UI Tip for Jamaican Banks

As a consumer of services offered by both of Jamaica’s largest banks, it pains me to deal with the little things that the banks take for granted.

For instance, look at how they quote the currency exchange rates.

NCB

Ncb-fx_rates

Bank of Nova Scotia Jamaica (BNS JA)

Bns-ja-fx_rates

This always confuses me. What do these rates mean? Who is doing the buying and selling?

A simple tip, that will get rid of ambiguity adding the word “You”, or “We”. So it reads “You Buy (Cash)”, “You Buy (CHQ)”, “You Sell”.

You (the bankers) have to remember that you guys are the experts. You guys get these quotes in real-time and update them many times throughout the day. To you, it is abundantly clear what these rates mean.

To ‘John Public’, that does an FX transaction once a month or once a few weeks or once a few months, we don’t have time to memorize how you are portraying this. Every time I come to one of these charts I say to myself “Which vantage point are they giving me this information from again? Is it mine, or theirs?”. Then I remember that it is yours, and that just seems selfish.

At the end of the day, it’s not about you…it’s about your customer.

Who cares what you buy and sell FX for? What we (your customers) care about is how much WE will pay, and how much WE will get if we sell to you. 

You are welcome :)


Marc Gayle
www.marcgayle.com
www.twitter.com/marcgayle

Appointment Reminder Launches - Congrats Patrick

Patrick McKenzie was able to avoid death by 1,000 cuts by finally launching. From one hacker to another…congratulations.

Appointment Reminder, not only has a pretty descriptive and unambiguous app name - which is awesome - but allows you (as a business owner that relies on booking clients for appointments - i.e. doctors, dentists, etc.) to easily setup automated appointment reminders for your customers, and gently reminds them via a phone call or text message. Do check it out, you can even try a free demo.

billboard.jpg

Congrats again Patrick.

I wish you all the best.

Startups Death = Death From 1,000 Cuts

You hardly ever hear of a startup that just goes *poof* one day and suddenly implodes. The more common occurrence are a series of bad decisions by management and/or the founders. This also applies to larger companies too.

One of the things I have encountered while building Comp Versions is that it is easy to become overwhelmed by the amount of work ahead of you. Especially when it is now common mantra to get something out as quickly as possible.

Even more especially when you have to be learning programming as you go along, are doing it by yourself and bootstrapping - talk about bad odds.

Although I have completed a major milestone (the majority of the Rails back-end is done), I have now started the front-end. 

Let me tell you, it is quite daunting when I look at my stylesheet and it is ~600 lines long, and I know that I still have about 80% of the application left of the front-end to complete.

This is further compounded when I spend an entire day (or two days) being stumped by some alignment issues of
  • items. Although, I must confess, once I complete that it feels SOOO good and there are cumulative effects - i.e. I will never have that problem again, and the issue is fixed everywhere else in the app that is needed. 

    • Each of these ‘stumpings’ is a cut. If I let this cut stop me, or conquer me, I am doomed to give up. In the cumulative, I am quite scarred (note: not ‘scared’) at the moment and I know I will be further scarred in the weeks ahead.

    But I have no choice but to get out my box of band-aids and press ahead.

    This is one of the reasons why many people recommend going all-in (i.e. quitting your day-job, and giving up everything else). When you are all-in, each cut is a milestone. 

    So don’t look at it like I am one more cut closer to quitting, but rather - one more cut closer to the 1,000 before I get to launch.

    So here is to about 450 more.

    You should follow me on twitter.

    I Would Never Work for Jason Calacanis

    After watching an interview with Jason Calacanis, I can safely say that I would never want to work for him, and never want to model my company to be anything remotely like his. Don’t get me wrong, I am not knocking Jason personally, I just think his work values are wack. Correction, I think his values (or those that I can see by his public persona) are wack.

    There I said it.

    In a world that is flat, where the best technical talent can go anywhere, who on earth would want to go and work for a company whose CEO specifically states that he has no interest in employees that want ‘balance’. Talk about a shitty job experience. 

    The worst part about all of this, is that I am yet to see Jason produce the ‘high quality’ product that his supposed “abnormal” (his words, not mine) work ethic produces. Perhaps that’s valuable in journalism where you have to fight for the best leads to break the best stories - so I can see how that MIGHT be applicable at Weblogs, Inc. but even that is pushing it.

    Jason also equated not wanting to sell your soul and work 80 hour weeks to being ‘normal’, i.e. it’s not exceptional and you don’t produce outstanding results being ‘normal’. 

    I guess when you have F U money, you really can say and do anything without caring about the repercussions, but I don’t think Jason realizes that the best leaders inspire (not intimidate). 

    I am yet to hear of anyone ‘brag’ that they work at Mahalo. All the instances I have seen of people discussing their jobs at Mahalo, it has usually been followed with ‘….yeah…I know’.

    I am still in disbelief that he really believes this.

    But…I guess, coming from the guy that thought he could pay for Digg’s top users, it isn’t much of a shock.

    You should follow me on twitter. 

    Screw Uniques and Pageviews; New Metric: Revenue Per Month

    I hereby suggest that we, as the web development community, from herein going forward ban all references to uniques, pageviews and hits.

    The only metric that really matters to the creation of a viable web company is revenues - but more specifically profits. Not just revenues & profits, but revenues & profits per month. 

    It’s not about making $1M in one month and nothing for the next 20 years (although, if that’s your MO, kudos to you). It’s about building a sustainable business that generates steady monthly revenues and profits.

    It is very difficult for me to think of any other industry, in history, where you can build a product company with net margins (i.e. after all costs and expenses are taken out from revenues) of 50+% on a monthly recurring basis, with literally one or two people. Said another way, once the product is built, $0.50 of every dollar earned is profit. This assumes that you will be reinvesting X % of your revenues in marketing to drive future growth and building out your team. Of course, as you expand and grow your net margins will reduce significantly because of higher expenses (staff/HR, infrastructure, etc.). But the figures are incredibly attractive…almost Ponzi-like.

    However, hits/pageviews/uniques don’t buy slippers for your daughter’s dance recital - so from here on out, I suggest we put more of a focus on revenues generated on a monthly basis - and not on those other metrics.

    If your app/site is dependent on advertising and eyeballs, then this can’t fully apply to you. But I would suggest that perhaps you might want to look at other options & business models.

    Editors Note: While I acknowledge that ‘banning’ the use of those metrics is a bit of hyperbole (there are good uses for them in some situations), I think we need a major shift in mindset from eyeballs (i.e. uniques and pageviews) to more business/profit centric metrics. Many people are uncomfortable with this idea, so I think we should start the shift now so that more and more people can get comfortable with it and migrate to it - for the long term viability of our industry’s sake. Profits don’t kill people. People kill people.

    Aside: The idea for this post came from me going through the process of trying to figure out a pricing plan for my, soon-to-be-released, web app targeted specifically at designers and agencies that need to share multiple versions of their graphic work with clients and other stakeholders.

    Can Bing Steal Google’s Traffic by Using Adwords?

    I have been meaning to write this post for a while, but it kept getting delayed. Then Mashable published this article about Google Advertising on Twitter.

    So I figured now is as good a time as any.

    I am no ad buying expert, but if Microsoft can bid on very cheap/obscure keywords (i.e. the extreme longtail) - e.g. every single keyword that costs $0.01 or less (if that even exists), assuming that the revenue they can generate per lead is greater than $0.01, then why not do it? Then from there, experiment with $0.02 keywords, and progress accordingly.

    It is possible (I would think), by doing that - rather than an aggressive mainstream media advertising blitz - that their conversion rates would be much better and they could steal a good chunk of Google’s traffic.

    Naturally, it has to make economic sense. I imagine they must measure the cost of every lead and with the waste that is generated with large TV campaigns, it’s not hard to conceive that a strict online ad inventory buying campaign would generate warmer leads than an offline TV campaign.

    Am I wrong? Would love to hear some thoughts on that.

    Edit: Some interesting links provided to me by the thread on Hacker News, although they don’t specifically point out data from Bing, it is interesting nonetheless: 

    When Do You Lose Credibility? Message to InDinero

    As a general entity – i.e. a person, for-profit & non-profit organization – credibility comes down to simply doing what you say you are going to do, and the converse – not doing what you say you wouldn’t. Politicians tend to face this crisis all too often. But so do companies. The following example is one such case.

    I have been a long time subscriber to mint.com. But, for some reason, I just stopped using it some time ago. Six months after not logging in, in a while, I got this message:

    Mint-urgent-message-in-may-20101

     

    At first, I was a bit shocked – because the subject of this email was “ACTION REQUIRED – Your Weekly Financial Summary from Mint.com”. This was the second time I was getting this email. The first time I got it, six months prior, I quickly logged in. This time, even though I was shocked, I realized that my mint.com account was not worth it enough to cause me to stop doing what I am doing right now to log in. I said I would do it later, and I never got around to it. So I got another one of these messages the following week.

    After the 6th week, I started to question the credibility of the threat. Funnily enough, by threatening to cancel my account 6 weeks in, and not canceling it makes me want to cancel it – because it erodes the value proposition. Five months later, and I am still receiving these email threats on a weekly basis. Here is the latest:

     

    Mint-urgent-message-in-october-2010

    Needless to say, I will likely send them a message requesting them to delete my account and take me off of their mailing list.

    Word to the wise: InDinero, you say you are the Mint.com for businesses. There are many things Mint has done right. This is not one of them. Please learn from their mistakes. You show much promise.

     

     

    A Notepad in HTML & CSS Only

    Ever wanted to have a nice, clean looking notepad – that scales with the amount of elements you need to write on it – in HTML & CSS? So did I for the startup I am working on. Could I find anything? Nope. So, I made one. It’s nothing fancy, and should look pretty close to this:

    Notepad

    The notepad was designed by the wonderful Andree Blixt.

    To see an online demo, check it out here. It is released under the MIT license, so do what you want with it. The only thing I ask is for attribution. Also, please feel free to suggest updates/tweaks/enhancements especially to show multiple pages and adding jQuery animation if you would like (either in the comments or emailing me directly).

    To get the files, download them from github here. 

    Enjoy :)