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No, wait: The most amazing thing is that I have often gone into B&H to purchase a specific product, only to be talked into something cheaper. For example, once I went in to buy a field video monitor to use for some interviews I was conducting. I expected to pay $600 until the salesperson said, "Why don't you just get one of these cheap consumer portable DVD players? They have video inputs, they work just as well, and they're under $100." This was no accident. "The entire premise of our store is based upon your ability to come in, touch, feel, experiment, ask, and discuss your needs without sales pressure," B&H's website says.

But wait: The conveyer belts, the prices, the smart salespeople, the fact that they recommend cheaper products almost as a rule -- none of these is actually the most amazing thing about B&H. Really, the most amazing thing is that because the owners of B&H are Orthodox Jews -- Hasidim, in fact -- the store closes every Friday afternoon for the Jewish Sabbath, and on Jewish holidays. Moreover, B&H's website, which reportedly accounts for 70 percent of sales, shuts down, too. Bhphotovideo.com is, to my knowledge, the only major online retailer that closes for 25 hours every weekend.

Truth be told, I don't think I ever bought anything from Circuit City anyway. On weekends, I would occasionally wander into the local branch, attracted like a moth to the bright wall of plasma TVs. When I actually needed a new TV, however, I found the Circuit City salesperson to be so aggressively unknowledgeable and remarkably useless that I fled to Best Buy, where I was helped by a cheerful, 20-year-old twerp who knew everything. I later learned that in 2007, Circuit City had fired the chain's 3,400 most experienced salespeople and replaced them with generic, untrained, near-minimum-wage workers.

So it was no surprise to me that Circuit City failed. The chain's CEO, in an e-mail, blamed the demise on "poor macroeconomic conditions" -- an assertion that was repeated by The Associated Press, which cited "the expanding financial crisis" for the liquidation.

因此，要把收入做大，就弄出各种与简历有关的产品来，大量“倾销”。

结果是，无论如何推广、宣传，广告仍然是超过简历搜索的主要收入。

多么美好！绝对双赢！消费者还能享受折扣优惠，就变成了多赢了。

生意就是这样，就如中国企业的国际化般听起来那么美妙，但实际却远不是计划中的结果。

我相信不是因为我们做得不好。仅仅在这3年中，有10家以上分布在各地的同行和我们一起证明－－用资金和时间－－为吃喝玩乐的生意提供推广的生意并不那么美妙。

三年，我们明白了一个最基本道理：用户需求。

没有需求，或者不是刚性需求，是可有可无的需求，你的服务/产品怎可能有大的前途？

• You purchase bids in pre-packaged blocks of at least 30. Each bid costs you 75 cents, with no volume discount.
  
• Each bid raises the purchase price by 15 cents and increases the auction time by 15 seconds.
  
• Once the auction ends, you pay the final price.
  

How important do you consider the originality of an idea to be? I have decided to embrace my variations on the idea, the size of the market, and go ahead with developing it.

Sometimes the specifics of the idea can be important though. For example, take Google: lets use hyperlink data to rank websites

Instead, its often better to just take something familiar and make it better or adapt it for a certain niche. Make an ipod, not a segway.

I think that the strongest ideas are never really original, they are just better implementations of the existing ones.

Ideally you do a startup where other companies are doing something badly, their users hate them, and they still make money.

Innovation in the way you will get traffic is one of the ways to distinguish yourself. If you are a paid service, consider integrating better commission/affiliate systems. They work.

The "build a great product and they will come" myth is bullshit 99% of the time (unless you have a built in marketing engine-- SEO or viral). Balsamiq won the same reason that 37s did (and JoelonSoftware for that matter)... They had a great story, told it well, and the story happened to resonate/be interesting to their exact target market (web geeks / entrepreneurs).

Bravo!

But try to build great software for supply chain management, or managing a beauty parlor and let me know how "everything else will follow" there. There's a reason that SalesForce.com (which, arguably, has/had a great product) has spent 60-70% of their topline on sales and marketing.

Every company that works online today ought to consider hiring three amazing people to lead these projects:




1. COMMUNITY ORGANIZER. Find and connect and lead a tribe of dedicated users that contribute to and benefit from the work you do.



2. STATS FIEND. Measure everything that can be measured. Do it efficiently and consistently. Find out what metrics are important and cycle until they improve.