A blog focused on helping bloggers and online retailers make more money online.

Shopify wants you…to not work in Kanata.

A few weeks ago I saw this recruiting poster previewed on Twitter by @MikeRochon with the callout,”Be Awesome—Don’t Work In Kanata” and it stuck with me. Kanata, for those not local to Ottawa, is Yet Another Beige Suburb™, a bedroom community about 20 minutes West of Ottawa. I should know: I lived there for almost five years. And then I escaped.

Kanata also serves as Ottawa’s vaunted Silicon Valley North, housing a large number of technology firms, both big and small. Most of these firms are situated in the doldrums of North Kanata, arrayed around March Road, somewhere adjacent to The Middle of Nowhere. It’s a terrible place to work unless commuting to lunch or chain pubs are your idea of a good time. I should know: I worked there. And then I escaped.

There are many reasons why people move their families and business to Kanata, but the primary one is that it’s cheap and there is lots of parking. As it should be: it’s relatively cost effective to level cornfields or raze forests for new construction than it is to redevelop urban space. And you can put in lots of roads, huge rivers of asphalt, which you need because you have to drive everywhere. However, cheaper is not always better.

Other than the obvious jab at the joylessness of working in an expanse of concrete boxes that all look the same, this poster told me that Shopify understands the people they are trying to recruit. Note that I say people and not employees. People have lives, dreams, like sunlight, drink coffee, eat Thai food on Wednesdays, and might bike to work; employees are crammed into cubicles under buzzing fluorescent tubes and wonder if it’s okay to do online banking while they eat their lunch at their desk.

So I took a look at the linked careers page and they list some interesting stuff above and beyond the standard HR rah-rah jargon. They make a huge amount of hay about the equipment you’ll be using (shiny Apple goodies), the office space (heritage post-and-beam construction), generous parental leave and childcare benefits (babies are expensive and inconvenient) and the location (in the restaurant/bar/coffeeshop/shopping district). I think it’s a compelling pitch because people actually care about such things: nobody dreams of working in a poorly ventilated 5×5 cubicle on a wheezing PC with a 17″ CRT and driving 10 minutes to get lunch or coffee.

The term ‘Corporate Culture’ gets casually tossed around so much it has become almost meaningless. The reason: the people who use/abuse it the most are usually the very people who chart how many kilo-keystrokes are  being extracted from the cubicle farms. They draft policy manuals full of “open door policies” and “work:life balance” without irony, failing to realize that corporate culture is not something companies do, it is something that companies are.

That’s the cool thing about working at a startup like AffinityClick: there is no policy manual, just wide open spaces, a Macbook Pro under your arm, and the goal of being something. It’s nice to have a beacon like Shopify to guide the way—they’re one of the most successful local startups in the area, and I think a big part of that is that they hire people and not employees. And as AffinityClick grows, we’re trying to do the same.

You can’t create a corporate culture, but give your people light, air, water, a few Mac Book Pros, and a place to grow and it will happen.

[An edited version of this post appears on Shopify's blog.]

I work for a startup, AffinityClick, that provides product placements for bloggers. But I’m not really here to talk about what AffinityClick does (we have a website for that) , I’m here to talk about what I do at AffinityClick on a daily basis. In short: everything, because at a startup there is no Department of Whatever to do the task. So while there are many things I wish I had to help me do my job more efficiently, the one thing I really need is more time.

Throughout my days I have reason to talk to people who can help me do my job. Let’s call these ‘meetings’. I submit for you a typical exchange between ‘Jim’ and I trying to arrange a time to conduct a meeting:

—…great, Jim, let’s talk on Friday about this.

—Sorry, Dave, Friday’s bad. How about Thusday afternoon or Monday morning?

—Can’t do Thursday, have a meeting. Monday at 10?

—Oops, my calendar filled up, Monday is no good anymore. Wednesday?

Add a week of dickering and negotiating by email, voicemail, and carrier pigeon later and Jim and I still trying to pin down a suitable time. Add two or three more people to the mix and the situation becomes a huge drag on forward momentum and a giant waste of time.

To add complexity to the problem, the calendaring landscape is a fractured, burned-out wasteland of warring empires. Outlook, iCal, and Google Calendar all exist as feudal city-states, each surrounded by a moat of incompatible data formats. There are ways to get them to play nice, but for the most part, your calendar remains locked up in a tower like a damsel in distress. More importantly, I don’t care what calendaring software Jim uses (I barely care what calendaring software I use), I just want to talk about the Next Big/Shiny Thing with him. And soon.

While I was in Blogworld a short while ago I met the team at Tungle. [I even crashed their party with Scott Stratten of Unmarketing fame]. They seem like nice people, they were wearing matching purple t-shirts, and they’re from Montreal. They understand poutine [warning, clicking the previous link will either make you very hungry or vaguely horrified] and purport to have a solution to my meeting scheduling woes through their web service tungle.me.

Like many things that happen at tradeshows, I promptly forgot about it until I had another one of those meeting-tag moments. So I checked it out. After all, what the hell is a tungle?

Tungle.me looks like this. They like purple.

Signup was quick and painless. They seem to support every method of authentication known to social media (even Yahoo! I LOL’d). I was able to set up and sync my Google calendar in a few key strokes, and voila, I now have my own Tungle webpage where I can share my availability and book appointments with other Tunglers (Tunglists? Tungleurs?) or even people who haven’t joined the service, provided they are using a modern calendar platform. There’s even the requisite free iPhone and Blackberry apps to make things even easier for people on mobile devices.

The good news is it works. And it works well. No more back-and-forth, no more negotiating, no more spending three days trying to arrange a 30 minute phone call or a week trying to co-ordinate a teleconference with five attendees spread out across three continents.

So despite what Tungle promises about making scheduling painless (it does) and easy (creating meetings is almost fun. Almost), what they really do is make it quick. And for me that is invaluable because time is the one thing I can’t make more of in a busy day.

Basecamp nixes their $24 per month Basic Plan.

Like many startups, AffinityClick has built itself using a number of cloud-based applications. Many of these services are free (e.g. Google Apps) and a number of them are subscription-based following the no-popular Software as a Service (SaaS) model.

SaaS has numerous advantages: no large outlay to acquire software licenses, the service is managed for you, no additional hardware resources to run it, no license management, simplified technical support, easier integration with 3rd party applications, easy access to data (provided you have network connectivity), and you should always the most recent version of software running. Salesforce CRM is probably the most famous SaaS tool (which we also use) but there are many others out there that fulfill all sorts of business needs.

This brings us to Basecamp, 37signals‘ flagship project management tool. We’ve been using Basecamp for a while now, and although it isn’t perfect (I find it to be more a glorified group To-do list than genuine PM tool) it is easy-to-use and the price fit the bill. For a mere $24 per month for the Basic plan, we could maintain up to 15 projects here in the office which was more than adequate for our purposes. We were happy to pay the subscription after the initial 30-day free trial.

Yesterday I was surprised to see this tweet from Adam McNamara (@adammacnamara): Wow. Basecamp silently nuked their Basic Plan. http://basecamphq.com/signup vs the cached version http://cl.ly/2zTH. Bear in mind that Adam isn’t any old online pundit: his company,Select Start Studios, develops mobile apps, not the least of which is Headquarters, an iPhone application that provides mobile access to your Basecamp projects.

As you can see, 37signals has discontinued the $24/month Basic plan. The new entry tier is the Plus plan at $49/month—more than double the price! So far 37 Signals hasn’t said what will happen to people using the ‘old’ Basic plan, but I certainly hope they grandfather us in: we simply don’t need the Plus package and frankly, hadn’t signed up to the service for such.

Other than the poor communication practice, 37signals’ move highlights one of the drawbacks of SaaS (and cloud computing too): if you don’t ‘own’ (and I’m simplifying the vagaries of software licensing here) a product, and the application and your data exists somewhere outside of your control, you are completely at the whim of the companies that provide you with service. Price increases, service outages, business changes, and bankruptcies could take away business-critical applications. Which is why I’m looking for a good, lightweight project management tool for Macs today. Any suggestions?

Blogworld was a smashing success for us. Perhaps more literally than we would have liked: last week, after returning to Ottawa, FedEx dropped this package to the office in horrible condition.

Print damaged by FedEx

When FedEx Delivers a box that looks like this, you know it isn't going to be pretty.

Opening the box confirmed what I suspected—the canvas print was completely destroyed. The worst part was this appeared to be the result of a kick to one side.

After taking stock of the scene, we took some pictures to document the damage and then did what any connected person would do: we complained about it online. Between our @affinityclick account and my personal account, we’ve got 2,200 followers on Twitter; there were a number of replies and retweets that spawned some discussion about the vagaries of shipping services.

FedEx is a bohemoth company. I seem to recall reading that they operate the largest airline in the world. While I have genreally lauded them as being efficient and good at their jobs, they are somewhat bureaucratic with lots of manual forms completed in triplicate. Therefore I was quite surprised when mere hours later @FedexLaShelia contacted me offering to help.

Chatting with @FedExLaSheila on Twitter

I was impressed. This is the upside of social media: cutting out the middle-man to allow, quick, direct contact between people (or in this case, people and corporations). After a brief, friendly exchange via Twitter, I sent her the information she requested and sat back hopeful for a quick resolution. Several hours later I received a scripted email informing me to file a claim through the usual FedEx processes.

I understand that FedEx is a large corporation, and as such, likely has reams of policies and procedures that need to be followed. But why go through the trappings of direct, personal engagement only to bump you back to 800-numbers and stacks of paper forms? Using Twitter as a cattle blind to drive distraught customers to ‘old media’ service paradigms is like using a surgical scalpel as a box-cutter: it does the job, but the tool is being horribly underutilized.

More importantly, FedEx had the opportunity to turn their now-public service failure into a win: @FedexLaShelia could have provided a beneficial resolution directly and demonstrated to anybody following that they can right a wrong quickly, efficiently, and through new tools and channels.

Instead, I still have a destroyed print and reams of paperwork to fill out and phone calls that will take up my time without a clear path or timeline to a satisfactory resolution. Despite the gloss of ‘engagement’ and  ’community’ provided by FedEx’ social media presence, I am still a dissatisfied customer, I still have merchandise they damaged in transit, and they’ve still got the same old porcine processes dressed up in social media lipstick. On this basis, not only did FedEx fail to deliver a package, they also failed to deliver on Twitter.

UPDATE! November 17

FedEx emailed me a Claim Form which I had to print and manually complete. I then scanned and sent it to FedEx with suporting documents and pictures attached. This bounced because it exceeded FedEx’s message limit. Sigh.

SECOND UPDATE! December 6

Received a telephone call from Angie at FedEx’s Montreal facility (514 area code). We spoke for a while about the damage which was slightly disconcerting since everything required was in the claim submission. She says the claim will be reviewed and they’ll get back to us.

FINAL UPDATE! December 7

Angie from FedEx called again. Upon review they offered us a settlement of $454.51 for the damaged DNA 11 print and a further $100.79 as a credit against the shipping costs (1/3rd of the shipment fees for three packages on the bill of lading.)

I think this is a fair outcome from a financial standpoint and kudos to FedEx, specifically @FedexLaShelia and Angie, for being helpful and professional throughout. However, I still maintain that the process doesn’t leverage social media to its full advantage and that filing a claim is a more hand intensive and sluggish chore than it needs to be.