The show’s writers and producers get extra bonus points from me for taking on the issue of healthcare, and having the stones to come right and say, “This is a business, and we need to make money.” They even couch the message in a scenario that most people should be able to appreciate from both sides. Very timely given all the discourse surrounding healthcare reform.

44 minutes, well worth it.

My good intentions were met with a lot of headshaking and a terse, “No, line’s full.” I apologized, and started to explain that I was just trying to help him out, and he repeated the same answer in the same cold tone. I took the cart off the end of the line, put it in the corral, and headed back to my car.

I didn’t even get to the car before I decided that, had that been one of my employees, I would have fired him on the spot.

From my perspective as the consumer, this gentleman couldn’t have done more to make me awful. He pointed a mistake I made, and blew off my explanation. I even apologized to him, and he still chastized my actions.

I walked away feeling like I had done wrong, like I had acted foolishly. No one likes making a mistake, but he only exacerbated my feelings by dismissing me again when presented with my explanation.

Having moved passed the experience, the business owner in me kicked into gear. I would be utterly mortified to know that one of my employees has left a customer feeling the way I did.

In this age of abundance, every consumer knows that they have a million options when it comes to just about anything. As a vendor, you simply cannot afford to give them excuses to look elsewhere. Forget being the stellar standout in your field, this is a minimum requirement simply to compete.

There is only one right answer for the employee in this situation: just say “thank you.” Wait for the customer to walk out of sight, pull the cart off the end, and go back to your job. I don’t care how much work they create for you, the customer has zero clue when it comes to the intricacies of shopping cart retrieval. And justifiably so: it’s not his job. I use the term “intricacies” here in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, but the same reality applies to almost any job.

The road to market failure surely begins where good (or at least neutral) consumer intentions meet employee apathy and negativity. If you can’t save the bad apple, cut it off.

In a Dec. 12 blog post, Widenius tries to rally open source MySQL supporters in an effort to seek assurances from Oracle that the project will, in fact, stay open source. He makes a good case for a future Oracle decision to limit or close off the open source elements:

Oracle [has] to lower prices all the time to compete with MySQL when companies start new projects. Some companies even migrate existing projects from Oracle to MySQL to save money. Of course Oracle has a lot more features, but MySQL can already do a lot of things for which Oracle is often used…So I just don’t buy it that Oracle will be a good home for MySQL. A weak MySQL is worth about one billion dollars per year to Oracle, maybe more. A strong MySQL could never generate enough income for Oracle that they would want to cannibalize their real cash cow.

Anyone who’s loosely familiar with open source software knows that the community can execute the almighty fork, just pick up the code and go. But Widenius believes the code is only a portion of the equation, and that the economy around MySQL is vastly more important. Richard Stallman penned a letter in conjunction with Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) and the Open Rights Group (ORG) that succinctly describes the issue:

MySQL is made available to the public in two parallel ways. Most users obtain it as free/libre software under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2; the code is released in this way gratis. MySQL is also available under a different, proprietary license for a fee.

This approach was able to provide (1) an attractive platform for developers looking to use FLOSS, and secured MySQL enormous mind share, particularly in supporting content rich web pages and other Internet applications, and (2) the ability for paying clientèle to combine and distribute MySQL in customizations that they do not want to make available to the public as free/libre software under the GPL. With excellent management and considerable trust within the user community, MySQL became the gold standard for web based FLOSS database applications.

Bolding my emphasis, which is the key here. Most MySQL users don’t need licenses, for two reasons. First, other OSS projects naturally play very nicely with MySQL’s matching open source license. Second, websites that use proprietary code in conjunction with MySQL are clear because nothing is actually distributed, users simply visit a site. My company Fwd:Vault is a perfect example.

The remaining clients, who write software that gets distributed (think boxed software in a store), must utilize MySQL’s second, fee-based proprietary license. This is where the money is, and is the true engine that has powered MySQL’s rise over the last 20 years.

As any business owner can tell you, replicating a strong consumer base and community climate is nearly impossible. “If it would be easy to take over MySQL by just forking it,” says Widenius, “Sun would never have bought MySQL and Oracle would have forked MySQL a long time ago instead of now trying to buy it as part of the SUN deal.”

Now this whole system get’s handed to Oracle, who has a directly competing product and feels major price pressure due to MySQL’s free offering. I agree with Widenius on the eventual outcome, but he doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on here. He sold MySQL AB to Sun, and they can do whatever they want with it. If Sun gets swallowed by Oracle, MySQL goes alogn with it. That’s how businesses work. He can argue all day that the Sun deal was predicated on their track record for positively supporting FLOSS projects, but his control over MySQL’s future was out the door the moment the Sun deal was closed.

I’m a huge OSS proponent, but I’m a capitalist first. If the EC doesn’t find the sale to be monopolistic — keep in mind the USDOJ already approved the deal — then I wish Oracle the best of luck with their new purchase.

That being said, capitalism favors the huge MySQL install base in the longer term. If Oracle removes MySQL “the open source database” from the OSS environment, they’re going to leave a massive hole in the market, a hole that cannot be filled with Oracle’s overpriced high-end database software. A new product will rise to fill the void. Maybe it will be a MySQL fork, maybe it will be something new, but it will happen. MySQL did it once, why can’t someone else do it again?

And when you acknowledge the likelihood of that potential outcome, it makes Widenius’ entire protest seem self-interested. He’s not necessarily concerned with the open source database community, but his position within it. I have no doubt that his intentions are at least in part altruistic — replacing MySQL would be a torturous process — but I’m sure he’d rather see his baby leading the pack than some neophyte.

In short, if he’s just trying to protect his turf, is his mindset really any different from Oracle?

For me, the entire issue is summarized in the introduction of his protest post, “I have spent the last 27 years creating and working on MySQL and I hope, together with my team of MySQL core developers, to work on it for many more years.”

If that was the case, you shouldn’t have sold it off in the first place.

While you’re right that you in essence ‘get what you pay for’ in this economic climate you’d be surprised how much lower vendors will go in order to keep a customer satisfied (which in turn could bring in more work…)

This is quite true, and I’m sure she wasn’t alone in her opinion, so here’s some additional insight. The problem isn’t the act of dropping prices, but the speed with which we as vendors come to that decision. Many vendors drop their prices at the first hint of customer disapproval. Clients know they can feign disappointment to try and get a better price (that’s what makes the video funny!), but if a vendor has a solid product at a reasonable price, they should ignore that impulse to cave to such requests.

Consistently dropping prices unnecessarily has a lot of long-term penalties. The customer who gets a discount once will ask again, further decreasing the bottom line on that client work. Those bits of discount add up really fast, yet the companies I’ve worked with rarely stopped to calculate how much they are actually losing in discounts. Only when the customer was obviously taking the business to the cleaners did they give it a harder look.

Plus there are more “fuzzy” net effects, like price perception. A product’s value is tied to the price that a customer actually pays, not what you “might have” charged them before you offered that on-the-spot discount. Decreasing the price decreases the value a customer places on the goods they receive. Luxury goods live and die by this rule. Why are Diesel jeans, Oakley sunglasses, and Coach purses considered premiums in their respective markets? An expert could talk about product quality, but the vast majority of people couldn’t identify these tangible advantages. The pricetag is the number one conveyor of luxury status.

I’m not saying “never give discounts,” just that companies should be more selective in doling them out. Most of the time, clients already see the value of goods and services, and *will* pay for it, they simply want to squeeze as much value as they can out of it. Standing up to these scare tactics, as illustrated in the video, can save companies tons of trouble down the line.

To that extent, I urge all you IT pros to ignore everything else in the article (wink) and follow my advice, which is to wait.

Find more details in the article.

I couldn’t find an index of all of them, and I wanted to watch them all in chronological order, so here you go. If there are videos for the presentations I’m missing (here’s the full presentation schedule), please let me know so I can link them.

Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose

Introducing Atlas: A Visual Development Tool for creating Web Applications by Francisco Tolmasky

Start-up Metrics that Matter by Dave McClure

Branding and Marketing Essentials for Your Web App by Alex Hunter

Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk

The Future of HTML5 by Bruce Lawson

You-Centric: The Future of Browsing by Aza Raskin

The Future of the Cloud by Simon Wardley

However through the tribulations of one of my testers, I found out that Comcast goes the extra mile for users of their comcast.net webmail. Unlike most setups, where spam is simply redirected to a spam-specific folder, Comcast will delete the message outright, without issuing any kind of notice to the sender or recipient.

Truly, above and beyond (belief).

Of all the lousy IT practices I’ve seen over the years, this one takes the cake. No spam filter is perfect, so it’s guaranteed that they are dropping legitimate emails (case-and-point: I’m losing Fwd:Vault account emails). Plus it appears they default to a “highly suspicious” mode with newer systems, as fwdvault.com, my IP address, and my DNS records are completely fresh and unblemished.

Finally, the sheer size of their operation means that getting a hold of anyone to actually fix the problem when it happens to you is virtually zero. I’d go so far as to say that they can get away with this nonsense precisely because they are a large ISP. As a former “your company IT guy,” I can imagine getting at least an earful, and at worst a pink slip, if I were caught doing this.

Despite my astonishment, I couldn’t deny reality. Through my logs I watched Fwd:Vault’s mail server find their systems, connect, and deliver the message and get a 250 response code (i.e. all good). Then over in my comcast.net inbox I’d get exactly nada, ditto for the spam folder. Since the actual delivery had no technical issue, I had zero clue as to the cause of the problem. I wasn’t on any blacklists, the IP was static, and my DNS records were in good order, including a reverse DNS record with my hosting service.

Fortunately, it seems that someone in the trenches at Comcast is fighting the good fight, as I took two long-shot attempts today and it seems one of them paid off. Here’s what I did, hopefully it works for you.

1. Use the feedback form at comcastsupport.com
I tried to retrace my steps on how I found this one, but their sites are so damn convoluted I kept going in circles. However I know I started from inside the web mail interface, aka their “SmartZone”.

(See kids? That’s what we call irony. Can you say, “irony?”)

Whatever, here’s the link. You don’t need to log in to use the form:

http://www.comcastsupport.com/forms/net/sccfeedback.asp

I selected Spam or Junk Mail in the checkboxes and wrote something to the effect of:

I am not receiving mail from example.com in my Comcast email. I own and operate the mail server for this domain and have confirmed through my logs that the message is delivered properly (response code 250) to Comcast MX servers.

My tests delivered via the server mx.comcast.net (IP 00.00.00.00). It’s been over 24 hours and I have not received a bounce, nor is anything showing up in my inbox or spam folder.

As I have nothing else to go on, I am looking for help from your end.

I did not receive any reply, however I also took another step…

2. Use their RBL Removal Form
This should only apply if your mail server has actually been blocked by Comcast, in which case you would likely see an error code of 550 in your logs. If your server picks up the full response from Comcast, you may also get additional helpful information as outlined in their list of custom mail delivery error codes.

None of this applied to me, as the connection and delivery went off without a hitch. Still, I figured it was worth a shot; a bureaucracy this big is bound to have systems running into one another.

I sent in a request to be removed from their RBL by way of this form:

http://www.comcastsupport.com/Forms/NET/blockedprovider.asp

Most of the information will depend on your setup, however I did check the boxes for Implemented technology to filter or prevent transmission of spam and Changed the rDNS records to reflect a consistent and non-dynamic setting just in case. I included text similar to what I outlined earlier in the Issue Description box.

I saw emails coming through less than 30 minutes after sending this message. However, I sent the feedback first, followed by a brief online chat with their support, who directed me to the RBL form. All told it was at least an hour between my first step and the delivered message.

Update: I received this message back in response to my RBL request…

Thank you for contacting Comcast Customer Security Assurance. We have received and reviewed your RBL removal request.

Below each IP address you submitted in your request, we have included the result of our research. Please do not reply to this message.

[IP address(es)]

We have received your request for removal from our inbound blocklist. After investigating the issue, we have found that the IP you provided for removal is currently not on our blocklist.

We need the IP address currently blocked to further investigate this issue. The IP address is a number separated by decimals and is located in an error code starting with “550″ in the returned email from Comcast. You can learn more about how to identify a blocked IP by visiting our Frequently Asked Question page at:
http://www.comcast.net/help/faq/index.jsp?faq=SecurityMail_Policy18667

Please verify the IP(s) and resubmit your request to http://www.comcastsupport.com/rbl

So it looks like the RBL request didn’t do anything. Unless it did, and some numb-nut at Comcast was covering for their idiotic policies.

My gut tells me that I caught a particularly helpful support person manning the feedback desk who was able to punch the few keys it took to rectify the problem. If that’s the case, thanks for the help, and I hope the rest of you get to run into him/her as well. I sent the message around 2:00 pm on a Monday.

You can find more helpful information, including a link to the Blacklist Removal Request Form, on the Comcast Postmaster Site.

Best advice I can give: encourage your users to switch to Gmail.

However, in most cases the decision to fire a customer stems from one or both of the following basic scenarios:

1. The client is a calculable drain on resources (i.e. the client is a net negative income)
2. The client is a complete pain in the a**

My personal feeling is that both situations grant justifiable cause to at least consider dropping the customer. In the case of A, something is seriously screwed up with the terms of the relationship. You initially charged too little or promised too much, or the client somehow wrangled you into that position after the fact. Whatever the case, the relationship has to be balanced or eliminated.

Scenario B is self explanatory. In addition to generating a massive amount of stress and anxiety around the office, these cases often lead to Scenario A.

In short, I would try to repair a relationship in Scenario A, but I would get rid of a B client as fast as humanly possible.

Today a friend presented me with Scenario C, which is a landmine for businesses.

The web developer for my friend’s company dropped them as a client recently. In the Dear Jon email on the matter, they stated that the relationship was “no longer engaging for less than $XX per month.”

*Smack* No! Bad web developer!

Let’s put aside the possibility that it was cover speech for the aforementioned Scenarios A and B and assume that the profit margin was the primary reason at work here. Unless there’s another con in the relationship to point to — perhaps toeing the line on B — this is never ever a good reason to drop a client.

Businesses grow by building on past success, and you have your clients to thank for the opportunity to create that success. Dropping smaller clients for bigger fish is a helluva way to say “thank you” to clients who helped get you started and/or grow.

No matter how awesome the work that my friend’s company received, that developer will only get bad reviews from here on out. Referrals, both good and bad, are the most powerful advertising you can’t buy. I’m on several business networks, and participants are often asking for web help. This developer has actually come up in a few cases. Guess what the response will be the next time someone asks about my experience with them?

And consider the payoff to the developer. There are always bigger fish, so this practice only helps engender a reputation as an “ambulance chaser” of sorts. It’s a clear indicator that money is your first, last, and only motivation, and no one likes working with a company that’s purely concerned with the bottom line.

You generate bad blood, and only get the opportunity to make more money in return (Which you had to begin with! Expand, hire more people, work harder!). There’s no way you come out looking like anything other than a money-grabber.

Firing a customer is fine, but you better make sure you have your head on straight before doing so.

He’s got a good regular column called Dave Says, answering questions about personal finance and business (with a focus on entrepreneurs and SOHO’s). The following came from the latest post, and I thought it stood out as a gem for anyone who’s their own sales force:

Dear Dave,
What’s the key to becoming a great salesman?
Brent

Dear Brent,
I can sum it up in one word – serving. And don’t think for a second that serving means being subservient. I’m talking about being proactive, and making an effort to ensure that customers and potential customers alike are served well. Serving means you’re excited about what you have to offer, and you believe you’ve got a great product at a great price. It means you’re determined your customer is going to have a great experience, and if you happen to hit a bump in the road you will take care of it in a way that will make them forget it ever happened.

Serving is an attitude. You have to provide goods or services in a way that makes your customers willing to trade their time or money – things that are very precious to them – to interact with you and your business. You can pressure people if you want, but that’s going to lead to a dull and frustrating life of one-shot deals. But if you serve people well, you’ll not only have clients for life but they’ll also send all of their friends your way.

If you help enough people, Brent, and make that your first order of business, you’ll never have to worry about money. That’s a different attitude, isn’t it? But I’ve got news for you – it works!
- Dave

There’s a feed for all the Dave Says articles.

Their mindset reminded me of my experience when I started freelancing computer support back when I was a teenager, and made me appreciate the experience that I’m carrying with me to Fwd:Vault. Here’s what I suggested to my fellow bootstrappers…

Compare rates of similar vendors
First you need a baseline. Gleaning pricing info varies from extremely easy to incredibly difficult depending on the market. For example, I can find hosting prices very quickly, but getting numbers from a web designer takes more effort. However there are basic tactics that apply across the board.

Since you’re starting your own business, it’s assumed that you’re walking in the door with a fair amount of experience, which should include knowledge of other players. Starting with previous employers, find out what others in your field charge for services similar to your new business. Most businesses make their pricing info public, so start with their website. Google searches can often turn up prices if the vendor is “hiding” their pricing (this is almost as bad as hiding phone numbers, never do it).

If that doesn’t work, try calling their office and asking for pricing from the receptionist. Most will give you some clue as to pricing, but some will immediately route you to a sales rep, account manager, etc. The key is to avoid as many phone handoffs as possible. These people won’t give you anything without extracting as much information about your project as possible — which doesn’t exist because you’re just looking for pricing, duh.

If they insist on routing to a sales rep, and the company is a direct competitor, hang up, because the jig is up. If however you’re talking with a similar company in a different market, tell them who are (make it clear that you’re not a competitor) and what you’re doing. Most people are happy will help out a colleague.

You’re worth more than you think
Once you have a picture of the overall price landscape, you have to determine where you fall in it. However a lot of freelancers and entrepreneurs make the mistake of undervaluing their own ability or product quality, myself included. I charged about $35/hr for one of my very first jobs, and standard fare was well above twice that for similar work. I was afraid that my age and limited experience would work against me, so I deeply undercut the competition.

It’s perfectly natural to cower a bit when putting yourself up for comparison against large standing players. But you (should) get into business for yourself for at least two reasons: (a) you’re good at it, and (b) you’ll make better money than working for someone else. Don’t sell yourself short on either one.

Never compete for the bargain basement
Even if a consumer is new to your market, most people have a decent nose for a good deal. A “deal” is not just about price, but what you get for that price. A higher quality product can fetch a higher price, and some people will take the better product because it’s better, in spite of the price increase.

We make this analysis ourselves all the time, but the natural feel to it goes out the window when you’re pricing your own product. Combine that with the poor self-valuation I described earlier, and you end up with pricing way under the mark.

I bring this up because there’s a real danger here. Businesses that deep-discount goods or services tend to attract a certain kind of customer: the kind only interested in saving a buck. These customers will never ever appreciate the quality of your product, or they’ll ignore it while attempting to squeeze you for a better deal. You’ll end up spending most of your time price haggling or figuring out ways to cut costs to improve your margins. Over time, the cost-cutting invariably eats away at quality, which is death knell of a small business.

It’s okay to undercut the competition, but don’t go so far that customers are focused solely on price.

Price is perception
Sometimes we pick the more expensive of equivalent products precisely because its more expensive. Why in the world would anyone buy a pair of Diesel brand jeans? They get worn like any other pair of jeans, and hold up as well. They even look the same, barring subtle stylistic differences. But they cost twice as much as a pair of Levi’s or Wranglers you pick up in a department store. You can make the same argument with sunglasses (Oakley), electronics (Sony), even food (Ben and Jerry’s), and there are hundreds of other examples.

Price helps determine customer perception to some degree in every industry, and you shouldn’t ignore its power. I worked for a non-profit for a number of years, and at one point we were discussing a price increase. In a hotly contested debate, one board member suggested that a price increase would be the equivalent of pricing a Pinto (i.e. our product) as a Cadillac. A board member compared our flagship program to one of the worst cars in history! How good of a program does that sound to you? Would you spend money on it? I retorted, saying that our program was in fact the equivalent of a Cadillac, but was priced it as if it was a Pinto. How enticing does the program sound now? Assume I wasn’t lying (I wasn’t; the program was bang-up awesome).

Fake it until it’s real
I’ve given you every reason to price your product “aggressively” — don’t shoot through the stratosphere, but don’t below sea level either. But none of this means a damn thing if you don’t have confidence in your ability to deliver at that price point. To that I say, “Suck it up!” Entrepreneurship and freelancing are not easy, especially at the beginning. But if you want to make a real honest go of it, you have to approach every new client, contract, and sale as if you were a 20-year vet. The only way to fetch professional prices is to do professional work, and the only way to do professional work is to just get started.

To establish the kind of street cred you’ll need, sometimes it really means you simply have to feign confidence. When I was just starting out, I came across some very aberrant behavior while fixing a person’s computer. I had zero clue as to what the problem was or how to fix it, but I knew that I could figure it out with enough time. When the person asked me what I thought, I waved the issue off as no big deal, that I see this kind of thing all the time. A few days of work and a lot of research later, the problem was fixed, and I had another skill in my belt.

This is a fine line; you want to look like you know what you’re doing, but don’t want to overstretch yourself. If it’s way over your head or way outside your area of expertise, come right out and say so. You look good by knowing your limits too.

Add 10%
So now you’ve got price guidelines and fake confidence, more than enough to come up with a good starting figure. Unfortunately, if history is any indicator, you’ll most likely end up underpricing yourself anyway.

So, once you’ve determined your final number, add 10% to it. If you don’t cringe uncontrollably, you’re set. If you do cringe, recalculate at 9%. Repeat the whole process until cringing ceases. If you reach your original number, add 5% and walk away, you’re thinking too much.