Jeremy Goodrich's Blog

It's been over seven years since my wife and I first bought the domain name...and, the last site we had there was an eyesore. This one isn't perfect, nor is it finished...but, I'm probably most proud of this project out of all the various ones we have had together.

I'm living in Maldives now, of course...if yo want to visit sometime, try travelmaldives. :)

I think this should perhaps be rather titled, "great expectations" for mine are very big. Of course, I'm not realistically expecting a sea change as we're working through the product requirements and mocks for our latest re-hash. Nearly seven years into it and we're still not 100% sure that the product is what it needs to be...but, the new version will bring us closest to what we imagined nearly three years ago the first time we set about redefining what we were trying to do and enable.

Does your product serve a neeed?
Yep.

Does it enable others to achieve their goals?
Yes.

First let me say that I love Seth Godin. If you haven't read his blog do so, as it's amazing, wonderful and makes me think daily. It makes me want to do better.

Next...the point of this writing. I aim to write more this year...and first, I wanted to say something that Seth inspired me to write down so I can remember it later. During 1995, I got internet at college...I didn't have broadband at home until 1999, via ADSL.

At some point, I plan on doing a video. At Copenhagen, many less developed countries are bitching about the US, my home country. I've met the government officials many times, they all seem like they mean well and universally intelligent, well spoken and everything you wouldn't typically expect from a politician.

However, as a consultant, I've always advocated a singular approach to doing business, since moving to a less developed country, I've also noticed that this approach can easily be applied to government and international relations.

Over the past few months I've been on the computer only a bit more than before...but, the ergonomics of my situation have changed dramatically (no, we didn't import the $2,500 office chairs to Maldives...that's a big loss, while we're here, and I miss it daily).

In tandem, we had our worst business disaster...ever, in August, for one of our businesses (November was the new date for shutting down one business to focus on the one that is now finally in recovery mode from the crash).

Funny thing, on our site, we have the highest number of ads (and the most ads above the fold) of any site in our category. It's true. We monitor these things very closely. So what does that tell the first time visitor?
1) We're a business.
2) We make money from advertising and we'd like you to help.
3) Expect more ads, if you continue to use our site in the future.

Ya, i know...I need to stretch more. I was reminded of this when the pain started about a week ago...so, I've been typing less and am looking into various options for computer driven dictation / speech recognition.

Funny referral of the week: "who is Jeremy Goodrich?"...well, clearly, there are many people with that first and last name. I'm the one who does "marketing stuff" as, near as I've ever been able to tell, none of the other guys who share my name in the states do that line of work. If you know me from Oregon, California, New York, or Costa Rica, feel free to get in touch.

If your sales pitch says "building this one block at a time..." yet, that self same message is included in a spam email, I'm going to both ignore you AND actively avoid you. Bam! You just lost a customer, for life.

One of those things that...nags at you. If you don't have a goal, how do you know when you won? Better yet: if you don't have a set number you're trying to reach, when do you decide enough is enough?

In business, it's all too easy to just say, "we want to grow...". However it's far more productive to say, "in the next six months, our traffic will bet at 10 million visitors / month, which represents a 200% increase). Now that is something you can sink your teeth into. Given the goal, you can start to make some decisions:
1) how do you get there?

My father in law lent me a book called "the road less traveled", which was a best selling psychology, self help kind of book from...well seemingly a while ago, judging by the yellowed, faded condition of the pages. However the book is fascinating. One of the first things I read prompted me to revisit my thinking on a few things...and, I realized: we've been pretty ambigious on any number of things.

For example consider this list:
1) Photo sharing, tagging, rating, syndicating, photo widgets, slide shows, varied permissions, comments, alerts, relatedness, popularity.