How to Start a Two-Bit Operation: Small Business Tips
From start to small business. Learn and live vicariously.
Some More PickFu Buzz
I found a couple more nice mentions of PickFu in my Google alerts this morning.
simple way to A/B test just about anything. You create two options or questions and get 50 opinions from a demographically selected audience for $10
Network Solutions Small Biz Blog:
Does indecisiveness have you frozen about making an important business decision? Wish you could run the idea by a group of unbiased outsiders? You can, for only $10, when you sign up at Pickfu. Should I open a new location or expand my current building? Should I hire an accountant or assign the job to someone already on staff? Create two options or questions and you’ll get 50 unbiased opinions. You can let Pickfu pick the demographics of your group, or if you have a specific target in mind, you can create your own.
Don’t forget to give PickFu a try for all your a/b testing needs!
Justin
Justin February 8th, 2012
Posted In: Publicity
Tags: pickfu
Recent PickFu Buzz
It always delights us to hear about people getting value from our products. Here are some recent blog posts about our PickFu A/B testing service.
Lately I’ve found myself repeatedly encouraging startups to use PickFu, so I thought it’s time to share that advice with a wider audience…In addition to recommending them to others, I’ve used it twice so far myself.
– PickFu Review by Gabriel Weinberg
At first glance I thought “Isn’t PickFu basically UserTesting.com?”, but then I realized the brilliance of it: it’s way way way simpler than that…It’s so frigging simple. As soon as it dawned on me what it was, I had to try it out myself.– PickFu – A Great Way to Get Instant Feedback for Simple Questions by The Buzz Media
$17 is very little to pay for a service that enables you to receive first impressions from people who visited your site for the first time ever. Moreover, you get detailed statistics about who voted for what based on their gender, education, income, et cetera. In my case, a few people even signed up for the service…
– How I got feedback from 200 people for just $17 by The Any New Books’ Blog
Have you given PickFu a try yet? It’s been especially popular with entrepreneurs, but we’ve seen plenty of folks use it for just polling opinion on everyday life decision (what to wear, baby names, etc). So go ask a question and let us pick-fu you! 😉
Justin
Justin September 11th, 2010
Posted In: Publicity
The Wedding Lens 2010 Refresh
Now that summer is here and wedding season is in full effect, I wanted to take a brief moment to announce some recent changes to The Wedding Lens.
New Design
Just to keep things fresh, we worked with Brad, our designer at Vanilla Green, to give the site a bit of a layout facelift. Many of the content elements on the public pages and in the album remain the same, but the background and container make it feel more like an elegant wedding album. There’s also a cleaner and more informative front page to explain why The Wedding Lens is the best way to collect thousands of photos are your wedding.
New Plans
Over the years we’ve gotten to understand our customers better and we’ve decided that a Free Trial model would be more fitting to the customer behavior. There’s now a Standard, Premium and Ultimate plan — each with varying levels of functionality and time commitment. The plans have been live for a few weeks now and it’s been a very positive response so far.
New People
John and I wouldn’t have been able to execute the new direction without the help of the newest addition to our team — Jenny Fong. Jenny’s joined us as our Marketing & Business Development Manager. She has an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and her BS from UC Berkeley (Go Bears!). Welcome her by leaving a blog comment!
Learn More
If you want to stay up-to-date on all The Wedding Lens news, here are a few links:
- The Wedding Lens Blog – Site updates and tips on wedding planning and how to capture all the memories at your wedding.
- Press releases about the new design and our live chat feature and our new plans (along with the passing of our 300k photo milestone).
- Follow The Wedding Lens on Twitter and Facebook.
Remember, if you know someone getting married, let them know that The Wedding Lens is their best way to effortlessly collect and share full-resolution photos from their family and friends! 🙂
Justin
Justin July 30th, 2010
Posted In: Announcement
Tags: redesign, the wedding lens
4 Years Ago…
It was more than 4 years ago that John and I quit our corporate jobs at Microsoft and HP to start our Two-Bit Operation. My how time flies (or does it). It’s interesting to think back to what you can learn in 4 years of college vs. 4 years of running your own business – one full of academic theory and one packed with practicality. One is not necessarily better than the other, but there were times these past years when I said to myself “I wish I paid more attention in <that> class.” But, alas, nothing good ole Google can’t teach us.
As a small business it’s always important to celebrate the milestones and that’s something we haven’t been good at, but we have definitely been better at celebrating than updating this blog. Some high level notables:
- Menuism.com continues to chug along profitably.
- The Wedding Lens continues to grow and have very happy customers.
- PickFu, being a lean service, is profitable on it’s own. We could use more growth here, so let us know if you have an ideas or want to try out a beta account.
- A couple side projects that bring in money but we’re not ready to share 🙂
What’s interesting about this milestone is that it feels like an eternity on the Internet and it’s surreal to watch other similarly aged companies fold due to lack of profitability or pressure from VC investment. People ask us if taking or not taking VC investment was a hard decision for us. In fact, it wasn’t a decision for us. Not taking it was sort of the point of the whole venture. We didn’t want to work for anyone else and we wanted to run our own business. Sure we haven’t had the budgets of our competitors but we get to work on:
- what we want – restaurant review sites, online wedding photo albums or a/b testing services
- when we want – passion for projects run hot and cold; if interest drops on one, we just work on the other.
- where we want – at home in LA for Justin, at home in SF for John (and some China last year)
Flexibility and owning your own destiny is an amazingly empowering feeling. Here’s to 4 more years!
Justin
Justin April 24th, 2010
Posted In: Announcement, birthday
PickFu: Now with more questions!
A few days ago we asked the supportive community over at Hacker News for some feedback on PickFu. We were extremely pleased to see that the overall sentiment was positive and that there were other entrepeneurs out there who have the same need for quicky and cheap polling. In the spirit of some of the comments, we now offer a few more options for the number of reponses (50, 100, and 200) and for some basic demographic targeting (gender and age group).
If you’ve got some new logos you need to a/b test go give it a try!
Justin
Justin June 6th, 2009
Posted In: Announcement
Tags: market research