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Business Tools

Launching Soon: Wishery, a Lean Startup

by Cooper Marcus on March 18, 2011

For the past few months I’ve been hard at work on Wishery, my latest startup. Wishery will offer tools that transform customer support into marketing, for the 2MM+ SMBs (Small and Medium Businesses) on Google Apps. Our first tool will help companies that do email marketing more efficiently handle the replies to their campaign emails. Future tools will expand the core concept of providing powerful support tools right within the Gmail interface to other typical support tasks. Plus, we’ve got lots more planned that I can’t tell you about yet. Intrigued? Sign-up to be notified of our launch and future releases at www.Wishery.com.

While we’ve got some great product plans, I’m even more excited about our distribution strategies. Again, I can’t reveal any details yet, but we’ve already got commitments to put our tools in front of 1MM+ SMBs – at zero cost to us! Distribution is the biggest challenge facing startups today – in recent years it has become much easier and cheaper to build a great new software product, but getting that product in front of potential customers remains exceptionally difficult and/or expensive. Wishery will succeed because we’ve identified ways to out-distribute and out-learn our competitors.

Wishery is a Lean Startup – for us, this means we are currently focused on getting a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) out the door as soon as possible, so we can accelerate learning from our customers. In true lean startup fashion, I spend much of my time researching the needs of my customers and refining my product plans to solve their most painful problems. Here are a few more ways Wishery is lean:

  • Wishery’s core product concept has already pivoted twice! Early customer interviews demonstrated that while the first two ideas for Wishery were interesting to customers, they didn’t solve a sufficiently painful problem to become a viable business.
  • We’ve been testing and refining our products with paper prototypes from nearly day 1 – this has meant less wasted effort building, and more time spent learning.
  • We are using many many parts of the Lean Startup Bundle – a most incredible gift to the startup community from hustler-extraordinaire Noah Kagan – doing so is Lean because the bundle was incredibly cheap, and it includes many tools we were planning on paying full price for – the savings means we can afford more iterations!

Right now we need two main things – the second of which would really help with the first:

  • Front-end coding – we’ve got some incredible back-end coders doing amazing work, but our product doesn’t look as good as it should. If you know CSS/XHTML/jQuery, or know someone who does, please get in touch – I’m cooper@wishery.com or call 872.222.9474
  • Funding – we’ve starting speaking to investors about how Wishery can win in the SMB customer support / marketing space. Are you an investor, or do you know one? Please get in touch!

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How I Buy Online – Minimizing Time and Maximizing Savings

by Cooper Marcus on November 13, 2010

I’ve refined my online shopping habits over the years, and I now think I have a darn good system. Here is what I use:

  1. I almost always start at Amazon.com – they typically have excellent prices and a wide selection. Their Marketplace feature, where individuals can list new and used versions of the item that Amazon sells alongside Amazon’s own listing, often let’s me find a less expensive version of the item I’m buying. Note, however, that Amazon’s outstanding “Free Shipping on Orders Over $25″ typically does not apply to the Marketplace listings, so be sure to compare the item+$0 shipping for the Amazon version with the item+$? shipping for the Marketplace version.
  2. Next I do a quick search of Google Products to see if someone else has it for less. Given that Amazon is so reliably excellent, I’ll only take my business elsewhere if I can save significantly.
  3. If Amazon has a decent price (including shipping), my process is over – I complete my purchase (there is no need to use the steps below for an Amazon purchase, as Amazon never offers coupons or rebates – they just give you the best price upfront). If I’m buying from another site, I’ve got a couple extra steps…
  4. First I visit RetailMeNot.com to see if there is a money-saving coupon code available – this is by far the best coupon code site, as it clearly shows you how reliable each coupon is before you try it on the retailer’s site. If you find a coupon that works well for you, be sure to click the green checkmark under “Did This Coupon Work For You?” so subsequent RetailMeNot.com users know to try that code!
  5. Finally, if I can’t find a coupon, I’ll check Ebates.com – this site offers rebates at an incredible variety of online stores. To use it, simply find the offer on Ebates you’d like to use, then click through to the retailer’s site, then complete your purchase. Within a few days, Ebates will tell you that you’ve got a rebate headed your way! Note that you have to establish an account with Ebates before you can earn rebates – this process is very quick and painless.

That’s it! I’ve found this technique to give me the ideal combination of minimizing time spent shopping and maximizing my savings. I used to spend way more time shopping many many sites, using multiple price-comparison tools, searching all over for coupon codes, etc. Now I use the sites above for quick shopping and great prices.

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CrashPlan Makes Backups Easy and Free – Want Help Getting Started?

by Cooper Marcus on February 13, 2010

Backing up your computer(s) is one of your most basic responsibilities – it should rank right up there with food, shelter, and companionship as a necessity of human existence. Without backups, you could lose everything – all your digital photos, all your documents, potentially all your emails, all your music, etc. Even if you do backup, if you don’t do it right, you can still loose everything – a friend of my mother’s lost the only copy of her nearly finished dissertation (6 years of work!) when her computer and backup drive were stolen.

Despite the risks, many computer users don’t backup right – mostly because it used to be difficult, or they didn’t think anything bad would happen to them. First you have to get over the second reason – something bad WILL happen to you – eventually. And now, thanks to CrashPlan, the first reason is no longer valid.

CrashPlan is a combination of backup software and an online service that makes it very easy to do the right sort of backups. I’ve tried many different backup systems and services ove rthe years – CrashPlan is, by far, the best. It works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it is simply awesome.

Amazingly, the basic version of CrashPlan, which does most of what you need it to do, is free! With it you can quickly set-up automatic, in-the-background backups (meaning you don’t have to do anything, or even see anything, to backup) to multiple backup destinations, including local hard drives, your other computers, and even your friends computers. That’s right – CrashPlan will securely backup your files to the extra hard drive space on your friend’s computers (if they permit you) – which means that even if your computer AND local backup drive are stolen or destroyed, you’ll still have a copy of all your digital goods. If you choose to, you can pay CrashPlan their extremely reasonable rates to backup to their servers and get additional features like continuous backups (instead of just once per day).

I have a free license for CrashPlan+ to give away ($60 value) – the first person to ask for it in the comments will get it! I’m also offering a backup setup service – if you are convinced you need backups, but don’t want to set it up yourself, I’ll consult with you, draft your backup plan, and implement it using CrashPlan, for a flat rate of $99. This covers installing and setting-up CrashPlan on all your families’ computers, teaching you how it works (if you want to know), and proving ongoing support in the unlikely event that you need it. If you want to backup to CrashPlan’s servers you’ll need to buy service from them (as low as $5/month for ALL your families’ computers) but I’ll do all the set-up for you, and there are no other charges. Email or call if you are interested.

UPDATE: I’ve got a second CrashPlan+ license to give away – post to the comments if you’d like it!

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Starting Your Own Food Business

by Cooper Marcus on February 5, 2010

Years ago my friend Gordon and I started Califa Foods. Our original intention was to commercialize his family’s recipe for caponata, an eggplant based sauce/relish. Along the way, we learned a lot, but never did produce the caponata. Recently I saw some folks on Hacker News asking for information about starting a packaged food business – that motivated me to write up the following summary of some things I learned:

  • Production happens in factories, typically fairly small scale, that often produce similar (or identical!) products for many brands.
  • You can easily get started by “private labeling” a manufacturer’s existing formulation – for example, they already have 12 kinds of pasta sauce in their “catalog” – you choose three, maybe pick a custom jar (if you want to get fancy), get labels printed, and the manufacturer will put it together for you – then you need to market and sell the product. Talk to Mad Will’s Foods to get started.
  • Selling into grocery stores is possible, but can take a lot of leg work. Big chain stores are very tough to penetrate, but local chains and one-off stores are much easier.
  • When selling to grocery stores, they typically want you to have a “range” of products (more than one type of pasta sauce) – you should have an odd number (three flavors of sauce is good, five might be better, but two or four is not recommended).
  • Selling direct to consumer via special events (put up a booth at a street fair, jazz festival, etc) is the route my partner and I chose – we made higher margins, and got our brand established (over 1mil “impressions”!), then sold the company to someone that was going to shift to the higher-volume, lower-margin sales to grocery stores. This type of selling is a lot of work, but you can get some valuable product feedback.
  • On the other hand, when selling packaged foods, customers (at least in the grocery setting) can’t taste your product first, so they make their decisions based on price, appearance, and copy (the words on your packaging). Getting these right is tricky – we used a combination of rapid feedback from the customers at special events, and digital label printing (to eliminate costs of printing plates when changing label copy) to iterate and find the optimal mix.
  • You can also sell direct via new and not-so-new online markets like Amazon and Foodoro – my company sold a few jars now and then through our own website.
  • Developing your own recipe is tricky – expect to pay a contract manufacturer to do this for you (they have the skills) – you might just have to commit to a minimum purchase, or you might have to actually pay them for development AND commit to minimum purchase. Once developed, the formula is fairly transferable – you can take it to a different manufacturer, either to get a better price, or to produce elsewhere to minimize shipping costs (which can be a LOT on product in glass jars).
  • Organic is a big draw – it raises costs a bit, but can raise your price a bit more, leading to higher margins.
  • The above is drawn from my experience with food that is cooked then jarred. Other types of food and preparations (like baked, canned, dried, etc) may be similar.
  • The main industry event, which you must attend (at least as a registrant, to learn the business, if not as an exhibitor, to sell your product) is the Fancy Food Show, which is held in both NYC and San Francisco every year.

Let me know if the comments if you have questions not answered, or if your facts/opinions are different than mine.

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Facebook Shows WAY More Ad Clicks than Google Analytics?

by Cooper Marcus on February 3, 2010

This is a bit of a rant, and a request to the great internet for answers – if you have no interest in, or knowledge of, Facebook Advertising and/or Google Analytics, you can move on.

OK, anyone left? Probably not, but I’ll press on.

In a nutshell, Facebook says my ads are getting way more clicks than my website reports seeing (via Google Analytics). In a perfect world, the FB Ad clicks and Google Analytics visitors should be nearly the same. In my world, they are different by around 85%! In other words, Facebook says that 10 people have clicked on my ad, and they charge me for those 10 clicks, but my website has seen only one or two visitors!

For more details, and to offer any insights as to why this is happening, please visit http://forum.developers.facebook.com/viewtopic.php?id=49767

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming…

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Inexpensive Office Space for Entrepreneurs and Small Teams in San Francisco

January 25, 2010

Having a permanent, out-of-home place to work has made me WAY more productive – and it can help you too! I’ve got a great desk in the office of a non-profit on the corner of 16th and Mission in San Francisco, just 4 blocks from my house. Here are some options if you are looking [...]

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