It’s interesting to contrast this with the goal of absolutely maximizing the length of life, regardless of the personal or societal cost, and as early as possible ceasing work and escaping in to a blissful retirement.

I’m not saying the latter is a bad thing, it is just worth remembering that not long ago the perspective was different.

Over the next few months I slowly added features as customers demanded to its present state, which is reasonably feature-complete and robust. Given the 100,000s of sites with out-dated store locators and new e-commerce sites coming online every day, the scalable potential is huge. However, despite several trials, I have not yet found a good strategy for acquiring new customers for StoreMapper, nor any good research on the topic of selling SaaS products to very small online businesses.

StoreMapper has three primary customer profiles:

1. Web developers who work for multiple e-commerce clients. Thinking, as I originally did, that it does not make sense to re-invent the wheel, many developers steer their clients towards paying for StoreMapper rather than spend custom coding hours.
2. Small business owners who run their own e-commerce presence. Typically they have some knowledge of HTML/CSS and are able to run their own websites on a platform like Shopify or BigCommerce. StoreMapper requires no coding other than optional customization of the style.
3. Webmasters at larger web-based businesses. This represents a tiny portion of customers and at this point I have not found any reliable ways to reach this customer segment.

Tactics to date for scalable customer acquisition:

1. Google AdWords: My first strategy was AdWords. At first I found AdWords to have an extremely steep learning curve. I called their free help line repeatedly and eventually got a decent setup targeting customers searching for “store locator app/widget/plugin.” While this did lead to some conversions at a reasonable overall customer acquisition cost, ramping up the daily spend did not lead to any increased conversions which lead me to believe that I was likely cannibalizing customers who would have signed up anyway through organic search results. I am not currently running an AdWords campaign.

2. Ad Hoc Referral: Many e-commerce platforms keep list of 100s of recommended developers on their website. Attempting to target customer segment #1, I scraped all these email addresses and sent a nicely worded (I thought) pitch informing them I would pay a referral fee (I A/B tested between $20-50) for any of their clients they signed up. Total emails sent: ~600. Total referral sign ups: 0.

3. Outsourced Cold-Pitching: One good pattern I found from my existing customers was that they were often converting an existing page with dozens of retailers just listed in text into a store locator. So I put out an oDesk job describing this criteria: “Find me websites of any kind with a retailers page that has at least 10 locations listed and get their email” and paid a very small per lead fee. I then sent out a cold pitch for StoreMapper highlighting the benefits of improved in-store traffic, etc. This yielded a few conversions but despite the very low per lead fee I was able to get on oDesk, it was overall not very cost effective.

4. Platform App Store: Shopify has a pretty robust App Store and I recently integrated with platform to allow sign up and billing through Shopify accounts and went live in the App Store. Conversions are pretty good and around 30% of total sign ups come through this channel.

5. Powered by Link: Nearly all of the other sign ups come through organic/viral marketing of the widget itself. Perhaps the best single line of code in the whole app renders a “Powered by StoreMapper” link back to the site. I send a follow-up email to every new users asking how they found StoreMapper and almost all the responses (confirmed by Google Analytics) show that conversions happen when someone in any customer segment sees StoreMapper on another site and follows that link. This is pretty fantastic and has been driving slow but steady (and free) organic growth for the app.

Through this process I have been in touch with other SaaS marketers trying to target the micro/small e-commerce market and have found little in the way of good tactics or research. I would love to work with a talented student or marketer on an internship or case study. I’m offering open access to all the business’s data, a willingness to experiment and a small marketing budget for proposed ideas.

If you are interested please fill out the form below:

Zoom in and out around areas you will be wandering taking snaps and then later you’ll have a pocket-sized map without having to unfold some giant piece of paper and look like a tourist noob.

I’m looking to build a simple iOS app that would make this process one-click easy. “I’m going to Paris and staying at this hotel”… boom it saves all the maps you’ll need for offline use. Anybody think that is something they would use?

Happy holidays folks.

Captio is an ultra-simple and very fast note-taking app that opens extremely quickly and sits on my phone’s home screen. Other than storing simple text notes, its one and only feature is that it will email each note to a specified address. Zapier is an awesome service for mashing up APIs. Much like IFTTT, Zapier let’s you build recipes where an action in one program triggers another action in a different program. E.g. -

When I post to Tumblr, tweet the link. When I add a Mailchimp subscriber, add them to my Highrise CRM, etc.

So I created a simple mashup. One of Zapier’s triggers is a custom email address. I set my Captio email address to my @in.zapier.com address, connected my Asana Workspace and set it to create a new task assigned to me with the email’s content as the task.

The whole process takes about 5 minutes and you shave 10 seconds off each time (for me about 30x a day) you need to get a To Do into your Asana. Very GTD.

Update: I now use the Squarespace Note app instead of Captio. It’s equally fast and simple, but allows Evernote sync in case I think the note should go there instead. Setup is the same by setting your Zapier inbox as the email option.

Anybody else got cool productivity hacks to share?

In September 2012, I launched a store locator app called StoreMapper. I built the first iteration of it on a long flight from San Francisco to Buenos Aires. The product has a nicely scaling customer base and provides a solution for e-commerce shop owners to embed a store locator, dealer locator or distributor locator to their website on any platform like Shopify, Magento or WordPress without writing any code.

I thought it would be good to actually be a customer of my own product (the scratch your own itch principle) so I built a first iteration of my own Café Finder. Enter your location and the app finds the nearest cafés from my growing list of places I love. Right now it’s only really works for NYC (The Village), DC, Cusco, and Buenos Aires. I’ll keep updating it as I travel (and remember places) and hopefully somebody will find it useful. I’d love to hear your feedback.

Specifically:

1. If you like the idea and want to add some locations, shoot them my way and I’ll add them. If you have your own blog/webiste and want to add the map to a page, drop me a note and I’ll give you the embed code. It takes about 10 seconds to setup.

1b. If you want your OWN locator of recommended cafés, bars, clubs, or really anything to add to your site. You can sign up directly on the site. If you have a good reason you’d like not to pay for it. Give me a shout and I’ll hook it up.

2. If you are a frequent freelancer, teleworker, café commuter or “cofficer” as dubbed by @TheCoffice and this resonates with you. Let me know if you think this is cool and should be expanded. Any tips on how to better solve the issue of where can I open my laptop, get some caffeine an do some work are more than welcome.

3. It turns out there are a ton of business implications of “finding stuff on a map” and I’m playing around with a lot of other business lines using the software base. The inimitable Michael Conti came up with the idea for Sandy Volunteer Mapper and I’m sure there are many more out there. If you’ve got a rad idea for re-selling or using this kind of thing for good. Let’s chat.

As best as I can tell, everybody who reads this blog is like insanely smart, so I’m looking forward to thoughts via email, twitter or in the comments below.

All the best,
Tyler

Here’s what I’m using:

- Pulse: Pulse for iPhone is the only way I consume news. Grabs all your news feeds and any RSS feeds you like. I use it to catch up mainly on blogs that I follow.

- Tweetbot: Really clean Twitter UI. When people tweet articles to read it runs them through the Instapaper API to render them in nice clean mobile-friendly versions with no ads or sidebars.

- Instapaper: For reading articles later. I can save articles directly from Tweetbot for later consumption on Instapaper.

- Sublime Text 2: The best code editor there is. Writing code feels like conducting an orchestra using this thing.

- iA Writer: I’m currently writing this blog post on iA Writer. The $5 app from the Mac App Store makes writing amazingly fun. The full screen mode has absolutely zero distractions and really let’s you focus on the only thing that matters. The words. You are going to look at it and think it is too simplistic and not worth the money, but you will be wrong. Buy and love it.

- Kindle Paperwhite: I just got this thing and I love it already. Global 3G, intelligent touch UI, soft backlight that looks great in any light and lovely to read e-ink. My iPad is ditched and forgotten.

Sometimes less is not more, it is clarity.

This is particularly present in travel and electoral politics.

When traveling, unless you are a crazy micro-planner, your day-to-day activities, like where you will eat and sleep, have much more uncertainty than usual. So you start the standard scenario analysis. “Surely hotel rooms will be cheap, it’s off season.” “There must be places to get breakfast nearby, it’s right in the middle of town.” “I’m certain they will book us on the next flight.” To a small extent this is reasonable and productive, running through several options and planning what you will do in each event. But we never stop there. We keep trying to squeeze more clarity, wracking our brains for the right answer when the reality is that we just do not have enough information and should just relax and see what happens.

In politics, this drives pundits nuts. Their presumed goal is to interpret events and provide clarity on the implications for the future. But most of the time the day’s events really do not provide a significant impact on projected outcomes. The truthful daily punditry should read “no change today, check back tomorrow.” But there is air time to fill and salaries to justify, so they draw tenuous implications from non-events and artificially amplify the volatility, adding value for no one.

The next time you find yourself grasping at straws, maybe it is time to admit you just do not have enough information.

Does this make sense at all to you guys?

I love his description of using “tiny habits” and then stacking them into long term behaviors. He uses the example of “after I brush my teeth, I will floss ONE tooth” to show how you can form a tiny habit and then grow it. I’ve just decided on “every time I check Facebook, I stand up and stretch for 5 seconds.”

The tooth thing led me to an odd thought. Like many kids, I had braces when I was in middle school. Afterwards I basically never wore my retainer and the subsequent tectonic shifting has left a small gap in my teeth just the right size to consistently get an irritating amount of food stuck in it. As such Im a very diligent glosser and always have it with me even when traveling. I wonder if there’s also a way to create “tiny bothers” that force a habit. I guess a good example be the withings scale that can be set up to auto-tweet your weight each time you use it.

I’m experimenting with this new habit design app Lift which in itself must be a habit before you can use it to create more habits. no idea if it will be useful.