Pear Analytics is a web startup in San Antonio, Texas. We build search engine optimization tools and software to help make SEO accessible to everyone. We also have a handful of enterprise consulting projects, including PEER 1, ServerBeach and Voxeo. (We’re currently not accepting any new consulting projects – but thanks anyway!)

Ryan Kelly

Founder/CEO

Ryan started Pear in 2008 in search of doing some cool work in the analytics and SEO space, an area where he had been dabbling in for five years with other companies. Low and behold, his need to inherently “automate everything” resulted in a neat little website analyzer tool that ultimately landed some seed cash to see where he could take this thing,  and voila – Pear is now a software development firm.

Before all of this SEO business, Ryan used to have a real job at a big aerospace company designing and working on jet engines and stuff. Go figure. He even got a patent for his work, but that was just because he got lucky and was in the right place at the right time.

Ryan barely graduated from the University of Massachusetts in 1998 where he majored in Mechanical Engineering, and minored in partying and basketball. He should have gone into the NBA at 6 foot-6, but instead decided to trade in the fame and fortune to be a geek and make a whole lot less money.

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Vid Luther

Partner, Lead Application Developer

Vid leads all application and tool development for Pear. He is an expert with system design and architecture (or so he says), and is responsible for load testing, high availability and security of all applications. Vid has been working on Linux systems since 1995, and has had the opportunity to work on, and design systems for companies like Double Click (acquired by Google), Rackspace, Network Solutions, Merck, and J.P. Morgan. Most recently, he implemented a mock trading game for J.P. Morgan on Facebook.

He loves bringing disparate systems together (not that we have any of those), and loves working with publicly available APIs (and hacking into non-public ones). Vid designed and implemented a unifying interface for Network Solutions, which allows them to manage their internet marketing, by having one interface talk to Yahoo!, MSN AdCenter, and Google. He is not only tech savvy, but also has business acumen, which helps ensure an eye on the bottom line. Vid was born in India, raised in New Delhi, and New Jersey, but moved to Texas in 2002, and has called it home since 2005 – and so that makes him our own Russell Peters.

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Romy Misra

Senior Analyst

Romy is Pear’s senior analyst and mainly ensures that our 20+ algorithms in our tools are working like a well-oiled machine. But in general, Romy just eats a lot of chocolate. We had to get her a timed dispenser, typically used for cat food, to dispense the chocolate to her on the hour, every hour. Without chocolate, Romy sort of paces around the office aimlessly looking for things to do. She also brilliantly manages our client’s analytics, search engine optimization and shopping cart conversion projects.

Romy has a Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering from Texas A&M University.

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Alex Ford

Application Developer

Alex is our new developer from North Carolina, having been enticed away from his hometown by the smell of money. We suspect him of being part cyborg, given that he prefers interfacing with computers to people. He writes Perl code almost all day long, pausing infrequently to breathe.  His job is to grab the raw data and gently refine it into digestible morsels for Vid. We suspect that Alex plays video games online in his free time, but it is just as likely that he returns to his monastery hidden in the mountains.

Those ninjitsu classes he’s been taking are really paying off.

Megan Haley

SEO Coordinator

Megan is our SEO coordinator, which is essentially code for: we don’t really know WHAT she does. Currently the office’s reigning Galaga champion, Megan graduated with a BBA in Marketing (motto: “the least boring of the business majors!”) from St. Mary’s University in December 2009. Armed with Nerf guns, she mans an impenetrable corner of the office, handling product testing, bookkeeping, marketing and market research, and other furtive and top secret operations.

Paul Singh

Advisor, Board Member

Paul Singh is an expert in growing early stage startups — backed by some of Silicon Valley’s blue-chip investors (among their investments: Rambus, PayPal, and Google) — and established small businesses in a wide variety of industries. He has over 10 years of experience with a broad range of technologies, demonstrates a capacity for learning and adapting to new tools and languages in short time frames. He’s also like BFF with Dave McClure and some other hot shots in the SFO.

Among Paul’s hands-on experience are his due diligence analysis, business process analysis, process and system design, development, monitoring and ongoing support, automation, preventative maintenance, configuration management, and technology integration. In addition, Paul has a strong emphasis on thorough requirement gathering, technical specifications, documentation, rigorous analytics and analysis methodologies.

Basically, Paul’s job is to keep the CEO on his toes, and make sure our investors still like us.

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Pat Condon

Board Member

Pat Condon is one of the co-founders of Rackspace Managed Hosting (NYSE: RAX) and is an investor and Board Member at Pear Analytics. He was a key player in developing Rackspace’s unique customer service mantra of Fanatical Support ™. Pat was also instrumental in the acquisition of webmail.us in 2007.

Rackspace is now one of the largest hosting companies in the world with 8 data centers in Texas, Virginia and the UK.

Pat earned his BA in Finance from Santa Clara University.

Morris Miller

Board Member

Morris is a co-founder of Rackspace Managed Hosting (NYSE: RAX) and is an investor and Board Member at Pear Analytics. He also acted as co-CEO and co-Chairman at Rackspace where he helped grow the company to more than 30,000 customers and over $500 million in revenue.

Morris is an alumnus of Phillips Exeter Academy, University of Texas at Austin, and the Southern Methodist University School of Law.

Would you like to try our free website analysis tool and get an instant report on your website in 30 seconds? No signup, no email to give, nothing to install.

2 Comments »Tags: about pear, alex ford, morris miller, pat condon, paul singh, romy misra, ryan kelly, vid luther

You might not expect it, but these entrepreneurs each have something to say about customers – the critical component to any startup.

Steve Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur who teaches entrepreneurship at UC Berkley and Stanford University, and the concept of Customer Development which is outlined in his book, 4 Steps to the Epiphany.

Steve clearly defines a startup as an entity who’s job is to discover a repeatable and scalable business model. Ideally you should find this business model before you start investing a significant amount of funds into the business. Steve cites several examples in his book (he really likes the Webvan story from the 90′s) where startups fail because they never bothered to find out what the customer wanted, why they liked or disliked about the product, how they used the product, and what would make them pay money for it (or not).

Steve believes it is crucial that the founders of the startup “get out of the building” and find the needs of the customers and who they are (customer discovery) and then test your hypothesis against a sample group of these customers (customer validation). If the test fails, it means you have to go back to the drawing board again (the “pivot”). You can’t go on and build your customers, and hence build the business, until you have found something scalable and repeatable. Many startups make the mistake of marketing their product heavily and hiring a small army of sales folks (customer creation and company building) to sell the product before they pass “customer validation” piece, and then scratch their heads as to why no one is willing to pay for the product.

Diagram courtesy of stevblank.com

37 Signals founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, who just released their book Rework, have a different take. They’ve built a business on developing a product that THEY want to use, instead of listening to what everyone else wants.  They talk about how to “say no” to customer requests, instead of being pulled in fifty directions by listening to them.  They talk about “scratching your own itch” and building a product you would use yourself.  “When you solve your own problem, you know exactly what to do.  When you solve someone else’s problem, you’re stabbing in the dark,” says Fried.

The book offers several concepts on how to build and run a small business while defying everything you think is “normal”.  Over 1,000 people a week sign up to use their products, Basecamp, Backpack and HiRise and have done so without any outside investment.

Then you have Mark Cuban, a successful entrepreneur who did well during the dot com boom and is now the current owner of the NBA basketball team Dallas Mavericks.  Usually cited for his brash remarks, Cuban talks about a variety of things on his blog from the stock market to Facebook privacy.  I recently found this on his bog the other day: “Why You Should Never Listen to Your Customers“.  Cuban basically says that entrepreneurs far too often try to emulate their competitors down to the feature, which prevents them from inventing anything truly unique and different.  So now when a customer requests a feature, its usually because of a feature they saw on a competitive product that they wish your product had.  He says “its not the job of your customers to know what they don’t know” and that every entrepreneurs job is to “invent the future.”  Steve Blank makes a similar comparison in a blog post entitled “Death by Competitive Analysis” where he says “instead of optimizing for a minimum feature set (as defined by customers), a competitive analysis drives a maximum feature set.”

These are all different views on how finding and listening to customers can affect your business.  There may not be any one right answer, but in the end, we think you should definitely listen to your customers, and that you (the software developer) should be a customer of the product.  We believe in the concept of eating your own dog food, rather than trying to build a product in a vacuum.  At then end of the day, we think it’s important to have an active customer feedback loop, but be careful not to go off into the weeds building one-off features that will only be useful to a few users.

No Comments »Tags: 37 Signals, customer development, David Heinemeier Hansson, Jason Fried, Mark Cuban, Steve Blank

So, it seems Adobe and Apple have decided to spend some money advertising by means of “open letters” Here’s my letter to both of them.

We get it, you don’t mean any harm and you think what you’re doing/asking for is best for the consumer.

The case for Adobe.

In an ideal world, it would be awesome if I wrote something once, and it worked across all platforms. It really would be cool if I could press a button and my code became an iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Blackberry app.

The case against Adobe.
Individual companies have been trying this for years, we’ve called it different things, and they’ve failed.

Sun started this with Java, “it’s cross platform! write once, run anywhere! world peace!”. How many people still use Java “applets”?.

Youtube and other flash player based websites were awesome, finally, one didn’t need realplayer, windows media player, and some other start ups “innovative” new adware player. The consumers made the case for you, and you won that battle. Then you proceeded to drop your pants, and dance.. and you got caught. You didn’t anticipate the growth in mobile phones for browsing, you didn’t think about how your tech would be used in web browsers where the mouse wasn’t the primary form of input.

Had you any foresight, leadership and innovation, you wouldn’t be in this situation. You’re trying to confuse the masses, because you yourself are confused. Who is your customer? The App developers? The Web developers? Or is it the people who are using the apps, and browsing the web sites? If you follow the money, in the end, your
customers are the people who don’t care what technology is used, as long as they get the content they thought they were going to get.

You have not made the same case for mobile devices, on phones that do support flash, the experience of viewing a flash website is horrible. You’ve had since 2006 to solve this issue, and from all recent reports.. you haven’t made any progress. So, with a 4 year track record of failing…. why should anyone trust you?

Why should we think that your cross platform tools will work as expected? You haven’t been able to keep up with changes in the mobile landscape, what makes you think you’ll keep up with changes?

The case for Apple.
You’ve spent a lot of time money building the iPhone OS, and you’re about to reveal OS Touch, or whatever Steve decides to call it. You’ve made it clear, you don’t care about quantity, your only concern is quality, and in the process you’ll piss people off. In the world of hardware development, you’re actually faster than most people would like to admit, or give you credit for.

The case against Apple.
You could screw up, you could take away a feature, or you could incorporate a feature into your OS that negates an app completely. We’re all aware of it, and it’s a risk we’re willing to take. Because, for the past 10 years, your track record, makes us want to be on your side.

Apple, fanboys will justify anything you do, and haters will find something wrong with you saving all the puppies in the world.

So What’s Next?
Adobe, first admit that you dropped the ball, go back to the drawing board, and come back. Don’t try to win a PR war for something that doesn’t exist. Flash for mobile doesn’t suck because of Apple, it sucks because of you. Apple is historically slow in adopting technologies, they weren’t the first with the mp3 player, the touch phone, the tablet, but they are the best. Get that through your ego.

Apple, keep doing what you’re doing, I wish you were more open about your intentions, but I understand that development by committee doesn’t make sense, and your committee would become too big, too quickly. We all remember System 7, copland, and your other failures. It’s obvious you do too, keep it up, don’t get too cocky.

No Comments »Tags: adobe, apple, rants, technology

Last week while I attended AdTech in San Francisco, I had a few hours to zip down to Mountain View and get a tour of the main Google campus.  We met up with Eric Higgins, who is a longtime friend of Pear’s CTO, Vid Luther.  He and Eric worked together back in the early days of Network Solutions.  Eric was most gracious, answering just about any question we would ask, letting us take tons of photos (of common areas, of course), and spending nearly 3 hours with us.  Thanks to Eric for the amazing tour!

Yes, the food is free.

You may have heard that all employees of Google get free food.  This is most certainly true, and it is fantastic, healthy food.  There is cuisines from nearly ever Continent on the planet, including some of the best sushi and Indian food I’ve ever had.  We loaded up our trays (me and Wes Wilson from Upstack), but it was hard not to look like guests.  I suppose you can tell a guest from a regular employee, because we had 3 or 4 plates stacked up with so many different foods it made no sense at all.  What was cool was that each table in the cafeteria had a set of Lego blocks on them so people could brainstorm and play as they ate.  As we toured the campus, it seemed like every other turn there was a coffee station, Odwalla refrigerators stacked with the natural stuff, and they even had the “real Coke” – you know, the stuff that’s “echo en Mexico” and uses real sugar?  Yeah, that stuff is awesome.  Apparently there is breakfast, lunch and dinner served there daily, so no wonder no one wants to leave.  Evidently, Google pays roughly $55M per year to provide free food to their 10,000+ employees in the main campus.

The 20% rule

Another rumor you may have heard about Google is that they allow each employee to spend 20% of their time (that’s one day a week) working on something unrelated to their current projects or tasks.  In fact, not only is this true, but it is how several of Google’s 100+ products were developed.  It was how GMail was developed – people needed an easier way to do email.  What’s interesting, and inspiring about all of this, is that Eric admits that 90-95% of what the engineers/programmers will come up with is junk – it will never be commercialized.  But, they learned a whole lot in the process, and there is usually that 5-10% of the time where they just knock something out of the park.  The moral of the story here is that allowing your employees to stimulate their minds with other things can inadvertently inspire them to make what their working on a whole lot better.  We saw a lot of things around the campus that was built in this 20% free time, such as this real-time search monitor.  It continuously scrolls with random searches from all over the world in every language imaginable (someone wants  be “eloping in myrtle beach” soon).

Hours, Fun & fitness

As we walked about the campus, lots of folks were riding their bikes.  Some were playing a volleyball game in the center of the complex, as they offer a full workout gym free of charge to anyone who wants to use it.  Many people also bring their dogs to work, and we saw several.  The unwritten rule is that as long as your office mates are not allergic, and they are generally tame, anyone can bring their dog to work.  I think you can bring your kids too, but I didn’t see any there.  Most people start their day at Google between 10 and 10:30a.  There are no hard and fast rules on when you have to start or end your day, although some business units who have client related business have to start at normal business hours.  Since a lot of people commute from San Francisco via train or bus, it can take 40 minutes to 1 hour to get to the campus, hence the later starting times.  Many of the people leave around 7 or even 8pm, and many continue to work from home.  Check out the cool bikes they have.  It’s a 6-seater where 5 pedal and 1 steers….cool!  These folks really love their jobs:)

1 Comment »Tags: google, San Francisco

At 9am this morning we’ll be taking a caravan of vehicles up I-35N to Austin to set up our booth for SXSW Interactive 2010.  We’ll be right next to the Brandstack booth, and across the aisle from our client ServerBeach Dedicated Hosting.  In fact, fitting all of our crap into our cars is going to be a challenge.  We’re taking 9 boxes of t-shirts, 6 laptops, a projector, a 10-foot banner, 1,000 brochures, a 15-foot interactive game called “The Score is Right” where people can get their website scored while watching Hans yodel his way up the mountain, just like Cliff Hangers in The Price is Right.  Yep, it’s complete with the theme music and all.

Across the aisle you can get your Speed & Performance score at ServerBeach on a giant plasma screen.  Then they tell you how to improve the performance of your website, which can help your search rankings.

So if you are going, stop by and get scored.  If you’re not going, come back to this page where we will be updating it all weekend with photos and video from the show!

Check out these videos from SXSW:

Popout

Check out these photos from SXSW:

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

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After catching up on some news this evening, I was appalled to learn how lacking the oversight is on the Government stimulus money that I feel like we were duped into in the first place.  CNN reports how a company in Tennessee was given $16 million of this federal warchest to do something useful, yet did not create one single job.  In fact, the money was used to do some soil remediation in Ohio – not even in Tennessee!  CNN also reports a bunch of money was given to Massachusetts company Aggregate Industries, who happens to be the same company who allegedly provided sub-par concrete to the Big Dig project (the largest civil project in the history of the U.S.) – so after the lies, cover up and lawsuit from the State, a big fat stimulus check arrives in the mail.

More capital needs to be accessed easier for the start-ups and small businesses to dramatically improve the economy.

Where is the funding for the start-ups?

I firmly believe that what will get us out of this economic slump is the start-ups and small businesses in this Country, not bailouts to companies who are “too big to fail” and prove over and over again that they can not manage their money properly.  The problem is that I don’t see any programs devoted to funding some of the small start-upst to develop new products, software or other intellectual property.  Sure, in Texas we have the ETF, or the Emerging Technology Fund, and I’ve even looked pretty closely at that program, but there’s enough red tape in that thing to go around the Equator.  It’s really not an attractive option for smaller start-ups like Pear Analytics.  The SBA program also has it’s limitations and hurdles.    Not too long ago I read in the local newspaper that a cap had been reached on the amount of loans available for small business.  That’s enlightening.  No more money there.  Small start-ups like us can really only turn to friends and family, or angels for cash.  A bank probably won’t give us a line of credit, so they’re useless (even though I thought that’s why they were given bailout money in the first place).

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No Comments »Tags: funding, government stimulus, start-ups

The following editorial is actually a thesis written by Josh Lavine, a student at Princeton University whose task was to interview a start-up company, preferably in the hi-tech area for an Entrepreneurship class.  It is quite long, but describes how Pear Analytics was started and where we are going, the challenges we face, and more.  I’ve also left out the Appendix due to length, which you may see notated throughout the report.  This is Josh’s final thesis, and frankly I was impressed by how much he learned about our business and industry in the mere 4 or 5 hours he interviewed me.  I also plan to implement several of his suggestions for improvement which he notes at the end of his report.  Josh is personally invited by me to come join our team at Pear any time. Enjoy!

It is December 23, 2009, noontime. I smooth my shirt and try to lick the tomato sauce stain off my sleeve, then open the door to the office of Pear Analytics. What I saw surprised me.

The office, located in San Antonio, TX is quaint, but strangely chic. It is only one big room with no walled-in spaces, except for the two small conference rooms in back. Large neon green and blue balls are rolling around the floor (I would later find out that instead of buying expensive chairs, the team realized they could just sit on cheap, cool colored exercise balls). Ryan Kelly, founder and CEO of Pear Analytics is presently standing (towering, really—he’s must be 6’6”) at one end of the room, watching one of his office mates from BrandStack, the company he shares office space with, play tennis on the Nintendo Wii on an enormous flat-screen TV—probably the most expensive piece of equipment in the room. If Kelly turned his gaze down and to the right, he would see Romy Misra, his senior analyst, writing equations in dry erase marker on a large glass table. She records her calculations on her laptop. Kelly’s other employees—just three web developers—were out for the day. I follow Kelly into one of the back conference rooms. We sit down and start talking.

A Man with Many Interests

It is about 18 months since Kelly founded Pear Analytics, now a Web-based company that helps websites with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and things are going well. But a decade ago he probably never thought he’d be doing something like this. In 1998, a recent graduate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst with a BSME in Mechanical Engineering, Kelly got a job in the aerospace industry working for Pratt and Whitney, designing and managing jet engine production for the U.S. Air Force. During his first year there, he developed a new kind of airliner turbine foil, for which he received a propriety design patent in 2002. At Pratt and Whitney, Kelly was frustrated by the non-linear way engines were produced on the floor. He described the production floor as vast and organized by an arbitrary positioning of part manufacturing booths (so to speak). Kelly observed that oftentimes a part or an engine in production would take days to get from one stage of production to the next because the booths were on opposite sides of the room, and transportation required trucks that had to be reserved in advance. As an engineer he had little influence in getting the floor rearranged for smoother production. Wanting to become more involved in management, in 2001 Kelly entered business school at the University of Hartford, where he studied Marketing Management. In 2002, Kelly transferred to the University of Phoenix, where he finished his MBA in 2006. For the last year of his 5 year stint at Pratt and Whitney, he acted as the sales and marketing director of Pratt and Whitney’s $20 million spare part business in San Antonio.

In 2003, Kelly moved from Pratt and Whitney to Blue Clover, a creative design firm in San Antonio, where he served as general manager and partner. At Blue Clover, Kelly managed all business processes and the company’s investments, and oversaw all of the production staff. He also oversaw all financials, budgets, legal contracts, and company proposals, provided key web strategies, SEO and marketing techniques for many of the company’s clients.[1] With Kelly there, Blue Clover became distinguished as an award winning design firm. In 2006 it was honored with 16 Addy awards, including 5 gold for elements of advertising, interactive media, and collateral material; and in February 2008 it was named one of San Antonio’s best places to work.

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3 Comments »Tags: pear analytics, princeton

To say that Apple has changed the mobile phone industry is an understatement. They changed the MP3 player market before that. Now all rumors point to an impending tablet/touchscreen device, what market will this affect?  Everyone else has their ideas, so I’ll throw mine in as well, some of these ideas aren’t just fantasies, but reports from sources familiar with Apple.

iPhone on Verizon

This is a big deal for the US, but not much of a surprise, AT&T doesn’t bring anything of exclusive value to the table, so the exclusivity contract will not last.  This is such a no-brainer, that I won’t spend much time on it.  If you have a contract with any carrier, and it’s about to expire in the next 3 months, great, just stay with them and go month to month, you don’t need to buy a new phone yet.

Tablet/Slate/Larger iPod Touch

I know for a fact that this is happening, and is bigger than people think it is. This is not just an addition to their line up, but an attempt to change theway we interact with computers on a daily basis. The iPhone and iPod touch were nothing more than experiments, and we all paid willingly, to be their lab rats. The first victim of this device will be the Amazon Kindle and other ‘e-readers’.  The proponents of current readers thought people would love to be able to carry the same number of books with them, as they do their music. Forgetting that most songs are less than 3 minutes long, and don’t require the undivided attention of the user. Even with things like “read to me”, the form factor is plain unsexy and cumbersome.  Combine that with text only display for magazines and periodicals, and the process of reading just becomes downright painful. Now imagine a device that lets you check your email, surf the web, and read your favorite magazine or book at any time, and it does it all in color.  That’s what the tablet will do. The first generation will not make voice calls via a cell network, but will have EVDO built in.  Now how is this better than any other tablet, or laptop/netbook?

As a consumer, it’s better because it’s further consolidation of multiple devices, it’s a bigger form factor than an iPhone, and I am 99% certain, won’t require a contract with AT&T. All data will go through Verizon’s EVDO network, with Sprint/Clear 4G coming in 2011. You can take this device to your office, “dock it”, and  use it with a bigger/newer display and your existing keyboard/mouse.

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1 Comment »Tags: apple, tablet, verizon

Despite a tanking economy, Apple has record sales and profits and doesn’t need a fire sale to compete this holiday season.  Find out four things they have mastered which make this possible.

Apple is coming off the best performing fiscal year ever according to cNet, with $1.67 billion in profit – which is a whopping $1.82 per share of earnings.  This along with record sales for the Mac and iPhone, I wonder how Apple does it.

When other companies struggle to weather the economic storm, how is it that Apple is able to sell a record number of some of the most expensive phones and computers on the market?  Why is it that people are willing to put up with AT&T just to have the glorious iPhone?

Image of the new iMac from apple.com

Dell just came out with their earnings a few weeks ago and missed even the most modest analysts expectations with only $727 million in profit, or $0.27 per share.  Not even close to Apple, and the new Netbooks with Windows 7 is apparently pretty hot, right?

Part of the answer is how they package it. When you buy any Apple product, the packaging is very high end – you feel like you have purchased something very special.  When I first opened my new MacBook Pro box, I felt like I was opening a gift from Nordstrom’s. Open an HP box and it’s nothing special.  You actually get instructions that look like they were meant for a 5-year old, or those wordless graphics like you see in the backseat of an airplane.  Yep – I think I can figure out how to put the battery in – thanks.

Part of the answer is how they market the products. If you visit www.apple.com from a PC, you see a page really hyping the new iMac.  If you visit the page from a Mac, then you get a page pushing new accessories.  This is smart marketing.  Visit www.dell.com and to find a monitor, you first have to decide if it’s for Home or Office – as if it matters – do they price them differently?  The Apple home page is simple, easy to navigate and puts a big focus on the “hero”, which are the products.  Their checkout process is refined and brilliantly cross-sells other accessories leaving you no choice but to fill your cart with about $300 of more stuff that you absolutely have to have.  After all, that’s great marketing, right?

Part of the answer is their trusted brand. Apple has spent years building a brand.  A brand that you can trust is reliable and where the products will last.  The only company that decided it was better to manufacture the hardware and the software all in the same place.  That means installing new software or applications will only require you to click and drag an icon, rather than having to scour the Internet for a driver.

Part of the answer is innovation. The innovative products that Apple keeps pumping out are a huge factor in their success.  If your company doesn’t change, or innovate, you likely will not experience explosive growth, revenue or profits.

So if you have all of these things and you’ve been able to create insatiable demand, you really don’t need to have sales on days like “black Friday.”  Not only would a sale “cheapen” the brand, but it creates an expectation in the mind of the consumer that all you have to do is wait and eventually the price will go down.  This is what the cable companies do at the end of every month, and car companies do at the end of every year.  Surely you’ve heard the best time to buy a car is at the “end of the year clearance sales” – right?  Apples doesn’t need sales, and unless the competition brings, well….competition, they probably won’t even have to lower their prices much either.

10 Comments »Tags: apple, marketing, marketing strategy

You heard it right…I use Keynote to develop iterations on user interface design for our products and front end retail site.  This method saves us a ton of time and cost in design and development.  I used to use PowerPoint, but then converted to a MacBook Pro a few months ago, and now I’m hooked on Keynote.

Before I get into how this works, I need to mention how cool is it that you can control your Keynote slide presentation with your iPhone by downloading the Keynote Remote app for like two bucks.  Just had to get that off my chest…

Ok, here we go:

1. Start with a basic wireframe – you’ll need to spec something out for your designer to get started.  Give them the basic elements of where you want navigation, sub-navigation, and general text and image requirements.  You basically have your header, body section and footer area.  You also might want to have an interior page concept as well.  Below I am showing you how I went from a PowerPoint slide (at the time) to the almost final design:

Here is another example of how I started designing and concepting our SiteJuice™ tool in Keynote and how it transformed into Photoshop:

2.  Research web icon sets and photos you want to use – I like to use actual icons and images in my concepts to portray the website as real as possible.  This way you can see how it would actually look, and then play with size and location.  Go to istockphoto or similar and look for “web icons” and you’ll find thousands.  I ended up with the Universal icon set, and purchased about nine different sets.  You can do a screen capture to use in your screenshots while concepting – just make sure you go and buy them later

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2 Comments »Tags: keynote, powerpoint, user interface