Whatever gets measured, gets improved!

The most profound business advice I ever got was from my mentor who told me “Find out what the problem is and fix it.” It couldn´t be that simple, right? Turns out, it is. The solution is simple, but in no way easy.

In Patrick Lencioni´s book “The Five Temptations of a CEO” he tells the story:

In an old episode of the I Love Lucy show, Ricky comes home to find Lucy crawling around the living room on all fours. When he asks her what she’s doing she explains that she has lost her earrings. “You lost your earrings in the living room?” Ricky asks. Lucy replies, “No, I lost them in the bedroom-but the light is so much better out here.”For many CEOs the light is best in places like marketing, strategic planning, and finance, safe havens from the painful darkness of behavioral self-examination. Unfortunately, they find little opportunity for meaningful improvement in these areas.

The hardest part is truly finding out where the problem is. The best way to do this in Consumer Internet is to talk to customers. Call them up, spend time with them, ask the most important people in the world, who make it all possible what they like about the experience, what they don´t like, etc.

If you don´t feel a deep need to satisfy your end-user customer on a personal level then perhaps you should not run a Consumer Internet company. Once you learn what things are important for your customers, that is not enough. The next step is to identify quantifiable and measurable metrics that can provide insight into how good of a job you are doing at improving these parts of the model. These are called KPIs (key-perfomance-metrics). Try building an organization where the right metrics are tracked, followed and where praise and compensation is built around these metrics.

The old saying is true, whatever gets measured gets improved. Whatever gets praised in an organization gets done. So track the right metrics and create accountability around them and one day you will find your customers are more loyal and eventually vote with their credit cards and PayPal accounts.

If you would like to know where to start with your KPI dashboard, I recommend that you track one of the most important metrics -> Net Promoter Score.

William Wolfram
Founder & CEO

Giving Thanks

Dear bidders, happy Thanksgiving.
Earlier this week DealDash sold its 100,000 auction.

Our mission has always been to provide fun & honest penny
auctions and nothing is more important than making sure
our bidders win deals on the site. Getting to 100,000 deals
is a big milestone for us. Thank you.

We are all so very happy that we are able to day after day
provide you, our bidders and bargain hunters with great
deals and a great experience.

Thanks to our friends at Amazon, UPS & FedEx for helping
us deliver more than 10,000 products per month on time,
every time.

Thanks to our candid customer feedback, the comments
have not always been pleasant, but has helped us improve
the DealDash experience in so many ways.

Thanks to the team, for burning the midnight oil and going
out of their way to provide the best possible customer experience.
You are all an irreplaceable part of what makes DealDash what it is.

Thanks to the team members´ families and spouses who have
patiently supported and stood by them when they have had to
work late nights or skip a weekend to ensure that the site is
always up and running.

But most of all, thanks to you, our bidders and bargain hunters
who every day make it all possible. You trust DealDash with
your time and money and prove to all other penny auction
sites that you accept nothing less than a fun, fair & honest
penny auction experience.

Happy Thanksgiving,

William Wolfram
Founder & CEO

DealDash is the original

What does it take to be a leader in an extremely fast growing consumer Internet market? To consistently grow userbase, revenue, profitability and shareholder value faster than dozens of competitors? The answer may not be what you might expect.

The US market is the greatest and most competitive market in the world, you can guarantee that any idea worth pursuing, big or small will be pursued by the thousands of fearless entrepreneurs and visionary venture capitalists who back those entrepreneurs with the capital they need. This is the spirit of America, open competition and freedom to choose in a very big way for the consumer.

Bringing recreational shopping to the internet from the shopping mall is a big idea. That is why more than 300 companies have in the last 2.5 years entered the US pay-to-participate auction market, each with their own twist to the model. More than $100 million have been invested in these companies by risk-taking visionary venture capitalists and private angels who have made big bets that pay-to-participate auctions is the next big step in recreational shopping. Out of the more than 300 companies, today less than 30 major competitors remain. Many major companies with $10+ million of venture capital funding have failed to build a sustainable, growing business and have shut down their businesses. This is not uncommon for new markets. In virtually every new market there is a trend of dozens if not hundreds of companies launching in attempt to be a winner in a new, fast growing market. We can all remember the hundreds of different of choices in MP3 players only a few years ago. Today there is the iPod. Or the hundreds of competing operating systems in the 80´s. Today there´s Windows (91%), Mac OS (7%) and various builds of Linux (2%).

So what does it take to be a leader in an extremely fast growing consumer internet market? If you believe the media reports and recently popular TV shows that promote the idea of over-night success stories you may think it takes big, bold innovative ideas. Successful entrepreneurs and venture capitalists know better than this. To consistently outgrow the market it takes constant, never ending improvement and optimization. There is no ‘one big idea’ that differentiates one company from another. Rather its a combination of dozens if not hundreds of small improvements that are constantly made and refined which separates the winners from the losers.

It takes constant innovation, obsessive customer-centric focus, accurate measurement and reporting of key performance indicators and an organization that is goal driven and accountable across the entire spectrum. What does it mean to be customer-centric? – Everyone in the organization must be focused on the customer first. Great ideas usually come from talking to customers and the only way to validate an idea is to bring it in front of customers. How do you set pricing? You test it with real customers. How do you know what feature is important? You test it with real customers. After all accurate data measured is worth more than a thousand experts with opinions.

It is a well known fact that DealDash is the longest operating penny auction or pay-to-participate website in America. One could easily argue that DealDash is the “original” pay-to-participate auction website choice in the US. Why has DealDash been able to consistently deliver on our promises to customers and grow its business while dozens of major competitors have filed for bankruptcy? It comes down to the things mentioned above. Why does DealDash have free shipping? Why does DealDash have a winning guarantee? Why does DealDash offer a 100% money-back guarantee for all unused bids? Why does DealDash provide users with a 100% risk-free bidding experience through the Buy it Now option? The answer is: because it matters for our customers.

It takes years to build a great reputation and just 15 minutes to destroy it. We intend to keep on building our reputation as the most honest, easy-to-win, trustworthy and fun to bid on pay-to-participate auction website in America.

If you are an active DealDash user and spend hours using DealDash every week and would like to share your feedback with me over the phone, please email me at william@dealdash.com and I would be extremely pleased to speak with you! Please include your username in the email.

William Wolfram
Founder & CEO

Giving Back to Bidders

At DealDash we believe in making decisions based on data. We like to observe, measure and test. We also like to keep track
of our competitors and attempt to learn from both their failures and their successes. One key element that differs dramatically
from company to company is the amount of product value that is given back to customers in form of product value. Or in
essence, the company´s  gross margin.

We did some of our own extensive research into this. What we found out was profound yet it made perfect sense.
In order for the business to achieve maximum profit, the best thing to do was to give plenty back to bidders in term of product value.
In fact, that was the only way to get bidders to stick around, coming back day after day to participate in DealDash auctions.

Some companies in this market only give a fraction 20-30% of the sales generated back to customers in form of product value.
These companies tend to over time not gather a very strong loyal following of bidders and shoppers, rather they quickly notice
that the advertising cost to acquire a new customer is far greater than the first few purchases that customer makes on the site.
So in essence, the key is to be able to over a longer period of time attract bidders back to the auctions and this can only be done
if a fair share of the sales generated are shipped back to bidders in term of product value. This means greater deals, more winners
and overall a far superior experience for all of our customers who love the DealDash experience.

The far majority of the sales DealDash generates is used to purchase products that get shipped back to our bidders every day.
We believe that this strategy, is what will generate the best business results in the end of the day. In previous posts I have
covered the importance of auction winners and this goes together with that. The only way to ensure that the majority of bidders
win at least one or more auctions is to give back to bidders and focus on building a great customer experience first and the
business metrics will follow.

William Wolfram
Founder & CEO

Winners matter!

As any DealDasher knows, we bid to win. Winning auctions is important and we know that is why you come back to DealDash day after day.

Because we know how important winning is, we have gone the extra mile to ensure that as many DealDashers as possible are able to win auctions on the site.

We even provide a “Winner´s Guarantee” where if you do not win an auction with your first purchase we will refund you all the lost bids back into your account for free so you can have another try at winning.

In each auction however, there can only be one winner. That is why we feel it is necessary to provide all auction losers with the option to buy the item they were bidding at for a reasonable retail price and get all their bids back for free so that, they too can have another shot at winning.

We pride ourselves at being one of the “easiest to win” pay-per-bid sites on the Internet. As our userbase and bidder count has grown, we have made sure to constantly increase the amount of auctions ran on the site to ensure that there are always enough items to go around.

Unfortunately we see many bidders who have just signed up and are beginning to get a feel for DealDash jump into the auctions for the 55-Inch HDTV or iPad 2. These auctions tend to have a lot of competition from senior bidders who will typically have a larger threshold for quitting or simply more bids stacked up on their account.

That is why we recommend that all new bidders get started by participating in the auctions for the low-medium sized products where they can learn the dynamics of DealDash and develop a thorough understanding of how the auctions work prior to jumping into the high-end items.

Today, there are thousands of winners on DealDash every single month and the majority of bidders win at least one or more auctions on the site. This makes us very happy, there is nothing quite like speaking with a bidder who has just won their first 95% off deal on an item they and their family can´t wait to get their hands on.

William Wolfram
Founder & CEO