Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

I was recently quoted in a couple of places on how OfficeDrop treats customers, and also about how we made some mistakes when we first started the OfficeDrop Document Management Blog. It’s fun to speak with other bloggers and let them know some of the things I’m learning at OfficeDrop as we grow the business here! I can’t believe how much more effective I am today than I was just one year ago.

Ways to Keep Your Long-Term Customers Happy by Zendesk – For SaaS businesses, existing paying customer retention id critical, and OfficeDrop tries hard to keep our existing customers happy with our service. The Zendesk blog post talks about how we ask “best customers for advice and involves them in big decisions.” And also “OfficeDrop also involves existing customers in new product development, in the form of beta testing. “They are excited to see the new stuff that we are cooking up, and it is fun and exciting for them to be the very first people to try new things.””

Top 5 Mistakes to Avoid on Your Company’s Blog on Mashable – This is a great post on Mashable about simple mistakes company’s make when they start blogging. We are quoted about how we originally did not effectively link back to the OfficeDrop main site when we first started blogging, but there are some other great tips on here about how to be a better blogger.

Anand Rajaram, co-founder of OfficeDrop, (i.e. my coworker) recently penned a piece on Kissmetric’s blog about how we almost doubled the conversion rate of our pricing page. Check it out!

Obviously this is very important for a SaaS company!

I’m very pleased to announce that OfficeDrop has launched our first app in the new Mac App Store. ScanDrop Mac Scanner Software connects your Mac’s scanner directly with popular cloud storage provides like Google Docs, Evernote and OfficeDrop’s own cloud filing system. I’ll keep you updated as to how this new distribution channel does for us, especially since this is a paid download. Go to our listing here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scandrop/id412518240?mt=12

We are launching the app for $1.99 in the app store, although we “pre-released” ScanDrop with a great piece of press from Lifehacker last Friday. You can also learn more about ScanDrop on our Mac Scanner Software page.

I’ve made noise recently about how Boston needs a stronger early stage technology press/blog ecosystem.

But I’ve also been thinking about what I can do to help fix this problem. I know that there are real journalists and dedicated bloggers here working hard to put out legit pieces on the New England startup scene. How can I support them?

One of the things that I think helps set the publications in other cities apart is the large number of readers who interact with the articles – in particular, in the comment sections. There are real conversations that happen around the stories by members of the startup communities in the comments on blogs like Techcrunch and Mashable. You don’t see that as much in Boston.

So, my New Years resolution is this:

I will leave at least one comment a day on a Boston tech blog

I know this isn’t much, but if other members of the community would do this too we would not only show our support for the journalists who try to help Boston tech companies get the word out, we would also potentially help increase the dialog that goes on around the local scene. (If I miss a day I’ll make it up the following with an extra comment…)

Maybe this is putting the cart before the horse. I know that other the big tech blogs have a lot of traffic, which leads to the large number of comments. But I also know, from my own blog and from the different blog publishing I’ve done for OfficeDrop, that after there are one or more comments on a post other readers are more likely to come out of the woodwork and post comments. And a healthy number of comments helps build community around a topic.

Here are the blogs that I want to try to help promote. Please let me know if I’m missing any:

Mass High Tech Galen Moore is out there everyday trying to make noise for New England.

BostInnovation I’m hopeful these guys will evolve into our own local Mashable.

Xconomy Boston I love the national ambitions coupled with local coverage.

Scott Kirsner Boston’s best known technology promoter.

Let’s try to help these local bloggers take their message to a national level. Is anyone else up for this? You could show your support by leaving a comment

The WSJ has a good article on how Google is supposedly gaming their search results to show Google sites over those of third parties. The article suggests “emphysema” as a good example where Google puts its own content ahead of more relevant searches.

Here is what I got when I ran that search on Google:

Google Games Search Results

The Google page show at the top of the list is not only less helpful than the Mayo Clinic and Wikipedia page that it beats, it is also a lower page ranked page with content that is less focused on the actual search term, “emphysema” and is more focused on COPD.

The Google Health page is also less useful, IMHO, than the Mayo Clinic page. After I read the first two paragraphs of the Mayo site I felt like I had a good grasp on what emphysema was, but it took me reading about half of the Google Health listing before I realized that it was actually on a page talking about emphysema. I think this is because the Google page is more focused on the term “COPD.”

I’m not a doctor… but I’d guess that COPD and emphysema are likely the same thing. But I’m pretty sure that if the Mayo Clinic put up a page on COPD it would not rank on the top for emphysema. So it doesn’t really seem fair that Google would promote a page that talks about a different term that the word that I searched for.

Actually, Google does have a little link just below the link to Google Health that goes to the Mayo Clinic’s COPD page, and after glancing at it seems that emphysema is a factor in causing COPD. But this leads to the question as to why Google is curating search results to something other than the actual search term? If I wanted to know about how emphysema leads to COPD wouldn’t I search for “emphysema and COPD”? And why didn’t I understand from the Google Health page that COPD is caused by emphysema – particularly when the very first sentence of the Mayo’s page made it really clear?

But here is the funny thing in my mind:

Google doesn’t have to game the system at all!!

Why doesn’t Google just SEO optimize their own pages? Wouldn’t that be cleaner? I mean, they publicly publish what the algorithm looks for in a page!

My company is now is a number of Google marketplaces, which are awesome ways for new customers to find our service. I specifically remember having a conversation with one of the product managers for one of these marketplaces about why they didn’t have certain basic SEO stuff in the listings that went into the marketplace (like search engine friendly URLs, for example). He point blank told me that he knew nothing about SEO and didn’t really think it was important! But do you know how awesome it would be for me to have my Google marketplace listings showing up high in Google searches? They are a great potential distribution channel, since people can pretty much check out right there…

Why would Google not build its own services to win at SEO by doing all the simple SEO things right like good URLs, titles and content? How hard would that be? And then would people complain as much when Google’s own services floated to the top of the search results?

So, my message to Google would be: SEO optimize your pages and get some great content on them – and you’ll naturally float to the top of the search results.

Very unrelated links, but both I found to be very interesting.

Web Design – Google and an Example

An amazing piece by Justin O’Beirne on why Google Maps is so much more readable than the competition. He must have put a massive amount of work in to this post. I love the modifications he makes to Bing’s maps to make them better based on what he sees Google doing. Awesome stuff.

Taking Money off the Table to Boost Growth

One of the venture firms I worked for, Summit Partners, used to say that letting a founder take a little money off the table often boosted the company’s growth rate. I know this may sound counter-intuitive – if the founder just got $, won’t they become a lazy fat cat? Roger Ehrenberg has a great post on letting your winners run – even if that means letting the founders take a little money off the table prior to the real exit. I think he explains how a little liquidity can give the founders the confidence to go for the big time with their company.

Carwoo has a smart post on how difficult it is to find qualified online marketing/sales gurus with hacking backgrounds.

My ocassional co-blogger and OfficeDrop’s CEO has a good post on Small Business Trends with some tips on working with outsourced designers. Like many startups, we can not afford a full time designer, so make extensive use of outsourced designers to help us with everything from logo design to site design to button design. It is working well for us, and Prasad shares a number of good tips in his “5 tips for working with outsourced designers” article.

As I mentioned in a previous post, my company recently did a lot of cool testing during our site redesign. Anand Rajaram, OfficeDrop’s co-founder has a series of posts on Performable’s blog that talk about tips, tricks and tools that we used during the process:

Optimizing Conversion Rates Part One – Quantitative Tests

Optimizing Conversion Rates Part Two – Qualitative Tests

Optimizing Conversion Rates Part Three – Lessons Learned

OfficeDrop co-founder Anand Rajaram has posted his second piece on Performable’s blog about how OfficeDrop used user testing during our site redesign to increase our site’s conversion numbers.