Rich Mintz  

This engaging postmortem account by Mark Hendrickson of what went wrong at Plancast got me thinking about our experience at BusyTonight, a late, great search engine technology startup where I was a principal. It was a great career experience for me, but we did a lot of things wrong, spent a lot of money that will never be returned (mostly lent by friends and family), and closed after about two years with no sales and no prospects.

User experience consultant Whitney Hess, who brought the story to my attention, called it a case study of what happens when you don’t do your user research, and that’s probably right. We didn’t either — we went into the development of BusyTonight with plenty of technical knowledge, an understanding of the problem we wanted to solve, a solid approach, and talented staff. The thing we didn’t have (aside from “enough money,” of course, and a host of other things that would have benefited us) was any evidence that anyone would want to buy the thing we were selling. Or, to put it another way, nobody cared enough about the problem we were trying to solve to get excited about our solution. And we didn’t give enough credence to inferior but better-funded and better-marketed alternatives, which eventually ate our lunch.

I landed on my feet, as did my two partners. But it would have been nicer if instead we had made our fortunes, no?

From today’s NYT Real Estate section:

A few months ago, Michael Bolla gave up his independent brokerage, Luxury Lofts & Homes, to join Prudential Douglas Elliman because he was about to handle some large developments and was not willing to invest the money to upgrade the servers for his Web site to handle the increased volume in his listings.

“If you have a 120-unit development on a small guy’s Web site,” Mr. Bolla said, “it will crash.”

Um, excuse me? For $50 a month, Pair Networks (for instance) will give you 240 monthly gigabytes of transfer on a redundant network that I bet you is more reliable than whatever Prudential Douglas Elliman is using. You can sign up with Pair online right now, and it’ll be ready for you in an hour! And capacity and reliability in the marketplace scale up very quickly from there, much faster than cost.

If the brokerage you’re about to list your house with runs its own servers,you’ve picked the wrong broker — they’re spending money on in-house infrastructure they should be spending on marketing your house.

I’m not surprised to hear people blaming their business decisions on technology, but I am surprised to see the Times passing it along unevaluated, even in a vanity story about New York real estate.

It reminds me of this gem, which I see every time I log into AT&T’s website:

Excuse me? My “connection speed” has nothing to do with why I’m sitting here waiting for your (apparently) underdesigned, underpowered authentication infrastructure to log me in. Didn’t your granny teach you not to lie?