I've been thinking a lot lately on various investments that would be able to handle the pending recession. There are the obvious answers (gold, basic materials, etc.), but I'm trying to round things out a bit.

It seems to me that when money is tight, people certainly cut back their spending, but the need for entertainment and pleasantry still exists. Cheap entertainment and thrills seem like a decent bet. Movies used to fall into this category I'd think, but that's just not the case anymore. I wonder if Netflix/blockbuster and other rental outlets would fit? Video games actually work out to be cheaper than most forms of entertainment, but they have such a high barrier to entry. Gamestop might be an answer to that, being that they sell a great deal of pre-owned (cheaper) games.

My sister pointed out makeup companies. That might sound a little funny, but truthfully if a $10 thing of lip gloss makes someone feel better, then it might match up perfectly. Never under estimate the feel good powers of vanity. That would suggest who, Proctor & Gamble?

Costco, BJ's, Walmart, Target, Dollar Tree, Big Lots -- big box stores and discount chains are a likely candidate. I started wondering about home depot. Normally, I'd say probably not, but given that much of this is caused by housing, maybe. People aren't going to be able to sell like they used to and will probably be planning on staying around a little longer. There might be a decent amount of home improvement going on, it's just whether or not that amount of home improvement is greater than the home improvement that was taking place during the housing boom. Probably not, but might be worth keeping an eye on.

Vacations are likely to be cut back on as well, but that doesn't mean families still won't try to go places and it doesn't mean that business will stop sending folks to different cities. Cheap destinations, discount travel outlets, discount airlines and discount hotel chains might be worth looking into (I think I'll pass on Spirit, though ;). When Kat and I were visiting family up in Ohio, we went to an indoor water park. I remember it as being a bit more pricey than I would have suspected, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were cheaper alternatives. It wasn't a water park like oh-my-god-a-water-park!, but more of an indoor pool with a bunch of neat slides attached to a hotel/destination type of place.

I've already been researching and following along with the alternative fuels world. I think given our economic situation, national politics and the general pulse of things, alternative energy will become even bigger in all this. A big part of our economic situation is oil. China isn't going to slow down their growth anytime soon, so oil demands aren't going to go down anytime soon. High oil creates higher inflation. The best way for us to reduce this added inflation may very well be alternative energy sources (combined with some clever Fed moves, of course). If the next president of the United States is a Democrat or one of the few Republicans pushing for massive energy reform, this sector will blow up.

Am I missing anything? Is my head in the right place or am I off base? I wasn't quite "investing age" during the last real recession we had, so I'm kinda basing this all off of logic. ;)

It's funny. As technologists, we're supposed to be privacy nuts. That's part of our stereotype, our schtick. We know just how vulnerable our personal data is and it scares the bejesus out of us.

But our actions certainly don't back that up. At least, not mine. I use the latest websites in my daily routine, I blog, I use twitter, flickr and just about everything else publicly. I stopped creating accounts under aliases and prefer to speak openly as "Alex Rudloff" most every where online. My reasons are fairly straight forward (anonymity brings out the worst in people), but yet there's a certain element of creepiness associated to things like facebook's beacon. I don't blog about specifics when it comes to business or work encounters or what I've been searching for on Google or buying on Amazon. Not only is it often in poor taste, in this day of profiling, I guess it's just the notion that there are certain history books best bought with cash, ya know? Privacy has become this strange, mixed up concept. We're really sensitive in some ways, but completely not in others.

I started thinking recently about the amount of data I've given about my life and my habits. I think the tides started to turn with Google making larger and larger headway into our lives. GMail was the specific catalyst, but only because its the most obvious privacy related thing. Long before GMail, Google could track our every move on the web via search and AdSense widgets on what seems like a majority of sites.

We expect things on the web to be free. At the same time, we know that very little in the world is actually free, it's just monetarily free. A web company's goal is to create something that is so valuable to you that you are willing to overlook certain questionable things, like scanning emails for relevant ads (initially seen as super creepy). I checked out GMail though, and decided that I really liked it. The ads became less important. In fact, they almost became kind of neat. Gavin and I will bounce company ideas off each other via e-mail sometimes, and on more than one occasional, Google has displayed an advertisement for a company doing the same thing that we didn't know existed. Lazy man's research.

Ultimately, I've traded an element of my privacy in exchange for a service that I find great worth in. It's not a free service, I'm just not paying for it with my wallet. My privacy is the currency.

Facebook has increasingly shown an unwillingness to put user concerns first in their thinking. They'll release something incredibly invasive and then apologize when their community freaks out. We all know how that works, the whole "it's better to apologize than ask permission" thing. All Zuck has to do is smile pretty, apologize, and scale the feature back a tiny little bit and people calm down and move on. It happened with news feed, it's happening with beacon -- but those are just the two things people noticed. What else is facebook doing with our data? Should we care, or is facebook worth the cost?

Beacon had me so freaked out that I walked through what would happen if I simply removed my account (my natural, gut reaction). The fact is, I'd lose contact with a lot of people instantly. There's no easy way for me to take my data out and apply it somewhere else. There is no friend export and there isn't anywhere suitable for me to go. I'm paying the currency because I find worth in facebook the same way I find worth in my cable company. I want the cable, I just don't want it from them. Unfortunately, I have little choice (for now).

How many people who signed up for Mint.com, a site where you add all of your financial accounts in exchange for advice on how/where to save money, are still finding value in it? Would anyone feel comfortable letting others (say, a social community) see their search terms if it meant a better search experience? Or do we just trust google with that information?

I guess the question is, at what point does something cost too much when it comes to privacy? Who are we comfortable paying with privacy, and what level of trust defines that?

I'm not sure what my answers are yet, but I'm curious to hear other folks' thoughts.

This blog post is worth a quick read. Hat tip to Gavin for finding it.

I love talking about customer service. It's one thing to call out bad customer service, but it's just as important to help bring focus to good customer service. This story certainly fits the bill.

Man, now that's personal business.

I just read Gavin's post on using tootsie rolls to bribe upset customers. Completely ignoring the humor behind Gavin at an Amscot, that has to be the most brilliantly laid plan I've ever heard. Follow that up with Marc Andreessen's reposting of a woot.com customer service letter, and well.. I guess I'm just in the mood to wax on the subject some.

Humor is a double edged sword. Too many people think that they are funny who aren't, and when they try to mix in their cheesy jokes in a presentation or an email, the whole thing can fall apart. In the case of customer service, I'd suspect thats especially true. Fortunately for woot.com, they totally pull it off. They know their audience, they know the demographic and they write to it. Simply reading the letter makes me excited to see what the next woot off is, and I don't even know the context in which it was written.

I'm probably not likely to find my self in an amscot (a check cashing type place) anytime soon, but it is an interesting case study. The jest of it is, for those who didn't see the post, is that whenever a customer is made to wait or is otherwised bothered, they slide them a free tootsie roll. I'd love to see the data for before and after implementing that. We Americans love our candy, and it's just enough of a gesture to give us pause. It might cost them ten cents a customer, but how much does it end up saving them? Hell.. marketing wise, here I am writing about it on the internet.

In the case of Emurse, we do our best to hand reply to everything that comes our way. At first, I was super snappy in getting back to folks. 4am and they'd have a response in 30 seconds. When that happens, there is a huge chance that they'll upgrade to a premium membership. There's most certainly a direct correlation. Unfortunately, as we've grown, it becomes much harder to get back to folks as quickly as I'd like. All the sudden, things like standard replies for certain issues and FAQ type answers seem logical. We haven't made the move to that yet, but it may sadly be inevitable. I can't keep spending my weekends on gmail, ya know? The question then is whether or not such a change would affect conversions. Would they be higher, would they be lower? I don't know. If they're lower, would it justify hiring someone to do nothing but respond to emails and blog posts? Maybe.

There's some sort of old fashioned attraction that I think most people share. Something that responds positively to a high level of service. It's a simple acknowledgment that you, as a customer, are an actual person living an actual life. The anonymity of business, especially online, makes transactions all too often boring and stale.

Chris Heuer gave a presentation at blogOrlando where he talked about business becoming personal again. In context, it was specifically about real life social networks and how we're all more tied. Individuals have been impowered through social media kind of stuff. I wonder though, if that mindset, that personal feeling towards business, will gravitate to other aspects of the market? I'd love to see less cost cutting on customer service, and a more human voice out of companies instead.

Really thrilled to see Brian pull off his vision over at ComicMix. It's gorgeous and really well implemented. If your a comic fan, go get used to this site. They'll be making a lot of noise in the future.

Been awhile since I posted the going on's of Emurse. Growth rate is really solid and is compounding (meaning, our growth % stays in our target range even as we add more and more users). Raw traffic, as defined by returning visitors and new visitors (unique), is exploding. Raw traffic this month is about 2000% higher than March, to give you an idea. On one hand, I want to say it's surprising, but I think that's only because I remember how this all started -- just a simple utility to help Gavin, myself and our friends.

We've been getting some blog press lately, which is great. Lockergnome, a favorite of Gavin and I's, posted a really glowing review. Always cool to wake up and find a site you enjoy talking about you!

We have some new features in the works, and some features that were postponed are now once again on the short list. Expect some exciting things over the next weeks/months.

A couple posts ago, I reiterated the cliche that ideas are a dime a dozen. There's more to that statement than simply "there are a lot of ideas," which is true, of course. There is also the fact that whatever idea you've had, there is a huge chance that someone else has had similar thoughts already. Ideas, themselves, are rarely 100% unique (hence the importance of implementation, execution, survival and luck.)

That's probably something to do with how we all arrive at our creative conclusions. We see different factors in play across whatever industry we're a part of and we start connecting the dots with other things that we already know. Certain things online really are kind of formulaic anyhow. Search, video, content, dating, social networking, music, classifieds -- these are all features that define an idea as "sexy" (which is largely influenced by previous success more so than interest level, I'd imagine) If some new technology comes along that makes it easier and cheaper to produce any combination of those winnable ideas, you can expect a flurry of activity in that space. The chance of a million twitter clones intensifies (okay, okay... poor example).

Part of being an entrepreneur is the emotional capacity to withstand the defeat of seeing "your" idea being developed by someone else. At least, I tell myself that, because it seems to keep happening to us ;) It seems to be a pretty relateable concept though, as almost everyone with an entrepreneurial spirit has some sort of story about the one that got away. The folks with the home runs are often the ones who swung the bat the most (BTW, Cliches are cliche for a reason. Because they kick ass.) So what's the best way to counteract it?

My thought is that you have to be able to move fast. You need the resources to take action right away. The key resource being talent. There doesn't seem to be much time available these days for learning curves. In our latest case (which I won't go into detail over, doesn't seem cool to the team that pulled it off), there was a ton of ramp up time and the fact that we have pretty active day jobs. A bad combination. We could have outsourced everything, but.. What's the learning curve like on Hindi? I say that in jest, but it's not hard to guess what the pitfalls of outsourcing may have been.

The good news is that we added a new skill set to our tool belt. The world's a better place because someone pulled the idea off. It's comfortable to know that our head is still in the right place (well, Gavin's at least. I wasn't the most passionate about it). There are other directions we can take the prototype in anyhow, and well, Emurse is kicking serious ass lately regardless ;) All in all, it ain't no thing.

If you're working on an idea that isn't first to market, and you get the wind knocked out of you by whoever is, don't let it slow you down. Analyze the situation, decide if it makes sense to compete, and if not, move to the next idea. After all, they're a dime a dozen, right? ;)

While I was away, John Rife posted an excellent assessment/announcement over at his blog FindingJohn. I've been friends with John for about a year now. He has a lot of passion for both Orlando and for technology, and a ton of experience when it comes to investing. We've had a number of conversations over the last couple of months sizing up the local tech scene and trying to determine our collective needs. It's great to see him moving in this direction, as I think it will help our community a great deal.

Why More Local Venture Funds are a Good Thing

As most of you probably know, Gavin and I have so far chosen to self fund Emurse.com and our other web products (hoping for a new yet-to-be-announced-product to launch soon, possibly barcamp?) The #1 reason for doing so is, well, because we can, but a close second is the lack of available options locally. We do not intend to leave Central Florida. In fact, I moved back to Central Florida from DC largely because of our growing company. The idea of packing our bags and heading west feels like we'd be selling out. We don't particularly have a problem with the west coast, but we don't particularly love it either. Orlando, we love.

Many of the issues entrepreneurs have with outside investment (besides the obvious equity exchange) revolve around losing control, losing corporate identity and risking their culture. When there are a plethora of options available, these risks are minimized by the presence of choice. If you don't like the investors, don't work with them -- there are others to choose from.

To give you an idea of what goes into choosing an investor.. I can't speak for everyone, but in our case, it's not so much the money that would be important as much as the connections the money might carry. Being on the east coast, someone with west coast ties would be appealing. We're in the HR space, so someone with strong local ties would be nice (easier to pilot beta products with someone right down the street). Then there are other questions, like what are the other companies in the investment groups portfolio? Are there in house partnership opportunities? How does the web industry view the investment group? Are they well received, controversial, or flat out hated? This might all come across as being picky, but investment is more than just money, it's an added business partner.

No one investment group will appeal to everyone, and thats where the necessity for multiple firms comes into play. Off the top of my head, Dan Rua and Inflexion comes to mind. There is also the option of the UCF incubator, but from what I've been able to gather, it wouldn't necessarily address our particular needs. The EDC can also help match up investors with investments, but I'm not sure their capacity. All in all, the Central Florida region desperately needs choice. We're far from establishing our own version of Sandhill Road.

Why Orlando?

I get asked pretty often why we chose to base ourselves out of Orlando. In most folks eyes, it's the tourism capitol of the world and not much more. What is sadly overlooked is the rapidly growing $10 billion a year technology industry that resides here in Metro Orlando. The fact that the metro area has 7 airports gives us easy access to other markets when we need to be there. Florida has an extremely friendly business tax system (Tax Foundation named us 5th in the nation), and no state income tax. UCF, UF and USF are all within a hundred mile radius of Orlando. UF is the 3rd largest school in the country, UCF is the 6th largest in the country, and USF is the ninth. All in all there are more than 25 colleges and universities in metro Orlando, and more than 50 technical schools. There's plenty of talent here, and it's cheap talent, because our cost of living is so low. In the last couple of years, more than a few leading business magazines have echoed the same sentiments -- Orlando is a great place to be an entrepreneur and a great place to live.

We have a great community locally that's finally starting to come together. Ryan's done amazing things with Florida Creatives, and Gregg appears to be organizing the barcamp to end all barcamps. Josh's blogOrlando format has not only taken root here, but all over the eastern seaboard. There's a ton of money here in Central Florida, and more choice in the venture arena can help get financing into the hands of people who need it. The success of our area's new companies will help create even more mentors and knowledge locally, and that will help create even more success.

Orlando's monstrous growth rate, local wealth, ample qualified talent, great weather, low taxes and creative spirit make it an amazing place to live and work. All that's left for this town is for the startup scene to start connecting the dots.

Around the Web:

• Summer Jobs - Summer job search tips and advice. It's that time of year.
• Personal Branding Blog
  
• How to Start a Business
• Cool Workspaces

We had another record setting month over at Emurse.com. Traffic was up something fierce, largely from various SEO improvements (all of the new traffic was organic, no paid links/ads/whatever)

I really think it was the result of ongoing work throughout the first quarter. April was big, but if you zoom out and measure from say, February, its been astounding. We're looking at 200% growth easy. Combine these improvements with the new look we launched a couple weeks back (mike is the man), and we get the month of April.

As far as accomplishing the objectives we laid out at the start of the year, we changed gears a little bit in late February. We started assembling the pieces to the "new" emurse project and realized that a complete I.A. overhaul was in order. Our focus then became the new look and feel, and it has really paid off in spades. Our conversions are up, we're all buzzing with excitement, and really, we just look much more like we ought to now. Sometimes it helps to stay flexible and responsive I guess ;)

We're focused on getting back to some of these shelved things now, though we've decided to break apart some of the components and bolt a few of the features on independently. This lets us easily test out the concept (much like we're doing with contact manager on network). It's a lot easier to get a solid idea of how something will play out once you can measure, tweak and change based on the responses. It's kind of like having a beta, but a bit more effective in that they are completely usable features on their own. (less about bug testing).

We'll probably contact our beta list about participating in a limited trial first though, so stay tuned. Also, drop me a line if you would like to be considered.

Recent Emurse Blog Posts:

• Phone Interview Tips
• New Resume Design
  

General

Traffic increases continue to impress us. March 2007 was the highest traffic month in our history, eclipsing our initial launch numbers when we were all over the web. March also set the bar for revenue in all categories.

Development

Some of the things we thought would be priorities this quarter have been delayed until next. We're getting better and better at understanding our metrics, and really think we can improve a few things before releasing all the new features. Changing our internal design (signed in users) helped improve things greatly, we're expecting even more success with the next couple of changes.

Currently Around the Web

• Sean Lavelle tries his hand at building up his online persona, starting with Emurse. Word on the street is that we are now Nadine's #1 search result after an initial rocky start. I'm positive Sean will have great success right away though!
  

Congrats to the fine folks over at SimplyHired with what appears to be a successful launch of their new product. Basically, it's a set of tools to allow blogs to create their own job board. Those postings then get factored into the SimplyHired search results (right?). Revenue gets split 50/50.

I'm not exactly sure what the benefit of ditching your already existing job board would be, but then again, I haven't played with the product yet. Getting factored into the search results would probably bring a windfall of traffic to a small niche site. If you're looking for exposure, the 50% split is probably worth it.

Mike Arrington mentions that each job board will be its own separate bucket of information. He chimes in with his personal thoughts on this near the end of the TechCrunch post:

Instead, I'd like to see a single job board for tech bloggers, one that we can all sell into, and share the revenues pro-rata. There's no reason why TechCrunch, VentureBeat, GigaOm, Guy Kawasaki and the others should all have their data in separate silos, aggregated only at the SimplyHired or Edgeio level along with other less interesting listings from all over the planet. None of these announced products do this.

And he's right. The thing is, I know of 3 companies (at least 1 of them funded) working on the exact same thing as SimplyHired's Job-a-Matic. There is also JobThread, JobCoin, JobTarget, and I think even Jobvertise offers something similar. They all lack the SimplyHired branding and the cool kids in the web2.0 circles aren't necessarily using them -- but they also all take way less than 50%.

As Jason Calacanis might say, the web is a hit driven market. If either Edgeio or SimplyHired moves in this direction with any success, expect a dozen other "me too" products. They'll all claim to be the bestest place in the world for you to store your data, and chances are there will be little sharing. There's the potential for all this to create further fragmentation and a world of mess when trying to distinguish what blog uses what product.

Hmm... if only there were a single place on the internet to store your resume that supports both hResume and HR-XML... ;)

Ryan Carson over at DropSend has been chronicling his attempts to sell his company. I admire his transparency, as an entrepreneur it's fun to read along at home. His name dropping accounts of failed acquisitions though may be breaking some sort of unspoken rule.

A commenter on TechCrunch mentioned how it should be fair game, since most companies are just interested in getting details on competition rather than making a serious acquisition offer. The cynic in me would like to agree, but I still think it may be best to turn the other cheek.

We've had both at Emurse, the serious and the not so serious. Hell, we've had a company bring in a team of engineers with notebooks to hear us describe how we do certain things. I guess we just figured if they're going to rip us off, they'll do it no matter what. You just have to be smarter and faster in the places where you can. If you're innovating and people are copying, we figure that means we're in the drivers seat.

But are faux pas and failed deals worth burning bridges with inappropriate name dropping? At least in our case, absolutely not. Everyone we've talked to has led to interesting and beneficial relationships. Even visiting the company with the note taking engineers, we found a cultural environment we could relate to and a host of intelligent thinkers.

As an entrepreneur, I'm grateful for Carson's posts. Then again, I'm not someone looking to talk to him about a possible acquisition. Actually... maybe we should... I wonder how much traffic his blog gets ;)

Wow

June 30, 2005 I have an e-mail thread between Gavin and myself where we outline exactly what Emurse would become. The idea was that the job hunt, especially for younger folks, centers largely around the resume. They're a royal pain in the butt to create, hard to maintain and difficult to keep track of. We set out to create a ridiculously easy method for accomplishing these tasks. Our stated mission is to "Improve your job hunt," putting technology to work on the traditional aspects and not trying to replace them.

We launched initially just as a private thing between us and a few friends. Soon after we added an invite system, and eventually we opened it up to the public. The first time we publicly mentioned the project was June 22, 2006, right here on this blog.

On July 11th, a user/friend of ours sent a link to Brian over at SolutionWatch.com. From there, it was all she wrote. Lifehacker, Digg, Delicious, C|Net, USA Today, PostBubble and a host of others ran blog posts regarding our site and our user count soared. We went from hundreds of initial users, to tens of thousands over the next couple of days.

User Feedback

Overall, the feedback has been incredibly positive. We've had countless testimonials and compliments sent in via our feedback link. We've grown the feature set by listening and adapting our service to meet user suggestions. We've user tested just about every aspect of the site, and have scored extremely high marks. (Side note: people still miss the drop down menu on sections. If anyone has any suggestions here, we're most certainly open to it ;)

The web resume screen and the privacy centric details have almost entirely been user driven. We've kept many of the form elements on the resume open ended, despite many business pressures to standardize and validate. We're committed to maintaining a job seeker focus, and we've followed through on these suggestions. We aim to give our users 100% control of their resume.

Growth and Traffic

We have, for all practical purposes, never made a serious marketing push on our product. We've experimented with a few advertising channels with various degrees of success, but our growth largely centers around word of mouth and viral activity. Most of this, of course, was spurred by July's flurry of blogosphere coverage.

Here are some graphs...

Here's our raw traffic log graph (May 1st, 2006 to December 28th, 2006):



Orange represents first time visitors. Yellow represents total visits.

August is a bit skewed, as stats were dead for a decent portion of the month. The low-point for us traffic wise was actually late August, early September. It's safe to estimate that August traffic with a tad bit higher than September.

And Alexa (Internet Explorer users only, June 1st, 2006 to Dec 28th, 2006):



The big discrepancy in terms of the graph patterns is due to the inaccuracy of Alexa, which is furthered by the fact that the majority of our user base uses some variant of Netscape/Firefox/Safari (the long tail of the browser world ;). This traffic, sadly, doesn't get factored into Alexa. Sure is pretty though ;)

We're especially proud of our numbers in November and December, as these are traditionally slower traffic months due to the holidays, and we were swamped with other initiatives (not much Emurse activity during that period). Much of what offset us in December was the blog relaunch. We're planning one article a week related to our space. We've done two articles so far (negotiating and personal branding), and both have been picked up on various social news sites and other blogs.

Our SEO efforts have paid for themselves 10 times over as well. Search traffic has seen strong increases in the last few months.

Revenue

Without going into specifics, Emurse is paying it's own way and the bank account is growing. As of December 28th, this month has seen an increase of 29% above our average for total monthly user transactions. Bot filtering lowered our overall cost, and refinement in our very limited marketing campaign increased our ROI. Mix that with our increasing conversion rate, and we're left with a very positive outlook.

Not too shabby for a boot-strapped project that turned down both acquisition offers and repeated investment attempts in 2006. The future prospects for Emurse look bright.

Looking Ahead

We expect 2007 to be an even bigger year for our small company. There are a number of new features planned for the first quarter, including some long tested aspects of the site. We're finishing up a small beta test of something we're especially excited about (hint: it's on the share tab). We've written it, tested it, and rewritten it probably three times over completely based on user feedback. It's simple and to the point. No frills is actually a pretty tough thing to do ;)

There are also some completely off the wall, unexpected and unannounced features planned for 2007 as well. We'll be running a beta test for these, and if you'd like to join, simply drop us an e-mail at service@emurse.com.

One of the only criticisms we've seen repeatedly is the lack of spell check. With many of our users moving towards more advanced browsers that have spell check built in (FF2), this feature stalled in beta testing. I'm very happy to announce though that you will see spell check added in the next couple of days. You can also expect smaller feature releases, such as updated resume templates and hopefully a wide scale roll out of the hResume micro-format (premium templates already have it).

The first half of 2007 will be very active development wise, and we're very excited about the next couple of roll outs.

Thank you for supporting us.

Without the suggestions, criticisms or occasional pats on the back we would have undoubtedly gone insane. Our product is a user product, and we're extremely grateful for all the blessings that we've had this past year.

Can't wait to recap 2007 ;) And if you haven't already, Create an Emurse account!