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A Customer’s Nightmare: The Tech IPO

hudey123 — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 22:00:36 +0000

If there is one thing that is detrimental to the ability of a tech company to continue to make decisions that are in the best interest of their customers it’s the IPO. In fact, going public is the worst thing that any company can do if their number one goal is to provide continuously great service in the best interest of its customers.

image courtesy of thadz on sxc.hu

Going public means that as a business you have to shift your focus to creating value for your shareholders rather than giving your customers everything they need and want. In my opinion, serving your customers and keeping them happy is how a business builds sustainability. But take any large public company and you can fit it into this equation: early on, they’re small and they find it easy to service their customers, which contributes to early, explosive growth. Eventually they go public and have to start catering to shareholders. For a while everything might continue to grow but eventually the company runs out of ways to innovate and create value and their only course of action to continue gaining ever-higher revenues is to undercut the quality of the product and the quality of service to their customers.

Without gaining those ever-higher revenue numbers the value of the business falls in the eyes of investors and the vicious cycle just feeds itself. There is ever more searching for ways to do business cheaper and more sneaky ways to add value to the company that result in shoddy products, cooked books, and worse.

I love seeking out the new thing and participating while its still young and still listening when customers ask for features and improvements. But once that new thing becomes the BIG, billion-dollar-valuation-thing, I’m not so interested any more because I know that they’re not listening to my feedback.

Do you think it’s possible for a hot new company to get to a perfect size and level of service and freeze there? To not get into the usual cycle of growth that results in so much red tape that they can’t get anything done? I’d love to hear your comments.

Renaissance Tech Guy

hudey123 — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:20:13 +0000

There comes a time when you need to make a choice. For me, 2012 is that time.

For the last 11 years I’ve been swimming in a bunch of shallow pools. Web development, graphic design, banner ad design and development (Flash, Actionscript, Photoshop), customer service, phone system installation and administration, CRM administration, web server administration, among others. I was the Renaissance Man in my company. Whenever something came up that no one had experience with, I agreed to take on the project. I loved being that guy because I love to learn new things and I have this huge propensity for learning technical concepts and procedures very quickly. I enjoyed learning to write a press release one day and then configuring Microsoft Dynamics CRM the next.

But what happens when you’re the Renaissance tech guy is that you float forever on the fringes of the company org chart. You’re not really a part of the marketing department or the IT department even though you’re doing important projects for them both. You’re not really a system administrator even though you’re managing the phone system and you’re not a developer even though you’re helping customer service update their member database. You’re forever learning bits and pieces of all aspects of the company but you’re not involved in making decisions for any of them.

I spent the last five or six years without a job title. I was Creative Director when I built all of the banner ad assets and designed all of the graphics. I was Web Developer when I was designing or developing a new site. I was API Integration Specialist when I wrote documentation for our API and helped customers implement it on their own web sites. But a proper business card would have to say something like “Wearer of Many Hats” or “Renaissance Tech Guy.”

2012 is when I will plunge into the deep end. No more water wings or inflatable life preservers. The pool might be filled with HTML/CSS. It might be overflowing with WordPress. It might be full of Windows/Linux web servers and phone systems. Regardless what it contains I will work hard to find the right one and jump in ready to swim the 1200 meter freestyle.

CSS3D Image Rollovers

hudey123 — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 17:50:04 +0000

I’ve started doing some research for easy methods to move banner ads into the HTML realm and away from Flash. Barely started the process and I’ve already come across this great demo by Chris Heilmann. The demo is here. There are several CSS3 tricks here that would make for a pretty cool banner ad.

Crisis Averted… back to normal

hudey123 — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 05:41:47 +0000

A Favicon Blunder

hudey123 — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 22:22:21 +0000

I just noticed this today. I guess I’ll have to rebuild my favicon to use the H instead of the arrow.

Welcome!

hudey123 — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 06:20:41 +0000

Thanks for visiting. This is my soapbox. I love technology and I love to try out new things and find great ways to make things we do online faster, easier, and more enjoyable. I hope this blog can become a resource for people to think about how they use technology and what the web and web-based services can do to help them with their everyday lives. I hope you enjoy reading here as much as I enjoy writing here. Welcome aboard!