Month: July 2009

I took Thursday and Friday off this week and went away with lauren and the kids for an extended weekend. We are having a blast.

For the most part and except for a few unplanned work related things I’ve been off the grid.

Tonight, everyone was wiped out and went to bed early. I’m still wide awake.

I’m staring at my inbox getting back to the most important items (family, urgent portfolio company matters, my partners and very close friends).

But my inbox doesn’t care about me and it’s all there. And growing. And in no particular order. It only cares about the most recent stuff because that is what it “bubbles up to the top”.

Not nice.

Time of email receipt isn’t the most important thing for me right now.

At a glance my email inbox looks probably a lot like yours:

-tons of work emails

-personal emails

-calender invite emails

-blog comments (disqus)

-Twitter DMs

-social net messages (so & so wants to be your friend, social net messages)

-PhoneTag voicemail transcriptions

-ecommerce receipts & status

-spam

The list goes on.

I need a way to fix this and I’m not willing to declare email bankruptcy.

When I get back home I’m going to do some simple inbox improvements:

1. Create a separate email gmail account for my disqus comments. iPhone handles multiple email accounts beautifully.

2. Create a separate email account for phonetag. (is there a way to use iPhone visual voicemail and Phonetag at the same time? I think the answer is no on this one.)

3. Create a separate email account for ecommerce stuff.

4. re-configure twitter to send DMs to sms only

5. Right now my work and personal email goto the same place. wondering if that is a good idea or not.

6. since switching to gmail, spam has gotten lighter. but it’s still a problem.

7. can i filter gmail to show me only messages where I’m on the To: line (vs cc) ?

Please share any simple inbox tips. I’m sure I’m missing some obvious ones.

Maybe I’m tired too :)

One of the best things about online services is the data. The amount of data can get massive quickly.

We all know that data is valuable for a variety of reasons.

But the thing I want to talk about is how that data can make your product better (vs data monetization).

Many web services do capture and record vast amounts of data. But a lot of that data isn’t very helpful. The key is identifying the important parts that can improve your service.

First, if you aren’t capturing that data then get busy and start. I recently met an entrepreneur who created a widely used Firefox extension. But he wasn’t keeping track of any data. He is now :)

Next, find out what data is important. Well, that’s the hard part.

Few examples to consider.

I recently spoke to an executive that ran a successful subscription based virtual word. He told me that as soon as users invested x hours into the product they were subscribers for life. The assignment in their case was pretty clear: focus on user engagement and the business model will compile. Other data was helpful but much less important than getting users to invest time in the game.

Another entrepreneur told me that in his social app, if a user connected with 5 friends then there was a high likelihood they would become highly active. They are working on improving their invite a friend component and friend discovery. Other features are taking a back seat for now.

Yet another entrepreneur told me that reducing the sign up process to a bare minimum, user name and password and nothing else, generated a 3x increase in sign ups. They did a lot of A/B testing of their home page & sign up experience.

In all of these companies the critical data components were different from one another.

A lot of this seems like common sense but it’s a challenge to figure out and prioritize. That’s especially true in a startup where you are chronically under funded and understaffed.

But I encourage you to make the investment & track down the good data and ignore the useless stuff.

(n.b. the entrepreneurs mentioned in this post are not in the Spark portfolio).