I have the privilege of driving the Lancer Evolution for a week, courtesy of Mitsubishi who found out I was in market to buy a car and the Evo was on my potential purchase list. I’ve known about the Evo for a number of years as my co-founder Erik Landerholm owned one and then subsequently crashed it into a wall at Infineon. Continue reading
Category Archives: Startup Stuff
Crowdsourcing Tommy’s New Car Choice – Day 3
We’ve had 48 hours of voting for Tommy’s new car, and the results show…Ford owners are crazy happy with their cars! When we posted Tommy’s story on the Ford Facebook page, we got a ridiculous number of comments and advice. Check this out: Continue reading
Why Is Everybody Always Picking On Me?
Dear Woo Dog,
I sell cars and I think I’m a good guy. I care. I try to do the right thing by people. I really want everyone to get the car they want. Why is it that people hate me so much? I don’t get it. I sell cars I don’t run people over in the parking lot, but people think I’m a devil. Help me! Continue reading
Design Tips for Site Conversions
Since starting CarWoo!, we’ve done 6 major iterations of our “brochure” pages–the ones that a user can browse through to learn more about our product before signing up for an account. Our latest iteration was more of a “refresh” than a “redesign”–an attempt to clean up and polish the interface rather than introduce a new interaction model. In other words, we rewrote a significant amount of copy, evolved the visual design (rather than a dramatic change), and updated most of the graphics to reflect the current (much-improved) state of the application inside the pay-wall, but didn’t really move things around on the page all that much. Continue reading
Employer Perks for CarWoo!
Is the Oatmeal NSFW? What about your Facebook page? Or personal email? What about car dealer websites? Like the one with the phone number that you’ve got to call between 9am and 7pm to see if they’ve got the trim you want for a test driven (which you’re going to take on a weekday afternoon, because they dealer is closed on Sunday and Saturday is full of soccer games and sheds to build and dishwasher deliveries).
So you’ll likely spend a few hours here, a few hours there, taking some time away from your job to search a new car. Most employees have no choice – car dealers don’t stay open too late, and many aren’t open on Sundays either. Continue reading
The Woo Dog Does Not Chase Cars
Being the Woo Dog here at CarWoo! carries many responsibilities. Continue reading
Procrastination and Long-Term Planning Will Kill Your Startup.
It’s important to plan ahead in many facets of your life. If you want to go to a good college it’s important you start getting good grades as early as possible. Waiting until your senior year to start pulling A’s is a great way to end up at community college not Stanford. If you plan on a having a child it’s good idea to start saving money before he/she is 18. I think you get the point. Continue reading
Why $150k For All Y Combinator Companies is a Huge Deal
If you don’t know, Yuri Milner and SV Angel just invested $150k in every YC startup in this class.
What a Startup Can Learn from Three Days at CES
…besides the fact that there are now dozens of hundreds of thousands of types of tablets.
A week ago today, I landed in Vegas with a suitcase, a Nikon, and a mission – explore the Consumer Electronics Show, meet a few folks, wander the halls, and report my findings back to CarWoo.
Below are a few of my findings. Continue reading
Anatomy of a Re-Design, Part I
Andrew Conn – our amazing designer – and I recently released a re-vamped version of the main CarWoo! application that all of our buyers have the pleasure of using after they’ve signed up with us. This blog post is meant to give you some insight into the UI decisions we made on one of the more complex pages in the app. Continue reading
A Marketer’s Guide to Wooing Hackers
It’s been only two months since I started at CarWoo, and I’ve already developed a strange affinity for Red Bull. I use the term “pwnd” (TWICE last week!), and this morning I changed my Pandora station from “Portugal. The Man” to “Daft Punk” (most likely inspired by my 3-d Imax viewing of Tron last night…). But there’s this other part of working with and for hackers that has actually affected the way I look at my job, my role, my function.