battery on the phone. The extended battery for the Droid X is only $50 – hell, if I know that my battery’s the problem, I’ll buy a new one tomorrow. I just want to know.
I’m going to continue the conversation with Verizon on Twitter to see how far I can get before I get too frustrated to reply any more. In the meantime, I’m giving my battery one more day before either taking it into the store to get a replacement battery and/or ordering the extended battery online.
P.S. Oh yeah. Also, no one has responded to my Facebook post (referenced above) on their page about my issues with the battery life. Great job, Verizon.
The camera is dead
I thought I’d go for more of a melodramatic post title today. Kind of like the headlines when people claimed Mark Zuckerberg said that the age of privacy is over (except he didn’t), or when Chris Anderson proclaimed a short while ago that the web is dead (except no one agreed with him).
Anyway, this is more of a prediction than a proclamation – and it’s actually more of a partial prediction than a whole prediction – but I think that in five years, the class of $200-300 point-and-shoot digital cameras will cease to exist. It was only five or six years ago when it seemed that the race among Sony, Nikon, Canon, and other manufacturers was heating up – and it seems like only yesterday that Nikon shamelessly retained Ashton Kutcher to promote its Coolpix line of cameras.
Now, as a disclaimer, I think there will always be a place in this world for higher-end cameras, just as there will always a market for a high-end class of other consumer goods like (luxury) cars, (designer) clothing, first class flights, etc. There will always be professional photographers using professional camera equipment for magazine photoshoots. There will always even be amateur photographers who use their expensive SLRs for personal enjoyment.
That aside, I think there is one obvious factor and one less obvious one behind this prediction:
1. The obvious reason: the rise of all-in-one mobile devices. I think it’s fair to say that we no longer just have smartphones that also double as a GPS device and camera. We now instead have mobile devices whose feature sets include the ability to make calls. There’s perhaps no more salient an example as the recent approval by Apple of a Google Voice app for the App Store. To my understanding, this essentially means that any mobile device with a WiFi connection and microphone can act as a phone – even if you don’t have a voice or data plan.
What an awful idea
Speaking of GPS – there is no better example of the course that I think digital cameras will follow than the GPS device. Once a standalone device that people paid hundreds of dollars for, GPS devices have been rendered obsolete as most mobile devices have become GPS-enabled and services like Google Maps have come to offer free GPS navigation. In what I think was a very misguided attempt at survival, Garmin even touted its own “Garmin phone” that, so far, has failed to meet expectations. My bet is that the GPS device as we know it will be extinct in the next couple of years, and that digital cameras will soon follow.
2. The less obvious reason: Facebook. Facebook Photos standardized from the very beginning the quality of photos that users could see and engage with on the site. Presumably the company did this to minimize the number of servers it had to purchase early in its life, but regardless of its original intentions, I think it has created widespread acceptance (or at the very least, tolerance) of a base quality of photos online. And as camera technology on mobile devices advances enough that photos taken on iPhones or Android phones more than meet this standard, standalone cameras will seem rather redundant – after all, what’s the point in buying a $300 camera if the photos taken on my phone are good enough for Facebook – or Picasa, or Flickr?
Actual photo taken by Droid X, courtesy of Engadget
Personally, I know I haven’t used my old Sony Cybershot except every once in a while. I’m sure I’ll be using it even less once I get a new phone in the next week. But who knows, maybe the average person uses a camera more than I think he or she is. I’d love to hear your opinions on your own camera situation and what you make of the reasons I cite above.
To book publishers and Hollywood
I have something to propose to publishers and film studios: let me “import” my collection of books and movies into my Kindle and Netflix accounts.
In a way, I’m asking them to let me do with my books and movies what Apple let me do with my music. Back in the day (when people actually bought CDs), you would import a CD into your iTunes account, providing you convenient access to your music on your computer and iPod. You only paid for a CD once – you didn’t have to purchase those songs again to listen to them through iTunes.
Why should’t I be able to do the same with my print books and DVD collection? Should I – and other consumers – even expect anything less, especially as media and content hosted in the cloud becomes the norm?
Maybe you could argue that books and movies aren’t consumed quite the same way as music is. For example, you might listen to the same song a hundred times over the course of a month. You’re less likely to do that with a book or movie, so it’s not as important to have immediate access to these media, and why bother letting people import them – right?
But why don’t we have that right regardless?
I have no idea how this would actually work logistically/operationally (provide proof of purchase??), or of any of the potential pitfalls (what’s to stop someone from borrowing my physical book or DVD collection to get free movies?) – but there’s got to be a way.
If any of you guys own a Kindle or have a Netflix account, is this something you’d like to see from these services?
Why Asians are good at math
It’s a pretty typical stereotype you see everywhere: Asians are good at math.
As an Asian-American myself, I’ve been subject to the stereotype on numerous occasions in my life. I think I lived up to the stereotype in high school. And I’m sure I failed miserably to do so in college (which, by the way, I’m totally okay with).
But this stereotype is more than just a stereotype: the claim is grounded in some data. In certain contexts, Asians outperform their Western peers in math and science.
To be honest, I have never really thought about why Asians might be better at math than their Western counterparts (as I write this, I’m actually surprised at myself for not ever having been curious about this).
Recently, however, I learned a part of the answer in Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point (my review) and Blink (which I didn’t enjoy as much as either of these other books).
It turns out that Asians excel in math because they are just better with numbers – literally.
Apparently, Asian languages are more conducive than English to learning basic math because of the difference in the languages’ numbering systems. The English number-naming system has some pretty arbitrary rules: for example, while we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen, we don’t say oneteen (eleven), twoteen (twelve), threeteen (thirteen), or fiveteen (fifteen). Similarly, we say forty and sixty, but we also say twenty (twoty?), thirty, and fifty.
On the other hand, Asian numbering systems are more straightforward and literal. Gladwell quotes Northwestern professor Karen Fuson, who gives the following example:
For fractions, we say three-fifths. The Chinese is literally ‘out of five parts, take three.’ That’s telling you conceptually what a fraction is. It’s differentiating the denominator and the numerator.
Come to think of it, this is the same in Korean: fractions are stated the same way as given in the example above, and what I’d call twenty, thirty, and forty in English are literally “two-ten,” “three-ten,” and “four-ten” in Korean.
This seemingly small difference matters a lot when young children are learning to count. Gladwell writes:
That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children. Four-year-old Chinese children can count, on average, to forty. American children at that age can count only to fifteen, and most don’t reach forty until they’re five. In other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.
This is huge. Some critics may argue that the difference in math skills between Asian and Western schoolchildren can be attributed to our school and education system. In fact, based on recent media coverage of the subject, it seems that many people adamantly believe this. But how can you blame only the school system if these differences emerge when the children are four or five – in the first year that they start school?
As Gladwell argues, you can also even see how the difference in numbering systems can affect the learning of basic math operations. For example, the fact that fifty in Korean is literally “five-ten” means that Korean children who are simply learning numbers are also already incorporating some basic level of multiplication in the process. In other words, Korean children are being exposed to multiplication as much as two or three years earlier than American children (assuming here that multiplication is taught in the third grade).
All of this means a lot for how we think about our education system and our need to “catch up” to Asian countries with respect to math and science skills. Ramping up our education system can might get us there 97% of the way, but there’s an inherent disadvantage posed by our language that we will need to be overcome some other way.
In the meantime, I’m definitely going to be teaching my children how to speak Korean.
If this is the state of local politics these days…
Then I fear for the future of our country:
Talking Points Memo has since posted an interview with Phil Davison, the local politician in the video above. My favorite line from the interview, of course, is: “I’m not very good with electronics, is there a YouTube? It was on some kind of electronic server.”
Anyway, HuffPo also reports that Davison has no regrets about his speech and would give it again, despite the fact that he ended up losing the nomination.
Thank God.
A hunter ______ a bear
I wanted to share an ingenious marketing campaign that I saw last week on YouTube. At this point, chances are that many of you have seen it, too.
I don’t want to spoil it – the best way to experience it is to try it yourself. Go ahead and take a couple of minutes to watch the video below, and follow the instructions:
I personally think this is one of the coolest and most interactive video ads I have ever seen (I think it’s as good as the Old Spice campaign I wrote about earlier this summer, albeit in a different way).
The ad is more than just novel and creative (you can try everything from “hug” to “dance,” including some more, er, creative verbs). I think it’s also significant as an example of how video advertising online can finally differentiate itself from traditional television commercials.
It’s been widely known that YouTube has lost Google a ton of money, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt confirmed last week that it’s still not profitable (although it’s reportedly close). Part of this is because of YouTube’s high operating expenses, and part of it is that YouTube has struggled to monetize its videos. It has tried using different ad formats (in-video, pre-rolls, etc.), and it has also pursued content deals, launching its popular music video service, Vevo, a year ago.
But maybe videos like this are the first in a new model of online video ads. Marketers no longer simply view advertising as an add-on to existing content. In the old days, for example, a SuperBowl ad might be shown on TV, then made available on YouTube. Now, however, marketers are using YouTube not only as a supplemental distribution channel for advertising, but also as an exclusive outlet for original and interactive content – content that users are responding to in a way not possible through television. Think about the (tens of?) millions of views racked up by the Old Spice videos. The video above alone has been viewed nearly 7 million times, and it’s an ad for whiteout of all things.
Marketers are already using engaging users in other social media, so why not online video? And by “engage,” I really mean two-way communication – in the same way users are writing on Facebook fan pages and talking to company reps on Twitter. There’s something to be said about creating video advertising that’s compelling enough that users engage with it. It’s certainly more effective – look at how Old Spice sales doubled following its viral videos. And it’s probably cheaper than producing and distributing a commercial on television, even if the company is paying something extra to YouTube for a customized video experience.
I hope we see more of these innovative video ads and that they continue to prove to be more successful. I have a hunch they will. And as long as video content also continues to move online – which I also think is inevitable – marketers will have no choice but to dedicate their resources toward platforms like YouTube, rendering traditional television obsolete.
