The Science of Small Wins
Meet Hari Palaiyanur, newly minted Ph.D, NBA fanatic, and eater of vegetables. Hari used iDoneThis to motivate him to make progress on his dissertation every day, until he had his degree in hand.
I was born in India and have grown up in the US for most of my life. At some point in college, I became addicted to basketball. I’ve lived in the Bay Area since graduating college and am planning to move to the East Coast this summer.
Age: 27
Location: Berkeley, CA
Contact: LinkedIn
Meet Andrew Zarick, digital media expert and hip hop enthusiast. Using iDoneThis every day, Andrew has discovered that he gets more done than he otherwise gave himself credit for.
I’ve lived in Brooklyn for almost 8 years. I started my professional career as Digital Strategist for DUMBO-based interactive marketing agency, The JAR Group. I recently founded a marketing agency called AZBK, specializing in performance and acquisition marketing through paid search, social and display channels. While in DUMBO, I co-founded Digital DUMBO – a community of New York’s brightest digital thought leaders. The organization has quickly grown into one of the city’s largest digital communities with over 4,000 members. When not helping companies acquire new users or grow revenues with online advertising, I manage 100BestRapSongs.com – a hiphop music aggregator. When not working, I enjoy trying new restaurants, playing soccer, meeting interesting people and trying to see the world.
Technology provides the basis for this two-man team to run a web service that has handled nearly 30,000 email entries. But going from about 600 registered users in late March to over 5,000 in mid-April not only required us to scale our technology, it forced us to scale customer service as we saw our support emails explode from 23 total requests between January and late March to about 300 over a two-week stretch at the beginning of April.
Great customer service is a highly personal process, but, of course, nothing says great customer service like a fantastic product. In the words of 37signals, “Copywriting is interface design” and “good writing is good design”. Here are 4 lessons that we learned as we learned how to scale customer support and knock our support email volume down from as high as 16 per 100 new users to zero by becoming better writers.
Meet Willem Bult, world traveler, entrepreneur, and software developer. Willem uses iDoneThis to build fine internet products by reflecting every day on his step-by-step progress towards his goals.
I write code and travel the world. I’ve lived in Europe, SE-Asia and the US. I’ve always been interested both in software development as in entrepreneurship. At age 15, I was selling my first “real” application. While pursuing my B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees I started four high tech companies. Software I created has taught children in the slums of Delhi how to speak English, and a company I founded makes people smile every day when they receive our personalized game products.
Celebrate — this week we got our 5,000th user! This is the most users either of us (Rodrigo and I) have ever had for any web project of ours. In the past, we’ve taken the “build it and they will come” attitude towards web development … and they never came! Here’s the story of how we got our first 5,000 users by constructing custom narratives for influential communities.
This is the first in an ongoing series profiling iDoneThis users. Meet Alex, denizen of New York City, and active food logger. Alex uses iDoneThis to write down every single thing he eats every day.
New York City native. Tried caviar at age 7 and loved it. Not a superstitious person outside of sport. I enjoy looking for things and ultimately finding them.
Age: 28
Location: New York, NY
Contact: ajz8 AT cornell DOT edu