Category: Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

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7 Reasons Crazy Egg Will Be Successful

The eagerly anticipated launch of Crazy Egg (or do you say Crazyegg?) is here!

Crazy Egg allows you to “Visualize Your Visitors” and gives you a clear picture of where your visitors are clicking and allows you to enhance your site’s results. By inserting a simple few lines of code, Crazy Egg allows you to see where people are clicking on your site and generate reports via overlay, list and heatmaps. The product has already been used on sites at leading ecommerce retailers who have given it a big thumbs up. For my blog, Crazy Egg during helped me learn to rearrange and eliminate non-performing categories for a cleaner and more useful look, thanks Crazy Egg!

To see an example of the types of reports available – they have a demo that nicely cross promotes Pronet Advertising.

Crazy Egg will also likely one day make a great Harvard Business Case study on how to launch a web property for the following 7 reasons:

1) They have always been transparent since day 1, public and open about their idea and primary vision – no NDA talk EVER! (I hope everyone learns from this?)

2) They used case studies that focused on client’s needs of early adopters in the blogosphere to tout the products benefits. This made the value proposition more clear to people.

3) The above two items enabled viral marketing to occur organically. I can’t say enough about the importance of this.

4) They sought out critical influencers to try the product and then asked for feedback.

5) Crazy Egg actively used this feedback in a timely manner to innovate and improve the product in numerous ways. This laser sharp focus on customer listening was critical.

6) The product is amazingly simple to install and activate and this reduces the barriers to adoption and usage. Many web products skip this important step.

7) Upon launch, a refined, non-beta product was delivered giving an optimal customer experience. Interesting and all too rare a concept these days.

Congrats to Hiten Shah, Neil Patel and the rest of the Crazy Egg team, they’ve worked tremendously hard to make this product a success and I’m certain this hard work will pay off.

Start improving your web site now!

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Introducing nextgoogleceo.com 3.0

Lately, Google has been showing that is it participating in customer listening. This is good! I hope it continues.

Since I’ve started studying search engine marketing these past full months full time, I’ve been applying to Google – even with employee referrals of former co-workers and people I’ve met at Search Engine Strategies, etc. with out the applications executed in a way I consider appropriate – that is the politest way I can say it. I’d like to see that change, I’m presently seeking post-MBA level leadership roles within your Search Services/ Syndication, Advertising Sales, Marketing or other leading areas driving customer satisfaction and impacting revenue as you grow new product lines. Ideally I’d love to work within local, dMarc or mobile. I resubmitted (again) today for numerous post-MBA leadership positions.

So I launched nextgoogleceo.com which is a cute take of HR microsites (and discusses how next Microsoft is obsolete now that google is a common verb in our language), except that I’ve changed the wording a bit to demonstrate my increasingly dynamic understanding of both search and viral marketing and the future thereof. As soon as I hit send, I’m leaving for Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2006 and look forward to meeting your wonderful business unit leaders speak once again.

I would of course invite aspiring competitors or “next google’s” to come up and talk to me about their ideas as well. I look forward to learning and adding to my large and growing list of amazing people that are making the Internet a special place.

I look forward to seeing all of my fabulous friends at SES San Jose. It’s going to be both great fun and great learning. It’s the 3rd or 4th time I’ll be seeing some of you and I feel like I’m going on a trip to visit family…that is because that is exactly what it is! I look forward to meeting many new folks to and learning many new and great things. Thank you and please travel safely. See you in San Jose!

I leave you with this parting thought: In the book, Creating Customer Evangelists, the chapters on Mark Cuban stand out in regards to the hiring of Matt Fitzgerald as Chief Marketing Maverick: “Instead of selecting a marketing person from the NBA or the sports industry, Mark consciously made a decision to hire someone from outside the industry,” Fitzgerald says. “He believed the NBA marketing community was too in-bred so [Cuban] was looking for a marketing person with a fresh perspective and ideas.”

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Catch-up: Through the Voice of Peter Harkins

In our increasingly thriving tech community here in Chicago, one of the more unique people is Peter Harkins. Peter is incredibly bright and talented in terms of both programming and comnon sense beyond his years. He is responsible for the current version of the Sociable plugin. In fact, I recently learned that an introduction I made led to him getting a desirable programming project. Not that he needed the help, he turns down several programming job offers per week. Ah to be a programmer and not a leader capable of becoming one of the most notable agents of change management of the 21st century!

Anyway, I bring Peter up for a few reasons. He has an amazing a sick wit and yet is so humble. He is one of many of my new friends that I’m so glad to have met, I’d love to be in a position to partner with him someday to drive a company to greatness. First he wrote a nice summary of this week’s Vox Non-launch Party. Then there of course there is that now famous programming post.

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Cellular Startups and Carriers the Next Google(s)?

The Wall Street Journal had a very interesting article today about how celluar carriers are shying away from partnering with Yahoo! and Google and instead forming partnerships with smaller entities that they can control. It’s interesting and exciting to me because it’s a modified pay per call play – not just search. This is truly exciting and potentially extremely lucrative.

I would like to invite Brian Lent, CEO of Medio and Dan Olschwang, CEO of JumpTap to have an interview or podcast on this blog shortly. Learning more about the specific people involved at the major carriers would be most interesting to me and I might make the same offer if they were to contact me. Seeing this article gives me significant context to the comments in the recent Google earnings conference call. I look forward to networking more with people in the mobile marketing space.