Being the Two-Bit Operation we are, John and I are on our own for health insurance. This is fine most of the time since we have basic health plans and are constantly striving for fitness using the CrossFit workouts. Dental insurance, of course, is something I didn’t buy. I have my SonicCare toothbrush and I floss daily – good enough right? Anyways, I thought it was about time I’d try to do a dental checkup and cleaning just to be safe. Before we begin, here’s the definition of a dental cleaning that I found afterwards: scaling, root planning and polishing. Ok, here’s what happened at St. Isabella Dental in Irvine, CA:

• I find a coupon for a dental cleaning, x-ray and checkup for $69 – what a deal! I call mid-day today to see if they have any openings and luckily someone had cancelled and they have a 5pm slot. Perfect.
• I arrive at 5, do my paperwork and they call my name called after about 10 min. So far, so good.
• I sit in the dentist chair and the receptionist tells me the dentist will be right with me. The chairs are outfitted with tvs so she offers to let me watch, but it doesn’t work. I stare at the ceiling and browse on my phone for about 20 min.
• The dentist comes by and asks if I want to watch tv. Upon seeing that my tv doesn’t work, he moves me to the back chair where the tv does work. I start flipping between Law & Order and X-Men.
• Meanwhile, the assistant takes my x-rays as I watch tv and I notice some other people have come and gone while I wait…peculiar.
• It’s past 6 now and there’s no other patients and finally the dentist comes by and looks at my x-ray. Just from looking at my x-ray and without looking into my mouth he decides I need a deep cleaning ($400, 4 return visits at $100 each), and 2 cavities filled (another $400). I tell him that I’d like to look into dental insurance before committing to anything and then he tells me that I should also consider laser teeth whitening… He uses his fingers and pokes around my teeth for about 2 min then leaves.
• The assistant comes back with a work order for all the stuff they want to do to me along with the $800 price tag. I also let her know that I want to defer until I look into insurance. She makes me sign the paper saying that I received the statement but that I’m allowed to deny the work.
• She then says she’ll do my cleaning now. Exciting! Finally! She gets out the polish and polishes my teeth. Tells me to rinse. Then raises my chair and says I’m done. No brushing, flossing, no cleaning w/ that metal hook thing. Oddly, my mouth doesn’t even feel clean. After wasting 1.5 hours of my life I really don’t feel like sticking around anymore and I leave. In fact, I wanted to leave after he tried to sell my on more services before even cleaning my teeth. I hit the gym and take out my frustration on some weights.

Here’s my takeaways:

• Make sure the your promotions fit your business. Do not go to a health care provider that takes coupons.
• Respect your customers and their time. Dentists and doctors really need to find a better way to manage their patient queue. I actually do have better things to do than watch X-Men at the dentist for an hour. I called around noon of the same day to make the appointment – shouldn’t they have known their load and known that they wouldn’t get to me until 6? Or tell me there might be a wait and provide wifi so I can work.
• It’s fine to upsell services in your business (all business do it), BUT if you’re going to do it, you better make sure people are satisfied with the basic level of service first. Yeah, I sorta knew it was going to be an upsell session, but at least give me what I wanted! Next time I go to a dental cleaning, I’m going to print out that definition of a dental cleaning and make sure they do everything.
• Don’t pay for lead generation if you’re not going to satisfy the customer. They obviously wanted me to become a loyal customer that buys more services. I could have been that customer if I had actually received what I was expecting. In the restaurant business, out of 20 unhappy diners, only 1 will tell you in person. The rest will go tell their friends. Friends, hear my story.
• Don’t let your success hinder the success of your customers. Private health care consistently leaves a bad taste in my mouth. What motiviation did the dentist have to clean my teeth? He wanted me to buy the $400 cleaning. And after I told him I would look into it – that was probably the flag that I probably wasn’t going to do it so they just shafted me on the cleaning. Either that, or all of his customers get subpar cleanings so they all come back for $400 deep cleanings…if that’s the case, that really sucks.

I’m glad I got that off my chest. Now I can continue my life, find a new dentist, and hope that people don’t follow in my footsteps by going to a dentist that takes coupons.

- Justin

In preparation for these and future promotional activities, we designed a sleek, black business card that could be used to promote Menuism and also be useful for the recipient, with a nifty tip chart on the back. We chose Vistaprint to print our cards, and in typical Two-Bit Operation fashion we procrastinated until the last minute and had to opt for the rush shipping. To our surprise, Christmas came early this year, and our big card order arrived today! We rabidly tore apart the packaging and found the following:

It wasn’t bad, but it definitely wasn’t as sleek nor as black as we had hoped. What’s even odder was the backside color was a different shade than the front, though our original images were both jet black. (Vistaprint will be hearing from us…) Who knew that gray was the new black? Regardless, we’re satisfied that the cards are at lease usable – we hope people like and use the tip chart. Got any suggestions for the next batch of cards? What other interesting things have you seen on business cards?

-John

p.s. If you want to help spread the word about Menuism, or just need a useful tip chart in your wallet, let us know – we’ll send you some cards!

Over the past couple years there has huge spike in the amount of user-generated content, ranging from the success of Wikipedia, to the skyrocketing of Digg as one of the most popular news sites, to all kinds of social networking/bookmarking/review sites.  The most interesting thing about all of these is probably the fact that their organic growth came from users with passion and interest in the site and topic and not from the company hosting the site directing the content.  So with wikipedia you have people editing any kind of topic for the free encyclopedia and Digg you have users submitting news sites and "digg"-ing them up for interest, popularity and relevance.  If users like, and especially if they love, something, they will do it and in amazing numbers.  Which is why YouTube and MySpace are at the top of the web traffic rankings – all user activity there.  These sites are optimistic on users – they believe in the general goodness of their users to contribute valuable content that other users will enjoy, and it has worked.

So across all the sites we have the constant of passionate users who pay nothing and get paid nothing.  There have been lots of editorials on what happens when you introduce money as an incentive.  Basically, you get a different behavior.  Even the well-intentioned users might even change their behavior as they turn it into an opportunity to try to earn the most.  In the worst scenario, you then have people trying to game the system to maximize earning potential.  Not only that, you can potentially corrupt the sharing nature and karma of the site.  This can be detrimental to the quality of any ecosystem, web communities included.  An interesting example is the case of Netscape.com which tried to launch a Digg clone and then offered the top Digg users (the ones that submit the most stories) $1000/month to switch to Netscape (Digg’s response).  To my knowledge, this has been a huge flop and a huge PR disaster for Netscape.  The big contributors are passionate about Digg and socially relevant news stories — they aren’t in it for the money. There are many other sites that are trying to drive membership, content, and activity by rewarding users with money, gift certificates, and other physical and monetary prizes (I won’t name names here).  I dunno, something about it sort of feels dirty to me.

In my opinion, it comes down to the simple question: Who would you trust more – someone who does something for the love of it, or someone who does it for money?

I think the answer there is also the answer to whether or not monetary incentives should be involved in ecosystems that rely on the quality and output of passionate users.  Sure, you might reduce the contributing population to just those that are truly passionate, but it you’ll also be reducing all the noise that they might be producing. 

So what’s my point?  I guess that I think more sites should stay optimistic and build something that users will truly be interested in contributing to instead of paying/bribing/rewarding them to do things.  I think this would create a better web for all of us.  After all, don’t we all just want to help each other?

- JC

(Note: Yes, I realize we have much advertising on the site, but we have to try to make a living somehow )

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- JC

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Anyways, that’s my rant for now (beer makes me talkative).  Now that I’m a year older, I suppose there’s a bit of added pressure to get back to making money.  So I’ll end the post now, suck up any fatigue, and get back to work. 

- JC

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Quote from “The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of American’s Wealthy” excerpt:

About two-thirds of us who are working are self-employed. Interestingly, self-employed people make up less than 20 percent of the workers in America but account for two-thirds of the millionaires. Also, three out of four of us who are self-employed consider ourselves to be entrepreneurs. Most of the others are self-employed professionals, such as doctors and accountants.

Interesting quote from Paul Graham:

So why do I spend so much time thinking about startups? I’ll tell you why. Economically, a startup is best seen not as a way to get rich, but as a way to work faster. You have to make a living, and a startup is a way to get that done quickly, instead of letting it drag on through your whole life. [9]

We take it for granted most of the time, but human life is fairly miraculous. It is also palpably short. You’re given this marvellous thing, and then poof, it’s taken away. You can see why people invent gods to explain it. But even to people who don’t believe in gods, life commands respect. There are times in most of our lives when the days go by in a blur, and almost everyone has a sense, when this happens, of wasting something precious. As Ben Franklin said, if you love life, don’t waste time, because time is what life is made of.

So no, there’s nothing particularly grand about making money. That’s not what makes startups worth the trouble. What’s important about startups is the speed. By compressing the dull but necessary task of making a living into the smallest possible time, you show respect for life, and there is something grand about that.

So what’s the takeaway here? Well, I guess that depends on your goals. As I personally went through the thought process to go down the path of entrepreneurship, I thought about all the different things I wanted in life and wanted to accomplish. While I can ramble on and on about those thoughts, let’s just say they didn’t involve being stuck at a large corporation. The 2 things that stuck out in my mind:

1. I wanted more control over my life and financial well-being.
2. At this point in my life, I have the passion and energy to aggressively attack “making a living”. Why spread the working evenly across life? I’d rather try to get the hard lifting out of the way…

I hope everything goes according to plan

- JC

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Here’s where breaks come in handy… Breaks from work. Breaks from each other Breaks from thinking. Breaks from typing. Whatever it takes to get rejuvenated and refocused. But it’s not even that simple because how do you know how long a break you need? And without the pressure of an actual boss and job will you be able to reign yourself back in?

I suppose it’s all part of the learning experience. We’ve taken a decent break after 4 months of intense development and a big internal milestone, had some fun with friends and I think we’re ready to get back on track. It’s a marathon and hopefully we can continue at a good brisk pace now. After all, we’re not pursuing some magical end game buyout (although it would be nice), we’re trying to make a lifestyle change to become self-sufficient small business owners that are only accountable to ourselves and our customers. To echo the Carpenters’ song: “We’ve only just begun”!

P.S. For those following the Two-Bit Bios, #2 is running a bit behind schedule – it should be posted on Monday or so.

- JC

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-JC

Since we had a virtual team I guess it would show alot of people (maybe Hollywood Squares style) sitting either in their cube or at home with a phone headset on while talking on the phone and looking at slides on their screen. The people talking or presenting would probably be pacing around the room or looking up at the ceiling (since you dont have to make eye contact in a virtual world) and the listeners would probably be trying to multitask (like making lunch, checking email, IMing, etc.) since they’ve been on the phone all day long and haven’t had a chance to do anything else. Then there would probably be all kinds of things going on in the house in the background (kids crying, dogs barking) as the people scramble to hit mute (many times not quick enough). There’s not as much in person interaction awkwardnes as “The Office”, but there’s a different kind of awkwardness when you have to work with someone you’ve never met before.

Ahh memories. Would it make a good show? It’s funny to me when I reflect about it now as an outsider…Maybe I’ll write the pilot if this venture doesn’t pan out

-JC

I thought this issue was worth mentioning now because we’re seeing some high-profile bloggers speak and act on this theory. Most recently Robert Scoble decided to start moderating his comments section to weed out those that were purely negative and added no value to the discussions, for the sake of keeping himself more positive and sane. Bravo! My personal view is that you can’t please everyone all the time. Time is valuable and it’s better to be thoughtful about whom you choose to deal with, especially as it could be more detrimental than just wasting your time.
As you would expect, there was a ton of feedback, both positive and negative, towards Scoble’s recent decision. Two opinions that I found to be enlightening were David Heinemeier Hansson’s post about being a Shiny Happy Person and Kathy Sierra’s post on the science behind how angry/negative people affect you. They’re both facinating reads if you have the time.