Simply put, we’re monitoring hundreds of daily deal sites and then notifying people of daily deals that exactly match the places that they’ve saved on their GuideList as a To-Do or a Love.

This solves the problem of not wanting to subscribe to a ton of deal services and get a bunch of emails every day for deals that don’t interest you. You just see deals for places you want. Simple.

Personally, I’m not a frequent deal buyer. Although, when a deal is available for a place that I have been meaning to try or a place that I’ve loved in the past, why would I not want to know about it?

Unfortunately this isn’t available in all cities yet, just most of the big high tech cities at the moment. We’ll roll out to more cities over time based on what cities grow in popularity on GuideMe.

photo © 2009 Chad Swaney | more info (via: Wylio)

Numerous tech luminaries have written about email overload, including going as far as declaring email bankruptcy. The concept of “inbox zero” is often tweeted about as a fantasy land where you actually have replied to, deleted, or processed every email in your inbox.

There are even multiple investor-backed startups such as Unsubcribe.com or ccLoop who are working at solving the “email problem”.

This was brought up again recently in an article on Techcrunch by MG Siegler about Tumblr’s new messaging system. While it looks like a pretty standard application messaging system, MG is excited about it as another place he can get messages that isn’t his email inbox. MG writes:

Yes, all of this stuff is rudimentary for a messaging system. But again, it does offer a small email relief in that it’s a new system with a slightly higher barrier to entry (you need to have a Tumblr account, unless you choose to allow anonymous messages). Mixed with Facebook Messages, Twitter, Twitter DMs, group messaging apps (Beluga, GroupMe, etc), and soon iMessage, I have a bunch of small work-arounds to avoid the nightmare that is my email inbox.

MG’s solution actually seems like the opposite of a solution to me. I have a personal Tumblr site like MG does, a Twitter account, Facebook account, the blog you’re reading, a LinkedIn account, a Quora account, and other various applications where I can get messages. I actually feel more overwhelmed by all the different places I have to go to gather the messages meant for me, then I do from the number of emails in my inbox.

When all the messages meant for me are coming to my inbox, I can handle them without switching to different systems, I can use filters, I can use labels/folders, and can do it all on one device without switching from mobile to PC. How does breaking up my messages across all these different applications actually lessen the burden? Does it lower the quantity or increase the quantity?

If anything maybe there is mental value of getting some variety by getting out of email, but I actually think the fragmentation of messaging takes up more time and makes me more likely to miss something.

Maybe I’m wrong, or maybe I just don’t get as much email as some of those who have complained publicly about it. I’ve led numerous teams of 30 people or less, and while I was at Yahoo! there were definitely some times in which a lot of email was coming my way.

I’ve tended to be able to handle the email load through effective filtering, keeping my subscriptions to lists and commercial newsletters to a minimum, and realizing the more email I send the more likely I am to get email in return.

But, I’m also not a tech journalist or notable venture capitalist so it’s quite possible I just haven’t felt the pain as badly where breaking up messages across multiple applications seems like a welcome thing. Someday…

The second big thing is that I’ve started a company and I’m currently in the highs and lows of that adventure.

What’s happened is that I’ve started to see a lot of parallels between what Chip Kelly has to do as the coach of the Ducks to what I have to handle in running a startup. Let’s compare:

Hiring Your Coaching Staff
In order to build a good football team, a head coach needs to first put together a top quality staff of assistant coaches. These coaches need to be able to work well with the head coach, work well with each other, and be more specialized to a certain area than the head coach who’s overseeing everything. An example would e your offensive coordinator who focuses on the offensive side of the ball, or a defensive line coach who coaches a certain position. Additionally, it works best if these coaches have skill sets and expertise that compliment the head coach and fill in where they are weak.

In a startup this is like building your early team. You need to early coworkers who work well with you, work well with each other, and have strong skills that can be applied in a specific area that hopefully go above and beyond what the CEO can do there. This could be your lead engineer or CTO, your head of product, or head of sales. Obviously in a startup these are people that may have to take on multiple roles early on, but they are ideally people who can become leaders and managers of the company over time.

A bad hire or hires in an assistant coaching staff will doom a football team over the long term just as early employees who don’t fit or add enough value will doom your startup.

Recruiting Your Team
After a coaching staff is established, the coaches have to get to work in recruiting players to join the team. They spend a lot of time and effort scouting high school players in their area and around the country, interviewing those players, checking references, and bringing them in for a visit to the school. While all this is happening they have to convince the players that they are the school out of all the options to come and play for. Sometimes promises are made by coaches, sometimes those aren’t promises but implications, and sometimes they just say you have to come in and earn it. Eventually it comes down to whether the player believes in the coaches, vision, strategy, and sees how they can fit into the team and that it’s a school they want to attend for the next four years.

In the startup world, this is when your early team starts to grow beyond that first core group. You have to start spending time networking, scouting LinkedIn, putting job applications out there, hiring recruiters, or doing other things to find potential candidates that fit the right positions in your company. Then you need to interview them, check references, and bring them in to see if it’s a bit on both sides. Promises are sometimes made, or sometimes not, but again the employee has to believe in the team, vision, strategy, and that it’s a company they want to spend the next four or more years at (common equity vesting length).

Setting the Strategy
When a college football coach looks at the upcoming season they’ve got to set the strategy for the team. This consists of working with those assistant coaches to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the team and match that against the types of offenses and defenses the coaches know well enough to implement. They’ll plan what they need to teach their team in order to get there by the upcoming season.

For startups, this is is like working with your founders or top employees early on to evaluate your strengths and what you know how to build and execute, and then planning out how you’re going to get there. What infrastructure do you need to setup? What do you need to build? How are you going to acquire customers? How are you going to make money?

Practice
Once the strategy and plan are in place for the football team, it’s time to get to work in practice. The team spends significant time and energy working on physical conditioning, practicing and improving skills, and learning the plays they plan to run in games. Practices can sometimes drag, especially if there is no big game in sight. The great coaches are expert motivators at getting their team to give 100% effort all the time in order to maximize this practice time. There are moments of excitement when the team’s potential is shown in practice, but also moments of fright when the team doesn’t perform well and things aren’t clicking.

For startups, I’d consider this the initial building phase where you work long hours but aren’t to a point yet when you’re getting feedback or having any big wins. Some days you think you make a ton of progress, while on other days you feel like there’s just so much work to do you don’t know how you’ll get it all done. A great CEO can inspire his team through this period and help them perform at maximum effort even though you aren’t getting user feedback yet or seeing any kind of growth.

Spring Football
Spring Football takes place in the spring when the football team practices for about a month and then holds a “spring football game” for fans to come and watch where they play against themselves. This is a time for experimenting with players in different positions and any new offensive or defensive plays and strategies you may want to use.

This could be considered a beta period for a startup. You spend this time to build a product and experiment on what you think might work. Then the spring game functions as your beta test when a small number of “fans” check out your work to see what you’ve accomplished over that month of practice. Usually those fans will see a lot of promise in the football team like hopefully fans of your startup will see promise in your product or service. However, they also usually feel like the product looks incomplete and is missing some key features that they hope you get fixed by the big games in the fall.

Big Games
Once the real football season begins there is a game every week. In college football almost every game is considered extremely important due to how the system works. The teams, coaches, and fans want to have a great performance every week to gain more exposure, support, and get a win on their record.

In the land of startups, I’d consider big games to be things like a product launch, big customer meeting, or big investor meeting. These are the big events that you prepare for, practice for, and stress out about leading up to them. Then they often end in a huge victory or a terrible defeat for your company. You learn something about your company with the win or the loss, but just like in football sometimes the loss teaches you more about where you need to improve. Either way, you have to bounce back quickly and start preparing for the next “big game” in the next meeting.

Competition
Being a good football coach involves preparing your team properly to take on their opponents. They study film of their opponent playing and try and predict what strategies they are going to employ against their team. They identify strengths they must prepare for and look for weaknesses they can exploit. However, if they worry too much about their competition and deviate too much from what their team does well it can have an adverse effect. Should you change what your team does dramatically based on what the competition does?

It’s very similar with a startup. You can study your competition and identify their strengths and weaknesses and try and predict where they are going to go. However, you can also get too concerned with competition and make incorrect decisions simply because you’re trying to differentiate too much or perhaps trying to emulate something they are doing well. It’s a really fine balance for a startup to figure out how they should deal with competitors.

Working with Boosters and the Athletic Director
College Football coaches in many ways aren’t the complete boss. They report to the school’s athletic director and really also report to the school’s largest donors or boosters. These are the generally wealthy alumni who donate large amounts of money to their school to help athletic department budgets or help the facilities of the football program. In the case of Oregon, Nike CEO Phil Knight is a prime example of this. While he doesn’t officially make decisions, you know he has a large amount of influence on who the football coach is and evaluates their performance.

In a startup that’s taken on investment, this is very similar to the relationship with investors or advisors. Depending on the situation the investors may control the board of directors and be able to fire the CEO/founder, or in other cases they may not but just have a lot of influence in evaluating the job that the CEO is doing. For major decisions the CEO makes, what the investors think has an influence on those decisions just like what Phil Knight thinks influences what Oregon coach Chip Kelly may decide to do in a certain situation with his program.

Handling The Media
The media can be a coach’s best friend when times are good and their worst enemy when times are bad. If a team is doing well, it’s common to see lots of praise about the team and very positive comments about the coach that can help their reputation tremendously. When things start to go bad though, those same people praising the coach and the company can turn negative extremely quickly and begin to get irrational in the other direction even going as far as suggesting a coach should be fired.

For a startup, the relationship can be very similar. You want the attention of the media if things are going well. When things aren’t going well, the last thing you want to see is the media covering the problems that are happening with your company.

The Fans
Just like the media, the fans out there can be just as fickle. When times are good they’ll tell everyone they know about the team and how good they are doing. They’ll support the team with time and money and cheer like there’s nothing more important in the world. But if the team hits a losing streak or has long periods of poor play fans will turn negative and stop coming to the games and showing support.

Fans are like your customers or users of your startup’s product. If your company is performing well those users will give you their time and money and tell their friends about you. But the second you wrong them in some way or don’t provide what they’re expecting to see, they’ll speak negatively of you and pull their money and go to a competitor. Not all users are like this of course, and there are many fans of football teams that are loyal as well, but it’s definitely something that companies and critically aware of and coaches need to have fan support to keep their job over the long run.

The Big Picture
There are so many things to worry about, plan for, and execute that it can be overwhelming for a football coach or a CEO to get the job done. Oregon coach Chip Kelly has installed a motto at in the Ducks program called “Win the Day”. He’s even gone as far as creating a logo for the motto and painting it inside the stadium as seen in the picture at right. It simply means that you can’t play your opponent every day, you can’t change the perception of the media and fans, and you can’t win a championship all at once. All you can really do is focus on winning that particular day and executing what you need to do to get the job overall job done.

I think the same motto can be applied at a startup. You can’t get everything done right away, you can’t sign every deal, you can’t beat every competitor. All you can do is win the day itself by accomplishing what needs to b accomplished now to move you towards your bigger goals.

I recently received my first auto-renewal email for my iPad 3G wireless data plan from AT&T. I suppose I should first give them some credit for even bothering to send an email to the customers they are auto-renewing since so many companies don’t do this at all. However, it seems like sending these emails would be common courtesy so I can’t get too excited.

What struck me as insulting about the email is that they are leading off the email with “Congratulations”. Is AT&T successfully auto-renewing my credit card for a rate many feel is too high an occasion in which to congratulate someone? Perhaps “Thank you for your business!” would be more customer-centric? Or maybe something neutral like “Hello, this is a notification that we successfully billed your credit card $29.99 for your iPad 3G data plan.”

Leading with “Congratulations” shows that the author of the email was thinking from AT&T’s point of view, not mine as the customer receiving the email. This is a common mistake in business writing, one that needs to be called out when seen.

It gives a preview into the type of things we’re working on making possible in a scalable manner through a premium exchange on APT from Yahoo!.

Enter another ahort-lived internet meme, Sad Guys on Trading Floors. The captions are the best part.

In some cases, we’re not being as green as we could be due to not wanting to make the sacrifices, but in other cases it’s a lack of knowledge.

In general when wanting to use less energy, waste less, and live sustainably the choices boil down to using or doing something less, choosing a more green way to do it, or adopting to new technology that does it better.

Being a fan of technology, I like seeing articles like this that point out new ways that people can use technology to become more knowledgeable about their energy use and how to use less. I currently don’t know for sure how much energy the different appliances and electronics in my house used, and I guarantee I’d use them less or differently if I knew.

I’m definitely going to look into Control4 and other technologies to potentially add to our house. Unfortunately, these technologies are probably still prohibitively expensive for the population at large, but maybe in a few years they’ll become standard on all new homes built and be cheap enough that the mass population can retrofit to homes and apartments.

As this past year at Yahoo! has been my first year working for what I’d consider to be a large company, I’ve become more interested in strategies around running and operating companies efficiently. My past experiences have been with startups or small companies where a lot of the challenges that larger companies face don’t exist.

This recent article about a practice at Zappos.com where they pay new customer service employees $1,000 to quit after their first month of training caught my eye. They seem to be thinking it’s doing well so far in making sure the employees working for Zappos.com really want to be there and feel that they are a good fit for the company.

It also brings up some questions. Does this affect the type of applicants they are getting? Do they have people applying with plans to actually quit ahead of time? Seems unlikely to me to go through a month’s worth of work and quit just to get an extra $1,000 opposed to keeping the job.

Is $1,000 enough? Would the number of employees quitting change if the number were $5,000? $10,000? They say that 10% of employees take them up on the $1,000 offer. How many take them up on a $10,000 offer? Is it the amount of money that matters, or just really giving the employees an easy out after the first month when they realize it isn’t for them?

Could this technique be used for more advanced positions? It seems to be working for customer service, but would it work for software developers? Marketing executives? Sure, you probably have to raise the number, but if I hired an experienced product marketer would they quit after a month for $10,000?

As I think through it, I think it might be the easy out of a job you don’t like instead of people really wanting the $1,000. Thoughts?

It’s been quite a while since my last blog post, and unfortunately I’m not blogging much for a variety of reasons. Essentially:

1. Adding a third kid to the mix at home definitely takes up some time.
2. Work is very busy and very engaging leaving not much time to blog.
3. A lot of the stuff I would say and discuss is either off limits while doing what I’m doing, or at least close enough to the line that I don’t want to spend the time analyzing it.

I would like to get to posting a bit more, so perhaps you’ll see some quicker posts with just quick comments. I tend to want to provide a lot of value to a post, but I rarely have the time to sit down for an hour or more and work on a lengthy post.

One thing that may help solve this is I’ve installed the wphone plugin so I can post directly from my iPhone. I’m finding that I’m interacting with Twitter and Facebook much more because I’m so often using my iPhone while traveling or out and about, so maybe if I can post to this blog easier through the iPhone I’ll do it more.

Instead of making lots of quick posts, I’ll go ahead and do a quick update in what’s going on:

1. I’ve had a number of recent offsite work trips recently that have been very productive and fun. There have been great discussions with smart people, and a lot of excitement about what we’re building at Yahoo! despite any clouds looming on the horizon. As you can see from the picture above while sailing in the Pacific Ocean, the offsite meetings also have a little fun as well. Unfortunately my team didn’t win the sailing race.

2. Ad Tech in San Francisco was quite a show, as it seemed like the largest show in recent memory. Unfortunately, I wasn’t really blown away by much there, as it seems like a lot of companies are competing in the ad network and ad exchange space without really differentiating themselves significantly from the competition.

3. The iPhone is really the most revolutionary thing web or technology wise that’s hit me in a long time. I’ve had mine for quite a while now, but it amazes me how useful it’s become. I also find that I do more RSS feed reading, twittering, Facebooking, and Digging on the iPhone than on a normal computer. Part of that may be because I’m traveling quite a bit, but I think mainly it’s because those applications all have simplified versions for the iPhone that I find more usable than the full web versions. I can’t stand the normal version of Facebook now compared to the ease of use and simplicity of the iPhone version.

4. My family is a lot of fun right now with the three kids all making it pretty wild at home.

5. I’m excited for summer and fall, as they are really the prime two seasons in Eugene for enjoying the outdoors.

Hopefully I can follow this up with an increased frequency of posts, although I anticipate keeping them pretty short until I have more time in my day at some point.