I just had to steal this 37 signal blog posting

How’s this for tenacity? John Dane is 58 years old and has been trying out for the Olympic sailing team for 40 years. He finally made it this year with his son-in-law, Austin Sperry.

Dane missed qualifying for the Olympics 4 separate times, each by a few minutes. He didn’t give up after each loss, he just improved his sailing skills. It would have been too easy to give up after losing one or two qualifying races. John Dane took the more difficult route and persevered.

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Every now and then I’ll run into a prospective client who wants to build the next newsvine, digg, flickr or Amazon. The thought being

“We’ll build it, throw it up there and see how it does.
If it doesn’t work we’ll move on.”

Whenever I hear talk like this, I flinch.

Why? Continue reading →

I was just chatting with some SEO/SEM guru buddies of mine about how yearly contracts in the SEO industry make potential clients nervous, but are still the industry standard.

They’d stopped requiring yearly contracts for their services, charging from month to month instead (with a deposit up front) . Their clients seemed more comfortable with that arrangement and they were a lot happier with it too.

That set me thinking about why businesses ever require contracts to service their clients. Continue reading →