Steven Cox - Founder of TakeLessons. Build Something You're Proud Of

Folksonomy and Social Tagging Grids

We are in the process of studying our information architecture and challenging the way we have currently built the site.

We started out in November of 2005 by matching music instructors and students. There were basically 25-30 musical instruments that covered the majority of searches. Over time, we've added dance, art, drama, and other creative outlets, most of which I am a novice in. Our instructors, however, are the experts at their craft. We found that many of them were requesting new areas of study to be added to our ever-growing list of categories. We shot up from 25 categories to over 130 now.

Chris Anderson's Long Tail is definitely at work here, and every day there are student searches for off-the-wall things, or new genres (such as krump, or pop and lock, burlesque exotic dance, east coast ballroom dancing, bag pipes, and tons more). We realized that as we continue to grow, the rigid hierarchical taxonomy that was in place was not going to scale with us.

Being a fan of social bookmarking, I've been studying the genesis of tagging and folksonomy, which allows users to identify and relate a piece of content (whether it be a profile, video, article, comment, etc.) to a series of words that help them identify the content on their own terms. The de facto world leader and president of the United States of Folksonomy is a dude named Thomas Vanderwal. He's the bomb. If you are the least bit interested in the benefits of tagging, I recommend that you read his papers and web site.

Over the next few months, we are going to be a living experiment in converting a hierarchical site to a more circular tagging site. We realize that we cannot possibly keep up with the ever-changing creative outlets that our users want to learn about. What we believe is that over time, our users (who are the experts) will tell us how things should be organized, and we will use that data to develop tighter social graphs, more relevant search results, and a more fluid overall experience.

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social networking picture sourced from Wikipedia

Social Networking Sites and Engagement

This week, Facebook revised their platform for application developers to base the validity and popularity of applications on engagement of the user instead of downloads. This is the correct way to do things. No more is it just about the number of people that visit the site and the number that become members. It's about how involved the users are on your site. I think a true test of a site is measuring how integrated the site and applications are in the fabric of people's lives?

What makes a social networking site valuable? Is it how many friends you have? Hardly. Social scientists have studied the 'pseudo-friends-myspace' phenomenon and, at most, we can truly have about 150 connections without going bonkers.

I believe the true litmus test over the next three years will be for social sites to create a safe, usable, and truly integrated tool set where users can connect and share among their group of 150 people or less. This means being able to transact commerce, share plans and goals, communicate, get closer, and get recommendations from the people you trust.

Cool photo tool

Want to spice up your photo set? Check out this cool new tool by Animoto. This took me about 2 minutes to do. Just import your photos from Flickr, wait for it to be rendered, and auto-post to your blog.

SEO Tips for Bloggers and Site Owners

Matt Cutts, Sr. Tech guy at Google, gave a great 1 hour presentation on the best tips bloggers can use to make their blog SEO friendly. While the focus is mostly on Wordpress users, Typepad folks can also benefit from it.

In essence, don't be evil, and don't try to trick your way to the top. Instead, focus on creating something of value that everyone can use.

Thanks to John Pozadzides for the video.

.NET to LINUX conversion

Last weekend, we completed the move on our site, www.clickforlessons.com, from .NET ASP to LINUX/PHP. We did this to take advantage and contribute to the open source community and to prepare for scalability down the road.

The initial results are showing that our site is running about 60% faster now. Here is a comparison chart of three main pages of our site and the size before and after. Overall, it's a 25% savings site-wide on performance. If you take into account that we are now showing more pictures on the "City-Category" page, we think the savings is more like 35-45%.

Some have said that it's faster because the pages are smaller. This is partially true. But overall, we were able to get the same functionality with less code. Everything is tighter. Even after you take page size into account in the calculations, the site runs faster.

I can't say whether it helps other sites or not. What I can say is that it helped our site. Speed is great, but just as important for me (as the business guy) was the costs as the site scales. 

Venture Hacks — Thoughts on Adam Smith’s Letter to Graduating Y Combinator Companies

Venture Hacks has great commentary on Adam Smith's letter to Y Combinator companies.

Y Combinator is a mini-incubator that focuses on getting very early-stage companies access to seed money, technical and business advice, and other things that help raise the probability of getting to market.

One particularly enlightening part of the post included the discussion of traunching. While I don't know the correct definition, it seems a lot of term sheets are written with the ability for an investor to re-price their investment later. That would suck...

"Tranches are generally stupid. They have zero upside and catastrophic downside.At best, tranches give your current investors a right to invest at yesterday’s valuation if your company is doing well. If your company is doing poorly, your investors will figure out how to get out of their obligation to invest."

Link: Venture Hacks — Thoughts on Adam Smith’s Letter to Graduating Y Combinator Companies.

Nightlife Social Networks

There are a ton of nightlife/party social networks popping up these days. In my opinion, I see them making a critical mistake. Many are trying to go wide geographically too soon.

Instead of getting 50,000 users all over the country, get 10,000 users in a city, or 25,000 in a region. It's much more logical and useful if users can see people and events fairly close to them (a short plane ride for a weekend jaunt). I am assuming their target market is the 20-30 something energetic, good-looking group that probably have decent jobs. They can afford to take off early Friday for a weekend.

That being the case, it's more valuable to their customer to have a solid group of people and reviews within my geographical area. I'm in San Diego. I don't care about clubs in Chicago. I want to see hot girls and DJ's in LA, Phoenix, and Las Vegas. The probability of me actually meeting someone and hanging out is much higher when the geography is closer to me.

Also, as depth and breadth expands, so does the costs associated with properly attracting the market.

Bottom line - focus the site. Geography first.

Diet and Exercise

I read a post from super-entrepreneur Jason Calacanis today that reminded me of my own struggles with the balance between the intense and arduous task of starting a company and maintaining my health.

On my 23rd birthday, I was a rock-solid 192 and competed in the light-heavyweight division of the Mr. Kentucky bodybuilding show (taking a respectable third place). I always tried to keep in shape and by age 30, I weighed 185 with a darn-low body fat percentage.

Age?

Something happened around 34, and I jumped to an unacceptable 205 lbs. I was working a lot, not getting out of my chair for 12 hours at a time, and thought I could eat the same number of calories that I did when I was more active.

That was a big mistake.

Some will blame their weight gain on just getting older, or the metabolism slowing down. But I believe it's a matter of choice. And beginning of July, I chose to get things under control.

Habits I've Changed

First thing I did was make a commitment to get up and walk around during the day. I'm still working just as hard, but find myself with more energy and a better focus when I take some time to get out and walk.

Second, I hired a cook. She makes every meal and snack before-hand. This way I find that I don't cheat. Basically, I'll eat whatever is set in front of me, so this REALLY helps! I consume between 1,300 - 1,600 calories a day.

Third, I normally get up at 5:15 am, and we're in the office by 6:20 or so. Three days a week, instead of going into the office, I'll go to the gym, watch CNBC, catch up on what's moving the market for 45 minutes while I do cardio. This is burning 450-500 calories a day.

Results I'm Seeing

As of this week, I'm down to 196 - a drop of 9 lbs. I have another 11 lbs to go. It's taken me a good 5-6 weeks to break my old habits and get in a groove, but I feel like I'm there.

As Tony Robbins says, we're all motivated by pleasure and pain. So I remind myself of my back that hurts when I weigh too much, I remind myself of all the in-shape guys there are in San Diego and how they're probably hitting on my fiance when I'm not around. I remind myself that I'm BETTER than 205 - and I expect to excel and succeed in all I do. Weight is not exempted.

The Journey...

Here's an opening quote from Steven Gary Blank, taken from his book, "The Four Steps to the Epiphany":

"All new companies and new products begin with an almost mythological vision - a hope of what could be, with a goal that few others can see. It's this bright and burning vision that differentiates the entrepreneur from big company CEO's and startups from existing businesses. Founding entrepreneurs are out to prove that their vision and business are real and not some hallucination; to succeed, they must abandon the status quo and strike out on what appears to be a new path, often shrouded in uncertainty. Obstacles, hardships, and disaster lie ahead, and their journey to success tests more than financial resources. It tests their stamina, agility, and the limits of courage."

True, very true. What I'm finding is that although the path seems empty, there are a lot of other people walking (running, more like it) on the path. None of us are alone - and the road's been traveled before.

Changing from Lead Gen to Community

Today is a great day.

Over the past few months, we've been working on changing our site from a lead generation site to a community site. While I won't get into the details (for competitive reasons), the plan is strategic, thought-out, a gigantic risk, but focused on long-term growth.

Today, I was able to tell our thousands of lead-generation customers that we are able to GIVE THEM FREE LEADS!!! We've found other ways to make money, so we're foregoing this revenue - and truly working on building a community of creative enthusiasts.

It feels so good to see a plan come together - with the technical delivery dates come in right as scheduled. We've totally converted the site from .NET to LINUX / PHP. In the interim, we've stripped out 60% of the code and threw away features that our users didn't care about.

One thing I'm learning is that it seems to have taken us 18 months of listening, conversing, and collaborating with our users before we had a grasp of what they wanted. Now, we look forward to giving it to them.

It's just so liberating to think think that we can be on the same side as our best customers . This totally rocks!

The site is going down this weekend - coming back with a new front page on Monday...