by jan

This book took me forever to finish. Another one I wouldn’t buy myself, but was given by a friend and didn’t want to leave it half-read. The first third is fun an interesting, then it’s get super boring and in the end it states the obvious.

What’s crazy though is that it’s based on a real story! I thought it wasn’t true  (although the author claims the contrary in the beginning) after I found plenty of videos with the author proving that yes, he dates (dated?) a member of Courtney Love’s band, got Britney Spears’ phone number etc. Puts the whole story into a different light, actually.

Yes, so what is this book about you wanna know? It’s about how a writer who had had huge problems dating girls discovered online forums where men were exchanging tips on how to pick up women most effectively. And the best ones even had seminars where they taught their skills. You guessed it, what Neil did was that he went take these lessons to become a guru himself.

And that’s just the beginning of the story, but you won’t care much because it’s not all that interesting. You might pick this book up (how appropriate wording) to discover how to become a pickup artist yourself. Well, I guess they are better sources for that, but this book has some interesting tips, too. If you prefer quantity over quality, you might try one of these:

1. You have three seconds to start talking to a girl after you notice each other. After that you can become too scared, she’ll think you’re weird, and the situation gets awkward.
2. If your target is in a group of people, focus on men and less attractive women first. Make the group like you.
3. If you’re easy to get, she won’t care.
4. Be happy and smile.
5. Be different than others (e.g. in what you wear, that you don’t buy her drinks, ask the same questions as everyone etc.)
6. Dinner is too long for a first date. If you find out there’s not much you can talk about, it’ll be awkward (and she might deny your invitation because of this).

And many more. The good thing about these tips is that it might help you become a better communicator / deal maker / social person instead of (or together with) getting hundreds of women to bed. Basically many of them simply make you a better and more interesting person. And, oh, they will improve your chances of getting and keeping the one woman you’ll actually care about.

When I released the first version of Flempo, I had this naive idea about user feedback. You just release something (anything) and people will tell you what to do next, right? No. Here’s a few observations I made (not only based on my experience with Flempo):

• If people find something annoying, hard to use, or confusing - in other words something is not clear enough for them - they won’t run to tell you. They just go away or work around the problem. Even if they’ve invested a lot of time or money in the product, the fact that they have a problem with it might not get to you at all. They don’t care about you. They care about themselves.
• Feedback buttons don’t do much. If you go talk to people (or run a survey, perhaps), they’ll tell you what they think about your product, what they do or don’t like. They don’t bother submitting any feedback though, unless they can significantly benefit from it.
  If you have thousands of users, maybe ten percent of them might give you some feedback. But are the loud ones a good enough sample to represent the whole user base? I doubt it.
• The main thing you’ll hear from users are feature requests. People will have a lot of ideas about what to add to your product. Your job is to find the right reason they want that particular feature (Paul Buchheit has some interesting thoughts on that ) and think how you can help them do that without adding anything to your product. Right?
• The only real feedback people give you is in using your site. That is the feedback you should use to improve it. Watch what people do and try to understand their needs and problems. Measure. Improve. Repeat.

To summarize, don’t expect your users to tell you what you should do. They might give you pretty good hints, but it will always be up to you to figure out where to take your product. But otherwise it would be far too easy, wouldn’t it?

Whenever I hear the word persistence from now on, I’ll think about this interview with Jake Burton. One thing is starting a company when the markets are only starting to be interesting, another thing is to create them from scratch.

Very nice staff (even in the Czech Republic and Holland!!),  tasty drinks, delicious cakes, comfortable chairs/sofas, nice music.

Too few of them in Europe, too many in the States. No Green Tea Latte in Europe!

Paid Flempo plans have come with e-mail integration for quite some time. What does it mean though? Two things basically:

1. Replies to e-mail notifications Flempo sends you don’t end up in a black hole, but rather create a new task comment.
   Thus if you receive a notification with someone’s task comment, you can simply reply to it and the text will comment the same task. If you attach any files to the e-mail, they will be attached to the task as well!
   This is incredibly useful for your customers that are not that much used to use web applications and e-mail is their primary communication medium. Especially if they use Flempo only to create a few requests a week to you, this feature enable get started with Flempo easily from their e-mail client.
2. Each team has a Flempo address assigned and any e-mail sent to the address will create a new task for the team. This is great for forwarding e-mails you receive to your other addresses. Did you get a request by e-mail and want to make sure it gets done? Just forward the e-mail to the right Flempo address and voila, there’s a new task. Forwarding can even be automated and then all your customers’ e-mails sent to support@ and info@-like addresses can become (easily trackable) tasks in Flempo.

These features have been in Flempo for quite some time and worked great for users already registered in Flempo. Answer a task comment notification from the address you are registered in Flempo with and the created comment will have your Flempo user as the author.

The thing is that most of the time, e-mails to support are sent to you by people who are not your direct colleagues or current customers (yet..). Here’s where the recent improvements come in. The task is created with a “dummy” Flempo user based on the address the message came from. Moreover, any activity on this task can now be “filtered” so it is not longer the case that everything you do with the task will send an e-mail to the creator.

Let’s say you received an e-mail requesting some information about your product. You might want to assign the created task, comment on it to clarify something with your co-workers, or report spent hours for your internal billing. However, these events could confuse the person who sent the request. Now you have the option to skip sending the e-mail:

Checking the check-box will cause a notification e-mail not to be sent about this event. Pretty useful.

Moreover, if the person signs up to Flempo with the same e-mail she or he sent the e-mail(s) from, they will be able to see all their tasks and comments created from their comments! Of course except for the events when you checked the magic check-box.

I’m pretty excited about these features, not only will they be useful for many Flempo users, but they also simplify my own e-mail management.

Any feedback? You know how to reach me.