Als Blog

Canadian camera resellers suck!

As many of you know I'm into photography and love it! It balances my creative side with my tech and toy side very well. I recently did a shoot of some skateboard sessions at the local skate club and learned a lot about fast sports and strobes which could be a post in itself. I wanted a fast recycle time on my Canon 580ex so I thought I'd grab the external battery pack for it. Time to shop!

I'm all for supporting local businesses but the camera stores have lost me as a customer probably for good!

Ok I went to my local camera store Lens and Shutter and they quoted me $350.00 and it was special order so I would have to wait for it. I thought hey if I have to wait for it I could order it online so I checked out www.vistek.ca a Canadian online reseller based out of Toronto and this is what I found.

It was cheaper online even with shipping added which was no big surprise to me really as I assumed I could get it for less than the store was asking but it wasn't as much as I expected. Then I though I'd check the big US Camera reseller www.bhphotovideo.com and here is what I found there.

The $149 is US dollars but the exchange rates what they are and the low cost of shipping this unit I decided to buy from B&H. Once it landed including tax, exchange, shipping, and duty I was into it for $180 Canadian dollars which is HALF what the local store quoted me and it arrived in 4 days.

Get your act together Canadian resellers! IT saddens me to say this but I won't be buying from local people for camera gear any more.

Internet Marketing At It's Best! - NOT!

Ok many of you know that I am the CEO of Oprius a CRM company with automated email capability. We fight spam HARD. We hate spammers, we hate spam, we hate anything to do with spam. SO you can imagine that we protect people by being paranoid about spammers and do everything we can to make sure that they can't use our system.

Enough background get on with the hilarity!

Ok we got a call today from a Gentleman that asked us:

"How often a day can I send to my email list?" which raised a red flag immediately for our support staff.

We then asked how big his list was and if it was double opt in or not. He said "over 1 million and yes all double opt in".

Ok so our next question was "where did you get this list from?"

He answered "I bought it from a guy"

We asked who and could we get in touch with them to make sure they were double opt in leads. He gave us a phone number we could contact and the website for them. Ok here is where the fun started.

The website states that they sell a list of 3 BILLION email addresses for $97 ........ Ok did you catch that.

Here are some interesting facts.

Email list they sell = 3 Billion email addresses

World Population = 6.8 Billion

World Internet Users = 1.6 Billion

Ok assuming that Everyone of those people in the world that had access to the internet had an email address his list (at 3 Billion email address's) has 2 email addresses for every person that connects to the internet in the world. ....... Really .... and this is legit ..... *shakes head*

This is what's wrong with the internet marketing world today. I have given you a screen shot of the website below (in case he changes it after this ... well I wish I had that much internet power but probably not) and the link to the page.

The best part is that the person that contacted us called us back to tell us that he called the gentleman (who sold him the leads) to ask about it and talked to his wife who ensured him that her husband was of the utmost character and that this was a legit list. I'm not pointing any fingers but by the math this is a bit sketchy  .... you be the judge.

http://supermailmarketing.com/

Late Night In Victoria

I had a great time walking around Victoria with Local Wedding Photographer Jon-Mark Wiltshire the other night. If you have a chance check out his photography at http://jonmarkphoto.com I think you will enjoy it. I was pretty cold and I totally had the advantage for staying warm with all my extra natural insulation.

I took this picture with a off camera shoot through umbrella with a 580ex wirelessly triggered with an ST-E2. I'm experimenting a lot right now with the Canon wireless triggering system with E-TTL and so far am impressed. In the background are the BC Legislative buildings.

Back At It:

Well it looks like I'm back to blogging again. Many of my friends know that I am invested in many different areas of life from Business and Entrepreneurship, Photography, Music, and Sailing are my big ones. I am always learning and crafting my skills and trying to become a better human if that's possible.

They have also noted that I am very hard to keep up with as I have so much going on and they would like to have a place to go for information. So at their request I am going to do my best to keep my blog updated with those area's of my life as much as possible. You can expect to see posts on all of the above topics and I will try to reduce my ranting to a minimum and just convey information that you might find helpful in those areas and the lessons and things I am dealing with.

I hope you have a great time reading this and getting to know me better. Cheers all!

My new Limo

Well summer is here and the family is on the move again. I had to figure out how to get both kids to school and transport us around when we don't need to take the car but still need to travel at a decent speed. Here is the result a cycling limo with me at the helm, my six year old on the trailer bike, and my three year old in the covered bike trailer.

I am not so convinced that the product designers intended this but hey as long as the brakes on my Kona hold out FORWARD HO!!!!

Key's to good trial to paid conversion ratio

This was a reply to a forum comment regarding our trial to paid conversion ratio that I though I would share here. The commenter said that they would like to know what our secret sauce is for our conversions and this was my reply

Obviously every company wants to keep their secret sauce to themselves as it directly relates to their competitive advantage.

I will say that conversion ratio's for trial to paid in my experience are the result of 5 factors.

1. How niche you product is.
2. How big of a problem you are solving for that niche.
3. How quickly a user can learn your product.
4. The level of free support you give to your trial users.
5. How well you are targeting your web traffic through marketing efforts. (The more broad your marketing on driving traffic to your web page the lower your conversion ratios will be.)

Balance those and you will have as good of conversion as you can for your product , market, and industry.

Transparency in SaaS

Wow I have been overwhelmed with the amount of email and comments I have received praising our decision to let our conversion stats be public domain. Most of the comments revolved around how much people appreciated this decision in an industry where we typically keep all this close to our chests. My mind got to thinking why is that and what good is keeping them to ourselves?

While I admit there are certain stats you want to keep to yourself and out of your competitions hands I see some good reasons to let the public know about the rest of them. Here is why I think some transparency is a good idea.

It Keeps Your Team Focused:

If you are in the practice of sharing certain data publicly you will naturally want to make sure those stats are as good as possible. I can guarantee that if you regularly publicize certain stats you and your management team will have those stats at the top of their mind whenever they are making decisions. Every company worth it's salt monitors some key figures that dictate the success of a company. Share as many as you can publicly and you will see your team take note of them daily which only helps you focus them on what's important. Outside scrutiny is the best form of accountability for your management staff.

It Helps The SaaS Industry:

Lets face it we are still a fairly young industry with a huge runway ahead of us. The more information we have in the public domain the better the world can understand us and what we do. I must say that I love the little exchange letters between Mint.com and Intuit. It warms my heart to see such good public press for SaaS. We need more of this to fuel the industry and make it move forward faster. The more we share the more real we become as an industry. If you are hiding your information people think you must not be doing that well. We need momentum in the SaaS world and being transparency is a good start to that unless you have something to hide.

It Helps Us All Get Investment:

How many times have you been at the table with a potential investor and they pull the "lets value your company on future revenues card" only to turn around and tell you that there isn't really enough good data to support your revenue claims thus undervaluing you due to perceived risk. The more data we put in the public domain the more we can support our revenue growth projections when looking for investment.

It Helps The Start Ups:

In my mind the more startups in the SaaS world that succeed the better it is for all SaaS companies as we map out our future growth. If we share our stories with start ups they will have better data for projections and planning (which means hopefully then won't go to investors with silly over states stories). If our industry has a track record of success in the start ups our job becomes easier. Easier to attract new talent and get growth investment.

Basically if we have good stats we should be sharing them. Obviously we have to be cautious as companies that we don't give away our secret sauce that is helping us with our fast ramps but lets face it some data is just helpful. I say go for it and post your information and show your support for the SaaS industry. Lets get this industry going and prove ourselves to be extremely viable and competetive.

Oprius conversion ratios for 2008

Well I must say as the CEO of a hosted sales tool SaaS company I never see people putting their conversion stats out there on the web. I know that stats will change based on lots of different factors so you have to take each one with an idea of what's behind it. What the company does, who they are targeting, and the amount of money going into their sales effort.

I don't mind sharing out data for others to look at. If you are familiar with Oprius and what we offer you will find these stats more useful. I am personally very happy with our stats for 2008 If I had gotten a report card like this is high school my dad would have been very happy.

Just to give you some back ground we launched our product at the end of January 2008 and as of January 2009 we are profitable. Our growth has surprised even us and we have to thank our users so much for their support over the last year. I have never been the CEO of a company where people send us so many cards and brownies in the mail saying thanks for building such a great easy to use tool with top shelf support. 

I think it has been our support that has driven the retention rate so high. We have unlimited toll free telephone support for users and people in trial. It is amazing to me to pick up the phone (yes even the CEO takes the some of the support calls) I am greeted by someone thanking us and praising us before they ask their question. I wish I had money for every time someone was amazed that they got a real person on the phone and on the first ring usually to boot!

If any of you have ever questioned how far you should go with your service the answer is way farther than your competitors.

Batchbook copies Oprius ...... it happens all the time.

You know i'm not really surprised when people copy the features of our software. We drive our software development off of what our users ask for. We listen and communicate with them all the time. We even have toll free UNLIMITED phone support that we actually answer! No one in our company is exempt from answering the support phone if it rings, not even me the CEO. We track users requests and build them out as they become popular. 

What surprises me is companies that grow from copying other companies features and don't really do anything innovative. Wouldn't you rather work with a company that is continually innovating, not just tweaking their offering and copying competitors, but creating sweeping new ideas on how to sell through software. 

Here is a screen shot of Batchbooks support forum, and we see this all the time (not just Batchbooks theirs is just the most recent)

Here is the link to it: 

What's next are they going to copy our call assistant, our built in IMAP email client, or our automated customizable relationship plans. Who knows! I know that I will probably get hate mail from someone for this but I just can't believe the amount of times we see this on the internet. People trying to imitate what we do at Oprius.

I particularly like this one lol 

Here is it's link:

Someone once said "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" so I guess I should just say a big thanks to Batchbook and the others that are copying everything we do here at Oprius. Thanks!

Tweeting more than blogging

Wow I really have been slacking on blog posts but I am realy enjoying twitter more and more. I light of this I have decided to post mostly on twitter and then like to here from twitter when I have more to write. So make sure you jump on twitter and follow me as opriusceo. See you on the twit side LOL.