I recently got an email from someone who was starting a business, including a website. He asked me for some very specific technical advice around modifying his WordPress theme to improve SEO. I feel like the advice I gave him was pretty useful, so I’m reposting it here.

First, my quick response to his technical questions about his blog software:

• Stop worrying what your blog looks like. Really. No one is going to see if for a long time because it takes time to build meaningful traffic. As long as it doesn’t look atrocious, it’s good enough for now
• Spend $25 to join Mixergy Premium and take the courses on traffic generation. Specifically, “Blogging for Business”, “SEO for WordPress”, and “Startup SEO”
• Buy the book Start Small Stay Small and read the first couple chapters, specifically the part about gauging demand by queries, etc.

Then, after I learned more about the business (independent auditing of buildings’ energy use), I told him the following. (Even if you’re not auditing energy, pretend like I’m talking about your idea instead. It’s very generally applicable)

1) Doing energy audits: have you actually done any of these audits? Who did you do them for? How did you find those people? Why did they choose you? Why did they care about energy audits? Most of success in business comes from having a good mental model of your customers. This lets you figure out how to give them things they value. If you can’t answer all those questions, all the other effort you spend on anything else is probably going to be misdirected and ineffectual.

2) If you haven’t done any energy audits, YOU MUST GO DO SOME! If you can’t find anyone who wants to let you audit them, then it’s either not a good idea, you’re not a good salesman, you don’t care that much, or you’re missing something about the it. If you talk to households and/or businesses and they say no, try to find out why. Try to find something they do value. Note that right now you don’t have to have people pay you for the audit – what you need more than money is market understanding.

3) When you have done a few, go over what you learned. What common problems did people have? Did people know about the problems? Did people know about possible solutions? If so, why didn’t they implement them? Do they lack of confidence in their ability to implement a solution? Do they perceive the benefit as too small? Are the solutions too much work and/or cost even if the benefit is valuable? Everything you find will help you shape your message when selling and presenting your audit findings, and give you fodder for writing on the website.

4) Once you have some patterns in the information you learned, THEN you can work on your website, both in your main marketing message and your specific content you create. Web businesses are attractive because you don’t have to take time with every customer, but that also means that you can’t give any personalized attention to any customer. That means that a website, especially one that drives business to real world work, has to be LASER focused at addressing a specific pain point for a specific audience.

There’s a finance blogger named Ramit Sethi who writes a lot of great stuff about the psychology of success. He told a story about one of his students (I think it was in this 90 min video of Chase Jarvis Live) who was trying to sell music lessons. She started with typically generic “music lessons” and made little money and had few customers. But while taking Ramit’s course, she talked to her customers and found out some specific things. First, her customers were almost exclusively Asian and Jewish mothers. Second, they didn’t particularly care about music, but they believed that playing the violin (always the violin) would help their kids get into Harvard. So she changed her generic music lesson flyers to say something like “Playing a musical instrument helps your kid get a great education” and had a picture of a girl in a cap and gown holding up a violin. She proceeded to make $80,000 in the next few months.

You might find something different when you talk to people, but this is my guess about who your golden customers would be: businesses (b/c they’re better at valuing investment in savings) that consume a lot of electricity that are inefficient in non-obvious ways (old uninsulated pipes, rental buildings where tenants pay electric, etc). Once you find your “Asian and Jewish mothers” then customer acquisition, content creation, SEO, ad buying, etc all get a jillion times earlier.

A final note, since your first instinct was to customize your blog theme, odds are that doing steps 1-3 will probably not be fun. They might really stink. That might mean you should do something else, but this kind of groundwork to verify demand and marketing is necessary whatever you do. Best selling books like The Lean Startup, and business classes like the Micropreneur Academy and the Software Roundtable all say start with identifying demand before you work on the solution. It’s just part of success. It’s the real hard work, not the busy work like picking business cards that people love to start with.

Today I got my copy of Design for Hackers by David Kadavy. I’ve followed the writing and marketing of this book since it showed up on Hacker News months ago. I’ve read the first chapter so far and I’m enjoying it so far. David presents himself as very knowledgeable, but not in an obnoxious way. Instead he seems like he’s genuinely awed by the power and value of design and he’s bursting at the seams to convey that information. I’ll write some more about it when I finish.

One thing I’ve tried to do lately with books is to get the big picture message besides just what the words say. Not every book has one, but here are a couple things I picked out of the first chapter:

• Section headings are in a sans-serif font while text is in serif. I assume this is demonstrating how to separate markup from content.
• Paragraphs are all roughly the same length. This makes the text flow and let me get into a good rhythm while reading.
• The page headers have the chapter number in bold, chapter name in regular, same font. This both unites and distinguishes the parts.

None of these points have been referenced in the book so far, and I don’t if the were intentional or even true. I’m just trying to see what a book about design says about design.

Great job David and I can’t wait to keep reading!

I had fun writing this on Hacker News and thought I’d share it here. The question was “How would you make public transit profitable / create more value?” and I answered with this:

It’s a complicated issue, so here’s a little background (I have a Masters in Urban Planning so I’ve read a lot).Streetcar lines (and subways in some places) were profitable businesses, just like railroad lines. But there were a few features that we don’t have today.

First, it was a new mobility technology so it opened up land that was too far away to be developed. There is no such land now in metro areas because highways and have cars make all areas equally accessible.

Second, they were a real estate play as much as a transportation play. Because they opened up new land, the lines tended to go to greenfields where the streetcar companies and their allies owned or could buy land. Take a look at the Brown line in Chicago and watch how it winds – that was a land acquisition issue. This wouldn’t work now because a rail line doesn’t increase the value of land enough since so much is accessible by car.

Third, people rode trains a lot more then than people ride them even now. These trains were extensions off of a very dense, centralized city. Technology and social changes reduced the number of daily rides. For instance, refrigerators meant that women didn’t have to ride into the market every day. Worker benefits (like the 6 or 5 day work week) meant that workers didn’t ride as often. As shopping and employment decentralized, people didn’t have to ride to the city as often. And when people got cars, they had an alternative to the train.

So what can we learn from history and contemporary transit to make transit more valuable today?

First, there must be attractions at both end so the fixed costs in tracks and cars can make money both ways. Early streetcar lines often has amusement parks at the terminus to promote two-way travel. The Las Vegas monorail is a decent modern version of this – there’s something at every stop. Transit lines that end in the suburbs at a big parking lot will be underutilized by definition.

Second, land use matters. All of the streetcars and subways were built before zoning and so the market built what the market could bear by transit, and buildings could be razed and built bigger if demand grew. Housing in transit-rich cities and near light rail in cities with new transit systems if more expensive because zoning restricts how much can be built. In addition to maximum height, massing, and lot utilization, there are also minimum parking limits that mean every house/condo is much more expensive and not affordable to people that would use transit the most. Take a look at the area around the transit stops in Arlington, VA for an example of transit zoning done right – extremely dense development within 1/2 mile of transit stops. It has the lowest car ownership and usage in Northern VA and generates 50% of the county’s property tax in 5% of its land area.

Third is that quality of service matters. Busses in the US suck and are slow because fare collection takes place one at a time while the bus is stopped. Curitiba, Brazil (look it up, it’s the world leader in bus transit) has bus stops where you pay to enter and everyone boards at once. The city has one of the highest rates of car ownership in Brazil and the highest transit utilization in Brazil. On their main bus routes they have 1-3 minute headways so there’s no such thing as looking at a schedule. Other things like priority lanes for buses at stoplights, tech to let the bus hold a green light to make it through, etc help. Bogota Columbia is the other leading bus tech center and both cities do something like 50x the miles of service per dollar as a subway would have cost to build and operate.

Fourth, if there’s lots of free parking at the destination it’s almost always easier to drive. Point to point means the trip is faster and free parking means it costs less. Places in the states that have the highest transit usage (Boston, New York, Chicago Loop, SF) are places where parking sucks or is expensive. Even LA traffic doesn’t keep people from driving because a) the buses are stuck in it too, and b) it’s free to park when you get there.

Basically, any city that’s building a light rail or subway line and not dramatically increasing the zoning around it is throwing money away. For instance, the 2nd Ave subway in NYC probably won’t change much for the $5 billion because there’s no way to dramatically increase the number of people that live in the Upper East Side or Harlem. Without the proper land use, there’s not enough population to drive demand, without demand there’s not enough incentive to provide good levels of service, and without good levels of service people will find it faster to drive.

There’s some more good discussion on the Hacker News thread.

EDIT: And on this thread as well.

There’s little that’s more satisfying than having a theory you’ve come up with be validated. I mean this in a very informal sense – having predictions come true is what the human brain is based on. You learn a little, you make a prediction based on what you know, and if the prediction comes true, it is kept and used as knowledge to make more predictions. (Read much more about this in one of my favorite books of all time, On Intelligence).

This can be anything – if you figure out that you have to take your cookies out of the oven one minute after you first smell them, if you find the right way to factor a polynomial, if you adjust the way you hold your elbows while shooting a free throw. Of course, it applies to business and life too. Those are two of the four biggest driving forces in humans (the other two being family and religion).

I just had a great experience where some predictions I’ve made about how to live my life and run a business have been confirmed. Now that GeekStack is moving from stealth to pre-launch publicity I’ve begun to deal with potential customers, investors, and partners, and I’ve had to figure out how to best deal with that (it’s a big change from working with just compilers). My verification came partly from first-hand experience, and partly from confirmation from a trustworthy source. What was the trustworthy source?

Quick quiz: What book has been recommended to me by more technical and startup people than any other book? SICP? TAOCP? A business book like Crossing the Chasm? Nope, nope, nope.

How to Win Friends and Influence People.

How much cheesier and scheistery a title could possibly exist? With a title like that I don’t know if he’s going to rob me or sell me a time share. I put off reading that for so long despite repeated recommendations from many people I respect. Life today is cynical and sarcastic and I’ve been a big part of it.

But part of me wanted out – I wanted to be positive, uplifting, constructive, and luminous. From the opening pages of the book, you can see that this book encourages all of those things. It isn’t New Age fruitiness, and it isn’t manipulative scheistery. It’s the refined process of decades of teaching public speaking and success in business relations. It was heavily researched and refined over many editions. For each princple it lays out, it gives anecdotes from people who took the Carnegie speaking classes, from historical figures, and from contemporary business people. The focus isn’t on doing things differently, it’s on completely changing your outlook on life and people and specific ways to implement that new self.

So what part of it confirmed a prediction of mine? After reading the first few chapters, I tried to implement as many variations on the basic principle as possible. The general idea is to care for other people enough to treat them well, reward them for their good works, and praise generously. So after getting results from doing those things I thought of, both from others and within myself, it was icing on the cake to read about those same principles later in the book! It made me feel like I really got the point of the book and that I wasn’t just following a checklist but becoming a better person.

(But despite all the goodness, it still sounds cheesy to modern cynical me)

I mostly keep my personal life out of this blog, but today was a sad day for me because a friend of mine passed away. While I had never met him personally, I have followed him and listened to him for my entire adult life. He’s been with me when I was at my best, and he has comforted me when I was at my worst. I do not feel sorry for him, because it would be hard to imagine a richer life than the one he lived. I feel sorry for the world that has to go on without him. Life will go on, but the world seems a little smaller and a sadder without him.