Emil Hajric

I love Steve Jobs

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 17:29:00 -0700

Fire your customer support staff

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 17:30:00 -0800

Why you should fire your customer support

A lot of people are frustrated with customer service..in fact, I, myself am more frustrated than I am satisfied with the service I receive. I tried calling Paypal to help resolve my issue with my account being frozen, NO ONE KNOWS WHAT THE FUCK THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT. Seriously. One woman tells me that I have to check with the credit bureau, then some other dude tells me it's due to my recent purchases and that I cant do anything about it ..

My main concern is that customer support staff can't really think like the person who deeply understands the product or has built it can. What I really mean is, they understand in the terms of what is really going on, what is really causing the problem and how it can be solved. Customer support can really only help you by creating a ticket and interacting with the programmer about the problem, after which time is loss until the customer gets a response...and let's just hope they get the answer right away.

Ok, ... but what to hire then?

We should hire technical people(no, customer support people are not technical), at least, I see this working out with some software companies. Programmers know what's going on, yet it can get complex when the number of programmers starts to increase..

Programmers know exactly what's going on based on the response which they get from the client, the event which provoked it, etc. Programmers can come to a conclusion that something's wrong and they'll (in most cases) know what to do.

Instead of having a customer support person send in a ticket for your customer, why not cut the middle man and link the customer directly to the dev. team. Having a solution such as a customer support forum(such as answers.37signals.com) can save you a lot of time and money, as you have your entire team grab onto certain cases AND your customers - people who have experienced the SAME exact problem as you are now.

Solution?

I suggest taking the route of something automated like answers.37signals.com or a custom solution. For my startups, I'm building an internal collaboration tool(which I might release to the public..email me at hajrice@gmail.com if you're interested). I really suggest people look into an alternative way of dealing with your customers instead of having a middle man...yes it can add a personal touch, but at the end of the day it really boils down to getting shit done (fast).

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My experience with EngineYard's customer support

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 16:28:00 -0800

After talking to EngineYards CTO for over an 1h:30m, I love EngineYard. They seriously give a fuck about customers. I can't wait to use them!!

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Your twitter is full of bullshit

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 17:00:00 -0800

I'm so sick of these people who have a few followers, constantly tweet, yet really never engage with their community. Twitter lets people follow you, get updates on what's going on and engage with you. ENGAGE WITH YOU. Twitter isnt there for you to speak AT your audience or kiss up to someone with the intention of upselling them. No, fuck you, I'm so sick of seeing people do this. Twitter is there for you to speak with your audience with these short tweets, update them(NOT UPSELL) with what's cool(and I really mean cool, not sellable cool or whatever).

Let's say you're some entrepreneur, sure you made 200k this year and have 3000 followers on twitter. You're replying to your customers complaints(ex. "{your product name} sucks. It constantly freezes") with stuff like: Send me an email and I'll check it out. First of all, NO; You should email them, apologize, perhaps offer a discount and send them roses; They trust YOU so they bought from you. If it sucks, you better fix it and apologize in a tremendous way.

Enough about your customers, lets talk about the people who are just following you because they like your blog or things that you're doing. These people have questions for you and will praise you and make you even bigger(hopefully). For example, if someone asks me "@itsemil how did you make the site for chalkboardhq.com ?" I'm not going to ignore them, despite how unimportant I might think they are. I'm going to respond via twitter or email(in case it's a long reply) even though I'm very limited with time.

Just because someone isn't buying from you or isn't tweeting about how awesome you are or isnt someone who you could leverage off of DOES NOT MEAN YOU SHOULDN'T ENGAGE WITH THEM. Don't be a douche, businesses are about people, not about money.

You should Follow me @itsemil and I'll show you how to sip champagne with Dave McClure through Twitter.

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A better approach to the art of software

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 08:35:34 -0800

First plan out your user experience.

Basically, you want to take yourself through the user's footsteps. Go crazy and start imagining what you specifically want to achieve and think of several patterns to get there. For instance, creating a todo item, one path could be "when the user lands on the dashboard display the dashboard page, if the user clicks CTRL+T a new todo pops up where they just enter the text and click enter after which the dialog disappears". This is a situation where having a cofounder comes in handy, a lot. Especially if your partner really pays attention to UX a lot. You want to sketch down all these ... I recommend you do it via text, drawing boxes to represent steps can get messy, they're hard to understand and are a pain when you have to change something. After you've done that, you send it to your team, talk about it, they'll have a few ideas, and add something, send it back, etc. Even though it does get a little complicated and messy in this stage, it's very important. It's great to keep it really minimal and have a unique format that answers the following questions.

What does the user do to arrive to _____ ?
What happens next?
What if the user ______ ?

Design the app

So many people go wrong here in my opinion and do the app first and then the coding. We design the app based on the feedback from the user flows, it restricts us to what the design should contain and it's much better to design when you know exactly what the user will do next.

When I was working on my first startup(bizteen.net) I first started coding it and then came to the stage that a lot of startups come to(“uuh should I add x here? should users be able to update statuses from one page or everywhere?:) the questions you ask yourself are definitely linked with the actual software infrastructure.After a failed attempt with BizTeen I decided to do it all over again, this time start by designing the entire User interface. After I was done designing and slicing the PSD into XHTML/CSS I started the coding. Marvelously this worked perfectly. The application was created in no time.After surviving that I really don’t understand when teams start the coding of a web app. first. It can definitely mislead the entire product into something you didn’t expect. My tip would be do the Design first and then code.

Code it

After you have the design ready for code, you start coding ... tho, I advise you check out the flows while coding. It'd be cool if you could place all your error-handling messages and entire copy in some kind of document so that you can specifically know how much space you need, etc. For example, you'll start coding a form, add some cool validation; You'll probably forget to add something you specified in your specs or flows document. It's good to have a short list of what the user will go through, it'll save you hours ... trust me...I've lost hours because of these stupid little hiccups.

Disclaimer: I'm the cofounder of Chalkboard - a user-experience planning tool.

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Designing the PilarHQ Landing page

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 10:55:00 -0800

A lot of designers(including myself) learn to design better interfaces and tricks simply by watching others work. My latest project got quite a lot of nice buzz. Here's the process of designing the landing page

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Unconventional Ways to Grow Your Fanbase

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 16:47:00 -0800

I just launched Chalkboard - a better way to plan out user experiences. If you sign up and send me your email, I'll make sure you get a 50% discount for your first month.

Lets say you wanted to build some value, build something no one really built before; Basically build a unique thing and perhaps you'll get popular. Infographics were awesome, then everyone started doing them...not so say that they're still not awesome, it's just not as effective and doesn't wow me as much. It's like one of those SaaS landing pages, when 37signals came out with them, everyone was amazed and the ones that had replicated thetypical landing page style early on were still cool until it got popular.

WOW marketing for $5

What's full of ideas, people executing them and things that amaze others which don't know much about how a specific cool thing is done? A website called fiverr.com, of course. Basically, they list people doing crazy things for five dollars. Now, there are soooo many talented people who really make people go wow. For example, if you don't know web design and you see some cool dude making websites for $5, of course you would be impressed as that skill set is something which you value a lot.

This is what I'm doing, I'm searching fiverr.com for crazy cool things like people posting an add on a high-traffic area in Tokyo, doing voice overs for texts up to 3 minutes and a lot more cool things. Whenever I see one, I think ok... can that + my business = wow. And luckily it can. If hackernews saw someone sing about Lean Product development, I'm sure that blog post would get super popular; and the crazy thing is, you could have it done for 5 dollars.

Examples of wow marketing

Here are a couple of examples of how we plan on being influential

A song about what our company is about, definitely something no one's doing - $5
A picture of Chalkboard's logo in some district in Tokyo, would look great on our home page - $5
Stop Santa from giving gift's to children and come work for Chalkboard as Chief Happiness Officer - $5
Post flyers around NYC telling people to stop using papers for planing their UX - $5
Pay this guy to dance to the Chalkboard support song - $5
Surprise our new customers with a welcome poem - $5
Make it snow on Chalkboard's logo - $5

...and soo much more. A lot of these are crazy and depend on how you want to brand yourself, but $5 a great deal and can come a long way for what you get in return. I don't want to release all of them, but if you do want them, I have a list which I'd be glad to mail to you if you email me at hajrice@gmail.com

A lot of people are going to think, ok that's not "professional" of you Emil, that's crazy. Yes, it may sound crazy, but that's the great thing about business. You can charge customer support with a slice of pizza, or whatever; you get to set your own rules of how you'd like to see things, because you're creating your own little world.

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Follow me on twitter and we'll be lovers

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4 landing pages (analyzed) from a customer's perspective

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 13:12:00 -0800

I've recently been doing a lot of landing page design for various clients and personal projects... I actually still am. I find it good to evaluate certain pieces of designs and have your final design be a compilation of elements which you like which are explained in your context sprinkled with your style. It's a great way towards having a design which has good UX and get your point across.

I've took the time to analyze a few designs, I wanted to know why they're so good and where they suck on a personal level. I visited Balsamiq, CampaignMonitor, Performable and Ballpark

See the full gallery on Posterous

Please do follow me on twitter here.

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Ramen doesn't mean ramen.

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 17:44:52 -0700

Ramen profitable? Fuck that, I'm from Bosnia, I'm used to living "ramen."

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Be A Ravepreneur

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 17:10:00 -0700

What I’m going to preach about is a concept which is already layed out in theory yet very few businesses use it - being ravenous.

Far too many companies are missing out on additional ways to make money. Being a ravenpreneur is all about selling everything you CAN sell(of course, under the circumstance that it is legal and moral). Ravenpreneurs are entrepreneurs who are extreamly hungry to make cash. I’m a ravenpreneur. 37signals is a ravenous company, they are selling everthing that they can sell.

Where does this come from?

There’s no exact answer but from my knowledge, I believe it comes from the food industry which isn’t as big of a surprise as a lot of food companies love to make cash and maximize their oppertunities on making it(...unfortunately, it isn’t the same with all tech companies =/)

Benefits?

Extend your network. You get to reach far more people by offering a by-product. I for example, am building an audience of people who want to learn photoshop while I’m building apps.
Make more cash. Lets say I decide to sell those videos(which I will). I can charge $9.99/month and easily rank up to an additional 5k with an audience of 500.

How can you be ravenous (examples)?

Rule of thumb: Find something you can sell that either teaches people something that is in need or sell them something that solves their need which requires very little work and (potentially) has a nice enough payout

A great example would be putting ads on your blog. I don’t like Google adsense but there are a ton of other great advertising companies(fusionads.com is a great one).
Why not make money while building your audience?

You should post your experiences with by-products and putting the make-money throttle in the comments below.

Follow me on twitter

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3 reasons why startup dad is kicking your ass.

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 13:26:00 -0700

1. Time

They don't have as much time as you do, instead, they have less. They HAVE TO use that time as wisely as they can, because otherwise, they're losing time which results to lose of motivation and boom! He's out. I wish I was a startup when it comes to this aspect, they use every second of their time in working on something that affects the product or sales. They don't spend time worrying about nonsense like a lot of people do. You really have to be a beast here and commit less if you're going to get more.

Example: I'm still in school, I attend a tough high school which always keeps me busy. I work a lot on my product(s), I can't devote FULL TIME in terms of hours, but probably put out the the same output as someone that does, since I have to make up for the less time committed.

2. Commitment

Startup dads are committed, perhaps they take it much more serious than the others. I take it that being married with children makes you much more serious about what you do and the outcome it gives out. Their view on the situation is realistic because they can't afford to play the YouTube lottery. Everything they work on has to have some sort of return.

Example: When I was working with a startup dad, he was very committed about the project and took it very seriously, making sure that we minimize our failure rate and focus on doing something that affects the product or sales.

3. They gotta make it.
Let's think about it: You have a family of 4, if you go full time on your startup and it fails, then you're fucked. Startup dad's have to make it otherwise their family is on the line. With the rest of us, we can always go back to our parents or crash at a friends house; so we're really lucky on this one. Yet, startups dad's have to make it and thus MUST BE committed to hard-core hustling. When you have a lot of bills to pay, you really have to focus on money and not startup bullshit that doesnt make you money.

Example: I'm in a similar situation where my parents borrow money from me for various reasons and where I have to pay my school tuition. I make sure what I'm working on now will make money ... heck, I presell every way I can.

I never bothered to ask; You disagree with me, but what's your take on this?

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