Finding Free WiFi

I'm Sorry, It's 24.95

Two instances of I'm sorry 'you need to spend (insert nominal amount of pocket change equaling less than a quarter here) more,' happened to me in the past two days.

Today, at Barnes & Noble, a lady was trying to find The Five People You Meet In Heaven, on cd, but the store was out.  The lady was shocked when the woman behind the counter said they could order it for her, and ship it directly to her house... for free.

There were two copies available, one read by Mitch Album and another version read by someone else.  Somehow, the one read by someone else was $30.00, and the one read by Mitch Album was $24.95 (and of course the lady choose the author).

"Oops," the woman behind the counter said.  "I'm sorry, It's 24.95, we can only offer free shipping on purchases over $25.00."

Of course, the way things are, that lady couldn't have given the bookstore worker a nickel and called it even.  Instead, she had to have the cd sent to the store....not a horrible outcome but not as exciting as the original offer.

 

Second Occurrence:

When I'm back near the University of Washington, I often park and work at the bookstore for a few hours, because they have free, University-level (aka fast) internet in the Cafe there and I can get 2 hours of parking validated with a purchase (which of course you have to make to sit in the Cafe anyways).

I bought some holiday spiced apple cider something and a croissant...my total was 3.89.  Apparently, the bookstore's policy is to only offer 30 minutes of parking for purchases up to 4 dollars, and anything over that you can get two hours of parking (the same amount of parking I'd get when I spent $500 on textbooks).

On paper it makes sense, to keep people from shopping in the area around the store then buying a pencil and getting two hours validated, they have a minimum.

However, I bought two things in the Cafe and was set to work there for awhile... and the college girl behind the counter made me buy a 60 cent five pack of crappy gum to get my extra hour and a half of parking.

What do these stories have in common?

Empowerment.  The word i don't let startups use any more.

Different this time, this time, it's empowerment of employees.  The girl at the bookstore could have easily said: "don't worry about the 11 cents, here's your two hour stamp (and no one would have known, they'd don't inventory the tiny 2 hour stamp in comparison with the 30 minutes stamp in comparison with the totals on the cash register)" and I'm sure there would have been an easy way for the B&N employee to enter some sort of code to give the lady free shipping, rather than using that 5 cents to make her come to the store again.

I understand that the minimums are there for a reason, and that once you let 11 cents slide you let 50 cents slide followed by more and more.  But, an employee behind the counter, in both of these cases, is a customer service employee.  They have to deal with people all day... the least companies should do is give them the power of discretion when it comes to negligible problems, especially that don't really hurt the company but make the customer's life a whole lot better.

It just makes cents (pun intended).

Athleon Wins Best Pitch

The University of Washington SEBA (Science and Engineering Business Association) put on a Science and Technology Showcase Event sponsored by some VC firms in the area at my old home 'Balmer High Commons' at the UW Business School...and Athleon won best pitch (and a nice deposit for our new bank account)! 

The companies presenting were all very interesting, and all more scientific than Athleon, but as a tech company we fit the bill and had a good time pitching and having conversations with all sorts of interesting people.  The overall winner went to two women who had done research at the University on using saliva instead of blood to preform medical tests.  Makes everyone who hates needles jump for joy. 

Spitting is the new cool thing. (see 23andme, the startup that will map your genes after you send them a bit of your saliva)

Come See Athleon Demo

If you're in the greater Seattle area, the MIT Enterprise Forum of the Northwest is having a Startup Demo on December 13th, 2007, and we were lucky enough to get through the screening and be invited to demo what we're doing at Athleon.

It'll basically be a 5 minute round-up of how we started with a non-tech founder (who got hit in the head a lot), had an idea, found a genius tech guy, and built a product on two college kids budgets.

We'll then demo an Athleon network for 5 minutes.

Here's the link for the event.

Tickets are $25.00, which, outside of the free nPost events, are definitely the cheapest tickets of the Seattle entrepreneur community scene (it amazes me how expensive some entrepreneur events are).

If you can't make it or don't live up here, feel free to send me an email and I can take you through our products.

Manly Man Business

This weekend in Las Vegas I had my first straight blade razor shave at the Art of Shaving shop in Mandalay Place.  It was not cheap... about 4 times what I normally pay for a haircut (though I have a buzzed head, so haircuts are cheap), but it was the full deal, three hot towels, warm shaving cream, oil, neck massage etc etc.  Awesome, definitely worth it, and a lot more fun than shaving yourself, no matter what Fusion commercials tell you.

A straight razor shave is one of those inherently 'manly' things, taking us back to a time when men were men and when best selling boots served a purpose more practical than as a street fashion accessory.

As cities become bigger and mens lives become more and more comfortable (when was the last time you saw a cowboy or a farmer needing to lift weights?), I'm willing to bet that there will be more and more entrepreneurs bringing the waves of city slickers ways to forget about their hot yoga/pilates sessions and 'sport' pedicures and feel like real men again... but still in their comfortable city (as good as City Slickers the movie was, it still takes a lot to get a man used to a desk chair on a horse).

I'm not sure what these businesses will be (otherwise I'd probably be running one), but a man can only take so many yoga posses before he needs to build something or get in a fight in a saloon.

I hope it never goes so far as stage bar fights... in the meantime, forget the MANicure (or 'sport' manicure they call it) and go get your face shaved...with all the fancy oil and brushes and creams of course.

Athleon Comes From The Greek Word For....

Ever see My Big Fat Greek Wedding?   You probably did.  The father claimed he could take any word and show you that the root of that word is greek.  Athleon is greek...sort of.

Guy Kawasaki has a post about coming up with names, and I figured it was a good jump start to take you through our naming odyssey.

Original name was myfitness, and I hoped i could get myfitness.com from the treadmill company that owns it...then I realized that for what I really wanted to do it was misleading anyways.

I, like many, many companies in my space felt the need to have some sort of straight forward name for people to understand...sports is NOT a market where you can get away with adding vowels (atleast I don't think so, spoooortio.com?)
So, after some more thought, it became teamandfitness.com, primarily because that domain name was available.  $8.00 on godaddy...my first investment in my company. I would keep that name for about three months, until I found my co founder, brought on a designer and started talking about branding and the logo...and realized that what we had just wouldn't work.  If we wanted to build a brand (which we do) we needed to have a name that could actually BE a brand.  As my cofounder put it, we needed a name and a logo you could put on a golf ball if you really wanted to fit in the sports space.

Athleon was the byproduct of about a month of research,  the best of which was me sitting at Barnes and Noble with two greek phrase books, a latin phrase book, an Italian phrase book, and a Hebrew phrase book.  I studied abroad in Greece and like the obvious tie ins with Greece and athletics (a certain shoe company did to), and the greek words encircling anything athletic SOUNDED like American words...so that book won out.

Maybe the man from My Big Fat Greek Wedding was right.

So, in keeping this post relatively short, I continually transfered from a Greek phasebook through 2 online translators and on GoDaddy, trying to see what I could do with a domain.

We ended up with Aethleon, (to be an athlete).  Plus the domain was $8.00

Then...while we were still developing the alpha and doing a boatload of market research, when we told people the name, we had to spell it.

Everyone forgot the first e (and my co founder, looking at  pronunciation, said it actually sounded like eeth-leon, which wasn't athletic sounding).

So, we dropped the e, and Athleon was born.  A domain squatter owns the name, we'll buy it when we need to, but for now athleonsport.com, for $8.00, works out great.

I'll tell you about the logo process sometime later on.

Vegas Recommendations

Went to Vegas over thanksgiving to watch my sister in the Mountain West Conference Volleyball Tourney (Go Aztecs!)...my first trip in a long time.  What I learned:

If you're going in the summer, stay at Mandalay Bay.  Staying there in November was just a tease... it's hard to take advantage of 6 swimming pools, a giant wave pool and a hundred and seven tons of imported sand when it's 50 degrees.  However, when it's 125 degrees...get out of the casino and go surf in the desert.

Don't bet against the shooter in craps.  Now, I'm not a gambler, but after learning to play craps I went to the lowest minimum table I could find ($10) and figured I'd play till I lost or broke $50.  One hot shooter later, I was at $55.  It took him about 20 rolls to finally hit the number he was supposed to hit (6, whatever that's called), and he never rolled a 7.  I didn't know anybody at the table, but there was jubilee when he hit that six, and the one guy on the don't pass line was...well...not a part of the celebration. 

There's a reason that that city is one of the most amazing places to see in this country...all the crazy buildings and lights and everything else are built off of YOUR money.  You're not going to beat the house, but, if you do want to bet a few dollars, you might as well enjoy it, and nobody enjoys rooting against the shooter.

See a Cirque de Soleil show, the $120 is far more worthwhile there than spent on the don't pass line.  I've seen 3 in my life, two in vegas (and the traveling Varekai which was amazing).  We saw Ka this time which was jaw dropping in the sheer creativity of what they were doing, as opposed to Varekai where your jaw dropped at what those human beings were doing.  O at the Bellagio is still my favorite, but if you're a mechanical engineer Ka should be a class field trip.

I still think the Luxor is the coolest conceptually.

You can get a real barber shave at the Art of Shaving at Mandalay Place (the shops connecting the Mandalay Bay and the Luxor).  Very cool if you've never done it before.

Even though it's a lot more 'family friendly' now, there are still sexual billboards at every corner and guys handing out flyers for hookers on the street.  Take your kids to disneyland (though my first Vegas trip was when I was 12, and I don't remember explicit things so maybe younger people just don't notice).

The best gelato in the world is in between the Spanish Steps and the Pantheon in Rome.  The second best may be at the Venetian Hotel.

Somehow, in the 8 years between my last vegas trips, the city has moved from having more and more 'themed' hotels (a la Excalibur and NYNY and Luxor), to having more and more classy european themed hotels.  Not sure why, Europe looked nothing like that.  The Wynn was pretty fancy though, and the Pellagio, when it's done, is going to be cool.

Probably will think of more later...breakfast buffets rock.

Defining Successful?

What is success?  Ok, I'm not going that broad... what is success in a web startup?

I've had bunches of conversations with entrepreneurs all over the success scale, from concept level to recently acquired, and all have different definitions of what 'success' is.

One founder I know regularly uses the world success, 'we've built three successful web apps'  or 'I've successfully launched my first company.'  Other people don't even really consider acquisition a success, just a stepping stone for further growth.

So what is success in the web?  20,000 uniques? 10,000 active users?  1,000,000 page views?  1,000 page views?  Revenue? 

'Successful' I think is another filler word I want to remove when talking about websites, same as 'empower' just because it seems to be over used.  Successfully exited 3 companies certainly makes sense,  but 'successfully launched' is just simply too hard to define.

Make your own definition of success, but most entrepreneurs I know never consider themselves successful anyways...they're too busy thinking through their next great idea.

I Never See the Ads on Facebook

I love facebook, despite the annoyance of application bombardments, and have been an avid user for a good 3 years now, as I believe UW was one of the early add-ons after it left the Ivy League.   It was the first thing I logged into upon sitting at a computer for the majority of college... even before email.

But...but...but, I still, even with design changes to move the ads up to eye level, can only name two companies whom I've ever seen advertise on facebook, and one of those only because it's my favorite brand. 

Zuckerberg announced today (read liveblog at TechCrunch) the new monetization scheme to finally turn my million page views and insane amount of information I've uploaded into dollar signs for facebook inc.  I'm glad they're looking at things other than the sidebar skyscrapper, because we, as users, STILL DON'T SEE IT.  Whether it's relevant or not, there's so much to see and do at facebook that we zone it out, worse even than the tv commercials that we half listen to.

Seth Godin (as always) hit it on the head:
When someone comes to facebook, they're not looking for stuff, they're looking for people, but people don't buy ads, stuff does

Sadly for people who want to buy ads, they don't get seen (or clicked on) either.

Seattle Web 2.0 List

Marcelo Calbucci compiles a list every month of Seattle web startups.  Since we haven't done a formal 'launch' yet I was hoping to keep off this list...but I randomly met Marcelo at an entrepreneur event so I guess we're on the radar.

We fall in at 101, though for whatever reason our alexa rank is way higher than compete, so I think it dragged us down.

Anyways, it's fun to look at the list: Seattle web 2.0 November