The inaugural Glue Conference was held this week & it was, as expected, fantastic.

When I saw Eric last November at Defrag, he told me he was starting another conference.  My one sentence response was ‘let me know how I can help’.  He promised he would.

Fast forward a few months and there I was at Glue as both a sponsor and panel moderator.  From a business perspective, it was time & money well spent, as I had the opportunity to meet & socialize with some truly amazing technologists & entrepreneurs.   The venue at the Hyatt is very well suited for conferences, and in the heart of downtown Denver, is easily accessible via taxi & light rail.

I’ll leave the deep analysis to others for now, but I do want to share with you the quote I left for Eric on the post-conference survey.  I think it speaks for itself:

"What an amazing group of people. Where else could I have had a one-on-one conversation with Bob Frankston while Mitch Kapor was standing less than 20 feet away, after having had drinks the evening before with a group that included an America’s Cup winner (hey T.A.!)."

Tags: gluecon, defrag

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I was having dinner last night with a friend, who recently became Director of Operations for his company. We were discussing how he is navigating the waters, and he relayed a few of his techniques for dealing with “push-back” – that behavioral characteristic displayed by business-persons when confronted with something or someone that is challenging the status quo (usually a status quo in which they are heavily invested). (more…)

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Seth Godin is riffing on customer service this morning & mentioned this from Joel, who runs Fog Creek Software. I became so engaged with what Joel is saying that I wanted to link to it here:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html

Good stuff, and I’m pleased to report that Freepository is already doing most of this (and from this point forward will do all of it)

Thanks, Joel (and Seth too…)

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Here’s a statistic that I find very interesting: 94% of freepository’s visitors hit us with a direct URI. That is, there’s no referral. They know about freepository already, so they type in the URI.

Freepository is a unique name; while it is possible some visitors simply typed it in randomly or accidently, well.. they probably meant to type it. This means that someone told them about Freepository, and they are checking it out.

Are these simply return visitors, who having found Freepository before now type the URI directly into the browser? Half true. Exactly 50% (a long term trend) of our visitors every day are new visitors. It is reasonable to conclude that these visitors have been told about Freepository, and are typing it into their browser directly as a result.

This is very interesting and represents a very highly pre-qualified visitor base. Referrals from other websites is certainly good; referrals from other people is outstanding.

Thanks.

Tags: freepository, cvs, svn, jbminn

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Last evening, DropSend announced that it was For Sale.   Ok, fair enough.  But then a few hours later, it blogged about already receiving several emails expressing interest, including "…one from Geoffrey Arrone (from Flock)".

This strikes me as a bad move.  If in fact there is interest being expressed via email, those persons communicating with DropSend probably had an expectation of confidentiality.  Since I didn’t see any of those messages (why would I have??), I can only speculate about how I would react in a similar situation.

I left a similar comment for Ryan Carson on his blog.  As I said there, I wish him well, but I suggested he reconsider the public discussion of what should be – at this point at least – confidential business discussions.

Ryan has since posted about getting picked up by TechCrunch, where Mike is also questioning the Flock disclosure.  It sure looks like Ryan is seeking publicity above substance here.   

This may backfire on Ryan.

Tags: Flock, dropsend, techcrunch, freepository

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By now everyone has heard that Dunn resigned and Hurd is in for a tough time, and may not survive as CEO. What isn’t widely known yet is the effect this will have on previously loyal customers.

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I read this in Seth Godin’s blog today:

“Letting your customers set your standards is a dangerous game, because the race to the bottom is pretty easy to win. Setting your own standards–and living up to them–is a better way to profit. Not to mention a better way to make your day worth all the effort you put into it.”

It struck me at once as both incredibly profound and somewhat common-sensical. And then I realized why it grabbed me today: at lunch today, a friend and I were discussing marketing, and we agreed that almost anyone could differentiate on cost. All you have to do is lower your price.

It is service & quality that people will pay for – and come back to purchase again and again and again. Today, there is a non-trivial percentage of Freepository visitors who visit the site an average of 14 times per day. This *isn’t* the cruise ship lunch crowd – which is different every day – it is the other crowd that Seth talks about.

And that’s a good thing.

Tags: freepository, marketing, quality, service

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There’s been a bit of a quiet period at Freepository over the past
couple weeks while we’ve focused on business development.

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As promised, we’ve analyzed the past three months worth of direct client connections (i.e. via Eclipse, TortoiseCVS, WinCVS, our secure command line client, etc.) and have confirmed the pattern that we believed was emerging.

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We’ve been collecting statisitics on site usage for a long time, and see some really interesting patterns.

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