Business Link - I might be about to change my view

As many of you will know, I've been pretty down on my experiences with Business Link. Well, this may be about to be consigned to history.

As part of our acceptance on the EMDA High Growth programme, we had a business review which prompted Julian and I to consider some aspects of how we're running Esendex.

It was suggested we speak to Business Link as the gateway to a host of services and, in truth a little grudglingly, we did.

One meeting on and we're wiser to some relevant grants and services and action is being taken to help us.

I understand there's been a big shake up of Business Link in the East Midlands and if these recent experiences are anything to go by it seems to have done something approaching the trick.

Will keep you posted but if it is as it now appears, maybe the government has provide the help needed for us to trade our way out of this recession.

The Internet is a cess-pool

Running the web site for Beeston Cycling Club has been a real eye-opener as to the crap that stands in the way of legitimate use of the Internet.

We run the site with a Wordpress blog at it's heart. Allowing our members to post and comment on rides, events and anything that takes their fancy, sadly it was thigh diameter last night, is key part of what makes our club different.

Problem is the couple of us that administer the site have to deal with pages and pages of spam comments.

Link building detritus that I'm amazed if it serves any purpose other than to keep several thousand Internet Cafe users the world over meagrely employed.

I guess this is what it was like during the Victorian era in Britain. Rich people able to pay others to mask them from the abject poverty and open sewers running in the streets. Anyone trying to work their way up, beset on all sides by scum.

Ain't progress brilliant.

A view on the economy

A healthy stats obsession is no bad thing when running a business. Measurement, metrics, feedback, refine is all part of the rhythm of improvement.

The great thing about our stats is that they also give us a view on the economy in each of our markets. Our focus on business messaging and the size of our customer base means we see, first-hand, how busy an economy is.

Our traffic reflects the pace of business. The number of grocery deliveries, new furniture purchases, broadband installations, car sales and a whole host of other business transactions.

So, what's the news?

Business is looking good. I'm no economist but based on what I'm seeing, maybe this is a V shaped recession afterall.

Nott Tuesday - Where did all the geeks go?

Last night we had the fourth Nott Tuesday event and from the feedback it was a success. However I've been left with the feeling that something wasn't quite right.

The start-up pitch competition was a new format for the evening and we had some great judges and great companies pitching but the audience wasn't the usual crowd.

As @alanodea said to me, he'd told Tadhg (a Nott Tuesday first timer) that this wasn't what it was usually like.

My vision for Nott Tuesday was that geeks and business could co-exist. Sharing ideas, discussing issues and seeing what opportunities materialise was what I hoped people would be doing.

The dirth of geeks at last night's event has made me wonder whether this is a) acheivable or even b) something that people want.

I feel Nott Tuesday is at a crossroads. I desperately don't want it to become just another business networking event for entrepreneurs to sniff each other's arses. I've no interest in committing my time to something like that.

So was last night just an aberration? Am I reading to much into it? Where do we take this thing?

Pointless Auto Follow from Singapore Democrats

I travelled through Changi airport in Singapore at the weekend and naturally tweeted about it. Next thing I know I get an email from twitter telling me that the Singapore Democrats were following me.

What a load of mistargetted nonsense. I'm not a fan of auto-follows at the best of times but this has got to be up there as one of the worst.

Measure, Measure, Measure

The focus of Web 2.0 this year was the power of less. While there was definitely a feeling that nothing really new was happening in the industry, a couple of talks I attended focusing on optimisation of your business were probably the highlights of the event for me.

Eric Ries (blog: Startup Lessons Learned) was almost evangelical in his talk: The Lean Startup.

He espoused the virtues of measurement, feedback loops and iterative, agile development. All music to my ears and things we're doing and continue to improve on at Esendex.

What really got me thinking though was the notion of A/B testing of application features and measure how that translates into improving your businesses KPIs (key performance indicators).

To date I had considered A/B testing to be the domain of web sites, try different graphics, messages, calls to action, processes, etc and measure the goal completion percentages.

We're deep into building the new version of our new application at Esendex and we're making important decisions about the functionality and features we're going to make available.

The problem is those decisions are pretty much based on opinion rather than any objective measure. While we think they're a good idea, it remains to be seen whether our customers find them useful.

There is a certain amount of inspiration required and going with our gut instinct. Innovation generally involves a step change after all. As Henry Ford famously said:

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

But, if we take the leap and put the feature out there, wouldn't it be good to know if it gave the desired results. We need to be able to measure a) whether people use it and b) whether not it had the desired effect.

Outcomes in the web analytics world are generally fairly well defined. A site visitor bought something, registered on the site or, in our case, signed up for a trial.

The desired outcome of introducing a feature could be more grey. Outcomes are very likely not to contribute directly to one of our KPIs. The path to KPI improvement will probably be circuitous and require a degree of assumption but at each step we should be testing the hypothesis.

Often we'll be introducing a feature because we believe that it will improve on of our KPIs but that could just be by offering something other services don't, encouraging people to sign up with us rather than someone else.

In this case we will need to measure an indirect outcome until such time as we enough of a population to then measure more directly against our KPIs.

Very much more art than science.

I'm very much working this through at the moment. We're adding feature measurement into the beta product we're launching in May and I'm looking forward to using this process to improve the product in the direction our customers want.

I'll report back.

All Hail the Uber-Geek

One of the highlights of Web 2.0 was seeing Steve Souders presentation: Even Faster Web Sites.

His book High Performance Web Sites, is a well thumbed tome at Esendex and YSlow is required add-on to Firefox on our developer's machines.

Steve is an uber-geek. He has a passion for web-site performance like few others. He tirelessly investigates, tests, hypothesises, tests those hypotheses, and, importantly reports back to the rest of us.

His passion, and most importantly, the fact that he shares his results with all of us is something we should all be thankful for.

As developers we get adulation for building faster, more responsive and thus more usable web sites.

As web site users, we get a rich, responsive experience that does what we want quickly.

So all hail uber-geek and thank you to you all.