The other day at the office was one of those days. Servers crashed. Customers bashed. Account managers and support put out fires. Sys admins and engineers were focused on rebuilding and maintaining stability. There was a lot of pressure to act quickly, with no mistakes. Every minute we were down didnt just hurt our company, but the companies who relied on us to power theirs. It was an opportunity to see how strong the team you spent months building really is. At the end of the day our lead support manager sent me a couple quotes I want to share. At the end of the day these really helped me put things into perspective. We are lucky to have the team that we do. Not everyone always sees eye to eye. But its supposed to be that way. Every day we learn something new about each other, ourselves, the culture we are building, the technology and the industry that we are changing. 

First and foremost, a start-up puts you on an emotional rollercoaster
unlike anything you have ever experienced. You flip rapidly from
day-to-day – one where you are euphorically convinced you are going to
own the world, to a day in which doom seems only weeks away and you
feel completely ruined, and back again. Over and over and over. And
I’m talking about what happens to stable entrepreneurs. There is so
much uncertainty and so much risk around practically everything you
are doing. The level of stress that you’re under generally will
magnify things to incredible highs and unbelievable lows at whiplash
speed and huge magnitude. Sound like fun?

- Mark Andreessen, Co-Founder of Netscape

Startups are not magic. They don't change the laws of wealth creation.
They just represent a point at the far end of the curve. There is a
conservation law at work here: if you want to make a million dollars,
you have to endure a million dollars' worth of pain. For example, one
way to make a million dollars would be to work for the Post Office
your whole life, and save every penny of your salary. Imagine the
stress of working for the Post Office for fifty years. In a startup
you compress all this stress into three or four years. You do tend to
get a certain bulk discount if you buy the economy-size pain, but you
can't evade the fundamental conservation law. If starting a startup
were easy, everyone would do it.

- Paul Graham, paulgraham.com

Far too often, companies who rely on online transactions make it damn near impossible for you to give them your money. I see it on a weekly basis. A web product manager thinks its a good idea to put an extra step, or ten, in the buying process that turns customers away. A site redirects to an irrelevant advertisement when you have your credit card ready to go. Or the support resources aren't available to answer your question before you are ready to pull the trigger. Little is more dumbfounding than when I cant give money to a company or service provider in exchange for something I want. Sometimes its not their fault. Technical difficulties happen, a server lags and a page goes down, etc. But bottom line is that the entire buying process needs to be completely thought through and flawlessly implemented, or you are going to lose potential sales. Even worse, potential repeat customers.

This example might be nobodys fault, but it fits. And for it, Im going to use my friend David Hoang. David, Im not really using you. Im just showing you off for all the ladies who read my posts. 

David wanted to book a flight on Virgin America. Who doesn't? In my opinion they are the only way to fly stateside. They also have a very user friendly website and make it easy for travelers to begin the process of getting to their destination. David hit a snag when Virgin America wouldnt take his money. Like the rest of the technically obsessed, David turned to social media.

From the bottom up, you can see Virgin America's website was returning an error. To make matters worse, it was returning as just "Error." Might as well have just said Fail, and redirected to a competitors website. Being the patient man that David is, he tried seven more times and asked his social following if anyone was having the same problems. One more try and David decides to call it a night and try tomorrow. If I owned a company and a customer tried giving me money eight times to no avail, I would make sure I reached out personally to address the problem. I don't think Richard Branson will be giving anyone a call about the website not working, but someone should be on it. If I were David, I would have booked on another airline. And thats exactly what happened next. 

A simple inquiry to a competing airline (JetBlue), and prompt customer service at an off hour time in the evening...

Leads to a happy David and his trusted companion with a flight booked when he wanted it booked.

And while VA might not be entirely at fault, the message here is more that you always need to be ready for when a customer wants to give you money. In a start up or small business, missing the opportunity of a sure sale is a bigger deal. Buy from yourself. Be your own customer. Go through the sales process and make sure it is comfortable, secure, and efficient. Ask yourself what can be done to make it easier for customers to give you money. Because thats what they want to do. Safe travels David and MegaKitty! I guess better luck next time Virgin America. 

Google+ has impressive adoption numbers as a beta product available for less than one month. In a recent earnings call, Google CEO Larry Page said that over 10 Million profiles have already been created, and one billion items are being shared each day. That’s 1.3% of Facebook's 750 Million users in just a few weeks. That's a lot, right?

Currently, social media user base numbers look something like this:

Facebook - 750 million users
Twitter - 300 million users
LinkedIn - 100 million users
Google+ - 10 million users 

It's a fast start but that shouldn’t surprise you. They are Google. Everyone with a Gmail account should have Google+ profile, or maybe one day will. The problem is fast doesn’t always mean good. Mashable's Ben Parr has a great read on if this growth is sustainable or not. Like Ben, I don’t think it is. He talks about the history of early adoption, explains Rogers' bell curve, and shows us the technology adoption lifecycle. While this is all solid information, I think it's simpler than that. 

Google+ was over hyped. Over promised, under delivered. As more users adopt the platform, it will be fun to see how it evolves and what audience it takes on. I’m not sure that even Google knows what Google+ actually is yet. But right now, Google+ is just another social media tool.

I have mixed feelings on the launch. The invites created a stir, a big one too. 10 million profiles in two weeks is no joke. Everyone on Twitter and Facebook were asking for Google+ invites, and everyone had questions. But that was the problem. Most of the talk about Google+ was on Facebook and Twitter! I had an invite on the first day, made my profile, and then waited. While Google staggered the invites and built the desire for access across the internet, I got bored. Not enough of my friends and colleagues had access, and still most of them don’t. The big names in the tech industry that do have access I already follow on two or three other platforms. Do I really need to see the same stuff posted again? Right now the launch looks like a great success, but to me this could be looked back at as the beginning of the end. 

Another problem is brand loyalty. Yep, Google has it. Google is everywhere! They have a lot of it, but just not in social media. Remember Google Wave? Tanked. Google Buzz? Womp Womp. - I remember the day I joined Facebook. I was visiting home on Fall Break my sophomore year of college. Facebook was all the rage with my friends at Indiana University, which was one of the first schools to gain access. Back in those days, there was a list of schools on "thefacebook.com" and if your school wasn’t on it, neither were you. I showed my friend I wasn’t on the list so he showed me his profile and some of the cute girls he was hanging out with. When we went back to the homepage it was there! Washington State University. I was the first student (maybe second, still waiting to hear back from Facebook records dept.) from my school on The Facebook. This next part just sounds crazy. I have spent almost seven years posting, updating, tagging, poking, and more importantly, friending, building my network on this website. Unless there is a magical widget to migrate select data to Google+ from Facebook out there (like Facebook would allow that), I just don’t see myself doing it again, with the same people, sharing the same stuff. Other Facebook fans have already built a skin to make Google+ look like Facebook. That’s feeding the habit.

Privacy, you know, the terms and conditions you agreed to while signing up. I know you have read it, and all the way through, so I don’t have to remind you. Facebook owns all the media you post to it. Google came out screaming "trust us, you own your media!" But how big of an issue is privacy really? Does anyone really care? I honestly can't tell you the terms of service I agreed to on either Facebook Google+ or Twitter, and it doesn’t bother me. I would imagine people who are truly worried about privacy are most likely not on social networks.

There are two main features that stand out. Circles and Huddles. They want it to be more lifelike using circles to choose who you share with. This makes sense because you don’t share everything with everyone all the time. It’s nice to be able to share industry news with your work circle and photos of your weekend with friends and family. I thought it would be a good idea to organize circles not just by relationships but by city also. Sounds like a good idea, but now I have 20+ circles to manage and what I like to call a mess. Maybe that is my fault, but I don’t think I will be the only making too many circles to sift through. Huddles, also known as video chatting with up to 10 people is the other feature that sets Google+ apart. But not by much now that Facebook announced their Skype partnership. The only difference here is the amount of people you can video chat with. I'm actually not going to dive too much deeper into features because it doesn’t really matter. Whatever Google+ has, Facebook will implement and vice versa. They will copy each other, driving innovation in social networking as long as Google+ can grow their user base.

 Currently the most followed users on Google+ are tech geeks and industry leaders. If it becomes a place for the technologically intuitive, then so be it. But they are going to have a hard time competing with Facebook if that’s the only niche they can reach. I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes, but right now I just don’t have time for another social network.

It might be a problem when... 

Last night I attended the SMX Advanced Seattle party sponsored by Bing. It felt like I was cheating on Google a little bit, but man was she sexy! Met a lot of very interesting people in the industry, and had a great time with the HasOffers and TruPanion teams.