Hacked!

I woke up this morning to the following email:

From: Barry 7:37 AM

(no subject)

Were you up all night tweeting?
—
Sent from my iPhone

No, of course I wasn’t.  Any good entrepreneur knows that you needs at least 9 hours of beauty sleep, so I most certainly was not interfering with that by tweeting at all hours of the night.  However, I was curious as to what he was referring to, so I fired up the old iPhone, loaded up TwitterFon, and sure enough, there were a few tweets from @bgreenstore throughout the night.  Hmmm, that’s odd.

• Green Building Products http://bte.tc/aWb #RTW about 1 hour ago from web
• Who the hell wants to hear actors talk -Harry Morris Warner #quote about 2 hours ago from web
• SmartyPig Decreases Interest Rate to 2.01% APY http://bte.tc/axk #RTW about 4 hours ago from web
• Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. -Natalie Goldberg #quoteabout 5 hours ago from web
• How To Become A Green Shopper http://bte.tc/dTw #RTW about 9 hours ago from web
• Is A Greener Product Green Enough? Our Greenwashing Series Wrap-Up http://bte.tc/agW #RTW about 9 hours ago from web

Yeah, so that’s a bit strange.  A couple of those tweets could be confused for ours, but quoting people?  That’s not really our thing.  They funny thing is that one of those quotes got re-tweeted a couple times.  Thanks, I guess?

So by my estimation, there are four possible scenarios that could have led to those tweets:

1. Some people sleep walk, maybe one of us sleep tweets.  Not likely.
2. Maybe those crazy lawyers duped us, and we really have a third business partner that we didn’t know about.  And he/she decided now would be a good time to reveal him/herself.  Possible, but not likely.
   
3. The ghost of Po Po Potanipo suddenly took up tweeting instead of haunting camper’s bunks.  Maybe, but we’re not sure he has thumbs.
   
4. Someone hacked our account.  Most likely scenario.

Wow, someone actually took the time to hack our account!  How Cool!  Yes, I know this should piss us off, but it really is pretty cool.  I picture a dude in a room with 20 computers, wires running everywhere, odd lighting, and fingers moving furiously over the keyboards.  Maybe there’s even an Angelia Jolie type character right over his shoulder.  Something right out of the movie “Hackers.” Sadly, this probably isn’t the case, and it’s probably some old gross dude living in his mom’s basement with nothing better to do that try and hack a budding entrepreneur’s twitter feed.  Needless to say, we’ve changed our password, and made it ultra cryptic this time.  Got to protect what’s ours.  Lesson learned.

The Late 90’s Are Awesome

Last night the bGreen team got together to take the next step in our quest for world domination.  We’ve decided to get involved with this new thing called “e-commerce.”  What’s that you say?  It’s not 1997?  Oh.  Well, maybe e-commerce isn’t a new concept, but it is new to us.  This will be our first attempt at launching an online store, and we want to make sure we do it right.  While we’re not serial online shoppers, we do know what we like and what we don’t.  In our opinion, it’s all about the user experience.  Screw that up, and you’re bound to lose customers and not make a sale.  Provide a smooth, easy to use experience, and you’re bound to keep people coming back.  Seems simple enough.  Unfortunately, finding the right software package isn’t quite that simple.

Last evening we had the pleasure (or not) of playing around with two software packages.  One from Network Solutions, called nsCommerceSpace, and the other from Shopify.  Our first impression?  We’re screwed.

While we have some technical experience in our backgrounds, neither of us is really proficient in HTML, CSS, Java, Liquid, or any of the other 500 programming languages needed to truly make one of these two e-commerce packages a fully customized bGreen store.  Designing websites for companies in the mid 90’s doesn’t equate to being able to customize a web store today.  Sadly we weren’t able to get the store to mimic our website design, so we were left to just putz around in the “dashboards” of each program, and try and learn as much as we could about each.

Each program has some shortcomings, and last night we simply put the two up against each other.  The best analogy would be Shopify is a Mac, and NS is a PC.

There are two big categories for us: User Experience & Customization.  From a user experience standpoint, Shopify wins.  Their dashboard is clean, easy to follow, and very user friendly.  We found the NS user experience to be a bit overwhelming.

Both claim that the shop design is completely customizable.  Maybe that’s the case, but we sure couldn’t figure it out.  The default templates that both offer really look like something from the mid 90’s.  We think they really need to update these.  We got Shopify to look a bit more how we wanted, but neither was really very good.  We’ll chalk this up to OUR lack of programming skills, rather than a flaw with either solution, and call this point a draw.

A couple more notes from last night:

• NS seems far more powerful/customizable than Shopify
• NS can handle gift certificates, Shopify can not – this seems crazy to us
• Cost is about the same, except Shopify charges a 1% transaction fee
• Shopify has a Wiki, which seems to be mainly a development resource
• The NS salesman got one of our last names wrong
• Both offer up a 30-day free trial for testing & development
• Both allow you to do batch uploads of product images and descriptions
• Both offer some sort of intergration with shipping & fullfillment

So after four hours of playing around, those are our first thoughts.  Neither solution has won us over yet, and we’ll be meeting again tonight, this time with our developers, to see if we can make a little more progress in making our web store a reailty.  Stay tuned.

Twitter Interaction

So the weather here on Cape Cod has been abysmal all day, so I figured this would be a great opportunity to, what else, look through our twitter @replies and see if there is anything that can be learned from them.  There are basically two groups of people we get @replies from: our moms, wives, girlfriends, and other friends and family.  Then there are the “others.”  It’s the others that are really interesting.

The first interaction I want to look at is one with @DunkinDonuts from the other day.  After I tweeted a tweet (is that the proper way to say that?) about DD using a stryofoam cup to insulate my plastic cup on an iced coffee I ordered the other day, I got an almost immediate tweet back from DD.  I was able to learn that, as a company, Dunkin Donuts doesn’t support “double cupping.”  While this is good to know, the bigger issue is why this multi-national company is still using styrofoam in the first place!  There are literally hundreds of alternatives to stryrofoam cups, and DD needs to seriously make a change.  A followup tweet from someone at Dunkin says they are actively researching alternatives.  Good to know, but I’m skeptical of seeing real progress here.  Dunkin Donuts, please prove me wrong.

The second interaction I want to look at is one that will directly impact our business.  We sent out a twitter poll the other day inquiring about which e-commerce solution people use.  We got several responses from users.  In addition, two e-commerce companies actually reached out to us.  Network Solutions and 3dCart tweeted US about their products.  Really amazing that twitter is being used as a sales tool.  There is a third company, Shopify, that is in the mix as well.  While we will give all three a thorough look, I must admit the scale is tipped towards Network Solutions and 3dCart.  Reaching out really does make a difference, and Twitter enabled them to do that quickly and effectively.  When we do make a decision, we’ll be sure to blog about why.

Finally, it’s great to be involved with Twitter as the medium continues to evolve as an effective means of business communication and development.

P.S. This is the second time I wrote this blog.  The first time was on my iPhone, and it somehow got lost on the interweb.  I think the first version was slightly better, but hey, that’s technology.  Win some & lose some.

9 Things We’re Excited About

1. Green festivals and events (Boston Greenfest, Greenbuild)
2. The Newest Member of bGreen, Maggie
3. Inventory
4. Warehousing
5. Getting our F. Rock bags (should be any day now)
6. Sorting through the various web store options (Network Solutions, Shopify, etc)
7. PHP
8. Giving this blog a facelift
9. The positive response to our website

ReBlog: The Cultural Revolution

Just came across this great article by Scott Kirsner of Boston.com.  Thought it really captured how we’re trying to operate and create bGreen.  We talk a lot about “old vs. new” and Scott hits it right on the mark.  Enjoy.

———————-

The Cultural Revolution: Which Side Are You On?

Email|Link|Comments (0) Posted by skirsner August 13, 2009 10:55 AM

There’s a cultural revolution afoot in the Boston innovation economy.

One culture is dying out, and another kind of culture is emerging.

The old culture was clubby and insular. To get funding, you had to know someone who knew someone at one of the venture capital firms perched high atop Mount Money in Waltham. To get anywhere, it helped if you’d already had one or two successes on your résumé. The typical employee or executive went to work in Hopkinton or Burlington, put in a solid eight or nine hours of work, and went home. They weren’t well-connected outside their own company, didn’t go to industry networking events, and didn’t make time to mentor up-and-coming entrepreneurs. In technology, the focus was almost always on developing products for the world’s biggest customers, whether they were banks, telecommunications firms, or health care providers. The old culture felt it needed non-compete agreements to create artificial employee “loyalty.” The old culture was reluctant to boast about what it was achieving, or Boston’s prominent place in the global economy. And Boston’s metabolism was slow: only a year or so after a trend emerged in Silicon Valley, a handful of companies had been formed here to pursue it.

Lots of people still live and work in that culture. They’re sort of like people who still break out the seersucker suit on the first hot day of July…people who still wait in line at toll booths to hand over their crumpled dollar bill… or those Japanese soldiers who didn’t realize World War II had ended.

Are you part of that world — or are you part of the new culture? Here’s what defines it:

The new culture is open, fast-paced, and encouraging of first-time entrepreneurs. It’s about blogging and tweeting and digitized networks of people sharing information about what they’re interested in, and where they’re investing. It’s about informal “unconferences” popping up to discuss the latest tech trend. It’s populated by people who see the value in having broad networks of friends and acquaintances across lots of companies. Employers who operate in the new culture realize that the way you keep people motivated and maintain your position in the marketplace is by giving them interesting projects to work on and rewarding them appropriately — not by forcing them to sign lengthy non-compete agreements. The new culture isn’t afraid to spread the good word about the innovation that happens here in Boston.

The new culture is about seizing opportunities, not reinforcing hierarchies.

When I think about things that represent the new culture of innovation in Boston, here are ten that come to mind:

- TechStars Boston, a summer program to help give young entrepreneurs a jump-start. It’s taking place for the first time this summer, with support from people like Bill Warner (founder of Avid Technology), Shawn Broderick (founder of TrustPlus), and Brad Feld (an MIT alum co-founded the Colorado VC firm Foundry Group.)- Web Innovators Group, a free monthly gathering that attracts roughly 500 people to see new start-ups demo their products. Run by venture capitalist David Beisel of Venrock.

- Stay in MA, a program funded by Flybridge Capital Partners that makes it free for students to attend seminars, workshops, and conferences.

- Blogs exposing the inner workings of venture capital and entrepreneurship, from local leaders like Larry Cheng, Bijan Sabet, Jeff Bussgang, Dharmesh Shah, Healy Jones & Prasad Thammineni, and Leah Busque.

- OpenCoffee, an entrepreneurs’ gathering that happens every Wednesday morning in Central Square, introduced to Boston by Bijan Sabet from Spark Capital and Conduit Labs founder Nabeel Hyatt.

- Biotech Tuesday, a monthly schmooze-fest for life sciences types, founded in 2002 by Seth Taylor and Peter Kolchinsky.

- The Mass Technology Leadership Council’s annual Innovation Unconference, held for the first time in 2008. One focus of the event is on encouraging successful entrepreneurs and executives to share their experience with up-and-comers.

- Microsoft’s New England Research & Development Center (NERD). Yes, it’s surprising that the Redmond, Washington behemoth would be contributing to the new culture of innovation in Boston, but the honchos at Microsoft’s Kendall Square outpost have made it clear that they want to be part of the fabric of the community here. Their first-floor conference center has regularly hosted conclaves like CloudCamp Boston, a forum on how federal stimulus is affecting the cleantech industry, a June dialogue about the future of IT in Massachusetts attended by Gov. Patrick, and this weekend’s GameLoop conference. (Many events are free, and they’re listed here.)

- Highland Capital’s Summer Entrepreneurship Program and Spark Capital’s Start@Spark, two programs designed to support fledgling entrepreneurs.

- EurekaFest and the Cambridge Science Festival, two local events targeted at young people and families that celebrate the excitement of invention, science, and engineering.

There are, of course, a lot more people, events, and institutions contributing to the emergence of this new innovation culture in Boston — from Mass Innovation Nights to Hubspot.tv to Betahouse to the Awesome Foundation.

What else am I missing? How are you contributing to (or participating in) this new culture? What are the signs that the old culture is stumbling towards irrelevance? (Or perhaps you believe that it’s here to stay…) When did this cultural revolution begin?

Leave a comment if you would–

You said what? Getting Schooled in Website Development

I wrote the below post a few days before our website launch but never posted it. We got busy trying to get the actual site up. In all we are really happy with how it turned out but we still have some work to do.  We look forward to the comments and feedback now that we are officially out there.
——
We are days away from our initial website launch and, as we put the finishing touches on the site, I can’t help but reflect on the decisions we’ve made that have gotten us to this point.

Like many new small businesses, we have accepted free help when available. One individual who’s been a huge support to us is my brother Stephen, our website developer. Quick shout out – check him out here: Greenstein Consulting. He’ll create a killer website for you and, at no extra charge, tell you you’re stupid. Oh, I kid. That’s special treatment only brothers get.

Starting off, we had some very clear items we wanted to incorporate into our website. Being avid users of social media, we were insistent on our site incorporating as much social media as possible. And we’ve done just that. One social media item we are not sure how to utilize, though, is Facebook. It’s easy to use for a personal account, but man they make it a pain to set up for a business. We’d write the whole thing off if they didn’t have so many subscribers.

In our past lives, we both have had experience building websites, either writing the HTML code or working on a design with a developer. With that experience behind us, we thought creating our own website would be a piece of cake. Not exactly. We certainly had the knowledge in terms of what general things to include but here’s where we got schooled big time: the back-end of the website. Basically, what’s under the hood…what makes our website work. We finally had the website to a point where we thought it was good to go only to find out that we hadn’t made sure it was put in a code that would give us the flexibility we need for the future. We need .php and have .html. What is that you ask?  Everyone tells us something different. What the hell does php stand for? According to php.net, “PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.” I know what you’re thinking – that clears things up. Needless to say we still have some learning to do, but what we have gathered is that php will allow us to have a dynamic website and just plain html makes our site static. Static = bad, dynamic = good.

Now, it’s easy to sit back and say “why didn’t your web developer advise you on this?” Fair question and to some extent a good point. However, as a small business owner you should NEVER fully trust a task to your vendor. At the end of the day, it is your job to know every aspect of what you are getting yourself into. We should have done the research to know what type of website we needed.

So, yes we got schooled. Our website has been delayed a few weeks and, once it’s launched, we will have to fix some stuff behind the scenes. As stressful as this has been overall, it’s good that it happened. I’d rather learn this lesson now than later, when serious time and money have been invested in the job.

At the end of the day, our website is going to be awesome and Stephen has been a huge help, but in the interest of full disclosure, these are some of the hiccups we’ve encountered along the way.

Getting Schooled in SEO

While we acknowledge that SEO is a hot topic and is totally necessary, we also acknowledge that we know very little about it.  We think the goal of any site is to be at the top of the Google food chain.  Currently, we’re not even on the plate for consideration.  So, continuing with our “Getting Schooled” series, below is a conversation we had today with Mike Gerstenblatt.  Mike is helping us along with this project and a few others related our existence on the Interweb.

bGreen: Opening this up for discussion.  What can we do in the short-term to get our SEO going?  Currently when you google “bgreen” we don’t come up.  Let’s figure out how to change this.

Mike: Well google page rank is determined by many things, but I think the most important is inbound links, proper use of keywords, and properly structured pages (including H1s and images with titles, alt tags, etc)

First, I think the site should be optimized to follow the guidelines established in Google’s SEO Starter Guide.

Second, you need to organically build up inbound links. That is, find ways to get other sites to link to bgreenlifestyle.com. Use twitter, facebook, yelp, blogs, whatever. This is obviously harder and takes more time. I’m not sure if there’s an established methodology to get this done, but I think it begins with great, dynamic content that people will want to link to.  (Speaking of which, I think you need to move your wordpress blog so that its under your own domain {so its blog.bgreenlifestyle.com not bgreenstore.wordpress.com} or at least link to your main site from the blog in the meantime.)

Lastly, you need to identify relevant and popular search terms and modify your content appropriately. For example, if people are searching for ‘Boston green stores’.  Have “Boston green stores” somewhere on the site.

SEO isn’t that hard, it just takes an investment of time.

So this is what we’ll be working on in the coming days, weeks, and months.  Hopefully with Mike’s help, we’ll soon be at the top of the SEO world.  Stay tuned.

bGreen Launches! World Domination Begins.

With great excitement we are officially launching bGreen lifestyle + building!  What began as a conversation on a cold winter night in January 2009 has now become a reality.  Our mission at bGreen lifestyle + building is to provide the latest green and eco-friendly products for everyday living, construction, & renovation.

Being green isn’t just for Ed Begley Jr. anymore.  Green is going mainstream and bGreen will help you get there. Within every aspect of your life there is an opportunity to make a “greener” choice. Why not try Bio Bags in lieu of your regular trash bags? They offer 100% biodegradable kitchen and dog waste bags. Or, if you’re getting ready to redo your kitchen, try Paperstone countertops made from 100% post-consumer recycled cardboard.

Be an active participant in the products that you use in your life. Good decisions now will ensure a greater world later.

We invite you to follow our progress as we begin to build this business. Please check out our Website, Twitter, Blog, and YouTube. If you would like to receive email updates from us, please sign up here.

Today we launch our Website, later this summer our web store, and next Spring our super secret phase 3!

We welcome your comments and feedback.

bResponsible
bConscious
bSmart
bGreen

- Barry and Lee

(Please forward this to anyone else who might be interested)

—-

bGreen Group LLC
Boston, MA
bGreen@bgreenlifestyle.com
bgreenlifestyle.com
twitter.com/bgreenstore

The Social Media Atom

We have made no secret about our love of and reliance on social media.  It’s a core part of our strategy at bGreen.  We’re involved with Twitter, Facebook, Blogging, and YouTube.  We think that these four components really make up the core of social media.  The nucleus, if you will.

We recently engaged in an internal debate on the value of Facebook as a core social media tool.  There are countless articles on why you NEED Facebook for business, but we just weren’t sure.  What’s the point?  We’re attracting followers on Twitter (400+ so far), our blog is having a moderate amount of success (150+ hits on one particular day), and we’re set to launch our website shortly, which will really be the main portal for all things bGreen.  So where does Facebook come in?  We’re not looking to share pictures of us from Spring Break ‘98 and we’re not looking to reconnect with our nursery school sweethearts.  I think we were really just over-thinking it.

Everyone is on Facebook.  My mom, your mom, my 82 year old grandfather.  Everyone.  Allegedly the user base is over 100 million strong.  Imagine if you get 0.0001% of the people on the service to notice you.  What about 0.01% or 0.1%?  That’s a serious amount of people catching a glimpse of what you’re doing, and frankly, it’s a market you can not overlook.  So, perhaps to our chagrin and despite Facebook’s massive shortcomings on the business application side, we’ll be there (we’re currently putting the page together).

This morning, while thinking about some other social media applications, I got to thinking about where some of the other services will fit into our strategy.  There are applications like Flickr, Tumblr, LinkedIn and even TwitPic to some extent, that offer great services and are gaining in popularity.

Flickr, as most people know, is a photo sharing service.  Perhaps it’s most valuable feature is search.  Fred Wilson, of avc.com, when talking about image search says, “When I look for an image, in the past, I would go to Flickr first and Google second. In the future, I’ll go to Flickr first and Bing second.”  So there is value in using Flickr.  We obviously want to leverage this value and get people seeing the pictures we’re posting, but there hosted in variety of other places as well.  They’re on our blog, in our Twitter feed via TwitPic, and some will end up on our website.

Tumblr falls somewhere between Twitter and Blogging, and seems to be popular amongst early adopters and those heavily involved with other forms of social media.  I look at it as a place for short bursts of info; a picture, a link, a video, that may otherwise not qualify for a blog post, but requires a more permanent home than a tweet.  Their software and interface are great and their iPhone app is snap.  My verdict is still out on Tumblr, and I’m not sure where (or if) it will fit into our mix.  Perhaps I’m overlooking some of their core services.  If so, please correct me and fill me in.

I can see the value in LinkedIn as well.  It connects professionals with other professionals.  It’s like Facebook, but stripped down to resumes and networking.  We think it’s important, and we’re working on setting up a profile.  However, I hardly see this as part of our core social media strategy.

Perhaps in all these additonal services lies the solution.  We have our nucleus (Twitter, Facebook, the blog, and YouTube) but we also have the orbiting electrons (like Tubmlr, Flickr, LinkedIn, and TwitPic) that make up the rest of the Social Media Atom.  We’ll focus on the nucleus, but perhaps it makes sense to complete the atom and bring the electrons into the mix just a bit.

Steps in the Right Direction

This post is nothing more than a brief status update on the newly formed bGreen Group LLC.  We’ve had a lot going on in the last few weeks, and this seems to be a good forum for updates.

First, in case you missed our previous posts, we are officially an LLC now.  You can read all about that here, and if you want to read about how we were almost not an LLC, you can read about that here.

Today, we took the next step in corporate reality and got our EIN, or tax ID.  This is a relatively simple task, however, as we’re learning, nothing goes off without a hitch.  We had one small question related to how we wish to be taxed.  As an LLC, you can opt to be taxed as a Partnership or as a Corporation.  After a quick call to our accountants (which apparently interrupted a golf game), we were informed that we should file to be taxed as a Partnership.  Perhaps when we learn more about the difference, we can do a follow-up post.  But for now, we’re just going with what the experts tell us.

The next step for us is to setup our banking, and we’re working on setting up meetings with various bankers in the Boston area.  We’re looking at Sovereign, Citizens, Bank of America, and Chase.  If anyone has comments or experience with any of these banks, please let your thoughts in the comments section.

Our website launch is slated for early next week.  We are literally putting on the finishing touches, going over the copy, and trying to figure out what anyone puts in the “terms of service” and “privacy” sections that you see on the bottom of every web page.  We’ve been to the Apple store countless times to make sure the site looks good on every size monitor, up to 24″.  We’re really focused on making sure the user experience is enjoyable, easy, and informative.  The more we read about what makes successful sites, products, and companies, the more we realize it’s all about user experience.  As recently as last night, we saw two companies, Zappos and Amazon, that provide the pinnacle of user experience, join forces.  From a small business standpoint, we’re excited to see what the two can do when their forces are joined.  It also gives little companies, like ours, a hope of one day being acquired for $800+ million dollars.  Yeah, that would be nice.

We’ve been networking like crazy, trying to meet as many Boston-based people as possible.  We’re dead set on making sure that we are a leader online, but also a leader in our local community.  We had a great meeting with Nicole Keane of F. Rock Bags.  Her bags are made locally, are completely customizable, look great, and are a pretty good deal.  We even ordered a couple for ourselves.  We’ll post pictures of them when they arrive.  We’re really excited about working with great people like Nicole, and if they’re based in Boston, that’s just an added bonus.  Over the next two weeks, we’ve got meetings set with bankers, a big-wig in the community service field, a developer, and hopefully one or two other networking meetings.  We saw the great folks at Nexus Boston the other night at the showing of “The Greening of Southie” at the Coolidge Corner Theatre.  Great movie, very educational, funny, and it’s always great to see the think Boston accent on the big screen.  If you have an opportunity, be sure to check out this film.

These are exciting and busy times at bGreen, and we’ll be looking to blog and tweet more frequently as we get going.  Stay tuned.