Email Newsletters
I've been sending a monthly email for one of my apartment sites for almost a year now. Not only has the newsletter been a great way to keep subscribers familiar with my site, but they also forward the email on to their friends. There's a lot of talk about viral marketing and building buzz these days, and a simple email newsletter is just one way to help accomplish it. Of course newsletters aren't as sexy as a video that get forwarded on to millions of people, but it still helps. Plus, with about 3,000 subscribers in a highly targeted market, sponsoring the email is valuable to my advertisers.

Sending a newsletter on your own isn't practical for a small business without it's own dedicated mail server. There are a few reasons for this. For one, you don't want to have thousands of addresses in the BCC field. For another, your ISP and whoever else might be hosting your email account tend to limit the number of emails you can send. I've commonly seen the max number anywhere from 200 per day to about 2000 per day. If it weren't for this limit I'd consider buying some software for managing, tracking and sending newsletters. Those 3 features are critical to any newsletter you send.

Since the number of emails I can send is limited, my only option is to use an email sending service. There are tons of them out there, and they can help you send just about any kind of email (not just newsletters). Prices vary. Some charge a flat monthly fee tiered by the number of email addresses you store (regardless of how often you email them), some charge monthly fees tiered by the number of emails you send, and others charge a per email sent rate. Currently I'm using Constant Contact. I get a slight discount because I signed up through my web hosting company and that's why I went with them. They're not bad, but they're not great either. I also just started trying out Microsoft's ListBuilder email service for one of my other apartment search sites. It's lower cost, but much more barebones than Constant Contact. Other services out there include: Bronto, VerticalResponse, JangoMail and MailChimp. Soon I'll write a review of Constant Contact and then ListBuilder. If I try out any other services I'll review them as well.
- posted by Drew @ 1:18 PM  

 
Maps Maps Everywhere
Everyday new sites are cropping up that integrate mapping features from Google, Yahoo, MSN and others. I even integrating mapping features with my apartment sites a few months ago. This is all possible now that their available for free. Just a few years ago MapQuest offered me lesser functionality for about $4,000 per site. Something I wasn't going to spend for sites that I was working on in my free time. But now that it's free and relatively easy to add maps sites there are a few issues. Today I'll be discussing just one them.

In my last post I made mention of a site that appears to be my closest competitor. The problem with their site (and many others) is an over reliance on mapping. Yes when it comes to housing or any other real estate it's "location, location, location", but I don't believe a map is the best user interface for doing searches. Location and price my be most important to users, but there are a number of other search variables that are also important. I've seen interfaces using a map with the ability to filter on price and bedroom and square footage, but that still doesn't cover all of the options people want in their search. If a map had all of the necessary search options, chances are it's going to be overly complex and just plain messy. So that's all on the search side. For results, I really believe tables rule. People want to be able to make comparisons between listings in way that you just can't do on a map. A table of results provides the easiest way to compare several variables. Don't get me wrong though, maps still add a lot of value, I just think there's a tendency to rely on them too much. Take LaywerMaps.com for example. When I'm looking for a lawyer, location may be one aspect of my search, but I also want to make comparisons on firm size, fields they cover, experience and much more. Using a map as the main search interface just doesn't work. Now for sites where you're not concerned with comparing lots of variables and location is important, then go ahead and make the mapping the core of your site.
- posted by Drew @ 10:18 AM  

 
Start-Up Investment
I read about a relatively new apartment search site in the Washington Post Start-Up section yesterday. I'm not going to mention the name of the company, as I don't want to help them with their search engine rankings. I'll write more about my analysis of what they're doing in the next couple days, but today I'm writing about a tangent of what I read. The article states that this company secured some initial start-up capital and is looking to raise an additional $500k. This has been something that's been on my mind over the past several months. Should I be seeking some sort of start-up investment?

In the short term, it would be great. For one, I could stop investing all of my revenue back into the company and begin to pay myself. I could kick start my site in new regions by buying a bunch of advertising, and maybe get some professional creative help. I could schmooze clients. I could bring on more people to help shoulder more of the work. I'd probably even feel more important. Though, in the longer term, a bunch of extra funding would only make a miniscule difference.

Maybe I'm jaded because of what I saw while consulting a few well funded start-ups during the dot-com boom. That kind of huge money is of course much harder to come by, and now a business needs to actually have some kind of revenue model. But it still doesn't appear too difficult for a business with a weak model to bring in $500k - 1Mil in funding. The way I see it, if my expenses are fairly low, then why give up a huge chunk of ownership for little, if any, long-term gain? An apartment search site with free listings isn't going to make millions each year. So an investor would have to take huge piece of the ownership pie to make the ROI worth it. Plus I'd hate to divert my time and energy from growing the business organically to finding an investor.

Now if someone came to me and offered to make an investment, and had a specific plan on how that funding would increase the value of the company, I'd be willing to listen. If their investment made more money for both the investor and myself in the long-term, that would make sense.
- posted by Drew @ 3:58 PM  

 
Business Principals
One of the principals I founded my company on was to be as frugal as possible while not detracting from the service provided to customers or partners. Not only would this help me in keeping prices lower to differentiate from competitors, but it would also help to maximize profit. After releasing an update to the apartment sites earlier this week, I was alerted that users with Macs were experiencing problems. In the past I've done testing on Macs by going to my wife's place of business or using someone else's Mac. Now that I have some money available to spend, my first inclination was that I should head over to the Apple store right away and get a Mac Mini for $700. I mean, why go through all the hassle of having to find someone with a Mac every time I need to test and/or debug? Well, after some reflection I've decided that I need to stick to my principals. Having to go somewhere else to do a little debugging now and then, or having any other minor (and infrequent) inconvenience is worth not having to pay anything more than a hundred bucks. Plus, with that $700 I can get a decent amount of text ads, or even a terabyte back-up drive. I guess the moral is that the principals that define my business shouldn't just be a result of circumstance (like limiting spending when you don't have the money to spend), but should hold true throughout the lifecycle of the business.
- posted by Drew @ 3:08 PM  

 
Pricing Options Bad - Simple Good
I've found that my customers on the apartment sites want information regarding advertising purchase options to be clear, concise and simple. I can offer a myriad of options including purchasing a single month, monthly recurring to lump sum yearly and then they have the option to pay via credit card or to be invoiced. These are all standard options, but with various discounts that I can offer depending on the options chosen it just gets to be too complicated. I even have a form where you choose what you want and the pricing options you're interested in and it spits out the price and highlights any applicable discounts.

The feedback I've gotten is that it's too complicated. So my current belief is that even though I can offer a lot of flexibility with payments, it's better to offer no more than two options. In fact, I might be better served with having just one option. As I complete some new features that make further testing easier I'll report back what seems to work and what doesn't. For now though, my advice is to keep purchase options as simple as possible. You're likely to lose more customers due to pricing confusion than you might gain with offering flexibility and discounts.
- posted by Drew @ 12:21 PM  

 
Starting a Marketing Internship
I've been considering bringing on an intern lately. Balancing technical design and development, sales, marketing and customer services leaves less and less time for each. The pay would have to be either at a minimum level or nothing, depending on my legal and tax requirements. Can you even have someone work for free? I know there are unpaid internships abound, but I also know you can't get around minimum wage laws either. Maybe it's like firing someone. If you fire someone for a reason, it better be a good one that can stand up in court if necessary, but if you fire someone for no reason, then that's ok.

I think it could really help me out, and since work for marketing majors is tough to find, the experience would be tremendous for whoever gets the position. Giving a sophomore or junior marketing major the ability to design marketing strategies and influence decisions is something that I think would be valuable experience. And since I've got websites catering directly to the college market, getting the word out about the position should be extremely easy.
- posted by Drew @ 10:36 AM  

 
Finding a Lawyer for Your Startup
A little over a year ago I was faced with finding a lawyer to help get the business formed. Having grown up with a lawyer for a father (or perhaps I should say a father for a lawyer) it was ingrained in my mind that it's extremely important to get professional legal advice with just about anything you do. Spending a few hundred dollars now can save you thousands of dollars later, plus you'll save yourself a lot of frustration and anxiety. So the trouble was finding legal counsel in the Seattle area. My father wasn't going to cut it since he doesn't practice in Washington. His advice was to use Martindale-Hubbell's Lawyers.com. If it wasn't for his suggestion, I probably would never have used the site. Not because I didn't know about it, but because a site with that name seems to me like a source for cheesy ambulance chasing personal injury lawyers. Maybe it had something to do with billboards they used to run near Hobby airport in Houston. Using the site I narrowed down the list to about 5 firms in Seattle (here's a link to the small business category). I contacted each via email rather than phone in an effort to weed out firms that might be significantly behind the times. I got about three responses by the next day and never heard from the other two. After explaining my situation and the services I thought I needed I got quotes from all three. To form a single member LLC including any state and local registration fees I was quoted $2200, $1700 and $700. The larger quotes were from small-to-medium sized firms with about 5 or so lawyers. The $700 quote was from a single lawyer firm (she had an assistant). I had been advised by my father to expect the cost to be around $500 as the work generally requires filling out standard documents and can lead to more work for the lawyer down the road. So that left the single lawyer firm, which also might be an advantage because she might be more in-tune with the issues facing a small business. I called her office number and got the voicemail for her cell phone. To me that just seemed to short sited. When a business uses a cell phone as their main number it just doesn't seem right, especially for a lawyer. This brought me back to square one. I decided that restricting my search to Seattle meant I was getting only downtown firms, and I'd have to pay downtown prices. By expanding my search to the nearby suburbs I got much better results. Lower quotes and firms that dealt with internet related businesses. Therefore my advice is if you're in a major urban area look for a lawyer in the burbs, find someone with clients in your field and do you're best to ensure their reputable. Oh, and in case you're wondering I went with Zeno, Drake and Hively in Kirkland.
- posted by Drew @ 11:54 PM