Archive for the ‘Boston’ category

Why haven’t we seen the morning half day pass?

February 1st, 2010

I just spent this past weekend snowboarding in Vermont at the Pico Resort. It’s a quaint mountain, but nice for an intermediate or beginner rider. Certainly no match for the neighboring Killington Resort, but for what it lacks in size, it makes up for in lack of crowds. I don’t think I waited in line for more than 30 seconds at the busiest of times, and I never had to worry about crowds on the slopes getting in everyone’s way.

It was a fairly relaxing getaway despite the subzero temperatures (thank you layering) and a few roommates who were determined to destroy the place by body slamming the bunk bed (then consequently blaming the bed construction when it cracked), knocking the dustbuster from the wall, smoking cigars in the kitchen and wearing ski boots on the hardwood floors.  Luckily, the Pico Frathouse was more or less returned to it’s original condition upon departure.

I did have a few thoughts on our 3 hour drive back home:

1) Thank goodness for helmets, which almost certainly prevented my girlfriend from a concussion (a nasty fall at the end of our second day).

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2) Why don’t ski resorts offer a Sunday half day pass that begins in the morning? I think one of the reasons that Pico was so undercrowded is that it offers no comparative advantage to the Killington resort. Killington is larger, has better conditions, more interesting terrain, and an earlier half day (starts at 11:45am instead of 12:30pm at Pico). There are also many people who refuse to wait until 12:30 when they have to make a 3-5 hour trek back home, so choose to head home earlier. If a morning pass was offered, I think many people would ski from 10 to 12:30 instead of forgoing skiing on Sunday. It’s also not a question of gaming the system or cheating since the ski lift operators scan your pass every time you use the lift and would catch freeloaders easily.

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Lunch and Inspiration

January 8th, 2010
Jeffrey Dahmer
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Just got back from lunch with a friend of mine named Zach Servideo. He introduced me to “The Black Sheep”, a restaurant located in an old Firehouse in Kendall Square which has phenomenal food. If you don’t know Zach, he’s a passionate PR professional who could befriend the most anti-social person in a room and turn them into an entrepreneur.  Needless to say, had Jeffrey Dahmer met Zach in the early 70’s, he would’ve started up a software company.

Zach is starting up a little side project called All White Kicks aimed at individuals interested in White Shoes. It’s a niche I would’ve never thought of, but with his passion, he can clearly make it work.

It also reminded me of my friend Alan who always has a few side projects going on. He’s experimenting with a few random AdSense pages such as My Reticulated Python and he’s also working on a niche site called The Curry Project, which aims to review every Indian restaurant in the world.

All of these side projects have inspired me, and I wanted to let you know about a new project I have called HapiMoney. Personal finance education is woefully inadequate and most people don’t know the first thing about where their money should go and in what amounts. I hope to shed some light on money management. Check it out and let me know if you have any ideas. Also, the name is awesome because Hapi is the Egyptian deification of the Nile flooding. This flooding helped water Egyptian crops and brought prosperity to the region.

These little projects also reminded me about one of the biggest mistakes that we ever made at WebNotes- we failed to follow the adage ” release early and release often”. The project was started in 2005 and wasn’t actually released to the public until 2008- 3 years of time which could’ve desperately used public feedback. But I’ll talk more about this in a future post.

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Moving On

December 20th, 2009
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This past week was a big week for me: I’ve officially left WebNotes and am searching for the next big thing in startup land! It was an amicable break up, so no feelings were hurt, and WebNotes is moving to the West Coast for a much needed restart.

In retrospect, it was a frighteningly fast sprint this past year and a half and I learned an amazing amount about entrepreneurship, software and marketing.  Now that I am no longer the head cheerleader for the firm, I will be trying to do a bit more teaching on this blog, instructing other wantrepreneurs (entrepreneur wannabe’s) how to be more efficient in their execution.  We made a ton of mistakes, and I hope you all can learn from them.

I wish the WebNotes guys the best of luck out in Cali, and I hope they are able to turn things around. And if you are a startup in the Boston area and are looking for some help in marketing, shoot me an email and we’ll grab a coffee to discuss.

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Why debate is awesome for urban students

November 9th, 2009
Law School Library reading room
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I’m helping out with a local charity called the Boston Debate League, which provides urban students with an incredible education in policy debate. In their most recent newsletter they presented the following findings:

Research Links College Readiness and High School Graduation to Urban Debate

A recent study published in the Journal of Negro Education demonstrates that participation in urban debate increases the likelihood of high school graduation and performance on the ACT Reading and English subject-matter tests; a major indicator of college readiness. Dr. Briana Merzuk of Virginia Commonwealth University and a research team at the University of Michigan examined 10 years of Chicago Debate League data and reported that among African American male students, debaters were 70 percent more likely to graduate from high school, three times less likely to drop out, 50 percent more likely to reach the ACT college-readiness benchmark for English, and 70 percent more likely to reach the ACT benchmark for Reading than non-debaters, even after accounting for 8th grade achievement.

This new study is a game changer. It is scientifically valid, peer reviewed research that demonstrates what we have known all along–that participation in debate prevents a significant number of students from dropping out of high school and more importantly gives them the skills they need to both graduate high school and succeed in college. As the Boston Debate League expands to new schools in BPS and goes deep in those schools, we can move from a program that significantly affects a small number of students to one that changes graduation rates and test scores on a schoolwide and even districtwide scale.

The one stat I don’t fully understand is how students are 70% more likely to graduate AND 3 times less likely to drop out. Assuming that all students who don’t graduate end up dropping out, shouldn’t those numbers match? Regardless, I think this just goes to show how much debate can help students out.

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DartBoston Panel

November 6th, 2009

Last night, I had the fortunate experience of appearing on my first panel at DartBoston.  We were picking apart the startup RiotVine, who was kind enough to fall victim to our snarls. I had the pleasure of sitting next to some very interesting minds, notably (going from right to left) our graceful moderator Cort Johnson, Nick the ultranurd, Vadim the microfinance revolutionary, and then me, the babbling incoherent idiot. Luckily, Nick and Vadim carried the show, and I, by association was made to look relatively cogent. If you’d like to take a gander, check it out below. It’s about 30 minutes of high packed action.

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Getting drunk with Venture Capitalists

October 27th, 2009
Wine and cheese tasting @ Strewn Winery
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Last Thursday, I had the immense pleasure of doing a little drinky drinky with some of the financial titans of industry at the 4th annual New England VC Wine Tasting. Dana Samuels of TUGG was kind enough to provide me with a complimentary ticket (they normally range about $150), so I was much obliged.

Luckily, I happened to know quite a few people who showed up. There were about 6 people from fama PR whom it was awesome to see (Keri, Keith, Marta, Whitney, Zach, and Liz). If you don’t know fama and you’re in the tech inudstry, you should.  I also ran into Healy Jones of Startable fame, and the new VP Marketing at Pixily, who’s one of my more recent acquaintances.

From there I met an absolute hodge podge of characters ranging from VC’s who were bidding on $5000 dollar cases of wine, to a clean tech entrepreneur who had just sold his $200 million dollar business and miraculously had the chutzpah and energy of an 18 year old. In all, everyone was rather convivial and jolly, no doubt lubricated by the libations, and making random introductions was hardly a problem.

By the end of the night, I had probably consumed about 8 to 10 glasses of wine with nary a bite of food, so my memory gets a bit hazy,and as such, my desire to network diminished accordingly. All in all, it was a phenomenal time and a rather enjoyable experience…I hope to be at the next event. Good luck to Dana Samuels, Jeff Fagnan, et al. and of their aspirations with TUGG.

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Boston Debate League

October 19th, 2009
http://teachpol.tcnj.edu/amer_pol_hist/fi/0000...
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This past Saturday I got back to my roots, aka policy debate. While doing a bit of random web surfing, I stumbled upon the Boston Debate League and was immediately attracted to the idea of volunteering. I debated for several years back in high school and absolutely loved it. It taught me to articulate my ideas in convincing ways, write better, and gave me self confidence. It’s also where I met some of my best friends with whom I still keep in touch. Besides, where else can you link every possible policy disadvantage to nuclear war and still be taken relatively seriously?

The BDL is an “urban debate league” and helps kids in the Boston public school system learn to debate. It is also shown to help these kids improve their grades, reading levels and note taking abilities.

It looks like not only will I be a judge, but also will be helping them do budgeting and marketing. I’m very much looking forward to this opportunity to help out! They are always in need of more volunteers, so if you are interested, let me know!

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The Secret of Surveys

April 16th, 2009

At my day job, we have a healthy, if not obsessive dedication towards hearing back from our customers. We also have an unusual statistic: an unusually large number of our customers respond to our email surveys. We don’t offer much in the way in incentives, often times only $25 or $50 dollars in a raffle, yet regardless, 1 in every 10 people we send a request to fills out the survey. Typical industry averages hover at less than 2% response rates

We’ve had several experts tell us beforehand that customers won’t respond to such nominal awards, some say that our users won’t even wipe their nose for the chance at $25. So what’s our secret? We make our users feel like they are a part of something before we ask for the survey.

Secrets to Community Building and Survey Administration

1) We have kept our userbase intentionally small while we perfect our product and build a community. If you offer advice, it will be considered.

2) We respond almost immediately to comments on our blog, twitter @replies or DM’s, and support requests. Support requests are enormously important to respond to, and I’ve had dozens of people tell me we provide the best customer service they have experienced (although they have probably never dealt with Zappos). We use Fogbugz to track support requests, which I highly recommend.

3) We make an effort to actually incorporate user feedback and our respondents know that their voice will be heard. People feel like they have their hand in making this startup a success.

4) We respond to our surveys takers. In our most recent survey, people were legitimately surprised to hear back from us even when we asked if we could contact them for more information!

5) We keep our surveys short. No one like’s their time wasted with 50 question marathons and if someone trusts you enough to click on your link, you better not lose their trust once they get there. We ask 5 or 10 questions max. If you need more than 10 questions, you need a focus group, not a survey.

6) Lastly, make your emails personal. We try to address everyone by their first name when we send email requests. If we don’t have the name, and it can’t be inferred from the email, then we don’t worry about it, but people like the personal touch.

As we scale the business, we hope we maintain this successful feedback rate. We might have to experiment with more focused survey’s on smaller user segments, larger rewards, etc, but we’ll tackle those problems when we get there.

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Charity Blog

February 17th, 2009

In the latest economic crisis, most everyone has been hurting. Surprisingly, charities held up alright for 2008, but  most predict misery for 2009.  People are hoarding cash, spending far less on non-necessary expenditures, including non-for-profits. Donations in the past have typically come from large corporations, grants from the government and wealthy individuals, but with banks collapsing, the government issuing a huge amount of debt, and most wealthy individuals’ net worth entering into a death plunge, these donations are freezing up.

I’ve started up a blog called Twiver dedicated to non-profit news and helping charities understand technology and new media, as well as how these new forms of media can help them interact with their donors. If you know of a non-profit that needs some exposure, send me an email at alex@twiver.org and I’ll see if I can’t do my part.

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Halloween Stories: Holiday Inn

November 5th, 2008

About a week and a half ago, my girlfriend and I went to a haunted house in Abington, MA.  We went on a Sunday night thinking that most everyone else would’ve gone on a Friday or Saturday. 

 

We were wrong.

 

So we stood in line for a good hour and a half, enjoying some humorous/scary pranks by the employees and a bit of funnel cake. Our enjoyment turned to surprise when 2 or 3 people dragged a young teen out of the house and called 911. He was unconscious and not responding to anything. After seeing that his situation wasn’t improving my girlfriend turns to me and asks,

 

“Did anyone stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night?”

 

Awesome.

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