Business Bricks

TOY OF THE YEAR SINCE 1985
Source: Toy Retailers Association

1985 Transformers (Optimus Prime)
1986 Transformers (Optimus Prime)
1987 Sylvanian Families
1988 Sylvanian Families
1989 Sylvanian Families

1990 Teenage Mutant Turtles
1991 Nintendo Game Boy
1992 WWF Wrestlers
1993 Thunderbird’s Tracey Island
1994 Power Rangers
1995 POGS
1996 Barbie
1997 Teletubbies
1998 Furby
1999 Furby Babies

2000 Teksta
2001 Bionicles
2002 Beyblades
2003 Beyblades
2004 Robosapien

Out of all the toys on the list, the sales success that’s easiest to explain (at least for me) is that of the Transformers:

[1] This probably dates me, but the only toy of the year that I found under the tree was Optimus Prime (I asked for a Decepticon but that’s another matter).
[2] The best toys/ inventions/ businesses/ messages are about before & after transformation. Like so the Rubik’s Cube (jumbled & unjumbled), Dyson’s bagless vac (dust you can’t see in the carpet & dust you can see in the see-through container) and Jamie Oliver (raw ingredients & Upside-Down Fish Pie/ fifteen problem cases & fifteen qualified chefs).
[3] Transformers had a slogan - “robots in disguise” - that you couldn’t say without singing the jingle.

A juicy list from Evan Williams, who sold Blogger to Google.

#3 BE CASUAL […] If you want to hit the really big home runs, create services that fit in with — and, indeed, help — people’s everyday lives without requiring lots of commitment or identity change.

This is stupid. John Clare, chief exec of Dixons (now known in city circles as DSG) tries to cover his own gloomy sales figures by warning shoppers off buying from small online stores. He predicts more small independent operators will go to the wall after Christmas. How so? Like-for-like sales at Currys and Dixons: down 3% and 2%. Like-for-like sales for online retailers: up 40%. Boycott small stores and come shop at Dixons? As a small business owner, I’ll be doing the exact opposite.

WHAT’S ALL THE FUSS ABOUT TRAFFIC?
[1] Traffic = the movement of people
[2] Website traffic = the movement of people on a website
[3] Most of the time we think of website traffic in terms of volume (i.e. number of hits/ page views/ visits) not movement
[4] The bricks & mortar equivalent of web traffic volume is footfall. If you rent a shop, you can’t do much to increase footfall (except walk around in a sandwich board). So you work on conversion instead. If you work out how to convert footfall to customers, then you get to rent a more expensive shop with better footfall
[5] If you own a website, you’re more likely to get distracted with the idea of increasing traffic, and miss the real work of increasing conversion. You can get 1,000 visitors a day and move nobody to buy
[6] Seth is right. “Any fool with money can buy traffic.” Most fools never work out how to convert traffic into customers

March | Yahoo! buys Flickr for $30m or so
August | Flickr Fans to Yahoo: Flick Off!
November | The Flickrisation of Yahoo!

Brickie Alex Woodroffe writes:

“This may be true or an adapted urban myth, but I have a friend in IT who was in a position where he had to do a lot of recruiting during the dot com boom. He was constantly interviewing, without fail about 20 a day (to put some perspective on this the company went from 150 just in London to over 1500 globally in one year). Anyway back to the point: he said that he received so many CV’s that occasionally he would take half of them and just put them in the bin - citing who would want to hire an unlucky person!!”

Like Alex, I’m not so sure about the story, but it does seem to echo the logic that it’s better to reject a good candidate than to accept a bad candidate.

Previously | How to hire (1) and How to hire (2)
Next | Contribute an idea for How to hire (4) by email

New series of Dragons’ Den starts tonight (Tue, 8pm, BBC2). But if you were the producer, what would you change? I’ll start the ball rolling:

(1) Press Red for the Contestants’ Cut. Like most reality shows, Dragons’ Den always seems overedited to make the contestants look stupid and the experts look geniused. I’d let the contestants do their own edit (seriously) or put an uncut version on the web.

(2) …

News in that writer Peter Drucker has died at the grand old age of 95. Apparently he hated being labelled a guru, so I won’t do that. The FT’s obituary calls him the most influential management writer of the modern era. I don’t know about his last words, but eleven words stick with me most: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

Etsy helps people who make handmade goods sell to people who want to buy handmade goods.

Kiva helps you make a direct loan to a small business in Africa. A loan that might change somebody’s life.

Two beautifully executed ideas. If you know people who either (a) make handmade goods or (b) like to know that their charity money is well spent, forward these links around.

The November issue of US mag Fast Company picks five non-US cities that might just be the next San Francisco:

Dublin
Helsinki
Montreal
Sydney
Vancouver

Early to mid next year, we plan to move out of London to another city. (We’ve decided where, but for the sake of this, let’s pretend we haven’t.) Where should we move? Is Dublin really a more happening city for business than (say) Glasgow, Brighton or Liverpool?

Different people value different things differently.

Kyle MacDonald is trying to up-trade from a paperclip to a house.

So far he swapped one red paperclip for one fish pen, that for one doorknob, that for one coleman stove, and that for one 1000W power generator (pictured). He says he’ll trade the generator with anyone who will offer something better or bigger in return. (Link via Boing Boing.)

From David Pogue (via jk, via df):
10 Ways to Please Us, the Customers

I particularly like:
III. Thou shalt not hype irrelevant specs
VI. Thou shalt not hide from thy customers
IX. Thou shalt not hog the power strip

Tom Peters (from Re-imagine!):
“A form is never just a form. Consider the role that form design played in the US presidential-election “system” in 2000. A poorly designed paper ballot in Palm Beach County, Florida, may have cost Al Gore the White House. Think about it.”

Form design is unglamorous but critical work. Every man and his dog has a subjective opinion about the yellow and orange you use on your homepage, or if Yahoo!’s homepage is better than Google’s. But who really knows (or cares) about form design? Who knows that marking required fields with asterisks loses significantly more sales than marking fields that are not required? Or that ugly error handling can cost you more sales than an ugly homepage? (Suggested reading: the distinctly unglamorous Call to Action.)

What’s the least amount of work I can do that ends up having big value? | Loud Thinking

The second in a semi-occasional series on how to hire:
JOEL’S GUERRILLA GUIDE TO INTERVIEWING

5 year old advice that still stands, and don’t be fooled into thinking it’s software industry specific. My Stabilo highlighter picks out: (a) “It is much better to reject a good candidate than to accept a bad candidate.” (b) “Jabe Blumenthal, the original designer of Excel, liked to ask candidates to design a house. According to Jabe, he’s had candidates who would go up to the whiteboard and immediately draw a square. A square! These were immediate No Hires.”

Previously | How to hire (1)
Next | Contribute an idea for How to hire (3) by email