I met John Warrilow in 2010, when we were both living in France. John’s an experienced entrepreneur, a published author (his own book, columns for Inc. and other business publications.) He runs Built to Sell Inc. and the informative business podcast “Built to Sell Radio,” which talks about the steps involved in selling your business, and profiles entrepreneurs who have gone through that process.
In November, I had a chance to speak with John in an hour-long interview. I touched on VacationSpot, Expedia, Microsoft and some of the lessons I’ve learned in bootstrapping versus venture capital:
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve added a few enhancements to Alignvote. Summary of Sentiment How are end-users answering the survey? Now you can see a summary. From the Voters Guide homepage, see the “Voter Sentiment” section. This shows you a rolled-up summary of how people are answering the quiz. As clearly described at…
When you’ve completed the interview on Alignvote, you’ll get a result list of candidates in the race, sorted by how much they agree with you. You can now click the “Show Detail” button, and it will show you, issue by issue, whether the candidate is in alignment with you (thumbs-up) or not aligned with you…
Every website owner eventually faces the same question: What do my visitors actually think? Analytics tell you what people do. Heatmaps show you where they click. But neither tells you why they came, what they’re looking for, or why they’re about to leave. I built Popsee to solve this. It’s a tiny, unobtrusive widget that…
Flipping channels today on CNN, MSNBC and elsewhere I’m reminded of a famous book in social psychology. Social Psychologist Leon Festinger, the same researcher who coined “cognitive dissonance,” released a fascinating book in 1956 called When Prophecy Fails. When prophecies fail, the most fervent believers often double-down on their original beliefs, asserting that their very…
New ALIGNVOTE Feature: Candidate Voices Immediately upon launch of the candidate-facing preview of ALIGNVOTE last Wednesday, I heard a great feature request from D4 candidate Heidi Stuber. Paraphrasing our exchange: “I understand why multiple choice is great for finding a match, but often, multiple choice questions have a need for explanation as to why a…
I’ve always been fascinated by past visions of the future. Science fiction uses the future to tell us something about ourselves, so looking back on past visions of the future, we can learn something about that age and the values, myopia, optimism and fears of the time. It’s also healthy to continually do cross-checks on “how…
