Jeremy Goodrich's Blog

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.

A lot of businesses here in Maldives have an odd assortment of products...the grocery stores here are pretty close to the ones back home in California, in that regard. Next to the eggs, you'll find batteries. Some odd household goods as well as perhaps some funky electronic devices, toys...maybe a party favor or three.

Last night for my wife's birthday, I had to take my older son to a friend's birthday party. Since we're new in town (less than two months) and his friend's family is from Denmark, I was hoping my wife and I could meet a few new people, since most of the folks we know are from her family here or friends of the family.

Seriously. I know my ego is entirely too large....and yes, an ego does serve a sociological and psychological utility. However you know the saying, "everything in moderation" ya? Too much water? It kills. Too much ego? You can't see past the shine of your own brilliance to see the even bigger shine of what's out there, waiting for those who seize the opportunity.

With that in mind, here's a checklist:
If somebody offers feedback, thank them.
If somebody points out a flaw, take it seriously and put it on the roadmap...not at the top, just somewhere.

Buried in our news archive is a reference to a technology blog about start ups called Crenk. These guys did us the favor of reviewing FunAdvice, giving us a link, etc, etc back when we had next to zero traffic. And I do mean, next to zero.

So I thought it'd be fun to point them out here for a few reasons.

1) They're cool guys (nice, helpful and sincere).

Reading a fluffy article with no meaty statistics on xconomy today reminded me of something - even though I've had arguably the worst cold of the last decade in my life (or perhaps two decades, I can't ever recall being this sick nor taking so many prescriptions at once)...I need to do a better job of giving back and paying it forward to make sure that *I* am not guilty of that which I accuse so many others.