Peter Keller

Back on the Horse - Another Asia Fastpack

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 09:41:36 -0600

Back on the Horse - Another Asia Fastpack

Today’s WOD Flight time: Consecutive double under...

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 00:39:12 -0500

Today’s WOD

Flight time:
Consecutive double under pyramid:
5-10-15-20-25-30-35-40-45-50-50-45-40-35-30-25-20-15-10-5

Review of the RPM Rope

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 15:34:02 -0500

Review of the RPM Rope:

Just wrote and video’d a review of the RPM Rope for FringeSport, my CrossFit equipment company.

7.23 WOD at Pillow Park 3x 100m sprint 5x 145# Atlas Stone...

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 23:04:15 -0500

7.23 WOD at Pillow Park
3x
100m sprint
5x 145# Atlas Stone Clean
400m run w/ 50# Sandbell
15:45

Sorry, Reena!

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 12:30:19 -0600

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

Converting Amex Points to Facebook Credits

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 10:00:05 -0600

AmericanExpress recently started allowing holders of their points-generating cards to convert points into Facebook ad credits. It’s not a bad deal for businesses that use an Amex business card.

To compare, here are a few items:

Maggiano’s gift card- $50, 5,000 points ($0.01 value per point)
Facebook ad credits- $50, 6,750 points ($0.0074 value per point)
Amex gift card- $50, 7,000 points ($0.071 value per point)
ipad2, 16g- $499, 94,400 points ($0.0053 value per point)

So unless you want to dine on mass-market food, the facebook credits are a pretty good deal.

To convert the points, login to Amex rewards and search for “facebook ad credits”. Amex will walk you through the rest.

Do note that a “cash back” card may be a better option than any of the above point-generating amex cards- many business credit cards will give you 1% or 1.5% cash back.

Best of Tim Ferriss' Blog for Entrepreneurship

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 14:57:41 -0600

I have collected below a few posts from Tim Ferriss’ blog (http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/) that are solid gold. I have removed some fluff ( […] ) and added some highlighting. My comments are in red.

Also note that while Tim does tend to focus on “muse”-type businesses (automated, relatively high profit but low revenue), many of his tactics can [should] be applied to other, larger businesses as well.

Enjoy!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/19lov3OExTInSEhKEAzO3xHzu-aHtSLz2eFPqLWs-uo4/edit

Wharton Biz School - How Niche Retailers are Thriving on Internet 2.0

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 16:18:00 -0500

How can an internet retailer compete in this world- where Amazon is curb-stomping all competitors with their combination of low prices, convenience, and logistics superiority? This article from Wharton offers some clues:

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2770

It’s a hugely important topic to internet retailers, as there is a growing gulf between the niche plays that are essentially mom-and-pop-shops, online, and the true players that are trying to grow national or international corporations based on their web retail strengths.

Here are my pull quotes as the most thought-provoking passages:

“Unfortunately, too many small brands don’t view themselves as a specialty,” Fader points out. “They think they can compete with the big guys.” As a result, the company spends too much on broad-based advertising and other attempts to drive scale. Ultimately, Fader says, they “get crushed…. If you admit that you are a small brand, go after the specialty angle and say, ‘People will buy us only occasionally’ — and you keep costs down and keep the message focused — then you can be okay.”

However, Lodish says [Quidsi’s] most important asset is its relationship with new parents, fostered through its own customer service staff, not a remote call center. “Their customers love them,” notes Lodish. “Their reputation with young mothers is better than anybody else by far. People talk about them and refer friends to diapers.com when they have new babies.”

new specialty retailers discover niches and create targeted organizations to meet those customer needs better than the large retailers

The differences between a company like Amazon and a small specialty player illustrate the disparities between a market-share model, designed to serve as many products to as many people as possible, and a customer-focused approach aimed at developing deep loyalty from shoppers

The new breed of Internet specialty retailer is reaching customers by building communities among customers, she adds. In traditional retail, the closest example of this kind of effort is at independent running stores where customers come together to form running clubs and train for races. “In the virtual world you can do that around any interest,” Kahn notes.

Beyond logistics and customer relationships, some of the new web entrepreneurs are focused on creating their own products. Bonobos, a men’s apparel e-tailer, designs, develops, sources and merchandises its own clothing brand. “So unlike Zappos or Quidsi, we are not about offering the deepest selection of brands on the market,” states Bonobos founder Andy Dunn, who started the company in 2007. “Rather, we want to curate brands, and go so far as to actually create and own the very best of those brands.” Dunn calls the strategy “vertical web retailing.”

Notes on Delivering Happiness- Tony Hsieh and Zappos

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 12:53:52 -0500

My highlighted notes from reading Delivering Happiness.
Never outsource your core competency

Pages 64-67 are huge.
64. “Table selection is the most important decision you can make”
65. “Help shape the stories people are telling about you”

p 82
Networking vs. building the number and depth of friendships

pps 118-119
“[N]ever outsource [your] core competency”

Note- $32M rev in 2002, which was 400% YOY growth

p 121
“great companies have greater purpose and bigger vision beyond just making money or being number 1 in a market”

p 123
dropship “easy money” no inventory risk, no cash-flow problems- “But we had plenty of customer service challenges”

p 128
“out-Amazon Amazon”

p 138
Culture book is/was completely unedited

pps 139-142
Culture book rules

p 143
“We view the lifetime value of a customer to be a moving target that can increase if we can create more and more positive emotional associations with our brand through every interaction that a person has with us”

pps 145
Call center info:
no upselling
5% of sales from phones
most phone calls do not result in sales

p 147
10 ways to instill customer service into your company

p 150
Employees must name a co-worker (right or wrong) to log into their computers

p 151
“Brand is just a lagging indicator of a company’s culture”

pps 151-154
More info on culture and branding

p 161
“Our philosophy at Zappos is to WOW with service and experience, not with anything that relates directly to monetary compensation”

p 163
“If you are not prepared to deal with constant change, then you probably are not a good fit for the company”

p 168
“Over time, we want everyone to develop his gut about business decisions”

p 170
Notes on quickly hiring many people, and developing a HR/hiring process from this

p 172
Sample interview questions

p 173
“[W]e’ll never be done and we’ll never ‘get it right.’… we’ll do our best to ‘get it right,’ and then do it again when we find things have changed”

“The only reason we are not swamped by our competition is because what we do is hard, and we do it better than anyone else.”

p 184
One of the most important ingredients separated “good” from “great” companies is a strong company culture- core values are a formalized definition of this

pp 184-190
Essay on Vendor relations. Emphasis on respect, friendship, and shared information

p 197
“Rather than focusing on individuals as assets, we instead focus on building as our asset a pipeline of people in every single department with varying levels of skills and experience, ranging from entry level all the way up through senior management and leadership positions. Our vision is for almost all of our hires to be entry level, but for the company to provide all the training and mentorship necessary so that any employee has the opportunity to become a senior leader within the company within five to seven years.”

Note on the merchandising program

p 203
“If you just focus on making sure that your product or service continually WOWs people, eventually the press will find out about it.”

p 208
Zappos Insights and Zappos Insights Live

p 218
“Amazon focuses on low prices, vast selection and convenience to make their customers happy, while Zappos does it through developing relationships, creating personal emotional connections, and delivering high-touch (‘WOW’) customer service.”

p 231
“people are very bad at predicting what will actually bring them sustained happiness”

p 234
“happiness doesn’t primarily from within but, rather, from between”

“higher purpose”

p 235
“most HR surveys show that once people’s basic needs are met, money is farther down the list of importance than intangibles such as the quality of the relationship with one’s manager and professional growth opportunities.”

p 236
Three types of happiness
Pleasure - high
Passion - in the zone
Higher purpose - being part of something bigger than yourself

Cicadas 2

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 02:43:06 -0500

Cicadas 2

Cicadas

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 02:23:02 -0500

Cicadas

A stealth shot of an Omega Speedmaster variant- worn by a Brit I...

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 01:07:05 -0500

A stealth shot of an Omega Speedmaster variant- worn by a Brit I saw at the IFC in Hong Kong.

Econsultancy- 25 reasons why I'll leave your website in 10 seconds

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 10:13:05 -0600

Econsultancy- 25 reasons why I'll leave your website in 10 seconds:

SEOMoz- 10 Ways to Get More SEO Clients

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 10:01:06 -0600

SEOMoz- 10 Ways to Get More SEO Clients:

This one’s for you, Wulfe!

Google buying Groupon?

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 10:14:17 -0600

My google reader has been blowing up since last night with the rumors of Google buying Groupon- and the valuations bandied about keep going up ($5.3B last I checked).

The topic is interesting to me because:

It’s another transaction in our space
Surprisingly, it’s Google, not Amazon (Amazon recently purchased Zappos, Woot!, and Quidsi)
Groupon is reportedly highly profitable- unlike the above Amazon aquisitions
The purchase price seems crazy high- even with Groupon’s profitability

Here’s the best short post/article I’ve read on the topic yet, from SEOBook.

A few key quotes from the above post- some that address my above points:

The rumor mill is going crazy. And it might be for 5 or 6 billion!

As a comparison, Yahoo! is worth about $21 billion, but that includes over $3 billion in cash AND equity investments in Yahoo! Japan + Alibaba that are likely worth close to $10 billion. In other words, Google might be offering to buy Groupon for 75% of the value of Yahoo! (excluding their cash on hands & foreign investments). $6 billion would be more than Google paid for DoubleClick and Youtube combined.

…

Groupon has tentacles deep into local businesses advertising budgets, and on a massive scale. Groupon have a large sales force that hand-holds local businesses into online advertising, and reduces risk by offering win-win deals.

Contrast this with Google, who have found it difficult to get small businesses to spend up large on Adwords. The reality is that search marketing is just too cryptic and time consuming for a lot of small business operations.

"Apple makes powerful, pretty devices for the prosperous. Full stop."

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 23:55:26 -0600

“Apple makes powerful, pretty devices for the prosperous. Full stop.”

- David Wolf, Silicon Hutong

WSJ- Bernanke on China, Translated

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 08:36:06 -0600

WSJ- Bernanke on China, Translated:

Fantastic “translation” of Bernanke’s Frankfurt speech- largely directed against China’s currency manipulation.

A sample:

“Second, the current system leads to uneven burdens of adjustment among countries, with those countries that allow substantial flexibility in their exchange rates bearing the greatest burden … ”

TRANSLATION: “The Chinese are making life miserable for countries like Brazil, South Korea, India, South Africa, Israel, and others that let their currencies move more freely, but are now at a competitive disadvantage because China won’t let its currency rise faster. All this flak should be direct at Beijing, not at Washington.”

Fees for the Kardashian Kard prepaid debit card

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 07:24:06 -0600

Not related to anything I normally post on, but interesting:

First there are the upfront costs. For a six-month card customers pay $59.95, or $99.95 for a 12-month card. (The median fee for similar, non-Kardashian-festooned products is $10.) After those six or 12 months, there is the $7.95 monthly fee to keep using it. Users pay a $1.50 fee to withdraw cash at an ATM and a $1 fee to check their balance. They pay $1.50 to speak with a customer service representative. If they lose their card, they have to pay $9.95 to replace it. If they want to cancel their card, they have to pay $6.

From Tap That Asset, Annie Lowery writing for Slate.

Also from Lowery:

Do not buy a complicated financial product hawked by a B-list celebrity with a sex tape.

Overstock.com sued by district attorneys

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 09:19:50 -0600

Overstock.com sued by district attorneys:

7 district attorneys in California are suing Overstock.com for misleading price comparisons on its site. They are seeking at minimum $15M in damages.

“Beginning no later than January 1, 2006, Overstock routinely and systematically made untrue and misleading comparative advertising claims about the prices of its products,” the civil complaint states. “Overstock used various misleading measures to inflate the comparative prices, and thus artificially increase the discounts it claimed to be offering consumers.”

One example cited in the complaint: Overstock advertised a patio set on its website for $449. Overstock said the next best price for the patio set was $999.99, but when the furniture was delivered, it had a Walmart price sticker on it showing it was selling for $247.

Overstock denies the allegations. I checked Overstock for one of our products- the EdgeStar Titanium Portable Ice Maker.

Overstock lists it at $167.99 + $1 shipping. They also state that Kegerator.com offers it for $194.65. Kegerator.com actually offers it at $148.75 shipped. Hmm.

I’m not sure that Overstock needs to be sued over something like this- caveat emptor and all- but something is fishy.

Eliot Spitzer- Obama's Asia Trip Reveals Global Decline in America's Influence

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 08:04:06 -0600

Eliot Spitzer- Obama's Asia Trip Reveals Global Decline in America's Influence:

Scary stuff- but Spitzer is an alarmist.

In the choice between China and the United States that was being made by many nations, even some of our most stalwart allies, such as Germany, were more than willing to rush into the arms of an ascendant China and align themselves against our declining power. On issues of trade and currency, which is where the battles of today are waged, nations were choosing the future, not the past.