Spencer H Fry

Story Time With Carbonmade

2009-11-11T10:00:00-06:00

Customer service is often an after-thought, but not for guys like Craig Newmark (craigslist) and Tony Hsieh (Zappos) who built their businesses around it. At Carbonmade, we deeply care about all of our customers and helping them the best we can, regardless whether they're paying or not. Here are three unrelated stories, involving a Carbonmade customer, a competitor's customer, and a guy who just happened across our service.

Story: Emily Hanhan, "Overbilled"

Emily Hanhan got in touch with us on January 22, 2009 because she was mistakenly being double-billed. Emily first paid for her Whoo! account through PayPal, then switched to credit card. Somehow PayPal — but we take full responsibility — failed to cancel her PayPal subscription when she switched payments.

She wrote us at 12:54 PM on that Thursday, and I quickly responded with an "I'll look into this for you" at 1:13 PM and contacted Jason over Campfire to help me look into the problem. We found the root cause, and Jason got back to Emily at 3:34 PM after handling the refund and manually cancelling her subscription. He wrote: "I also looked up all the transactions made via PayPal. Believe it or not, we actually incorrectly charged you $96! Practically a crisp $100 bill."

Instead of refunding the $96, we rounded up the refund to $100. It was our mistake and even though $100 is only $4 more than she was "owed" we felt like it was a better gesture to round up rather than nickel and dime the refund. Again, it was our fault and she was kind enough to contact us directly rather than submit a chargeback request through PayPal.

We thought that was all we'd hear from Emily.

Jason and I both have Google Alerts set up for any blog or website mention of Carbonmade and the next day we stumbled upon this article in Consumerist entitled Carbonmade Quickly Responds To Error, Fixes It In Less Than 4 Hours. Emily had written to Consumerist about her billing fiasco, but thankfully only had amazing things to say. Here's a snippet:

Having had a fast response from Carbonmade when I had an unrelated question a few months ago and not having much hope in Paypal, I emailed the main Carbonmade contact email at 12:30pm today. Not only did I get an email back 20 min later saying "Hey, we're looking into it," but by 3:30pm, they emailed me with an apology, explanation, and a Paypal refund was processed through. Not only that, they found that the mistake had occured not six but eight times, a $96 refund. Except they rounded it up to an even $100 for my troubles!

While we know $4 is not much, considering the state of the economy, I was not only impressed by the small act of generosity, but the quick response of this company.

I remember blushing when reading through the Consumerist post (and the comments). Here's one comment: "My heart goes pitter-patter when I hear of good companies like this. Yay, Carbonmade!" I remember being so proud.

She also wrote us privately: "Hey, I should be thanking you! Seriously, the way you handled the issue was fantastic, more than I could ask for. Even before today, I've recommended your site to many of my fellow design folks. But today just solidified what a great site/company Carbonmade is! :)"

What a fantastic moment.

Story: Ruth Kalinka, "Tea With the Competition"

On September 15th just after we moved into our new office, I tweeted out from the @carbonmade account asking if anyone was in the area and wanted to grab coffee or tea and chat Carbonmade. Ruth Kalinka lives in Philadelphia, but happens to find her way to New York City every so often, so she favorited the tweet to respond to when she was next in town.

On October 7th I received an e-mail from her asking if the offer to meet up was still on the table. Of course. Not thinking twice, I went to check her portfolio only to find that she wasn't a Carbonmade customer, but in fact was using a competitor of ours, ViewBook, for her portfolio. A little shocked, I asked her why she was using ViewBook and she responded: "Perhaps you can show me how I can do the same even better with Carbonmade?"

I was up for the challenge. Although I felt a bit odd meeting with someone I had expected to be a customer of Carbonmade, I went into our chat over tea at Oro Bakery ready to make my pitch. Also, simply to hear why she found ViewBook useful would be valuable to me.

I came away understanding why she was using ViewBook, and thinking maybe I had secured a new customer. She wrote me after our meeting: "Thanks so much for meeting up on Thursday. It was great chatting with you and finding out who's behind Carbonmade. I'm excited to see what's next for your company (and my portfolio)!" I didn't try to push Carbonmade on her. We just chatted our way through a bunch of different topics: her career as a freelancer, Carbonmade, ViewBook briefly, her experiences with clients, and other things.

All in all, I was able to make a connection with Ruth, share my experiences, and (hopefully) gently convince her of the benefits of using Carbonmade. She now often interacts with our @carbonmade account and is a friend of Carbonmade in more ways than one.

Story: Stewart Mackenzie, "Fire Drill Service Test"

Stewart Mackenzie's story is funny, because he's not a customer and I don't think has any intention of being one. However, "I wont forget you cause of it ;) my best wishes to you guys!" was the conclusion of an e-mail correspondence with him.

Stewart read my piece two weeks ago entitled What's a Non Programmer To Do? and wanted to test my customer service response time: did I really practice what I preach? That evening at 9:50 PM Stewart wrote an e-mail to support@carbonmade.com with the subject line "firedrill service test" and the body: "This is a fire drill for the customer service of carbonmade."

Now I happened to have my e-mail open at the time — as I often do — clicked the reply button as quickly as possible and in under a minute wrote back: "Hi Stewart. :) Told yah I'm fast." Then for fun I told Jason in Campfire to respond too. He added two minutes later: "Spencer told me some alarms went off. Do we need to call the fire department?"

He naturally got a kick out of it and responded three minutes later with: "awesome, really really awesome." This was a riot and Jason and I had a lot of fun with it. We continued to toss e-mails back and forth with Stewart. Asked him about how he'd heard about us, what he was working on, etc., and ended the correspondence as friends. I gave him my personal e-mail address and told him to contact me any time with any entrepreneurial questions as he's a fellow entrepreneur working on a startup with his wife. We didn't gain a customer, but we gained a friend and now have a great story to share.

Finding the Needles in the Haystack

2009-11-04T08:19:00-06:00

We share offices with Harvest and often rib each other when our competitors come out with something new. With the release of Haystack last week by 37signals, who have only produced small business software until now, it was my turn to take a few in the ribs. Haystack is self-proclaimed to "find the right Web Designer for your next project" and has a bit of a portfolio twist to it, but it really doesn't worry me.

The More Competitors The Merrier

There's a lot to worry about when running a startup, but worrying about your competition is one of your least concerns. Competition means your market is big enough to support multiple companies. If you find yourself with a new competitor — or hopefully multiple competitors — it's time to rejoice, especially if they're venture-backed.

If a Venture Capitalist is backing a competitor of yours, you know you're working in a large market with a lot of upside. VCs generally give their first consideration to the quality of the team, but they also take market potential very seriously. A bootstrapped startup on the other hand may not worry about market potential as much, they just see a niche and hope to create a market as they go along. (That's true to a certain extent, anyway.) But VCs always worry about the market, hence VC backing for a competitor proves the market is out there.

I'm not advocating that you completely ignore your competitors. We don't. But if you're looking to them for key ideas and not focusing on your own product and your own users, then you're going to be a step behind. Typical things I look for in a new competitor are: who is behind it and what have they done before? Here are a few more things to keep in mind:

Teams of two or fewer who are moonlighting aren't a cause for concern initially — until they start bootstrapping for real. A team working in their off-hours won't be able to compete with you if you're working full-time. If they do come out with something innovative, you'll have enough time to react.
If the competitor's product is simply a carbon copy of ours, then I'm delighted, not worried. I can name a couple dozen Carbonmade copycats off the top of my head — teams that even copy our layout options and color schemes. They'll always be playing catch-up and are hundreds of thousands of users behind us. They tend to grab a few thousand users and then give up. You rarely see a second version from these people.
Has this new competitor been successful with something else? This can be cause for minor concern. At Carbonmade, I was initially concerned when Krop released their portfolio tool after doing such a good job with their creative job market, but then again that was just a validation of our market size. (Side note: Krop was actually an early advertiser on Carbonmade before they launched their portfolio tool.) Haystack falls into the same category as Krop as it too was launched as another product by a successful team.

Close But No Cigar

So as I say, Haystack falls into my to-be-concerned-about category because of who is behind it. But at the same time it's different enough so that I can brush it off after a brief look-through. Haystack so far is simply a means of finding a new web designer, and that's not too worrying. They have implemented limited portfolio-like features and could, if they chose to, spend some time building out an online portfolio system, but I don't think that's the direction they'll take.

As Jason Fried wrote when introducing the product, “So there's another question we've been hearing a lot: ‘Can you recommend a web designer to help us with a project?' Now we'll have an answer to that question as well: Haystack.” They built Haystack to divert all the requests they were getting for web designer recommendations. I don't think he envisions the product being any more than a tool for offloading those requests. It also serves as a supplement to their job board.

Apart from that, in the end I think Haystack fails to produce real value for the job seeker and is more of a giant advertising billboard. My evidence to support this claim is that at the moment there are several companies listed there that have no intention of taking on designers work. They simply want their brand shown off. Many of these companies aren't even doing consulting work any more; like us, they did that in the past before releasing their own products.

Haystack is also choosing to charge web designers instead of charging the people who are hiring. And, as anyone who works in the creative arena knows: The best designers aren't going to pay for references because they have jobs coming in all of the time while the poorly-established people don't have the money to spend, hence you'll be left with the designers of middling quality. For this product to be truly successful, you need to be able to attract the best creative people. But don't get me wrong: they're still going to make a killing on this product.

Is Carbonmade Going to Compete With Haystack?

In my earlier article, 100,000 Users And So Can You, I mention in the second to last section that we spent all of 2008 working on a second product that we ended up scrapping. We even had a successful private beta. Well, that product would in fact have been a direct competitor for Haystack. So at least behind the scenes Carbonmade is a closer competitor to Haystack than it seems to be.

It's been very interesting for to me to see how 37signals chose to tackle the same problem that we came up against: it's just not that easy to find a web designer out there. Like 37signals, even now we get a dozen e-mails a week from people hoping we can recommend a designer to them even though we stopped doing consulting nearly two years ago. Their solution is a lot different from how we chose to tackle the problem. A lot different. I don't think there's necessarily one right or a wrong way to approach this challenge, but I don't think either that they've taken the best approach by any means.

I won't comment on the solution we came up with, but I will wrap up this article by reiterating my earlier point. Having competition is a good thing. Besides its validation of market potential, it allows you to see how other people tackle the problems you face yourself. This is not threatening, it's informative.

What's A Non-Programmer To Do?

2009-10-28T09:44:56-05:00

I wrote a comment for Hacker News back in August in response to a guy's question about what a non-programmer should do in a startup. My response received 164 up votes and is the tenth most popular comment of all time. In this article I add some depth to most of my previous twenty bullet points.

Product Development & Road Map

As the business guy, you've got to look at everything with a big picture mentality. Think macro, not micro. I've got to think about what we can do today that will bring us to where we want to be in six months, one year, two years, maybe further along. You don't want to spend all your time thinking too far in advance (dreaming, in other words), but you definitely need to have some sort of road map.

Luckily, everyone on our three-person team thinks about things in a different way. Dave and Jason are meticulously focused on the present — they're doing the daily design and development on the new Carbonmade release — whereas I'm looking toward the post-release phase. Dave often says that he can't let himself think about the future or he wouldn't be able to focus on the present development. This isn't to say that I'm not involved with the day-to-day on our new product release, or that Dave and Jason aren't involved in our road map; but we all need our focus to be on different areas.

So while Dave and Jason are concentrated on getting our new release to market, I can take a more macro approach and focus on what's next. We'll then come together, go over my plans, and decide jointly where we want to go from there.

Managing Cash Flow & Budgeting Bills

I've told a lot of entrepreneurs that I think managing cash flow is one of the most important challenges. Sadly, this is something you learn over time and with experience. It's really instinct — knowing whether $500 is better spent, for example, on marketing or development. It can't really be taught.

At Carbonmade, I routinely break down our expenses in Excel and create quarterly budgets based on our projected revenue, payroll, merchant fees, and expenses. I don't project beyond three months, because that would be irrelevant for us. I work with Jason to estimate our fluctuating server costs and other expenses.

It's my job to give Dave the thumbs up on a new MacBookPro purchase or respond to Jason's request for a better DNS solution. (Side note: We're about to make the switch to DynDNS.) I've got to make sure we don't overspend and that we plan our budget accordingly. For example, upgrading our servers may be better put off until next month, and I need to make that decision.

Since I handle our budget and cash flow, paying our bills is a natural progression from that. While we use AmEx for most purchases, especially the big ones like server expenses, I write all of our checks — from payroll to marketing expenses to office rent — when a credit card doesn't make sense. I keep the checkbook for the company and make sure that every bill is accounted for.

Customer Service

Providing excellent customer service singlehandedly transformed Carbonmade from a side project into a profitable company. I can confidently say that, as pro-active customer response is the most significant “update” to our product we've released to date. When Carbonmade began, we were still a full-time consulting company, and we didn't have time to respond to our customers. As the company began to grow, I stepped in and made it my initiative to handle all incoming e-mails right away and add a human touch.

The first thing I did was go back and respond to a backlog of about six months of e-mail, apologizing for our silence and explaining why we didn't respond. In the same e-mail I would ask if anyone still needed help. Most people were very understanding when I explained our situation. From that point on, I never leave an e-mail unanswered when I go to sleep and I make sure to answer any new e-mails that accumulated while I was sleeping before I shower and brush my teeth in the morning. Throughout the day I answer all e-mail as soon as it comes or at least as soon as I can get to it.

Now, you shouldn't do what we did and not answer e-mails the first six months. You should be on top of this from day one. If I e-mail a new startup and don't get a response in a timely fashion, it's really a turn-off. It's not a lot of work and should be a priority, especially early on.

Investors

Probably because we are a self-funded company that's never taken financing, we get a lot of investors reaching out to us. While we're not opposed to taking financing at some point, we're in the unique position of not needing it right away, if ever. And that's really attractive to outside investors!

The e-mails from investors come in weekly, and while I haven't taken any meetings to date, I do take the time to respond in every case and to answer any questions they have. We're focused on pushing out our new version, so I tell any investor who e-mails me that while we're interested in meeting at some point — if that's what we decide to do — we're pushing any meetings back until after our new release.

And if we do decide to meet somebody, I'll be the guy there pitching our company, listening to what they have to say and answering any questions. It's going to be a lot of work and I'm not necessarily looking forward to the distraction when it happens. While we're not opposed to financing, we want to see how our revenue projects after our new product is released.

Incoming E-Mail

We don't just get customer service-related e-mails, we also receive lots of partnership requests, e-mails from investors, sales-related e-mails, marketing opportunities, etc., and I handle all of these. Timeliness matters here too, but it's generally not as important as with customer service e-mails. I try to get back to everyone before the end of the day, but these e-mails usually take longer to think through and write. With customer support, I've seen every question a thousand times (literally), so that's a lot easier for me to do quickly.

The trick to answering these e-mails is not to close the door on any opportunity. Keep everything open to discussion. Be friendly and don't shoot anyone down. If you're presented with an “opportunity” that's totally ridiculous, then you just politely decline, but there's no reason to be judgmental.

Social Networking (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

I wrote an article on how I use Twitter for business entitled Let's Be Friends two weeks ago, so the details are in there for you to read if you're interested. Social networking has definitely impacted our business and allows our customers to reach us outside of e-mail. It's the kind of experience that feels far more personal and allows us to publicize our brand in a way that blogging and answering e-mails do not.

Marketing (AdWords, Text Links, Banners, etc.)

Marketing has definitely taken over my life the past few weeks and will continue to do so for the rest of 2009. Carbonmade barely spent a dollar on advertising until a few weeks ago when I began experimenting with Google's AdWords and banner advertising on various websites. I'm in the process of building out our brand.

While I'm waiting until the next version of Carbonmade ships to go all out on marketing, I'm beginning to test the waters with various ads and see what performs best. I have learned for example that: You need to run Google AdWords for at least 30 days for their algorithm to work to your advantage. Most people don't know that your cost-per-click will decrease as Google AdWords learns more about your account. So you should get started early with a budget of at least $5/day to begin feeding data into your account.

Accounting

I know a lot of startups spend very little time on their own accounting. Although we could just hand over our statements for every quarter to our amazing accounting firm, I prefer to input everything into Excel myself. (I don't like any of the recent accounting programs out there. There are just too many unneeded features.)

Every Monday I take a few hours to input all of our expenses and revenue from the previous week into an Excel template I created a few years back. This way I can easily do our budgeting and cash flow. People think I'm crazy to bother with this, but I think they're crazy not to. I have a clear picture of every dollar and cent going in and out of our company from day to day, and this really helps me plan our road map.

Legal

Working with lawyers is not an inborn talent. If you don't know what your needs are in advance, you can spend a lot of money needlessly. If you don't do your preparation and carefully outline everything you think you need before going into a meeting, you'll lose time, which is in turn billable hours.

Luckily, Carbonmade is my 5th LLC, so I have a lot of experience dealing with lawyers. I don't go down side alleys and don't need a lot of explanation from our lawyers, because I've done it all before. For those of you who lack this experience, it's just a necessary business growing pain, and I promise you it gets easier.

One of the main things you'll learn is that there are many legal things that you can take care of yourself, hence don't need to get your lawyer involved. I'm fortunate that my law firm Hodgson Russ taught me early on “how to use a lawyer,” explaining what's worth calling them about and what I can do myself.

But you can't operate without your lawyers. First and foremost you need to set up an Operating Agreement between you and your partners. This is often overlooked early on, but it is the single most important document you can have your lawyers draft. I mean good, experienced lawyers: I nearly got burned in one of my early startups as a result of having a Yale law school student draft my Operating Agreement rather than a real law firm.

Next, there will be lots of miscellaneous paperwork: filing your company with the state, writing Terms of Service, perfecting your Privacy Policy, having your lawyer look over key contracts, writing up templates for contractors and personnel, submitting your trademark, etc. Whenever you think you've got a breather from writing checks to your lawyer, another stray item turns up. But these are necessary evils.

Networking Events

One of the major responsibilities of the “business guy” (or girl) is to get the word out about your company by meeting people in your community. This is especially important early on. Usually you can coast after you've met the right people because they'll introduce you to new people and you won't have to be quite as active discovering a community. It's kind of like the investor thing: once you have a good core group of friends around you, people will want to be introduced to you rather than the other way around.

I moved to New York City in September, 2006, not knowing a soul in the entrepreneurial and tech communities. For an entire year and a half I attended as many events as I could, including the NY Tech Meetup, which was a lot more tight-knit back in the day, and any other event I could find on GarysGuide.

It took about six months to become confident in myself and my pitch, and to figure out how to best interact with the people I wanted to know. It then took another six months to a year to find my way into what you might call the inner circle. Now I know everyone in NYC, or if I don't know them I know at least one person who does.

It's a time thing and something that your business guy needs to go to work on early. It would be nice to think that we could all be lone wolves, superior to the occasional indignities of networking, but the fact is, most of us need to reach as many important people as we can.

Blogging

While I don't update our blog as often as I'd like to, it gets quite a lot of traffic — especially when we post an interview with a top designer. Companies handle blogs differently. Some write a lot about the nuts and bolts of their current operations and others simply post company updates. I take the second approach with Carbonmade, because I don't have time to do anything more with the blog at this point. I do send out interviews every so often, so that makes up for it somewhat.

I won't linger over the importance of blogging. It's fairly obvious these days that writing blog posts gets people talking about your company and brings them to your website. Keep in mind, though, that there are now more and more avenues for achieving these goals.

Market Research

You have to stay up-to-date with what your competitors are doing. Carbonmade has a lot of them. Make sure you sign up for all of their services, keep their RSS feeds in your blog, and subscribe to all of their newsletters. It's easy work, honestly, because mainly you just want to keep tabs on them. If you're doing a good job yourself you won't have to worry about spoiling your day feeling envious or resentful.

Since Carbonmade was the first online portfolio around — and is now the largest as of Monday, October 19, 2009 — we've got a nice head start over our competition. We've never had to look to others for ideas. We generate plenty of those on our own. However, it's important to be able — as quickly as possible — to spot anything your competitors are doing that's attracting customers away from you. Is there a small feature or a way they do something that's giving them an edge somehow? You've got to find those.

Writing The Copy

While Dave wrote the initial copy for all of Carbonmade, I've since gone in and added a Frequently Asked Questions, taken over the blogging, re-written our About area, and put in other stuff. It's important to keep the site fresh and add to your support documentation as things change. Even though Carbonmade is three years old, I still find myself adding a new question every few weeks.

You don't have to be an expert writer to keep your startup's copy updated and fresh. Just write clean sentences that make sense and aren't too wordy. One of my rules is not to over-think anything. Just write it how you'd say it and then go back and revise later. Some of our FAQs are one-line answers and that's fine if one line does the trick.

Dave and I still collaborate on the bigger pieces, as he's an excellent writer. Recently, Carbonmade was featured as a case study by Microsoft and Dave and I worked together to piece together the final copy. This was after Jason and I were phone interviewed by Microsoft for the rough copy they put together.

Advertising Requests

While Carbonmade doesn't accept advertising any more, there was about a one-year period during 2008 where we sold a small ad on the right side of our portfolio listing for supplemental income. We've never put advertisements on the actual portfolio pages, but our search seemed appropriate enough.

We'd get inquiries from lots of different brands looking to buy out this space, so I'd keep a simple Excel file organized with their name, length of the campaign, and the price. Since we only sold one ad at a time, it wasn't difficult to keep track of. The difficult bit was sorting out the real advertisers from the pretenders. Nearly half of all the inquiries were a total waste of time.

Merchants

If you accept credit cards or PayPal for your web service, you know the headache of dealing with merchants. It's probably the least satisfying part of the job. We're fortunate to have worked with Chase Paymentech since our beginning, which has been a breath of fresh air for me after having worked with Authorize.net and others.

What I do in this area is to handle all the communication between our company and our merchants. There was a lot of paperwork when we switched LLC names last year, and then last month we changed our business address, so I had to update that and get things squared away there. I also get monthly statements from them that I read over, input into Excel, and file away.

With PayPal, it's mainly logging in, generating monthly statements and making daily withdrawals into our checking account. PayPal doesn't have an option to do this automatically, so it's just an annoying task that I have to do daily so that our money doesn't pile up in our PayPal account. Their savings account is rubbish. We use ING Direct for that.

Phone Calls: Incoming and Outgoing

While we chose early on not to provide phone support for our customers due to the time drain, our phone number appears on credit card statements. I'll get about a phone call a week from a customer who goes to my cell phone routed through Google Voice. It's typically a parent asking about the charge, me asking whether they have a son or daughter who's an artist, them saying they do and then being pleased that we're helping their kid show off their work.

I also like the idea of CEO Office Hours that Jason Fried introduced over at 37signals. It's definitely something I'd like to do at some point in Carbonmade's future. It's just tough to lock myself into a set of hours each week to take calls.

I find myself having to place phone calls on behalf of our company for the most random things. Just the other day I was talking with our health insurance provider to change some routing numbers. It's random, but I'm on the phone a few times a week.

100,000 Users And So Can You

2009-10-21T13:14:00-05:00

This is the history of Carbonmade from its start in early 2006 up to our reaching 100,000 registered users in March 2009 and how we got there. It’s not a story of rock stars and energy drinks; just three guys working on something they enjoy and grinding it out every day. When Carbonmade started, it was nothing more than a small tool for Dave to update his portfolio. Today it’s a healthy, thriving business supporting the three of us full-time without any outside investment.

Before Carbonmade

The stars were first aligned in 2004, when Jason and Dave began working together formally, having founded a small design studio called nterface. They’d dabbled on projects together as early as 2001 as freelancers. Jason was working out of San Francisco and Dave was in Chicago. Jason has since moved to Chicago. They did a lot of great design work for bands, popular websites like Scribd and MerchNow, record labels and other websites: see Dave’s portfolio for more of their work.

While Dave and Jason were making a name for themselves running their design studio, I was running a startup out of my college dorm room at Yale called TypeFrag, founded in 2003 and later sold in January, 2007. I was a brash nineteen-year-old when I started it, but it wasn’t the first thing I’d done. I’d been running Internet startups since I was eleven years old and I have some stories to tell if you happen to be in NYC and want to grab a beer. Just to name a few:

A small ISP I started back in 1995 as a summer job was shut down after a run-in with the FBI. Apparently our servers were compromised and government computers were hacked using them.
A few years later, I was running some web hosting servers out of my parent’s house on the Yale campus (my parents are professors there and this was before I attended). I was forced to shut that down after a phone call from the IT department on the night of the Oscars. They thought our house’s bandwidth usage was my mom, a film professor, running some sort of Oscar-night website.
Then came Game Communications. My business partner at TypeFrag and I entered a business plan contest at Case Western Reserve University (where he was a student) and took the first prize of $75,000.

That all sounds great, but I was never truly happy with what I was doing until I met Dave and Jason and began working on Carbonmade. Carbonmade just felt like home. I’ve always been fascinated with art and design — my grandfather having been a full-time painter, my father a painter on occasion, and my mom a film professor. I had an artsy childhood to say the least.

The Early Carbonmade Years. How’d We Get Started?

In early 2006, Dave came up with the idea of creating a simple tool to enable him to manage his personal portfolio. We all know the pain of having to keep things updated manually. So Dave designed and Jason coded the first version. Although it was originally conceived just for Dave and a few of his design buddies to use, we opened Carbonmade up to everyone after many requests. “Who the hell would want to use this,” we thought. We were amazed.

At the request of many of our new users, we released two quick bursts of updates: one two months after Carbonmade was first introduced and one six months after that. The first consisted of minor bug fixing and tweaks. The second had some more significant features: we launched Whoo! a paying plan at $12/month. (Originally everything was free, but server costs add up in a hurry. We just hoped to offset those costs.) The other two things we added were captions for images — for which we’d had many requests — and a strategy for building up our extremely popular portfolio listing. The portfolio listing was originally just for us to be able to track the few dozen people who were signing up, but it quickly grew into something unwieldy.

How’d We Market Carbonmade?

A few bloggers started sharing Carbonmade with their communities and growth began to pick up: there were 3,504 portfolios on August 7th, 2006, when Tom Coates wrote his review (the first detailed description). Our appearance was much the same then as it is now, though. It’s fun to look back at how ahead of the curve Dave’s design was; some people think Carbonmade is less than half a year old.

Throughout most of those first couple of years, we never imagined that Carbonmade would reach 1,000 portfolios, let alone 100,000. But things really picked up quickly, and it was all through organic growth. We’ve spent only a few thousand dollars advertising Carbonmade.

Organic growth is funny. People we never thought would use it are using Carbonmade. We figured we’d get illustrators and photographers, but we had no clue going in that makeup artists, architects, fashion models, and landscape artists would use it too. We have an incredible variety of creative people from all walks of life. How could we anticipate that São Paulo, Brazil would be the city where we’re most in demand? And that half our traffic would come from overseas?

We are very fortunate to have enthusiastic people using Carbonmade. It shows once again that if you build something that people enjoy using and care about, it’ll market itself. We benefit from the people using Carbonmade sharing not only their portfolio but their positive experiences with their friends. Creative people are likely to be friends with other creative people who turn out to need portfolios themselves, and this creates a rapidly expanding circle. Unlike users of Facebook or Twitter, our users derive a direct benefit from showing off their portfolio, which in turn is free marketing for our service.

I also attribute our success to our commitment to making sure everyone has a good experience. We constantly say: “This thing is big. We’re no longer just building it for Dave and his friends. We’ve got hundreds of thousands of people to worry about.” It’s what keeps us up at night. It’s no longer about what’s best for us, it’s what’s best for our users. I hope that doesn’t come across as bullshit, because it’s the truth.

Then There Were Three (2007 and 2008)

Fast-forward to 2007. It’s funny how small the world is. Dave and I actually first talked back in 2006 when I asked him to design some business cards for TypeFrag. He declined the job. I was later able to convince Dave and Jason to design and develop Uncover — a Yelp-like restaurant and bar review website geared toward nightlife — and we all just clicked. Uncover proved difficult to get launched and slowly fizzled out. But I had met Dave and Jason, so it all worked out.

Our working relationship developed out of the camaraderie we felt working together on Uncover, and I began doing odds and ends for Carbonmade unofficially in 2007. I then joined nterface officially as an equal equity partner and the “everything else” guy in January 2008. It might have happened months earlier, but we put off the legal stuff until the start of 2008 for accounting and other reasons.

When I joined nterface in 2008, we were still doing client work to make ends meet (and working on a second app — more on that later). But after drastically overhauling our attitude to Carbonmade — within a very short period of time — we changed our little side project into a legitimate business. Since then we’ve become profitable enough through Carbonmade to be able to focus all our efforts on its development.

While from time to time we released a few changes in 2008 — most significantly portfolio search and PayPal as a form of payment (PayPal really helps for International customers) — 2008 was sort of a lull for us, except of course for our amazing growth. We just didn’t get all that much done on Carbonmade.

Why were there no significant updates? Well, making the transition from doing client work to a small startup (even wrapping up a few small projects) takes a large shift in attitude and takes more time than you might think to get adjusted. (It’s also something I hope to talk about in 2010 at SXSW with Danny Wen if our panel gets approved.) We still did put in thousands of hours of behind-the-scenes work. There was also adding a third person to the mix, which naturally took a while to get used to, as well as Jason’s move to Chicago. These all presented new challenges.

However, the biggest thing that held us back was that instead of going all out on Carbonmade, we decided as a group to create a second product for creative people. We spent the first nine months of 2008 developing this. We put so much time into it that we even have a working beta that’s been seen by, and praised, by a dozen or so of our close friends. However, none of the three of us were satisfied with how it turned out. And above all, we didn’t enjoy working on it. Not only that, we’re only three people and that’s hardly enough to support one product, let alone two. So that was a mistake.

All wasn’t lost, though, as we did a lot of research and development for this product, and we’ll be able to incorporate parts of it into Carbonmade. We learned a lot, and, best of all, we found our calling, which is to continue to develop Carbonmade. 2008 was a year of transition and self-discovery for us, and we’ve emerged with renewed purpose. Sometimes you can trust your instincts, other times you have to learn from your mistakes. Now more than 100,000 people have spoken. Carbonmade is our future, and nobody could be happier about that than we are.

100,000 Users and Beyond (2009)

As I mentioned earlier, by the end of 2008 we felt that Carbonmade was our future and we needed to focus all of our attention on that. We reached the benchmark of 100,000 users in March 2009, and we’ve continued to grow at a fast pace, with 158,000 users as of this publication — nearly 10,000 new users a month.

While our good fortune continues, we are working at a fever pitch on our new version. It’s taking longer than expected, but we don’t subscribe to the "Release Early, Release Often" philosophy. Admittedly, we’re perfectionists to a fault, but when you’ve got 158,000 pleased users, you can’t simply disrupt things with a series of bells-and-whistles updates just to follow a silly motto. You have to take your time and do things right or you risk upsetting a lot of people. But more on that in another article.

We’ve got a fancy new office with the boys and girls of Harvest, Dave has moved to New York City, Jason is coming in early 2010, and things are picking up quickly. We are now more accomplished than ever before, and hope to get out something new and significantly different shortly. Keep your eyes and ears open — and, of course, remember that successful companies are not built overnight.

Let's Be Friends

2009-10-13T23:57:00-05:00

I signed @carbonmade up for Twitter back on March 19, 2008, mainly to protect our trademark. I didn't start tweeting, though, until the second half of 2008. I didn't really get into it daily until 2009, when I realized Twitter could be all about communicating quickly with lots of mentions of your brand. The following is what I learned along the way and the process of how I got there.

Search Made Things Easy

The difficulty of finding and interacting with followers all changed when Summize was introduced. Summize, for people who don’t know, was the precursor to Twitter Search. Before Summize, I had no way to find @carbonmade members. It was like talking into a void and hoping that someone would hear you.

I caught wind of Summize around a month before Twitter acquired them in July, 2008 and began to use it heavily. Through Search, I could follow prevalent topics around our brand — something I wasn’t able to do earlier. The keywords I mainly followed were "carbonmade" and "online portfolio". I could certainly have searched for other keywords as well, but I focused mainly on these two.

There's always the devilish side of your brain that says you should search out your competitors and interact with people who mention their name, but I could never bring myself to drag them through the mud. I'd rather compete on other things. That said, it is beneficial to scope out what people are saying about the other guys, but I don’t do that obsessively.

Publicizing Your Twitter

I never feel comfortable promoting anything social media-related like our @carbonmade Twitter account until we have a strong presence. Otherwise you potentially scare off customers, because of how small and unestablished you look. It’s one of those reasons I’m against having forums on your website until you’ve got a large userbase, because otherwise it looks barren. (I’m actually against having them at all, but that’s for another article.) But even without promotion, after a period of searching, following, and interacting with our members on Twitter, our account slowly began to grow.

After acquiring several hundred followers, I thought it was time to introduce Twitter to our everyday Carbonmade members who are (1) either on Twitter and haven’t tweeted out the word Carbonmade or (2) haven’t signed up for Twitter yet. The only way to reach these people was to publicize our Twitter account on our blog, link it up directly in our sidebar, and put it in the footer of every email we send out. (I also include a link to our blog in every outgoing e-mail.)

The first two ideas — blogging about it and linking it up directly in your sidebar — are not necessarily novel, but I think my idea of putting a link to Twitter in the bottom of every email is to some extent, at least as recently as early 2009. Your members don’t always read your blog, so it’s hard to ensure that everyone is going to see it in the sidebar. That’s why you have to put it in your outgoing emails, which are typically read all the way through (especially support/sales e-mails). It was around January of 2009 when I thought to do this and I could simply feel the effect it had on our user count (this was before TwitterCounter and similar services).

Timeliness Counts

Even with Twitter Search in place, and being able to go to the website and search for keywords, it was still a cumbersome process that wasn’t very time efficient. You had to search, open up a new window with the person’s tweet, follow them, reply to them, and repeat. Lots of windows and lots of clicks. It consumed an hour a day or more and I was desperately searching for a better solution.

I experimented with the built-in searches through services like CoTweet (web browser), Twitterfon (iPhone), and Tweetie (iPhone). None made this approach simple. I actually handled our Twitter account entirely through Tweetie’s iPhone app for several months, but typing on an iPhone and keeping track of everything that was being said was no picnic.

I began to fall behind on tweets, as we were getting dozens a day, and if I skipped one day then I’d have twice the work to do to catch up. Don’t even think about skipping a Friday and a weekend and trying to catch up with everything on Monday. I’d be looking at a hundred tweets that I’d have to follow and reply to if I did that.

The introduction of Tweetie’s desktop app for the Mac solved all my problems and made things so much simpler. Tweetie allows you to save searches and when you re-open it, you’re automatically placed where you left off. Genius. It made all the difference, as I wouldn’t have to perform a search and scroll down to the person I last replied to.

Now, you should use this method until you’ve reached about 1,000 to 1,500 people following you on Twitter. I suggest you change your practice after your account looks something like "Following: 1,254, Followers: 1,400." At that point what I did was unfollow all people I was following (e.g. 1,254) excluding myself, Dave and Jason — my two business partners — and anyone else who works on or for Carbonmade. Your account will look more authoritative and people are more likely to follow you if your ratio of followers/following is impressive.

No matter what tool you use, and regardless whether you start unfollowing people at around 1,500, the single most important thing to do is to stay on top of tweets. To have any success at all, you need to make this a part of your daily routine, an activity set aside for several times a day. Why? Because these unassuming people who have just tweeted out “carbonmade” don’t know you’re paying attention. So contacting them three days later with a “Hey, John, thanks for using Carbonmade. I hope things are working out well” is far less effective than grabbing their attention within a few hours of their having shared their Carbonmade portfolio with their followers.

Case Study: Paying for Followers

I often debate with friends about the best way to use Twitter for business. One thing we often discuss is whether paying for followers is a smart move or not. Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo, was the first to take the side of “yes” when he proposed paying Twitter $250,000 to be on their Featured User List, which brings in several thousand new followers a day and is hand-selected by the brass at Twitter. While this was mainly for show, Jason had a simple point: The more followers you have, the more people your message will reach — especially with re-tweeting — and this is valuable for any brand.

Paying for followers is a gray area for me as I’ve always been one to play it strictly above-board. So while you’re not hurting anyone by using a service like TwitterCounter to buy advertising space, you are artificially inflating your followers count, which seems somewhat shady to me. The idea behind paying for followers is that the greater your follower count, the easier you’ll be able to accumulate new legitimate followers who see that thousands of people are following you and then conclude that you must be an authoritative source.

You can only debate this for so long before someone tries it in the spirit of research. One of my friends bought $300 worth of advertising on TwitterCounter, which yielded him close to 3,000 new followers — some bots, but others simply new Twitter users looking for accounts to follow. He reported positive results: His follower count is now trending upwards at a greater rate than it ever was before. So I’m hesitant about advising you do this, I do think it’s something to consider seriously.

Case Study: Chat

For the past six months, I’ve been starting impromptu chats with @carbonmade’s followers by tweeting out something like: “Join the party! Chatting still at http://drop.io/carbonmade/chat. Come chat with me and win a free Whoo! upgrade.” Eric Friedman beat me to the punch in discussing why you should talk to your customers and let them talk to each other, using my chats at Carbonmade as his example. He summarized my position well: “Many companies have two way communication via blogs and comments — but there is something powerful about a real time chat where you actually get to interact with the folks behind a business.” Try it out. I think you’ll see positive results as I have.

Case Study: Contests

After many successful months starting chats through Twitter, I got the idea – mainly inspired by SquareSpace’s #squarespace Twitter iPhone challenge earlier this year – to giveaway a free Whoo! upgrade if people completed my sentence. For example, just last week I tweeted out “Tweet out ‘You should sign up for @carbonmade because...’ and win a free Whoo! upgrade. Feel free to be creative about it. ;)” I’ve done this three or four times now and always get great responses. My favorite from last week was by @jfcorcoran tweet that linked to a hilarious Caddyshack video of the infamous gopher: “You should sign up for @carbonmade because it make you feel like this!”

This has the obvious effect of treating your loyal @carbonmade followers to a free prize (an upgraded account), gets their creative juices flowing, and exposes your brand to people on Twitter who follow them but may not have heard of you. Since most people follow and are followed by people who are similar to them, in our case it’s likely that we’re reaching more creative folks who follow these people.

Value

One of peoples’ main gripes about Twitter (at least early on) was that it adds no value to your daily life – and could be seen simply as a procrastination tool. While there may be some truth in that, it’s a lot different for businesses. A clear example of Twitter being exceptionally good for business is what has happened at Dell. Dell reported back in December 2008 that it had made $1 million in revenue through Twitter. And then more recently The New York Times reported that by June 2009, Dell had earned $3 million by this means.

While those figures are larger than your average business is making on Twitter, they should give you an idea of how effective marketing on Twitter can be. For Carbonmade, although it’s more difficult for me to quantify how much we’ve earned, I do know that we’ve signed up a few hundred people who must not have had a clue what Carbonmade was before hearing about us through Twitter. We track all signups from the twitter.com URL in our backend.

Not only are we gaining more users through Twitter, but we’re also interacting with our members in a way that was never previously possible. I spend plenty of time each day — as mentioned previously — replying to people’s questions and interacting with them. This near real-time interaction allows me to be more living presence than a simple e-mail address. This translates into more loyal members, because they see you as more of a person and less of a company.

The final value it adds is the quick snippets of information you can send out that can be re-tweeting to hundreds or thousands of people who may never have heard of your brand. This is easily measured too by following the number of re-tweets your brand gets and will be even further clarified when Twitter releases their new re-tweet mechanics.

Conclusion

If your business is just starting out and is not on Twitter, I understand that this may not be your primary focus. You’ve certainly got more important things to worry about. But as soon as you’ve amassed a fair amount of users and have people to interact with, it’s clearly a must. The constant real-time updates, getting to know your users on a more personal level, and the shaping of your brand are all augmented through Twitter.

Just make sure not to get lazy. As with blogging, you need to keep producing content and interacting with the people that follow you. Keep your activity up and make sure to do it with a smile on your face and treat it like fun, not work. Nobody wants to hear from a corporate Grinch.