Erich Stauffer

Blog

  • Post No Signs

    Why do it for the lulz?

    “Sign Lulz” was a web site dedicated to capturing funny signs wherever they may be. The term “lulz” refers to the plural form of “lol”, which stands for “laugh out loud”. Sign Lulz was published by Cost Publishing, a division of Watershawl, Inc.. I’ve since moved all of the funny signs to a category of The SDN.

    The logo was from a a sign that hung on the Wan Shi Da Bakery across from the Pui Tak Center in The Armour Square area of southern Chicago, otherwise know as Chinatown, Chicago. The picture in the logo was taken in 1997, but you can see a more recent version of the sign on Flickr, which was taken on April 8, 2006.  However, according to what we can see on Google Street View, the sign has been removed (but no signs have been posted!).

    Across from the Wan Shi Da Bakery to the north is the Pui Tak Center on South Wentworth Avenue, which is a great community center. It is run by the Chinese Christian Union Church and have lots of programs to offer. Many student fellowships are held in this center. Volunteers tutor reading and math after school and on the weekends in addition to the English as a second language classes for adults.

    Further south on South Wentworth Avenue is the actual Chinese Christian Union Church, which is one of the few Christian churches in the Chinatown area. The church serves as a preschool center as well. The children there love to play with the toy Godzilla. It is their favorite toy.

  • Lean Startups

    Indianapolis Lean Startup Circle

    James Paden, VP at Compendium and Mentor at Indianapolis Startup Weekend, spoke at last night’s Indy Lean Meetup about the difference between bootstrapping and lean startups. While both conserve cash whenever possible, their goals are different. Lean startups aren’t opposed to accepting funding, they just shouldn’t take it until after some customer validation has occurred.

    From Iteration to Execution

    As you can see from this chart, in lean startups, the process starts with customer discovery, then goes to customer validation. The arrow back to customer discovery indicates revisions until a product/market fit is established and the process can move over to customer creation and eventually company building. While the goal of bootstrapping is to build without incurring debt, the goal of lean is to learn from short, iterative processes (the discover and validation phases) AND to build the company as fast as possible.

    The Lean Startup

    As Matthew pointed out on my book recommendations page, The Lean Startup by Eric Ries is a great book to help your startup get started right. But what I didn’t realize until attending last night’s Indy Lean Meetup was that lean was a part of the agile method.

    The premise of The Lean Startup is to, “Apply lean thinking to the process of innovation.” After reading this book, the next time you go to make a new product or start a new company, you’ll be asking yourself, “Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?” and you’ll start to look at customer requests/desires differently than you may view them today. Using innovation experiments explained in the book, you’ll be able to determine whether a new product or service is required or simply a tweak to any existing product, but Ries warns, “Stated customer feedback is not always an accurate reflection of actual need/desire.”

  • Facebook Book Printing Companies Review and Analysis

    Back in June, Mashable wrote an article on 7 Facebook book printing companies. As Christmas is now approaching I remembered that article and wondered if any of the companies let you print other people’s Facebook walls. Not everyone wants a book about themselves for themself, but if someone else gives it to them – hey, that’s a gift.

    Facebook Friend’s Wall Book

    Out of the seven Facebook book printing companies, only two let you print a friend’s Facebook information: Book of Fame and Ego Book. I also added Social Print Studio, which doesn’t print books, but does make posters and photo albums of your or one of your friend’s Facebook pictures. Between Book of Fame and Ego Book, the biggest difference is not price, but layout. Book of Fame will print one status message per page, essentially making a customized notebook for someone, while Ego Book is more of what you would expect in a Facebook book: pictures, wall posts, and comments of you and your friends. You’ll pay more for Ego Book, but you get what you pay for.

    Ego Book – Choose who you want the book to be about.

    Your Facebook Wall Book

    For those interested only in printing their own Facebook wall, Ego Book is still a good choice, but you might want to compare it with Jot Journal and Year Bound. Jot Journal is less expensive, but offers fewer options. Year Bound had more options, but it’s software seemed buggy. I had to try it several times before it would stop ‘blueing out’ the screen.

    Jot Journal

    Life Tracking Stats

    For those interested in printing their stats for the past year, Social Memories is the only choice on the list. Even if you don’t choose to buy it, you can still create the book and post it to your wall as an album for free. To print the 25 page book it costs $27 US.

    Social Memories

    Here’s a link to the Facebook Book Printing Chart I created in Google Docs.

  • Agile Indy

    Last night at the Agile Indy meeting I learned a little bit about what Agile is. At it’s core it’s a focus on people and teams power to get things done by communicating. Agile facilitates that movement from the individual to the team and from idea to implementation. It’s similar to lean principals when it comes to short, iterative product development cycles.

    Retrospectives

    We did what they call a “retrospective” which involves these steps:

    • Brainstorm
    • Cluster
    • Prioritize
    • Action
    • Commit

    For the brainstorming session, we were looking for topics the group wanted to discuss or cared about. We used the default star-pattern of, “What do you want to…

    • = Stay the same
    • > Do more of
    • < Do less of
    • – Stop doing (it’s hurting us)
    • + Start doing

    The brainstorming is done with a “one-in-hand” post-it note process where everyone writes one thing, then puts it on a wall or board. The “Cluster” process then uses the team to sort the post-it notes into categories using the same “one-in-hand” method. Seven random people are then asked to assign the clusters into seven different categories. The group then is allowed two dots each to assign importance to the categories. One dot on two categories or two dots on one is allowed. The two most popular categories then go into discussion and from that discussion, 5 action items are created. The last step is to commit these action items to being done and completed.

    This is just one part of Agile. There are terms like SCRUM and SPRINT, neither of which I know what they mean (yet). I recently wrote about the Agile meetup as part of the broader category of what meetups mean to me, but I felt there was enough material from last night’s meeting that it deserved it’s own post.

    The most popular book on Agile in Amazon doesn’t even mention Agile in the title. Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries, is a book about achieving breakthrough results by, “methodically taking small, experimental steps in order to discover and develop new ideas.” The author, Peter Sims, researched what went on behind the scenes of some of the great achievements and innovations we witness in today’s world. He said, “Most of them weren’t the epiphanies of geniuses, but instead the result of masters of a specific type of experimentation. To find out the common elements of their experimental approach, I reviewed empirical and neuroscience research about creativity and innovation, and interviewed or observed dozens of people about their approach, including Army counterinsurgency strategists, architect Frank Gehry, agile software development teams, stand-up comedians, entrepreneurs who had self-financed billion dollar businesses, the rapidly growing field of design thinking, and musicians like John Legend, as well as executives inside a range of organizations such as Amazon, Pixar, Procter & Gamble, Google, 3M, General Motors, and Hewlett Packard.” As one reviewer wrote, “Constant experimentation (‘learn by doing’) is fundamental to this approach – and I would add, fundamental to Agile.

  • What Meetups Mean to Me

    In January of 2005 I started my first Meetup called Indy Game Dev. One person joined and together we started to code a game. I didn’t know how to code a game. I had just graduated college with some Computer Science classes where I had to make a few small games in Visual Basic.NET, but I didn’t really know how to make a game.

    We started out meeting once a month, and then weekly at his house in Noblesville. He didn’t even have his own computer so we had to use the computer in his mother’s bedroom. I researched gaming engines and different programming languages, but we ended up going with a type of game similar to the NES game, Shadowgate.

    We had agendas and a group logo. We created the first screen in the game and started working on the story line, but then that’s when things started to fall apart. In April of 2005, Meetup began charging group owners a fee for hosting a group and the bottom sort of fell out as far as my desire to make games. What I realized is that I didn’t want to make games, I wanted to learn how to make games. Once I did that, my interest level was gone. My partner continued the group and the game for a while after I left, but I didn’t really start going to Meetups again until three years later in 2008.

    A Brief History of My Career

    I worked full time for the last two years I was in college and then immediately after helped a friend start a computer repair business on the side while continuing to work full time. It was during this time that I started going to Meetups, but I didn’t start going again until I left that job I had through college, started my own business, and got a new job in IT in October of 2007. This is when having a day job and going to meetups felt like I was living a double life. During the day I was a computer technician for an IT company and by night I was a web designer wanting to learn more about Adobe products or PHP.

    Through web design and SEO work, I was introduced to the world of affiliate marketing and started making money that way too. Eventually my web design customers started using me more for their technical needs and I began acting as their outsourced IT firm, or simply, their “computer guy.” Eight months after doing IT full time, I became a business analyst at a mid-sized, regional bank. By August of 2011 I was making enough from all of my side ventures to go at it alone so I quit my day job and went full time on my own. That’s when I really started to take advantage of meetups.

    Why Go to Meetups?

    To Socialize

    When I worked for other companies I was around other people all day long. We had meetings. I sometimes got to go places on the company’s dime. Some of these times were good. Most of them were not noteworthy. However, once they were gone, I started to miss that in my life. Sure, I met with clients occasionally, but for the most part I stayed in my office at home. While my family is a joy to me, there is a certain need to go beyond that and meetups can help with that. I wouldn’t go as far as to say I’m lonely, but there is a certain amount of Edward Norton’s Narrator that goes through my head when I visit a group for the first time.

    To Form an Identity

    What consistently meeting new people does to you is to help define who you are. This is partly because of the amount of times you have to explain who you are and what you do to new people, but also because simply by going to a particular group, you are associating yourself with that type of person. I’m currently a member of 16 meetups: Affiliate Freelancers Indianapolis, Affiliate Summit Indianapolis Meetup, AgileIndy, Central Indiana Entrepreneur’s & Vendors, Coaches, Consultants, Authors, Speakers & internet marketers, Esri Dev Meet Up Group – Great Plains, Geeks with Swag, Indiana Small Business Networking, Indianapolis Lean Startup Circle, Indianapolis Marketing Group, Indianapolis Search Engine Optimization & Internet Marketing, Indy Cowork, IndyDevHouse, TechLunch, Verge, and the WordPress – Indianapolis Meetup Group. I recently spoke at the affiliate marketing group, which gives me credibility with the speakers group, even though I already am a consultant.

    To Learn

    While I have been encouraged to get my masters and have gone back to school for Microsoft, A+, and Network+ certifications, meetups allow a different type of continued education in a wider array of fields. They are also the fields you’re most interested in learning about, or else you probably wouldn’t have signed up or gone to the meeting. Even though I’m profitable with affiliate marketing I still learn things from my affiliate marketing group, but a better example may be the Agile Indy group I attended last night. I had no idea what Agile was, but I kept hearing it and seeing it so I wanted to find out more about it. I wanted to learn. I can’t say I’ve gone to a traditional classroom much with that mentality. If you’re interested in what Agile is, review the Agile Manifesto or visit David Christiansen’s blog, Technology Dark Side. Speaking of affiliate marketing, David makes $2000 a year from advertising Rally Software on his blog. Rally sponsored last night’s meal, which brings me to my next reason.

    To Eat

    Most meetups either serve food or meet at a restaurant where there is an opportunity to eat food. If you enjoy breaking bread with your fellow man around a topic you love, what better place than at a meetup. The early Christian church would call this their communion time, while the modern church might call it “small groups”. What are meetups, if not small groups of people, passionate about a topic? One exception to “small” may be Verge Indy, which currently has 1,280 members and regularly has to limit members to their events at Developer Town. Most meetups who serve food serve pizza and most of the time it’s free, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch so be prepared for the corporate sponsor to pitch their goods to you. Don’t worry if you’re not interested, maybe one day you will be. Maybe one day you’ll be the sponsor.

    To Travel

    You probably can’t just walk into Miles Design or Allegient‘s offices, but that’s exactly what I did when I attened Joomla Indy and Agile Indy, respectively. While Joomla Indy isn’t an official meetup, it still meets regularly, in-person, around a topic, which is what meetups are all about. Tonight I’ll be attending the Lean Startup at Green is Good off 86th and Zionsville Road and the Esri meetup at Harry and Izzy’s on Illinois Street, downtown Indianapolis. When I was a business analyst I got to visit the Greater Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce’s board room once, now I’m visiting new board rooms every month.

    To Network

    If you’ve ever been told that you need to get out of comfort zone to grow, meetups are a great way to do that. Most of the people at the meetup I attend, I don’t know before attending. In fact, it’s actually rare for me to know someone there at all. However, once I’ve gone once, I do at least recognize them and can start to get to know them. Networking is a natural result of getting to know other people and meeting new people. Sometimes business cards are passed around and sometimes they are not. Meetups that are specifically setup to network don’t seem to be as popular as ones that are setup around a specific topic. What makes Verge so popular is that it brings together inventors, startups, and venture capitalists with those interested and willing to help. The energy there is intense and the barriers to entry are low. There is no fee for most events, food is provided, and those attending get the chance to pitch and network with others. It’s a great mix.

    To Succeed

    Whatever you’re trying to accomplish, there is probably a meetup out there to help you do it. Whether it’s meeting like minded people for encouragement or collaboriation, or learning from others who have paved the way before you, meetups can help you become a success. As Eric Willke, agile adviser and speaker at Agile Indy said, “Know you can succeed,” and to that I add – “and you will.”

  • Sales Insight from Google Analytics Service Providers

    Google Analytics’ Service Providers listing can give you insight into who is visiting your website each month.

    I was showing one of my client’s their web statistics for the month via Google Analytics and discovered that there was some useful information that I hadn’t been sharing before. When I showed them the Visitors section I drilled down through Network Properties to show them the Service Providers. While Google may have intended this to show Internet Service Providers (ISPs), if a company has a T1 or other type of prosumer connection to the Internet, the name of the business will display instead of the ISP. What that means is that the client now has a view of some of the businesses visiting their site and how often.

    For those with an active sales pipeline, information like this can be invaluable. Who better to sell to than those who have already been visiting your site? In the case of the client who helped me discover this, they found out someone at a major corporation had been viewing their web site regularly. Now, it could be anyone at that company and it could be for any number of reasons, but what it does indicate is that your web site has something they keep coming back for. When we reviewed the history of that company, they had visited almost every month for the past year. I’ve since started emailing out this page specifically as part of my monthly hosting report.

    Too Much Information?

    Depending on the amount of traffic your web site has, you may need to use the filter at the bottom of the listings (not pictured). You can either include or exclude words by using the “containing” or “excluding” drop-down, respectively. Use ‘pipes’ instead of spaces or commas to search or exclude multiple terms. For example, to exclude the most popular ISPs, you would write something like this:

    verizon|comcast|road runner|embarq|sprint|bellsouth

    Advanced Filter

    For a more advanced Service Providers search, try the Advanced Filter. Click “Advanced Filter” next to the search box, which brings up the dimension “Service Provider” with the condition “Containing” and a blank value. That much is the same, so here is the ‘advanced’ part. If you want to contain one or more values (remember to use the pipes) and exclude others, add a second dimension for “Service Provider” and choose excluding and your search value.

    But wait, there’s more. As you may have noticed, you can also add a metric for Visits, Pages/Visit, Avg. Time on Site, % New Visits, Bounce Rate, and Goals. When used together with Service Provider, you can seek and sort the visitors by number of visits, number of pages, and so on. This is a potentially very powerful sales tool and one that should not be overlooked in your web analytics.

    IP Exclusion

    If you want to exclude your own business or your webmaster’s business from Google Analytics, which can sometimes skew your data, use the IP exclusion feature. To do this, click on the “Edit” button for your site on the main profile page. On the “Profile Settings” page, scroll down the page until you see the box named “Filters Applied to Profile” (below goals). Click on the “Add Filter” link, and you’ll be taken to the “Create New Filter” page. Once there, put in the IP address(es) you want excluded and then click “Save Changes”. This will keep your business from being counted in Google Analytics. If you’re not sure what your IP address is, just Google, “What is my IP?”

  • Choose Your Time

    I wrote this in one of my notebooks back in 2008 and recently re-discovered it while doing some housekeeping. Apparently one or more of my children had taken it to draw in, but after reading what I wrote I thought I’d share.

    Ironically, words are the most powerful weapons or tools that we have, yet they are used most carelessly, wasted most often, and sometimes not said at all.

    Words have power.

    Once spoken or written down, words take on a life of their own.

    Then I start to offer the reader (myself) advice, each one longer than the first:

    Speak what you want to happen.

    Write down your goals, your plans, your loves, your life.

    Speak the words out loud. Talk to yourself when you so that when you talk to others you can speak with authority. You know it to be true because you spoke it so.

    Then a bit of opinion-as-knowledge sharing:

    Those with bad luck have it because they pronounce it every chance they get! Those who want change, who have hope, speak change and preach hope.

    Choose your words so that you can choose your life.

    The next page reads with a slightly different tone, but on a similar topic:

    Yes, we are being tested. The question is, will we pass?

    Who speaks words? Who hears or reads words? Who is affected by words? Why do we speak, hear, understand, and be affected by words?

    People. People is the who. People is the why. Words are the what. They are a medium. The point is people. The purpose is people. People who use words change the world, one person at a time.

    I close with the following paragraph:

    We write down our goals and we begin to speak them out loud and we begin to do what our God has asked us to do and then, alas! A roadblock. A problem. What is this?! We followed the steps. We did what you asked! What did we do wrong? God is allowing us to be tested to see what may happen if we were granted what we asked for. The question is, will we pass?

    It wasn’t long before I would be tested – and then I was tested again, and again – and will continue to be tested until the day I die. I believe that this whole time on earth is a test of our mettle, our personality, and our faith. Like the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30), we have been given opportunities here on earth during our time. How we use this time is up to us.

    Here’s Mathew 25:14-30 in full:

    The Parable of the Bags of Gold

    14 “Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his wealth to them. 15 To one he gave five bags of gold, to another two bags, and to another one bag,[a] each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey. 16 The man who had received five bags of gold went at once and put his money to work and gained five bags more. 17 So also, the one with two bags of gold gained two more. 18 But the man who had received one bag went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.
    19 “After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them. 20 The man who had received five bags of gold brought the other five. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with five bags of gold. See, I have gained five more.’

    21 “His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’

    22 “The man with two bags of gold also came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with two bags of gold; see, I have gained two more.’

    23 “His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’

    24 “Then the man who had received one bag of gold came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. 25 So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.’

    26 “His master replied, ‘You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? 27 Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.

    28 “‘So take the bag of gold from him and give it to the one who has ten bags. 29 For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. 30 And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

  • How to Differentiate from Competition on the Web

    As recent as the late 90’s just having an IT department set you apart from your competition and gave your company an edge, but by the early 2000’s it wasn’t enough anymore. Every business worth its salt had bought computers, built networks, and setup servers. IT had gone from a luxury to an appliance.

    In the late 2000’s the same sort of shift occurred in web design. First, just having a website gave you an edge, then it was SEO that put you on top, now it’s social media, community involvement, being human and transparent, or content marketing. Web design and SEO are now standards – it’s what else you do that sets you apart.

    How to Set Yourself Apart from Your Competition

    If having a great website and search engine optimization are now the new baseline, then how will your company stand out against the competition? The smartest people in the room are saying three things:

    • Humanize your business.
    • Consider your community.
    • Create great content.

    Humanize Your Business

    Mimi Henderlong of Threadless says, “Staying human creates loyalty,” and part of being human is making mistakes, “Mistakes are OK! Even can bee good.” International advertising firm, gyro, says that people don’t buy from businesses, they buy from people. Consider telling a story about someone who works at your company and make your customer the hero. Be as transparent as possible. Share what your company believes in and why the employees do the things they do. You may have heard that people don’t care about what you know until they know how much you care, but as Simon Sinek says, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” Start with why.

    Consider Your Community

    Threadless is a community-powered ecommerce website that is highly engaged with it’s community, partly because of Mimi’s work, who believes there are four core values of a healthy community:

    • Benefit – What is the benefit to the community? Why does someone join a community?
    • Influence – Do users have influence? Do they know what to do?
    • Belonging – Do they feel like they belong? Do they know what to do?
    • Empowerment – Ambassador programs, elevate members, badges, camps, events

    Create Great Content

    “I don’t care about what you care about, but you should,” said Merlin Mann of 43 Folders when talking about priority. Merlin is passionate about helping people do more with their lives by doing less things that don’t matter and focusing on doing things that are great. If you focused less on the email that comes in every 4 minutes to the project you’ve been trying to complete for the last 4 months, do you think you could complete it faster? Is the project really a priority if you keep checking your email? Does the project even matter? Merlin Mann says, “If you say ‘yes’ to everything there’s no time to make something great.” And great content is one of the primary things that will set your company and yourself apart from your competition.

  • Custom Maps

    How I went from being a map blogger to a map maker by just realizing that I love to make custom maps for myself and others.

    I always thought of myself as an urban planner anytime I encountered something while driving that didn’t make sense. I used to wish I could change city streets the way you can in Sim City or Sid Meier’s Civilization.

    When I worked for other companies I’d make maps of where people sat, where restaurants were located, or branch locations. I was rarely, if ever asked to do these things. I just did them.

    As a business analyst, I created many intricate spreadsheets to turn data into usable information that could be shared. Our output was often compared to a map, maps being Edward Tufte’s standard of visual simplicity and design. When I visualized spreadsheet data, I was really making customized maps.

    As an IT worker, I created intricate network diagrams of all of our client’s computer setups, which were really just customized maps.

    When I finally came to realize that making maps was what I was most interested in, I learned that it was also the lens through which I viewed the world. I created maps in my mind to help me understand the world.

    This past weekend I attended The Combine in Bloomington, Indiana. Merlin Mann of 43 Folders was the headliner. Before I left I created the map you see below:

    It’s nothing special, just some information from a schedule laid over a Google Map screenshot. The reason I’m showing it is because no one told me to make it, I made it for myself to use at the Conference. I made a map so that I could better understand the material. It’s the same thing I did when I was a business analyst in the banking industry. I made maps of information so executives could make better decisions. In IT I made maps of information so that problems could be solved faster and so everyone could be on the same page as to how a system was setup. No one argues that the United States is located in between Mexico and Canada because maps tell us this is true. Maps make data obvious. They tell a story. They matter. And I care about them. That’s why I like making custom maps.

    Map Design Resources

    For those interested in map making design, you might enjoy reading Gretchen Peterson’s blog. Gretchen also wrote GIS Cartography: A Guide to Effective Map Design. I’m currently in the process of learning TileMill from MapBox, but may also try MapTiler.