A Sack of Seattle

Say goodbye to these newspapers

As a guy interested in local search, this article about the top 10 newspapers to fail is interesting.

Judy's Book as a facebook app?

Well, not exactly. But it's interesting to see how the base idea of judy’s book is now showing up as Facebook apps.  My friend Todd Zawicki pointed this out to me --  He's got a good blog too.

Judy's Book farewell party

We had a really great farewell party last night with lots of past employees from the company attending. It's strange -- I had a little nervousness about having past employees attend the farewell party but in the end it was a great thing to do. I'm really appreciative to all those that were able to make it.
The whole event reminded me that endings are just as important as beginnings. It's usually harder to celebrate at the end of a relationship that didn't go the way you wanted it to (whether that be with a company or with a person) but in fact a celebration is exactly what's needed. Tequila sunrises don't hurt either.

My feelings surrounding Judy's Book public wind down

My wife asked me how I was feeling about the fact that the wind down of Judy's Book got so much press in Seattle (Seattle PI, TechCrunch, etc).  At first, I admit there was some shame. I felt like a failure and I was ashamed of not succeeding. Lately, however, I've been feeling (in an odd way) somewhat pleased about the public nature of the flame out. From my perspective, the publicity means that people cared about what we were doing at Judy's Book. This feels good.
In addition, the publicity means I don't have to have the awkward and painful experience of telling everyone about the failure.  You know -- seeing people in cafes, holiday parties, and in public and being asked "how's it going at work?" and having to tell them some version of -- "oh, I laid everyone off a month ago and am winding down the company". People already know the facts and they come up to me and say "I'm sorry to hear about Judy's Book. What are you doing next?". This is much better in my opinion than having to constantly tell people the same story over and over again.  Don't get me wrong -- I wish Judy's Book succeeded. I didn't start the company to end up winding it down. I'm just trying to share some of my feeling about having the wind down being so public.

Mistakes in the early years of Judy's Book

We did a lot of things right in the first 2 years of Judy's Book business (FYI - July 2004 was the start of the business), but I think we made two reasonably big mistakes.  Both mistakes prevented us as a company from achieving critical mass as a company in a specific geography -- i.e. Seattle.

The first mistake: we weren't aggressive enough in customer acquisition. We had the idea of using the address book as a hook into customer acquisition but we never spent the energy and focus to really maximize the use of the address book in growing the social network. We thought that using the web address books was too "spammy". In retrospect, this perspective on customer acquisition was a little too ivory tower and not enough boot strappy. In fact, there's a broad spectrum of what constitutes spam in the eyes of a consumer. We/I didn't understand the subtleties of consumer perceptions sufficiently to build the app that grew our social network AND that consumers wouldn't perceive as "spammy". Linked In and Facebook today have finessed and pushed these consumer perception boundaries -- but back in 2004 and 2005 it was difficult to see just how willing of consumers were to send out invites from their address books. 

The second mistake: we expanded out of Seattle in August 2005 and went national. We did this because Insider Pages expanded nationally and we were feeling the competitive pressures to keep up. The fact is that neither company had figured out what it took to create a community directory that achieved critical mass. I remember when we were raising money for the series B round and Bill Gurley of Benchmark challenged me on the decision to nationally. I defended the decision at the time. Looking back, I think the decision to go national in Aug 2005 was an error. We ended up spending the better part of 6 to 9 months building a local search web site that could be accessed nationally -- going national was more work than we expected. Ultimately, this decision prevented us from focusing on the customer acquisition problem I mentioned above as well as other improvements that would have made our product more sticky and compelling.

More mistake and lessons learned blogging to come....

Another major lesson learned: baby steps come first

I think it's useful to think of start ups as babies. The metaphor works pretty well. Start ups and babies require lots of love to get from infancy to the toddler stage. And when it comes to starting a technology business, it's necessary to take baby steps before walking and you have to walk before running. 
At Judy's Book we had a BIG vision -- I think in retrospect, perhaps too big for a start up and in retrospect I think we didn't take the necessary steps to break that BIG vision (your friends yellow pages) down into sufficiently small enough baby steps to prove out the concept before expanding the concept nationally.

Judy's Book company retreat

I'm at the Judy's Book company retreat yesterday and today. We had a great day yesteday. There wasn't a lot of business meetings or strategy sessions. Just some good conversation, a great game of badmitton, and some smores around a fire. I think people are feeling refreshed and ready to go back to the office and kick some arse.

How offline retailers are dealing with online e-commerce?

Greg Sterling writes a good post about ecommerce and online - offline retailing. If you're wondering about the opportunity we're pursuing at Judy's Book this post is worth reading.

Judy's Book and Mpire

John Cook of the Seattle Times has been writing here about the similarities between Mpire and Judy's Book.  I actually think that the two companies are more complimentary than competitive.  Judy's Book is really about local shopping.  We are a destination site for you to find out what's on sale near you. If you want to do shoe shopping this weekend -- and you're wondering what's on sale / where near your home....i.e. where you can get a deal on shoes then Judy's Book is the place for you. Mpire -- as I understand it, is about shopping analytics of new and used products. You want to know what's happened to the price of ipods over time then Mpire will deliver this to you.  I'm looking forward to seeing how both services evolve over time.

A new home page!!

If you're wondering what we're up to at Judy's Book -- I think our new home page tells the story well. Check it out!