Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

I know the metaphor of the online land grab in the late 1990s has been way overdone to the point of cliche but I think the metaphor can be extended in a more meaningful way. Typically the land grab referred to “cyber-squatters” who purchased domain names in hopes of selling them later to desperate companies establishing online identities. Today I like to think of online entrepreneurs as landlords more than speculative flippers.

I’ve had a fair interest in real estate for quite some time but I’ve always had a hard time reconciling my interest in real estate with my larger interest in e-commerce. Perhaps my interest in real estate came from my civil engineering studies in my undergrad days or from my summer construction jobs in the southeast. Recently, however, I realized what really attracts me to real estate and e-commerce is the ability of both to extract rents.

Real estate investors buy properties so they can take in rental income from renters. Eventually, the hope goes, a real estate investor will have enough properties to live comfortably collecting checks from the properties he has acquired over several years of wise investment. For me, e-commerce offers the same hope. If one can build enough sites bringing in advertising revenues, there is little left to be done but sit back and collect the checks. This oversimplification is, of course, ignoring depreciation, competition, etc. but you get the point.

Speaking of real estate, I highly recommend two home shows on TV these days. One is called Property Ladder and it follows amateur investors buying homes, fixing them up, and hoping to resell them months later for tidy profits. The second show is called Flip this House and it follows Richard Davis, a Charleston, SC real estate investor who has a team that identifies properties, fixes them up in weeks, and then resells the units. Richard seems to be the man and a fun guy to work with, probably my favorite show on television these days. Hey Richard, if you’re looking for an MBA with limited real estate experience (I did take a class called Real Estate Entrepreneurship), give me a call, I would love to work with you when I graduate!

I’ve been deluged recently with bogus trackbacks on this blog and I’m really fed up. Unfortunately this version of BBlog doesn’t give you the option of manually approving trackback responses like it does for comments so spammers are able to post their links on the site automatically. I do get an email notification of trackbacks but these messages always get caught in my spam inbox because the names of the sites contain viagra, cialis, etc. in them. There must be a better solution!

The best I could come up with is to turn off the appearance of trackbacks on my blog. So essentially the trackback URL still works and trackbacks are still added to my database but they aren’t displayed on the site. This is pretty annoying for legitimate trackbacks since their link won’t appear but I honestly don’t know what else to do. Yet another important technology rendered useless by the spammers…

I made a few changes to the form users fill in to review mountain bike trails on singletracks last night. This morning I awoke to reviews filled in by “porn bots” full of links and h1 text all over the place. I was a bit annoyed and surprised since we’ve NEVER had form bots successfully post to our site. I initially figured it was just a fluke and I modified the review processing scripts to reject HTML tags.

After receiving more spam form fills throughout the day it just hit me: form bots can’t use pull down menus! Our previous review form (before I modified it last night) required users to select their state of residence from a select pull down menu. The form would return an error if a user failed to select a state and would not post the review.

So it seems that instead of attempting to install a sophisticated captcha scheme to prevent form bots, one can simply have a required pull down menu for users to select (almost like the Yes/No button you have to push when swiping your credit card at the grocery store to verify the charge amount). Are you a real person (yes or no). If yes, your review will be posted.

Seems so simple, I’m surprised these bots aren’t sophisticated enough to just pick an option from a menu (any option, doesn’t matter). Hopefully this post doesn’t give form bot writers any ideas…

Anyway, I put the state pulldown requirement back on the site for now, even though the data collected will not be displayed. You can take a look at a sample form here:

http://www.singletracks.com/php/review.php?id=558

I went to a presentation at the Engineering School featuring “serial entrepreneur” Scot Wingo, currently the CEO of ChannelAdvisor. He talked mostly about his background and the about the software businesses he has grown and sold in the past. I really enjoyed the presentation because Scot started out as an engineer doesn’t have sort of the “typical” business background.

One of the most interesting things Scot talked about was the emergence of major internet channels that control the way consumers find retail sites and make purchases online. Scot claims that roughly 80% of consumers come through one of three channels:

1. Search engines. This one is probably the biggest (I’m guessing) and probably includes both natural and paid search. It would be interesting to see how important natural search is compared to paid search for specific retailers and specific search engines (Yahoo! probably refers more paid leads than natural search leads, for example).

2. Shopping engines. These are sites like Shopping.com, BizRate, Yahoo! Shopping, Froogle, and others. I actually did some strategic analysis and research on shopping engines during my (unpaid) internship at ChannelAdvisor and I came to the conclusion that these guys have a pretty shaky business model at best (guess Scot didn’t get to read my report!). I came across a report about Google temporarily blocking one of the shopping engine sites (I think Shopping.com?) from the search engine due to a dispute of some sort. This is tough because shopping engines get most of their traffic from search engines but they’re also competing with the search engines’ own shopping services (Froogle anyone?). The other thing to note is that shopping engines are essentially performing paid search arbitrage. They buy clicks on search engines and then resell those clicks to retailers on their own site. It’s only a matter of time before retailers cut out the middle man and advertise directly and exclusively on search engines. Paid search just needs to become a bit easier to manage before this happens.

3. Marketplaces. eBay, Amazon, Overstock, et al are the big marketplaces online today and they are becoming more and more important in driving sales to online retailers. This is the area where ChannelAdvisor really shines today, and in fact this is where things all got started.

Scot also talked about some of the guerilla marketing his companies have done and the stories he had were pretty entertaining. Most of the things were pretty simple but they were things that I personally would have thought twice about doing since some of the campaigns were mildly destructive and/or illegal. I would love to slap singletracks.com bumper stickers on mountain bike trail signs but that seems a bit tacky and/or destructive. This, however, would be something Scot and his team would have NO PROBLEM doing.

Another interesting comment Scot made was regarding his choice of staring a business in the Research Triangle (Raleigh / Durham / Chapel Hill) instead of Silicon Valley with all the other tech companies. Scot said he felt like the Triangle keeps his company more grounded and insulates them from chasing the e-commerce “flavor of the week” that many valley companies tend to follow (example he gave included tagging and social networking).

Finally, the biggest thing I got from Scot’s talk was that starting a business is all about just doing something. Alot of the things I’m learning at Fuqua focus on the analysis portion of making decisions but Scot warned against analysis paralysis when starting a business. His experience has been that it’s best to just get started and make mistakes so you can learn by doing rather than spending alot of time and money just figuring out the best way to do something (which may end up being wrong anyway). I also appreciated his ability to do things without really worrying about the outcome, (like his guerilla marketing tactics) a lesson that many entrepreneurs can use.

Over the past year or so I’ve gotten many questions about how I built Singletracks.com. It appears that Singletracks is a modified forum program that allows users to register, post new topics (trails), and reviews (posts) of trails. Of course there are lots of add on features like wishlists, recommendations, etc. but at the core the site largely uses features associated with messageboard systems.

In fact Singletracks has been built almost entirely from scratch. The very first version of the site that allowed users to post their own trails was actually constructed using a Perl script for allowing users to create custom homepages. The concept has survived but all the scripts have been completely rewritten using PHP and MySQL. If I were to build the site all over again I would probably start with a messageboard script package to get the main functionality necessary to run the site.

One problem with using a messageboard application is the fact that it is tough to find a really basic bare bones set of scripts that doesn’t have alot of fancy bells and whistles. In fact, since messageboards are not exactly analagous to an information review system, you’ll find yourself making extensive modifications to get things organized and doing what you need them to do. Plus the templating schemes these days have gotten out of hand and you need to be up on the latest technology just to understand how they work (Smarty, BBCode, etc.).

The solution I’ve come up with is a set of PHP scripts and MySQL tables I’m calling the Information Review System (IRS). I’ve been using it myself for a couple of months to post some of my own review sites and it appears to get the job done. The basic scripts let you collect user information (name, email) and build user accounts that can then be used to post new information and reviews. The setup I’ve posted is organized geographically by default but one could definitely switch the country/state categories for other product categories (like media/genre for example). The owner of the script can also modify or delete listings easily using a simple web interface. Finally, the templating scheme is simple: an include file for the header and an include file for the footer. You can change these files all you want to “plop” the forms and outputs into any page format you like.

I’ll be working on adding more features to these scripts over the next several months and I welcome any feedback. Enjoy.

I’ve just spent the past 10 hours or so working on integrating PHPBB2 into singletracks.com. The installation is a snap, one of the easiest scripts I’ve ever installed. The problem, however, is figuring out how to integrate the thing into my existing user, state, and country tables and my overall navigation. Let me say it has not been easy.

I initially set out to create my own forum scripts (I know, it’s crazy). I had used PHPBB on Safarium before so I knew what a great program it was but I also knew how difficult it is to integrate into existing user schemes. I wanted to be able to use my existing HTML headers and footers, advertisement keys (I have a key for each page to tell the ad script which ad category to show), user data, etc. AND integrate all the forums into my existing content pages. For example, if you’re reading about a mountain bike trail in Alaska, you would be able to click a link on the page to join the discussion in the Alaska trail forum.

But building a (good) forum system from scratch is tough. There are tons of features that users expect from forums that are difficult to build yourself. In the past I’ve built everything from scratch because I have had a difficult time finding scripts that fit my needs exactly: from inventory management systems to data recommendations and sorting, I’ve built it myself. But this is VERY time consuming and I just have too many projects I would like to work on instead. So I decided to give PHPBB another shot.

So far I’ve had a few problems. For one, on singletracks and Safarium we use cookies to keep track of user logins while PHPBB uses sessions. Arguably sessions are the better way to go for logins but it’s nearly impossible to get the two in sync without destroying your current login scripts or modifying the crap out of PHPBB. I chose to modify PHPBB login scripts (and my own), and (for now) everything seems to be working ok. I’ve also spent the better part of my time syncing the singletracks user tables with the ones in PHPBB. So when a new user creates an account, their username and email are saved in two tables; once they update their location, that information is synced as well (and each time they modify their info).

I had also hoped that PHPBB would be using Smarty templates for the HTML output. Instead the latest version uses some strange templating format with .tpl extensions. It looks a little like Smarty but unfortunately BBEdit doesn’t recognize the syntax and all I see is gray text as opposed to the Christmas tree view I get for HTML, PHP, Perl, etc. The templates also make it tough (probably not impossible) to include other scripts. I would love to be able to include the singletracks header file in the PHPBB header template so I can use my existing headers (and not have to worry about 2 header and footer files each time I add a site navigation link).

Another recycled school paper… This time I’ve decided to post one of my essays from my Harvard Business School application in 2004. I was able to get an interview with Harvard but alas, they did not admit me (their loss!). I realize that my description in this essay may sound a bit oversimplified but my word limit was tiny (400 or so?). I’ve got some more thoughts on this subject that I’ll put down in a future blog entry.

Starting a new business is an exciting experience, but one fraught with potential risk and opportunities for ethical compromise. The competitive landscape of today’s business world is cutthroat and demands owners take every advantage possible. In starting our by owner vacation rental directory, Safarium.com, my partner and I were faced with an important question: to spam or not to spam?

Most Internet users are familiar with spam, the unwanted advertisements for “amazing new products” and “unbelievable business opportunities.” However, many do not realize that spam comes in many varied forms and flavors. For instance, in promoting our mountain biking trail information website, Singletracks.com, my wife and I took to competing mountain biking websites and sent carefully targeted messages to users asking them to check out our new site. We figured mountain bikers would be glad to know about our site and wouldn’t mind that we had sent them an unsolicited commercial message. This turned out to be correct for a while, until we were reported to the SpamCop.

SpamCop is a website that Internet service providers and individuals can use to report unwanted emails. One of our email recipients notified SpamCop of our transgression, and SpamCop in turn notified our web hosting company. In the end, our hosts told us in no uncertain terms that they would not tolerate spam and they would terminate our account if we spammed again.

Fast forward four years to a new website, Safarium.com, and a new web hosting company. My partner and I were beginning to have doubts about our business and wondered how we could increase traffic to our website. We were offering free one-year listings while other sites charged upwards of $100 and we were confident that property owners would greatly benefit from our service. My partner and I knew that our competition was bombarding property owners with unsolicited messages and we sorely wanted the same exposure. Besides, it was cost effective and we were offering a smoking deal to our customers. But somehow, this all seemed too familiar…

After mulling the issue for several weeks, my partner and I sided against spamming. Today our site boasts almost 100 properties in 19 states and we are proud that we made the ethical decision against questionable business tactics. We’ve even made a name for ourselves through adding features to prevent our property owners from becoming victims of spam. In the end, our decision has given us the pride and resolve to continue running our business with ethical and moral conviction.

Web sites that have horrible content or a complete lack of content have much higher advertisement click through rates (using adsense or affiliate links) than sites with useful, interesting content. Makes perfect sense, right? If an internet user mistakenly wanders onto a site or a page that sucks, he or she will use almost any exit available (a well positioned ad) to find the information he or she was looking for in the first place. It’s why these ad-only sites are able to flourish; just buy a domain that will get a decent google pagerank and plaster the site with ads for related products. If your site isn’t “sticky,” who cares! In fact, this is exactly what you want!

I found this phenomenon to be true on my own website in a couple of instances. In the early days before we had bike trails in all 50 states, several of our state landing pages were blank and we filled the space with affiliate links to guidebooks that covered that state. Lo and behold those pages had the highest conversion rate even though we didn’t have a bit of content! Nice.

More recently I’ve found that the conversion rate on our fairly new gear review section of the site has an above average click-through rate, probably because we don’t have much original content yet. I’m almost dreading the day when our users want to hang out there; how will we ever make any money if no one wants to leave!?

The stickiness curse is real and it’s unfortunate in its effects. Quality content providers don’t make any money and the scammers win. Unfair…

So I have most of my domain names registered with Yahoo! (or whatever third party registrar they use) and up until recently I have been satisfied with the pricing, the easy to use domain control panels, etc. A few months back one of the domains I registered, remlyrics.com was up for renewal (although I didn’t realize this). Yahoo! took the liberty of re-registering the domain for me, a nice service that most users will appreciate.

Unfortunately I had previously decided NOT to renew the domain since I hadn’t really updated the site and I was hosting it on my singletracks.com hosting account which was skewing some of my webstats (not to mention hogging bandwidth I desperately needed). It was my bad for not realizing this would be auto-renewed (prolly in my user agreement somewhere) so I resolved to make sure I didn’t have the same problem next year.

The Yahoo! domain control panel actually has a nice little link to use for canceling your service for a particular domain. I clicked the link and found a form to send outlining my reason for canceling, etc. I filled out the form and wrote that I didn’t want to drop the domain immediately since I had just re-upped for another year. Instead I just wanted it to fall off once it was up for renewal since I didn’t need it anymore (slim chance that someone would read this but I figured it was worth a shot, I really wasn’t that concerned either way). Anyway, I submit the form and get a message: 406 Not Acceptable. I had never seen this error code before (perhaps Yahoo! invented this one?) but I guessed it was a glitch that would be fixed in a day or so.

I’ve gone back to the page several times and keep hitting the same response. It’s as if Yahoo! is saying to me in a computer-sounding voice: “SORRY, YOUR REQUEST IS UNACCEPTABLE. I MUST NOW TERMINATE YOU…” (not sure how to enunciate computer voice?). Anyway, it’s pretty convenient that the cancel service page isn’t working but the purchase additional domains form works just fine. The real thing that makes me mad is that there is no form or contact email on the site to report problems like this (again, very convenient for the yahoos). I did find a phone number eventually but I don’t have the time nor the cell phone minutes right now to wait on hold to cancel a single domain name renewal.

Anyway, back in the day Yahoo! used to be the heat but clearly they’ve become overly focused on the bottom line, so much so that they make it nearly impossible to cancel a $10 a year service. Troubling…

Here’s a neat little trick I figured a little over a year ago with a couple of my PHP-driven websites. I noticed that Google and other search engines weren’t picking up some of my new database-driven content pages while other database-driven pages were picked up and updated regularly. Of course we’ve all read that the big search engines are making an effort to include these pages today, but coverage is far from complete even by the search engines’ own admissions. So maybe this trick isn’t that useful anymore but I thought I would share it in case I’m the only one who figured it out

The pages that were picked up by the search engines were my “state navigation pages” and their urls typically looked something like: database.php?state=CA&sort=name. The pages that weren’t getting picked up (which just so happened to be the bulk of my content) were those pages that had a url similar to: trail.php?id=14. Can you spot the pattern? Turns out the search engines weren’t interested in pages generated through numeric keys but they were interested in those pages whose URLs contained only letters (and question marks, ampersands, periods, etc.). I quickly threw together a little code to convert my number references to alpha characters: 1 = a, 2 = b, etc. I prolly could have used hex or something like that but I’m no computer scientist . So now a request for trail.php?id=ad was translated in my php script to call the trail data associated with primary key 14.

Wonder upon wonders, within a week all of my trail pages were picked up by Google. I’ve since taken most references to my alpha-code down since Google now indexes the bulk of my pages regardless of the URL. I understand that search engines most prefer pages with static looking URLs (they must think the more ghetto and unsophisticated your site is, the better the info) but I’d be interested to know how pages under my alpha scheme stack up to those under the numeric scheme (I’d guess they’re equal now but who knows?). What about a page whose url looks like: /trails/14 versus a page whose url is masked using my method: /trails/ad? Clearly the more data a site has, the more likely they are to use some kind of content database, yet these sites are penalized under current algorithms (unless they are sophisticated enough to look ghetto by building a static looking scheme like the /trail/14 example above). Crazy.

My scripts still accept either the alpha-code or the numeric id but I’ve removed all the alpha-code links for the site (as far as I know). Interestingly, Google still indexes both versions of the pages (often as supplemental results, but not always!). I’m sure this is bad and perhaps grounds for banishment from Google but an interesting result nonetheless, although I don’t know of any advantage to having multiple listings of the identical page in a search engine.