eROI Days Email Agency

Not bad for a 23 year old kid who everyone chastised as insanely stupid for turning down Yahoo’s $1 Billion bid for Facebook a year ago. So, what’s the lesson for high-tech entrepreneurs? My takeaway is that you should be bold and hold-out for higher valuations as you continue to build community online and build tremendous value in your company. Of course, there is a finite window for some industry sectors, especially in technology. But, if you have confidence in the long-term viability of your business model, be patient and hold off on accepting seemingly generous offers like Zuckerman did.

Read more about this MSN article on Facebook (the first paragraph is below):
Microsoft Corp beat out Google Inc on Wednesday in a battle to invest in socializing Web site Facebook, agreeing to pay $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in the Web phenomenon. Microsoft also clinched exclusive rights to sell ads on Facebook outside of the United States as part of the investment that valued Facebook at $15 billion — on par with the market capitalizations of retailer Gap Inc and hotel chain Marriott International Inc.

MarketingVox wrote about Forrester Research’s new forecast of the online marketing industry. The 3 things that made an impression on me in this forecast are:

1. I’m psyched to be part of an industry that is growing 27% a year for the next 5 years to go from $18.4 billion this year to $61.3 billion in 2012. If we can’t grow our company by at least 27% per year then we’re doing something wrong.

2. Search is strong. The big winners are search media giants Google and secondarily Yahoo, MSN, and a couple others. Email is growing, but at a slower pace.

3. Interactive agencies and media are disrupters. The report forecasts, “Interactive’s share of total ad spend is forecast to increase from 8 percent in 2007 to 18 percent in 2012.” Things move so quickly in the interactive world that we need to continually educate ourselves on the next Facebook, SpotRunner, MySpace, or disruptive community site or technology that may accelerate this trend.

My hat goes off to a Portland entrepreneurial group called Starve Ups that I have been involved with for the past 7 years. John Friess, our leader with unbelievable entrepreneurial passion, wrote a really meaningful email to the group just now and I copied my response below his email.

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From: John Friess
Sent: Monday, October 15, 2007 10:35 PM
To: List
Subject: Starve Ups 7 Years Later

Everyone,

Seven years ago this evening 7 companies met at the offices of Rumblefish in downtown Portland and founded Starve Ups. The founders of these companies (AssetExchange, Versation, eROI, viaLanguage, CoolerEmail, Rumblefish and wired.MD) met for about four hours that day as we discussed exactly what Starve Ups should be, what it should accomplish and where it should go.

That evening we decided that the group should be about providing one another feedback, resources and networks to propel our businesses forward. We decided that what it should do is make success the only business model worth pursuing and that eventually we should all get to our exit or existence strategy as defined by our teams.

Well since that time all 7 founding companies, though some have had name changes or have undergone corporate restructuring, have survived and have made it to profitability. One has been acquired and more are sure to be acquired within the next two years. We have collectively employed hundreds, we have sold product to tens of thousands and we have earned tens of millions. We have built two Inc. 500 companies and have provided viable business solutions in 6 of the 7 continents.

To date we have had a total of 32 membership companies, 27 of which are still in business and building or selling products and solutions. This is an 84% success ratio amongst our membership companies, where the national average after 7 years is approximately a 16-18% success ratio. We have built a brand with a single purpose and that is to ensure that we all succeed in our businesses through paying it forward. We have done exactly that as a group, as a team as Starve Ups.

Thank you all for a great 7 years.

John

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My response:

This is awesome! And the cold, hard truth of it all is that Starve Ups would not exist if John Friess wasn’t driving it forward each and every day – you’ve done far more than you give yourself credit for.

With that said, congrats collectively to everyone on this list – we need to appreciate and celebrate our accomplishments – John’s email above shows all of us that we have legitimate things to be proud of with our companies.

Cheers,
Ryan

For the past month, this Blog – Email Days and our other eROI blogs, The Email Wars and Return on Subscriber all had a few errors on them due to the challenging server upgrade of Movable Type 3.1 to the insanely powerful and feature-rich Movable Type 4.0. We weren’t able to display our Category pages, Permalinks, and Comment pages on all pre-transition postings which there numbered in the thousands of blog postings. All that is fixed as of this afternoon and we can let out our inner-geek spirit in celebration!

We will roll out new features in the upcoming weeks for this blog including digg and de.li.cious links, Captcha code for Comments to reduce blog comment spam, create some widgets, and play around with a variety of other MT 4.0 features that I’m just learning about.

Pictures say a thousand words, so I’m going to let these images speak for themselves. Great progress on sand-blasting (which was actually more like chopped walnut-shell blasting to be more sustainable) of the giant wood beams and brick throughout the space. Also, the floors are quickly getting re-finished. The demolition is nearly complete (where a significant percentage of the demo construction material is being re-used or recycled). Without further ado, here are the pics of 505 NW Couch, Suite 300 (our new office as of Dec 1, 2007):

What’s more annoying than pop ups…the ever present intrusion to content? Yes, Orbitz, your games are fun and excluded from this conversation, but to the rest of you, go away.

So what can be taken away from these daily digital intrusions? How about some design mishaps. Surely once a design technique has worked its way into a pop up, it must be time to move on. Remember that jittery windows pop up. God that pissed me off.

Here’s a look at my most recent pop up encounter. Web 2.0 (shiverrrrr) in a nut shell. I’ve circled all the over used elements, but in case it’s not clear, here are the bullets:

• reflected graphic
• Beta button
• swirly stuff
• wings
• gradation
• repeated graphic background
• overly large call to action fake gloss jelly rounded corner button thing

Now, some of these elements work by themselves (or maybe I’ve just been told that by clients so many times that I believe it) but all together… look out! I use all these elements all the time, but my point is, whenever design starts to look like pop ups, maybe it’s time to take a deep breath, and hit the drawing board.