May 2012
3 posts
Give back to the community
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It seems to come up fairly often that members of the UX community are hesitant to share their experiences because the principles of UX are perceived as too abstract to be easy to teach to others. I have to disagree. Teaching UX is no different than teaching any other subject. The reason I’ve been thinking about this lately is that I recently worked with...
The High Cost of Making Sure Everyone Is Very Busy
To the aspiring manager nothing throws a chill more than seeing idle people at work. There they are - the shiftless dregs - doing nothing: staring out the window at the Korean taco truck, reading an article on Smashing Magazine, checking the fantasy basketball standings. Surely there is something they should be doing. Something to add to shareholder value. Aren’t we paying these people? Why...
So You Think Working For A Startup Is Bliss
The past week has fucking sucked.
Let me back up slightly and explain what’s been going on at Adzerk. In the past 3 months we’ve turned over our support department, twice; which means we spend cycles interviewing numerous candidates. At the same time, we’ve increased our customer base by 300% and due to the increased impressions now running on our platform our engineers are...
April 2012
2 posts
Life's Too Short to Write Shitty Software
A few Fridays ago, I was at my favorite bar in downtown Raleigh with some friends. We were hanging out and having a casual conversation about startup culture and how it compares to corporate culture. A young guy with a button down shirt and a loosened tie was ordering drinks at the bar and overheard our discussion and introduced himself. His name was Jonathan. He passed his ordered drinks over to...
The underground is alive with the sound of...
I have written before about Adzerk and our choice to work in the American Underground. I also wrote a post last year about the cancellation of the Launchbox Accelerator program and the negative effect it had on the community and the Underground.
I have good news. Chris Heivly has started a new accelerator Triangle Startup Factory and they are back in the exact same spot they were in before and a...
March 2012
5 posts
A word on managing feature flags
Feature flags are an indispensable tool for working with continuous integration and deployment. They allow us to add new code to the app without breaking things, keeping everything safely hidden until the big reveal when we turn them on and our customers get to see the new feature in all it’s shiny glory.
When we first started with our continuous integration system, we implemented...
Build your own Personal Pipeline
I was planning on writing another blog post until the last minute when I decided to write this one instead due to some hard times that have hit home in the triangle area. As I am sure everyone has heard, iContact was acquired and then scaled down causing some layoffs to old colleagues of mine who I also consider friends. This got me thinking about what would make this situation easier on...
Embracing Rejection to Succeed
In high school I was terrified to ask out the girls that I liked - which meant I didn’t ask very many of them out - which meant I didn’t have very many dates or girlfriends in high school. It seemed like a wise strategy at the time - I didn’t want a girl to reject me so the best way to avoid that is to never ask a girl out.
I believe embracing rejection is one of the keys to...
Cloud Management Elysium
No snow is there, nor heavy storm, nor ever rain, but ever does Ocean send up blasts of the shrill-blowing West Wind that they may give cooling to men.
Any cloud management service worth a damn does 1 thing and does it well: provide leverage. Everything else is frosting on your cupcake - it’s sugary fun but not enough to keep you alive.
What do I mean by leverage? I mean that the...
The Slaying of CSSthulhu: CSS Architecture and...
At Adzerk, we practice continuous integration. This means that any new code that’s committed to github will immediately run the gamut of functional and unit tests, and if it passes, be promoted to production, all in a matter of minutes.
This is amazingly convenient and easy, especially for the backend developers, who simply need to place a new or incomplete feature inside a feature flag to...
February 2012
2 posts
Don't Hire - Automate!
This post is about our foray into the marketing automation jungle. As a SaaS start-up our budget is meager and our resources limited but our resolve is mighty! I’ll talk a bit about what tools we’re using, how we’ve got it setup, what we love and hate about it and what we know we need to improve on.
Early on we decided to use Salesforce as our CRM solution so this was...
How to Not Be a Shitty Recruiter
If you read Hacker News or keep up with technologists, you’re probably already aware of how broken the recruiting industry is. Specifically, recruiting for small to medium sized tech companies is so awful that it’s becoming laughable now.
See, there’s a problem. The need for talented engineers and designers is at an all time high, and the supply of the unemployed in the industry is lower than...
January 2012
2 posts
Lead Follow-ups That Don't Suck
Go Bold or Go Home in your Sales Communications
When starting at Adzerk, I was basically given the reins to the sales process so I started doing research to find the best ways to handle customers that you are talking with through the sales process. I have always been told to ‘be brief, be bold and be gone’ in different sales trainings, but I wanted to make sure that point hit home when creating...
Tools Used at Adzerk- Crazy Egg
We love user data here at Adzerk. We really can’t get enough of it- we’re running at least five different metrics gathering tools in our application and on our marketing site. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, but Crazy Egg is our go-to tool for visualized user information.
What it is & why it’s awesome
Crazy Egg is a hosted service that provides a variety of...
December 2011
2 posts
Who cares what your Klout score is...
Who cares what your Klout score is, or where you checked in for lunch, or that you are the mayor of Chubby’s Tacos….. Is it important? Is it a healthy and productive use of technology? Or more importantly is this a productive use of your time? I am more interested in knowing if you are a good parent, spouse, employer, employee, sibling, neighbor, friend… Are you “wasting” your...
Who really wrote that post?
A couple months ago I was sitting in a conference room with a member of the Adzerk team. We were using one of our cell phones on speakerphone talking to an experienced marketer in the ad tech space. We were talking through ways to promote Adzerk in the industry and the topic of writing guest posts for popular industry news sites came up. What the marketer suggested was that he write a detailed...
November 2011
1 post
Agile UX and Kanban at Adzerk
Experience design is the art and science of finding out what makes life as easy as possible for your users, and then doing it.
In a more traditional organization, there’s often an entire team who dedicate all of their time to developing comprehensive studies, aggregating user data, conducting surveys, and the like. In the fast-paced world of a startup, you don’t really have the time to do all...
October 2011
2 posts
CRM Solution Review: How Adzerk uses Assistly to...
This article is a review of Adzerk’s implementation of Assistly as our CRM solution. My goal is to share insights into our needs, goals, and how we’ve utilized the Assistly platform to help us track, monitor, and improve our customer support efforts.
Why we chose Assistly
For starters, it is cheaper for us based on how big we are and our current customer base. We also like the...
DevOps at Adzerk
“A system of local optimums is not an optimum system at all.” - Dr. E. Goldratt
DevOps, the mutant offspring of software development and the subsequent operations to keep that software functioning, is typically an abberaration for most organizations. Most engineering groups create a cultural wall between the developers and the people tasked with installing and running the software....
September 2011
2 posts
Adzerk & Kanban
We’ve been using Kanban for a couple of months now at Adzerk so I wanted to give you an update on how’s its been going. spoiler alert: it’s great!
The Way We Were
As mentioned in previous posts, we’ve always used AgileZen to manage our backlog and current development work. When it was just James, Kacy and me we could operate without too many rules/conventions. Mostly...
Tools Used at Adzerk - Hipchat
Over the last few months, Adzerk has been searching for the best group chat client that could meet our needs. We were getting pretty serious with Jaconda, and then we spotted Hipchat in a coffee shop one afternoon. It has everything we need and more. We’ve fallen in love with it. Honestly, if it had a finger, we would totally buy a ring and propose.
Why it Rocks
In early June, the...
August 2011
3 posts
Durham sits and watches opportunity as it passes...
There is only one Silicon Valley. Every time I read an article about how Boulder, or New York, or Boston is going to be the next Silicon Valley I know that the person writing that article doesn’t know what they are talking about. If you have ever been to San Francisco, walked around SOMA and then driven down the 101 you know that nowhere will ever be Silicon Valley - the next Silicon Valley...
Answer every damn email
One of the goals I have set for Adzerk company wide is to answer every email that comes our way. Nothing frustrates me more then when I send an email to a company and never hear back. It has happened with companies of every size - but tends to happen more the larger a company is.
I think it comes down to two core reasons that so much email never gets answered.
1) It has become acceptable to just...
Don't Solve Tomorrow's Problems
I know, it sounds absurd. If you don’t solve tomorrow’s problem’s then you’re just going to have to deal with them when they get here.
Which is exactly my point.
There’s so much to do around a startup and the one thing you’re typically short on is resources. At Adzerk we certainly don’t have the dev team or sales organization that DoubleClick does so...
July 2011
1 post
SaaS Support Team is Either Unloved Stepchild or...
The title says it all. Your SaaS based company support department is either treated like the unloved step child given no love and encouragement or the favorite son that gets everything he needs to grow and succeed. As a customer contacting the support team, who would you prefer to talk to? Do you want to speak to a disgruntled agent that hates his life and job or the one that is a beaming image...
June 2011
4 posts
Consulting is like selling crack
A number of hot startups in Durham are looking for developers and I wanted to help them out (that’s how it works in the south), so I contacted some awesome rails developers that I know. One of those developers responded that he was only interested in consulting work or founding his own startup. This reminded me of one of the biggest mistakes I made on my path to being a startup founder:
...
Where's Raleigh?
As mentioned in a previous post our office in the underground was a great first office for Adzerk. As we grow Adzerk and add employees we’ve started to think of life aboveground. All of our attention is focused on moving to a bigger space somewhere in Durham, staying close to the culture and other startups we’ve enjoyed this past year.
Funny thing is that most of our team will most...
The benefits of working underground in Durham
Adzerk was one of the first startups to take residence in the newly created American Underground in Durham. The local incubator Launchbox Digital was there ~6 months before as well as the game focused incubator Joystick Labs, but it wasn’t until January that other startups started moving in. The only other startup that gets to claim they were here before us is Preation (founded by Aaron...
Tools: Roadmap
Keeping track of a roadmap sounds simple but a lot of factors determine the format. Because of this it’s often a matter of personal preference when it comes to what a product manager uses to track their roadmap. There are tools out there to use and I’ve tried many of them (most recently I tried Interstate) but I always end up back at Excel.
I’m not talking about the immediate...
May 2011
1 post
1 tag
Welcome to the Adzerk Team Blog
Welcome to a new blog by the Adzerk team - we are going to post various technical posts, observations, and just about anything else we think of. If you want to keep up with the official Adzerk blog for product updates you can find it over here.
Interested in being a part of the Adzerk team? We are hiring developers, sales people, as well as a kick-ass support person. Interested? Get in touch.