Somewhere Microsoft may still have a warehouse full of beautifully printed manuals from an obsolete product because I crusaded on behalf of our customers. It took me a bit too long to notice the customers didn’t really care, and had never requested the kind of generosity I offered.

I joined Microsoft in 1996 as a Program Manager for Visual Basic, at the time the most popular programming language on the planet. Everything about that job was ridiculously good, from my kind and brilliant coworkers to the product to Microsoft itself. I am forever grateful to Bill Gates for creating such a wonderful company, and for the opportunity to work for the developer tools division, which can only be described as a dream come true.

So about my cleaning service

We have a large house. We’re messy. We hire people to clean it every week and here’s what we want: a mediocre cleaning done quickly. It’s not that I want cheap (I have plenty of flaws, but underpaying for labor is not one of them). It’s that I work at home and don’t relish the interruption.

We are forever trying to find a cleaning service that will give us lots of coverage without much detail. Stained grout in the kitchen? We don’t care. We just want the cooktop cleaned reasonably well. Dusty floorboards? We don’t notice. Clean the toilet and I’ll be thrilled. Oh, and those little rosettes on the toilet paper? Creepy, in my opinion. I’d greatly prefer you get the gunk under the dishrack in the kitchen sink than tie rosettes in three bathrooms. Instead of being sloppy and quick the way I’d like, the cleaning services lavish vast amounts of time on things I don’t care about, like straightening up the pillows on the couch or reorganizing our messy bathroom counter. We spend $250 for a weekly cleaning that takes 4 hours. I’d be only too grateful if they’d do the same job in 2 hours and skip the rosettes. I make my request very clear: be sloppy. The cleaners ignore it. They know better… right?

Visual Basic 5.0 was the first programming language from Microsoft to ship with no “real” (read: printed) documentation, at least by my exalted standards. It was to ship with a beautifully written 150 page starter guide (starter guide? 150 pages? Yes. VB was a massive product by that time, and it’s much bigger now). That wasn’t good enough for Tom Campbell, Visual Basic Program Manager and Unelected Customer Advocate. Our studies showed that virtually no one used Microsoft’s printed docs, other than third-party publishers who were smart enough to use them as the basis for the bloated, shelf-threatening, tree-killing $30 books that were the rage in bookstores for so many years. This was back before you could get so much awesome content on the net.

So here’s who liked printed documentation. Savvy third-party publishers, me, and a few vocal users. Emphasize “few” and “vocal”. These were the good people I decided to champion, despite clear internal survey results showing that the average customer didn’t care whether we shipped 10 pounds of books with Visual Basic. (Riddle me this. After getting their $1500 VB Enterprise shipped to them they would then go out to Barnes & Noble, expense 15 pounds of generally inferior third party books that rehashed with a higher signal to noise ratio Microsoft’s own docs, and trundle happily back to their cubicle. Answer: WTF? I wonder to this day.)

In team meetings as VB neared release I harangued the product team about the absolute importance of printed documentation, how great a job Microsoft did at it, and how cheesy it would be not to include it with a product with such high perceived value. The sales guys finally cut a deal with me. We’d include a coupon for free printed documentation in the VB packaging. Microsoft even paid for shipping if you redeemed the coupon. I think I crusaded for that one too.

I might mention here that the VB team had incredible technical writers. Microsoft’s programming tools documentation has always been severely underrated, a tradition that continues to this day. I still think it’s a secret weapon no other company can match, and one of the unstated reasons programmers stay with Microsoft. Even within Microsoft this was not well understood, with (I think), an undesirable ripple effect I’ll discuss another time.

Printed manuals, though? Not a high priority with Microsoft’s users. A year after the VB5  was released I asked the sales guys how the coupon deal went. “Disaster,” they said cheerfully, to their credit not pinning on me the blame I so richly deserved. “No one ever redeems those things. We have a warehouse full of books we don’t know what to do with.”

Here are the takeaways.

1. Feel free to listen to your customers. They spoke. I didn’t listen. I then negotiated against my own employer on their behalf, benefiting no one.
2. Next time you imagine Microsoft as a cold, faceless, uncaring entity, remember they went to enormous expense to do the right thing for the customers because of one guy’s speechifying, even though they had plenty of evidence that guy was wrong.
3. Enough with the rosettes.

Ten weeks ago I started a new eating plan. It immediately threw me against a wall, punched me in the gut, and crouched in the corner of my office laughing as I begged for mercy. And that was only the first day.

Because my reaction was so extreme I won’t name the diet just yet. A hint: it’s the only peer-reviewed eating plan known to prevent and reverse heart disease without surgery, and has been proven consistently to do so over the last 25 years or so. It requires eating only plant-based foods, and even those are restricted. It ruthlessly eliminates oils, salt, nuts, and nut butter. Obviously no milk, eggs, meat, cheeses. In other words, all the fun stuff is gone, other than whole-grain bread, walnuts on occasion, and trace amounts of fruit juice and sugar used to add flavor to recipes.

By the second day, I was fantasizing about peanut butter and my sense of smell went into overdrive. When my wife sauteed up some shrimp, the smell was so nauseating I had to leave the house. When my kids opened the wrappers to their Halloween candy, I had to leave the room. I became irritable and stayed that way for hours at a time. I was not good company.

I knew it would be difficult for me. I’m 150 pounds overweight, and you don’t get that way being a casual eater. I’ve dieted many times before. All my other diets were common sense versions of the just-eat-less-but-balanced school. The documentation that this is the best way to reverse heart disease, reduce cholesterol, and eliminate harmful plaque buildup is compelling. I always viewed it as a last resort, hoping to achieve those ends by less rigorous means. I haven’t been able to, and I’m too old to keep fooling myself. So hardcore vegan no-oil diet, here I came. The bargain I made for myself was that I would slough off any obligations other than family if it came down to that.

It did, with near-disastrous results. More tomorrow, but I’m bringing this into the conversation to explain my long absence from this blog, an absence I am not proud of. More next time.

I haven’t forgot the seller experiment, despite almost incontrovertible proof of a severe case of ADD on my part.  In fact, I’m still sifting through the ideas you all have given me and am adjusting the experimental protocol. I am also trying to fight my way through a mental block. For some reason I keep not taking snapshots of the iPods in question and posting them here. Don’t know why. Now that I’m ready to do it… they’re at my office while I’m at home.

A couple of years ago I spent $1.3 million on a new business, and lost it all. Let me tell you my $1.3 million lesson.

Don’t spend $1.3 million on an Internet business.

There. You’ve learned it! Seriously, though, there’s a bit more to that very expensive lesson, one that cost me my life’s savings and very nearly my marriage.  The complete lesson is a syllogism: a chain of statements connected by logic. Here it is in full.

1. People spend lots of money for all kinds of things on the Internet. And by a lot, I mean hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
2. You can spend a lot of money trying to market something people aren’t sure they need, but you aren’t guaranteed success.
3. People buy when you sell something they’re desperate for.
4. You don’t need to do much marketing when people are desperate for something.
5. Therefore… sell what people are already desperate for.

I lost my shirt selling something people weren’t desperate for. It was a classified site that was superior to Craigslist in every way. Guess what. People aren’t desperate for an improved Craigslist. Sure, if you ask, they say they’d like one. But they aren’t desperate.

How do you find out what people are desperate for in the eBay world? One way is to learn what searches are most common. Another way is to see what sellers are most successful. You can find both at eBay Pulse.

Here’s a bonus lesson many of you will ignore. It is so frustratingly, maddeningly simple that it makes Yoda sound like Shakespeare. The lesson is this: Sell what other people are successful selling. Here, let me repeat it. I think maybe you got distracted for a second.

Sell what other people are successful selling.

Ignore this lesson at your peril. I bet you think the trick is to sell a brand new product into a brand new market that you have created. Sure! This definitely works! Like maybe once in every 30 billion tries, or for pharmaceutical companies who can spend $1 billion developing a new drug and another $200 million marketing it. Inventing a new product or market won’t work for you. It is the path to heartbreak.

I have been a careful watcher of Microsoft for a quarter century, and Microsoft is one of the most successful companies ever. One of the criticisms leveled most frequently at them is that they only steal ideas from other companies, that they don’t invent their own products. Now, this is demonstrably untrue. I can name half a dozen innovations that came out of Microsoft. However, it is true that all their most successful products were indeed improvements on existing ideas. Bill Gates is way smarter than you, and here’s something he knew in his early 20s: let someone else do market research. He knew the pioneers are the ones with arrows in their backs.

Don’t invent a new market, at least not to begin with. Understand what’s selling well, and start there.

See? I just saved you $1.3 million.

The last month has been a whirlwind of activity, and I’ve been derelict in reporting why. It has to do with the blasted economy and how to make money from home in these dark times.

I am not a great saver. I am however an exceptional earner. Always have been, and it’s because I lived through the Seventies as a kid with eyes wide open. While other kids were watching TV, I was reading everything from Popular Science to Money to biographies of achievers to Andrew Tobias. My thought was this: many people weathered tough times successfully. If by reading I could learn from their successes (and mistakes) I could make a decent living even when times got hard.

Times got hard, obviously. Now here’s the funny thing. My methods of earning work better in bad times than in good. While we did just fine during the bubble, we didn’t make bubble money. During the recession, however, while business is down, I’m still doing pretty darn well. The $64,000 question is this: what have I learned that others can use?

Product X, my wholly unimaginative name for the course we’re developing is a method you can start with. It uses the revolutionary method known as “buy low, sell high”. Turns out that eBay, the world’s most diverse and efficient marketplace, is brimming with just such opportunities. This business can be started with a few hundred dollars’ investment and relies on your cleverness, plus some powerful third-party research tools now available for completed eBay auctions.

More later. I’m excited.

After a lifetime of work with little time off, I have taken two vacations recently. I had grand visions of writing plenty of blog posts in advance and having them posted automatically every few days. That didn’t happen.  My vacation days on a cruise ship and in Juneau, Alaska were enjoyable enough that I let my work ethic take some time off too.

Work isn’t a burden to me. I think work is a blessing, especially considering that I enjoy my job(s) so much. Besides eSnipe I am also working on a company that publishes ecourses. I am also learning about internet marketing so I can do a better job spreading the word about eSnipe, and I think affiliate marketing will be the best way to do it. During vacation I didn’t write much but I did study. I am investigating work at home possibilities for older people who are enthusiastic Web users but who find their age is a negative on the job market.

From the time I was young I was readying myself for economic doldrums like these (and worse). I have done a pretty good job of it. I studied the lives of other who had achieved economic security and wanted very much to follow in their footsteps. My parents came out of the Depression and I am naturally cautious, so I went entrepeneur fairly young, failed a lot, and finally found a position where I could be productive and earn a decent living.

Starting a traditional business has always been hard. I know, I’ve done a few. By the 80s and 90s it had become much worse in many places than it had ever been before, due to layers of red tape thoughtlessly wrapped around the wrists of entrepreneurs at every bureacratic level: city, county, state, federal. And whereas in 1935 you could at least start a hot dog cart business with relative ease by 1995 it was an ordeal, with health inspectors and zoning and permitting that made it impossible or nearly so.

But the Internet is still in its early stages. Starting a small business on the Web is roughly like putting a hot dog cart on a busy Manhattan street during the Depression. You can do it with a modest expenditure, but while times are bed there is still a tsunami of potential customers rushing by your business every hour of the day.

I am exploring these no-physical-inventory, low expenditure web startup possibilities and have been even as the blog has been languishing. I have alwyas been an expert on how to make money even in hard times, and my last big success (eSnipe) was a pioneering web business launched during the first bust of the Internet era.

Along with the Great eBay Seller’s Experiment I am working on those ideas too. I have found a world-class mentor  and will report back to you as I progress. Now more than ever we need to understand the possibilities allowed us on the Net, especially those of us who are old enough to suffer job discrimination and who want to explore work at home possibilities that take full advantage of a connected world. More coming on that.

Meanwhile, I’ve been getting some excellent feedback on the Seller’s Experiment and will post more about it ASAP.

There’s a lot of advice floating around about how to sell effectively on eBay. Some of these eBay seller tips are even good. But which? What are the best headlines? Does paying for bold or colored backgrounds matter? How important is free shipping vs. loss leader pricing vs. high shipping costs? Your pictures vs. those provided by the vendor? What makes the most compelling copy?

Using the scientific method

If you’ve ever thought about it, the only way to determine the best way to sell on eBay is the scientific method. Sell an item using one technique. Sell the exact same item using a different method. Compare the results.  Lather, rinse, and repeat.

Certainly there must be a fair number of successful sellers who have done this. But as far as I know, they aren’t telling. Makes sense. The most successful sellers are those with specific niches they exploit efficiently. Publishing their techniques would be a surefire way to inviting unwanted competition into their niches. Therefore from what I can tell no open source experiments of this kind have been done. So how to conduct such an experiment?

The Great eBay Seller Tips Experiment Methodology

You need a bunch of identical items to sell. You must sell one or two of them as baselines to see how the other ones will sell. You need to be able to conduct the experiment in a fairly short period, because many eBay sales patterns are seasonal. You need the guidance of good sellers. You need the kind of items you know will sell. You need to be willing to lose money, because some of your experiments will fail, and by fail I mean you’ll either not fetch the highest possible price or your item may not sell at all. What kind of a sucker wants to take those risks?

Sucker Experimental Subject needed

A sucker like me. And you’re going to help.

I have a couple dozen  first-generation iPod Shuffles I had imprinted with the name of a now-defunct startup. The imprints tiny and appear on the back of the iPods. The iPods are unopened.  I am willing to sacrifice these little critters to science in order to test various combinations of selling techniques and see which work best. All you have to do is contribute your best ideas. Over the next few weeks we’ll winnow out the ones worth trying, then put them to the test and see how well your eBay seller tips work.

Let the Great eBay Experiment Begin. Use the Comment feature to tell the world how you think we should sell the iPod Shuffles. Make the world safer for eBay sellerdom.

Cheers,

Tom Campbell

Slightly embarrassed about an old Facebook entry showing you smashed out of your mind wearing an elaborate beer bong and a T shirt that says WORK SUX BUT I NEED THE BUX? You should be, and not just because it shows someone filling the bong with some lite beer that tastes more like a urine sample than actual malted hops. You should be embarrassed because your next employer will find it too. Or should I say the hiring manager at the next job you apply for.

Unfair? Of course not. Gimme a break! Suppose you had started a business with your own money. Given two equally desirable and qualified job applicants, is Mr. or Ms. Beer Brong the kind of person you’d put first on your list? Or would it be the who looked stone cold sober on that Facebook page? What if that page linked to a blog showing off that person’s expertise in web promotion, mentoring skills, or church involvement?

Maybe you’re not the business-minded type. Try this on for size. You learn you’re about to have new baby. You work your butt off at Olive Garden or Wal-Mart or a local insurance brokerage to get a managerial promotion with medical benefits. You hire someone with less than stellar work skills. Your boss turns up that same beer bong page in the three-minute-after-the-fact forensic investigation to determine why you hired the kind of flake who showed up on Wednesday for a job that started Monday. How do you plan to defend your hiring decision?

Let’s take the heat off you for a second. Suppose an apparel brand you like is demonstrably underpaying its employees and exploiting children in a third-world country. They respond to stories about factory conditions with weasel wording about local cultures taking a different view on child labor, about how they really aren’t associated with the company that runs the factory, and about how it was all set up by a consultant and not themselves. What message are they sending to you? Suppose another apparel brand you like has a factory here in your own country and has a great reputation for paying its workers fairly. You’ve seen a news story about how their workers stay on for 40% longer than the industry average and that job openings always result in lines that stretch around the block. You like both brands fine. Which are you likely to choose next time you need a T shirt?

Take it from a hiring manager. We know how to use that internet thingie almost as well as you do. Late-breaking update: it’s not even very hard. More and more, employers are acting on something you should know already. You are a brand. What you’ve published about yourself is often the only message most people will get from you. The web is the best way for a prospective employer (or children, or spouse, or ex-spouse’s attorney) to find out about Brand You.

And if you don’t control your message, it will control you.

I like eBay. I especially love the concept of eBay. It is easy to forget that just a few years ago, there was no eBay.

For years economists have used in their models the idea of a frictionless economy, which is one where both buyers and sellers know as much as possible about any particular item being sold, and about the market itself. Sellers can set fair prices and not accidentally price too low. Buyers can determine whether a seller’s price is reasonable and whether they are less likely to get ripped off. Before the Internet, this was a fiction used to illustrate how free markets should work. Until eBay it was understood that such an economy could never exist, but that as an illustration it could be used to calibrate the success of any transaction or market for both parties.

This problem led to the market for so-called “blue books”.  These were expensive yearbooks issued in particular markets to help buyers and sellers determine good prices for things like cars and comic books. In theory it’s a good idea, but it’s one that has always favored the dealers.  The blue books tended to be vague about where data came from. They would cite things like auction results and newspaper ads, but no rigorous explanation of their methodology could ever be found. So if you were a 14-year old who was assured by a comic book dealer that a comic was worth $100 and you paid only $50, the dealer would “prove” it to you with the blue book. Of course, when you tried to sell the comic back, that $100 would suddenly become $7, and you’d get some muttered dissembling about fluctuating market conditions. I always thought the blue book ideas was corrupt, and I remember seeing that notion proved when a guitar I know to be nonexistent was listed in a blue book with 3 different price ranges, one for each possible condition.

The power of blue books has decreased dramatically with eBay, and thank heavens for that. Think about it: eBay, or whatever replaces eBay if they don’t start minding the store, is the closest we’ll ever get to a frictionless economy. You can see what people were actually willing to pay for something, if they were willing at all. How cool is that? You can often see photographs of the actual item, and even, occasionally, comments from other customers. An economist’s dream come true, and in fact thousands of academic papers have relied on eBay data in the decade or so eBay has become a potent market force.

And yet for some reason eBay wants to become Amazon. Why?

My theory is this: top management at eBay is ashamed of of being America’s flea market. I think when they go golfing with their Silicon Valley cronies and hear about the latest play in social media or Amazon’s amazing profits, they’re a little bit embarrassed. eBay is so low tech. It’s so 1995.  It’s so… regular people. I think they’re throwing away an opportunity to become bigger than ever. Why not just be happy that you’re the best flea market there ever was? The concept of the agora is an honorable one, dating back thousands of years. Remember the stand-up philosophers in Mel Brooks’ “History of the World?” Something close to that really happened. Philosophers did sometimes stand up on platforms and try to sell their ideas while throngs of consumers shopped for grapes and olive oil.  The marketplace was thought to be an essential element of society, and might be thought of as the birthplace of the concept of free speech here in the West. Even if that sounds pompous, eBay is undeniably a vibrant expression of the near-frictionless market and is nothing at all to be ashamed of.

I’d rather see eBay spend an extra $50 million on fraud control than blow another billion on the next Skype. And I bet their bottom line would like it too.

eSnipe is an unusual business in a lot of ways. (eSnipe is a service that places bids the last few seconds on eBay, the best way to prevent emotional overbidding and to keep prices down.) Its way of getting new customers is a paradox: eSnipe relies on word of mouth. Yet to recommend eSnipe to another person theoretically goes against your best interest. This is far different from most businesses, which tend to make your life better with increased trade. More people going to Wal-Mart? Great, Wal-Mart can exert pressure on its suppliers to lower prices. More people going to MacDonald’s? That means they can offer more $1 meals. It’s all good.

Not with eSnipe.  Each person you refer to eSnipe is potentially a competitor to bid against you on an item you hoped you could score in secret. So why do people refer other users at all? An eSnipe customer with the amusing name of Dr.HopeToHelp commented

that my own little green eyed portion of self creeps out thinking “Why do I want to refer Bidding Competition to you, the Wonderful, Terrific esnipe website, that helps me get lower priced buys that make it EASY FOR ME TO RESELL and make a WHOLE LOT MORE than I would by getting referral money????”

I must confess, I tend to agree with the good doctor. My thought in recommended eSnipe to others before I actually owned the company was this: since no one I knew was bidding in my particular niche I felt reasonably safe letting others know about it. Still, I would like to get back some of the business we’ve lost to the general econonmy and eBay’s seeming insistence on erasing its reputation as America’s flea market (what’s so wrong with that, anyway?). Hence the notion of an eSnipe affiliate program, which would give you a cash or BidPoints incentive to recommend eSnipe to your pals.

At least the ones who aren’t buying Fender Performer guitars (oops, revealed my niche).