Author Archives: Thor Muller

Thor Muller is CEO & Co-founder of Satisfaction. You can find out more about him here: http://thormuller.com/netpositive

September 13, 2007

Wow, we’ve got some great investors!

Satisfaction launch team sans Thor

Anybody who has raised money knows that it’s nothing like going to the bank for a loan. It’s a lot more like a job search. Or dating. Both sides in this courtship–entrepreneurs and investors–are looking for a combination of attributes in the other that they sometimes aren’t aware of until they’re right in front of it. We’re looking for love matches, if you will.

We found that even though the process took longer than we hoped we received a tremendous amount of useful feedback along the way, much of which was critical in helping us evolve our product and business model.

It’s this consultative process that allowed us to get to know the investors we’re so proud to announce today. Each one of them has a unique perspective on how to build a business, develop a community, perfect a product, and connect with customers. Here’s what I’m talking about:

  • First Round Capital: As one of the first investors we spoke with, we were able to cultivate a real collaborative relationship with Rob Hayes long before they ever put a term sheet in front of us. Backed by the tremendous experience and street smarts of Josh Kopelman and the rest of the First Round Team (who have been behind such hits as Half.com, VideoEgg, 1800FREE411, PowerSet, and Aggregate Knowledge), Rob is going to be a killer partner for us with his steely business acumen and executional focus.
  • O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures (OATV): We’re huge O’Reilly fans. Tim has a far-reaching vision of where technology is going, and has fostered a powerful network of big thinkers and doers. Over the past few months we’ve seen how Bryce Roberts and Mark Jacobsen at OATV are a natural extension of this network. Bryce, who just joined our board with Rob, is already proving to be a potent business catalyst.
  • Jeff Clavier: Jeff has built a reputation as a Web 2.0 “kingmaker” with his investments in firms like Truveo, Kaboodle, MyBlogLog, Kongregate and Dogster. Seeing him at work putting together deals and being a true “connector” we can see why his companies’ success is no fluke.
  • Mike Brown: As a VC youngin’ Mike Brown looks at opportunties a bit differently than his seniors, and that’s why we think he so often gets things earlier than most. For instance, he convinced his old VC firm, the enterprise-focused Partech International, to invest in the smash hit widget company, RockYou. Now, as an angel, he is working with Satisfaction to find scrappy ways to build the business.
  • Adaptive Path: As the elite user experience design consultancy co-founded by Satisfaction’s own Lane Becker, Adaptive Path was an early believer in our mission to transform customer service. They are incredibly insightful, and understand the startup product design issues thanks to their experience in launching MeasureMap (sold to Google last year).
  • Jason Schultz: He was the first investor in, very early indeed, and deserves a ton of credit for his chutzpah. More importantly, as a staff lawyer for the EFF he’s a leading legal expert in online intellectual property law. He even testifies in front of congress! Based on his experience in defending the rights of individuals online, he understands how power is shifting outside of organizations into the hands of empowered creators/users/customers.
  • Mom: Finally, my mom insisted on investing despite my protestations that it’s one of those “risky startups”, bless her. She’s been amazing, too, suggesting some very clever business ideas along the way. Full of surprises, that girl.

We’re going to need all the help we can get, so we’re very happy to have such a group as this behind us. Thanks all!

By Thor Muller | Posted in company, Satisfaction | Comments (7)
September 12, 2007

Satisfaction can no longer hide behind its landing page

Indeed, we’re going to have to learn to live in the public eye, for today we’re releasing the public beta of Satisfaction! It’s been several unforgettable months of research, design and development, supported by amazing early beta users and the endless genorosity of friends and advisors. We feel very fortunate–and proud!–to launch the first version of this web service we believe will do a lot of good for people everywhere.

It goes without saying that we’re just getting started, and we have a few tricks up our sleeves in the coming weeks and months. We really do believe that customer service can be fun!

So go ahead and add your company to Satisfaction–you’ll want to be listening here when your customers start talking about your company and its products [more on why you should]. Maybe you’ll get hooked and start replacing your old-fashioned customer service process with one that puts your community at the center.

(Note: I filmed a brilliant video of the exact moment of launch, complete with whooping and hollering, and spontaneous hilarity. However, somehow I forgot to hit the record button. We made a second video after that, but we found ourselves just going through the motions. It was just pathetic. So you’re getting this spontaneous blog post instead. :-)

By Thor Muller | Posted in company, Satisfaction | Comments (8)
August 28, 2007

Freakonomics gets it right, even when they get it wrong

A few months back I gave some unsolicited advice to Digg after its users rebelled against the company’s decision to comply with a DMCA takedown notice. My point then was that Digg could have avoided relinquishing control of their business if they’d defaulted to greater transparency; specifically they should have engendered a dialog with their customers prior to making their decision. My point was that this transparency and conversation would actually enable them to retain *more* direct control over their business then they could by maintaining an opaque process. As it turned out, they were coerced into reversing their business decision, effectively ceding the management decision to an angry mob of users.

Digg is doing just fine today. In fact, their traffic seems to be significantly up since then. The temptation is to conclude that Digg was well served by their decision. I worry that they’ve set themselves up for unnecessary future power struggles with their own hyper-empowered users.

Last week we saw a counter-example unfold on the Freakonomics blog. This most popular of economics blogs recently moved to the New York Times, and one of the changes was that its formerly full RSS feed had now become a partial feed (i.e. people reading the blog in feed readers were suddenly viewing excerpts rather than the full article). This created a torrent of resistance from many long-time readers: “Please fix the partial feed problem. They’re just plain rude and I’m afraid I’ll have to unsub from your blog if its not fixed.”

The unbridled frustration from readers continued for weeks (albeit with a fraction of the vitriol as Digg’s users), and the Freakonomics writers posted twice in response, explaining that they were examining the issue closely. Via the blog comments and all over the Web, people took the opportunity to express themselves at length for and against the truncation. Finally, Freakonomics’ Stephen Dubner published a post explaining the blog’s final decision: against the wishes of the most vocal users Freakonomics would be sticking with the excerpts. Importantly, he prominently mentions (even links) to the critics:

Are there strong and sane opposing views on this issue? Absolutely. You can read, for instance, what TechDirt wrote about full feeds potentially creating more site traffic, not less. There’s another interesting view at Online Spin and another at Poynter.org.

While I agree with TechDirt that the decision to truncat feeds are short-sighted and silly, I do think that Freakonomics exemplified a winning strategy: they engaged users in a conversation about the issue and then, after due consideration, made the decision that they felt was right for their business. Like Digg, Freakonomics is nothing without its readers, but its owners are also the only ones responsible for keeping the site a going concern. By being inclusive in the process they respected their readers, even if their decision didn’t please them all.

Now I bet their traffic will go up. Just like Digg’s.

By Thor Muller | Posted in case studies, community, Judo move | Comments (0)
August 24, 2007

I’d like to thank our detractors for all their support…

Palm, Inc., Your Destination for Handhelds, Mobile Managers, Smartphones, Accessories and Software TitlesIt’s easy enough to thank the folks that say nice things about you. But it takes real wisdom to embrace your critics. Recognizing that it’s passion, whether positive or negative, that fosters forward progress, Palm Computing’s CEO Ed Colligan has paid real respect to those who are clobbering his company with the truth.

In “Dear Palm: It’s time for an intervention“, Engadget’s Peter Rojas basically tells Palm that it is falling apart and better fix itself before it’s game over. It’s a detailed laundry list of things the company needs to do, and analysis on what it’s done wrong. All in all a very tough review.

What’s remarkable is the grace by which Ed Colligan accepts this very public feedback. The traditional approach is to ignore negative press like this, as if by not acknowledging it will become less credible. But Colligan instead expresses his gratitude, then reinforces the criticisms as a way of expressing his seriousness of intent:

I really appreciate the fact that you guys and others care enough to take the time to write such a comprehensive list of actions. I forwarded it to our entire executive staff and many others at Palm have read it. Although I can’t say I agree with every point, many are right on. We are attacking almost every challenge you noted, so stay tuned.

This is a Judo move worthy of a master.

By Thor Muller | Posted in case studies, reputation, Judo move | Comments (3)
August 23, 2007

You decide who speaks at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival

Hugh Forrest, the director of the Interactive portion of the famed South by Southwest conference in Austin, TX, is one of the savviest conference organizers out there. Since 1994, he’s been instrumental in channeling the rock-and-roll energy of the SxSW Music festival to the geeks, always making diversity a priority. In a nod to the open collaborative spirit driving the Web, over the last few years he’s introduced an interactive panel-picker as a way for attendees to influence the conference content.

It’s only in its second year, but it has already broadened the diversity of potential participants in the conference. Anyone can propose a panel or presentation, and attendees can preview and rate these submissions based on what they’re interested in seeing. Like Threadless does with its t-shirt design contest, the SxSW panel-picker directly reflects the interests of its users, and by not displaying the votes of other users it keeps the system from being unduly gamed or manipulated. Hugh and his team are still the final arbiters of the event programming, so they can still curate the content based on their own experience and judgement.

To help you get the most out of the panel picker I’ve done the work for you. I’m recommending the following list of panels and presentations. If you like the kinds of things we discuss on this blog, you’ll probably like these. If you agree I encourage you to login to the panel picker and rank them highly.

In the self-promotion department, I’ll first point you to two presentations proposed separately by myself and Lane Becker:

Here are the rest of the suggestions. There were almost 700 panels to sift through, though the elegant implementation by Lindsey Simon makes it easy to filter the list to a more manageable number by keyword, skill level, and category. Nonetheless, it’s intimidating to start the process of winnowing through them. I hope this list helps shorten your path.

By Thor Muller | Posted in conferences, appearances, co-creation | Comments (2)