For this first beta release, we’re keeping the service very rudimentary. Although the service seems very simple on the surface, this is a very big milestone for us at WhitePages.com because it marks the first time ever that…
- we have added cell numbers to our site
- we have allowed our users to contribute listings
- we have configured our database to allow real-time updates on a listing-by-listing basis

Lots of product development and engineering heroics have gone into making that possible. Woo hoo!

Now that we have our foundation built, please stay tuned over the coming months, as we look forward to layering lots of additional (and useful!) services on top of the base offering.

In addition to the picture of a recyclabe Grande coffee cup, the following words appear on the ad:

“We believe that our baristas can hand-make any espresso beverage perfectly. With over 87,000 possible combinations, that’s a lot of perfection. This is why we promise that if your drink isn’t perfect, every time, let us know and we’ll make it right. This isn’t a promotion, this isn’t ‘for a limited time only,’ this isn’t ‘while supplies last.’ This is every coffee, every day, forever.

Looks like SBUX is trying to reposition themselves as incredibly customer-focused, with the ability to make a perfect coffee drink all the time. This positioning is much different than the ‘third place from home’ positioning and overall in-store experience that SBUX once built their brand on. Granted, getting the right cup of coffee, everytime, is certainly part of that experience, but the ad makes me wonder if they’ll ever be able to regain the essence of the ‘original’ brand. Seems to me that they should put the focus back on what they once were….warm, inviting, personal and friendly….versus spending a bunch of $$$ on trying to change perceptions through advertising.

John Lusk
VP, Marketing

Top Search Terms - Jan 2008
1. dictionary
2. heath ledger
3. white pages
4. weather
5. lyrics
6. yellow pages
7. people search
8. irs
9. fafsa
10. cloverfield

Full top 25 list at Compete.

On Monday, February 11th, 9am, Konstantin Guericke will speak to WhitePages.com employees on his experiences with Viral marketing, what’s worked for him in the past, what hasn’t and how we can incorporate viral marketing components into our products. Call it an extension/crash course in alternative marketing by somebody in the know.

As for Konstantin, his successes speak for themselves. As co-founder of LinkedIn, he was able to cut his teeth on bleeding edge marketing tactics and is experiencing some of the same succeses as CEO of Jaxtr. The guy knows what he’s talking about.

Given that we’re holding this event in a ballroom of sorts in downtown Seattle, we felt it worthwhile to open up attendance to any of our friends in the area who might have an interest in hearing what Konstantin has to say. Just shoot me an email at jlusk@whitepages.com if you have an interest in attending and I’ll send you all the deets.

John

1,200 calories: Amount the average Super Bowl watcher will consume while snacking. To burn that off, it would take walking for four hours or running an hour and 45 minutes.

30 percent: Increase in sales of processed-cheese loaves the week before last year’s Super Bowl. Flavored snack-cracker sales jumped 68 percent.

$11.8 million: Additional sales of beer (regular and light) during 2005 Super Bowl week.

Aside from the game itself, many people tune in to watch the commercials. Everyone knows and expects to see entertaining commercials during the Super Bowl, its part of the whole experience. Have you ever wondered why some companies chose to spend millions of dollars on a Super Bowl ad and others don’t? Inc.com published a story today that tries to answer that question and it isn’t necessarily about having budget as our very own V.P. of marketing John Lusk explains in an interview with the reporter last week:

“You have to have a very good understanding of brand before you do something of that nature,” WhitePages.com’s vice president of marketing John Lusk said, noting his company’s own brand is still evolving. “A growing company is constantly trying to reinvent itself, and with that, you’re always reassessing who you are. So for us to spend $2 million telling people who we are and knowing that that could change in nine months is a big waste.”

“Our background, that scrappiness culture really sticks with you and it forces you to better understand where to get the best bang for your buck,” Lusk adds.

You can read the complete article online at the Inc.com site. It includes perspective from other industry experts including Go Daddy.com, a company known for their “interesting” Super Bowl advertising.

If you are curious about the ads for this year’s game, you can catch a sneak peek here.

Like many small tech companies, our dreams are bigger than our staff: we’re always looking for those holes in the work week to try out new technologies, learn a new skill, or build a great prototype. But there’s always one more feature to write or bug to fix, and it’s hard to find the time.

Last week, we found the time. Jan 14-18 was our inaugural Hack Week, where our engineering, IT operations, data, and product design teams dropped their normal workload to build interesting things. Work began on Monday (or earlier), and we went pencils-down on Friday 2pm, for a series of 5-minute talks on each project, plus beer, carrots (not in the beer), and some weird chip-like things with a sour-cream-heavy dip.

We ended up with 30 projects, teams ranging from 1 to 7 in size, including

• Porting features of the Smalltalk debugger to Perl
• Using our geographic data to draw different kinds of maps - too bad the Zillow neighborhood data didn’t become available until midweek
• Testing managing our code base with Subversion, Fisheye, and Crucible (yes, we’re still a cvs shop…)
• Building bootable Windows CDs with core backup, recovery, and virus scanning tools for our install base (until we get everyone on MacBooks, anyway)

And a host of things we can’t talk about just yet. We have at least three projects which will make it out of Hack Week to the Interwebs - more to come on that later.

We had an esteemed judging panel which chose three winners - one from QA, one from Development, one from IT, so a nice mix - and each one received a chumby. I dropped one of the chumbys - seems like it should keep working, but we gave that one to the IT guy just in case.

The overall feedback was quite positive and we’ll be doing it regularly. One engineer did mention that it was “creativity with a gun to your head:” he’s planning his vacation for the same week. Can’t win ‘em all.

However, one student asked a question that’s been bothering me for the past week, especially given some of the strategic decisions that we’re making here at WhitePages.com.

The question: “Before starting, did you and Kyle (the biz partner) agree on a bailing out point? That is, did you define when you might choose not to keep running the business.”

The answer: “I don’t think Kyle and I ever even considered when, or if, we’d ever bail. We were so confident that our product would sell that the thought of failure never crossed our minds. I guess we probably should have asked that question.”

In that past couple of weeks, we’ve been discussing the future direction of WhitePages.com, how we’re going to continue growing the company and what we believe our users truly want to see out of our product. For the most part, we’re talking about entering some pretty cool new areas and markets and that means driving incredible innovation. The student’s question has been playing on my mind since he asked it last week, primarily because it’s a question that we need to ask ourselves at WhitePages.com.

When you embark on new initiatives or new businesses, how do you make sure that you’re not afraid to walk away if things aren’t going so well? I’m a big believer that you’ve got to manage the costs of a new initiative vs. managing for failure. If you try to manage failure, you’ll over analyze and never actually pull the trigger…or worse, you’ll walk away way too early. If you manage the costs, then you won’t be afraid of walking away even if costs are sunk and you’ve already spent countless dollars and resources. Easier said than done though. Lots of emotion, personal attachment, persistence and pride goes into starting new companies and launching new products. But you honestly have to ask yourself when enough may be enough.

My quandary is that had Kyle and I actually managed the costs, we would have probably walked away too soon and never experienced the successes that we did. Failure just wasn’t an option for us. So, do we take the same approach with our innovation efforts at WhitePages.com?

Thoughts, concerns, questions? Feel free to comment.

John
VP, Marketing

When we were manufacturing our MouseDriver product, we took the same approach to CRM. Our feeling was that any positive experience that we could provide to an actual or potential customer would lead to customer evangelism, and ultimately, increased sales of our product. For the most part, our efforts paid off in droves. Customers subscribed to our Insider newsletter (you actually had to send me an email to my personal account claiming that you were ‘In’), the media started picking up on the company and ultimately our story made headlines in numerous major publications. Could we measure what our efforts actually drove? No. But we were pretty sure that the time spent personally responding to each and every customer was well worth it as our sales increased dramatically without spending a dime on marketing.

At WhitePages.com, we have roughly 40MM unique users who utilize our product and services. I don’t know the exact number, but I’m guessing we receive at least 1000 comments a week from customers addressing all sorts of things….what they don’t like about the site, what they love about our company, anecdotes on how WhitePages.com helped to find a long lost friend, comments around privacy, etc., etc. So, with that kind of volume, is it worthwhile, or even feasible, to respond to every customer personally? Is there a measurable benefit that we can track to ensure that our efforts are rewarded? My personal belief is that it’s worth it, but at what cost?

Would love to hear your thoughts.

John
VP, Marketing

At a glance, the image is a nice shot of an old notebook page with names and numbers. But behind the picture is the best New Year’s Resolution I’ve ever heard — made even more impressive because the author actually followed through with it.

Here is the accompanying story:

About four years ago on new years day my mom was contemplating life, thinking of how she wanted to start the year off. so she sat down and made a list of words. words like love, peace, hope. and then she opened up the phone book and looked for people that had these words for last names.

yes, you guessed it. she called them. each and every person on her list, and said, “Mr. hope?, you don’t know me, but i just wanted to wish you a happy new year and that i want my year to be filled with hope, and that yours may be too”.

to which mr. hope said a confused thanks. and on down the list she went. and now, four years later, she pulls out the list every january 1st. and wouldnt you know it, most of them are waiting for her call. she has even visited a an elderly lady from the list. they tell her that they always wonder if this will be the year she doesnt call. and she tells them she cant imagine stopping.

I can only think of one way she could have made this better: by picking a few names that might need that pick-me-up a little more than the “Joys,” “Happys” and “Hopes.” Maybe throw in a Mr. “Sad” (49), Mrs. “Bummer” (48), Mr. “Doom” (280), or Ms. “Pain” (172).

That image made me smile today – great picture and an even greater story. It would be awesome if this turns into a fad – so if you want to join in, be sure to use our Names.WhitePages.com section to help you fill out your “Resolution Phone List.” What a great way to start off the new year. Put a smile on a few random faces and make some new “friends” — something we can never have enough of. Get out there and meet a Joy to world!

Top three reasons why I joined WhitePages.com:

1) Impact and Influence: The opportunity to impact and influence the strategic direction of a rapidly growing company. WhitePages.com only has ~130 employees and that leaves robust opportunities for every single employee to contribute in ways that have meaningful impact. The accountability for results, the opportunities to impact big change and the potential to see ideas come to fruition was a big attractor. Plus, you don’t need multiple levels of approval to act on decisions.

2) Industry Growth: The online ad space continues to kick some serious ass….and it doesn’t look like the growth opportunities are going to stop. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), internet advertising revenue grew 26% in the first nine months of 2007 and is expected to finish up at $20B for all of 2007. As more $$$ continue to shift from traditional media (TV, print ads) to online, we’ll continue to see the IAB numbers skyrocket.

3) Business Fundamentals: WhitePages.com has crushed it over the past five years. Part of this growth is due to industry dynamics and part is due to leadership and execution. Our latest press release show us growing revenues by 23% in 2007 with even bigger growth numbers in 2008. More importantly, we have two critical components that make for a healthy business: Customers (22M unique visitors according to comScore) and Revenue (~$64M in 2007). We’ve also got a well established, seasoned Ad Sales Team with tons of online experience. And at the end of the day, business is all about making and selling.

Of course the people, the culture, and the brand-building opportunities were also big influencers of my decision…but we’ll leave further discussion on those topics to future blog posts.

Comments, questions, criticisms? Just leave a comment.

John
VP, Marketing