May 2009 Archives

We're Passing the Text at Kashless.org

Kashless is moving to a premium text notification service. Now you can receive real time alerts on your mobile phone each time an item from your saved search results is posted.

Text notification assures reliable, effective delivery of saved search results. Text alerts will arrive instantaneously, and before email alerts, so that you can act quickly on the free things you want. Never again will you be tied to the refresh button on your computer when seeking out a certain item.

We hope you enjoy the new services. Keep your eyes peeled for upcoming site additions and improvements, along with lots of other green tidbits in our bi-monthly newsletter.

The Kashless Krew

Existing Kashless Members will receive 20 free text alerts from the Kashless Krew!

Click here for an FAQ on Kashless Premium Text Notification Service

Here's a quick tutorial on how to redeem promotion codes received through Kashless.org

Promo Code How To.mov

Tomorrow is Seattle's much anticipated BIKE TO WORK DAY! And remember, Kashless.org is hosting a commute station at Counterbalance Park with Caffe Ladro and Counterbalance Bicycles. Here's what you need to know:

What: Bike to Work Commute Station
Where: Counterbalance Park.  Corner of West Roy St. and Queen Anne Ave. MAP HERE.
Who: Kashless.org, Counterbalance Bicycles, Caffe Ladro, and YOU!

There will be Coffee, Water, Snacks and Bike Services! It's Bicycle-rific!

Can't wait to see you there.

This NPR radio spot with Brian Reed on KPLU news focuses on Kashless's points of difference, including advanced e-commerce features and online profiles for users.  The whole Kashless Krew is excited to be featured on NPR and we hope you enjoy the clip!

Kashless on KPLU NewsRoom

Martin was interviewed by Curious Office, a Seattle-based seed stage investment and technology development organization. 

Below is my favorite quote from the interview.  I think that it explains a lot about Kashless, because our goal as a company is to use technology to actually solve a problem that exists, making it easier for people to re-use their goods and reduce their carbon footprint.

"Deep in my bones I am a computer nerd and gadget freak. But I have this need to use technology to actually solve real life problems rather than just be technology for technology sake. I guess I am in Technology because I really believe things like the PC, the Internet, wireless, etc. all have changed the world and can continue to improve my life."  - Martin

Read the rest of the article here!  

Adam, my fellow Kashless Community Marketing Manager, and I had the pleasure of being able to attend the Seattle 2.0 awards last night and mingle with some of the brightest minds and gutsiest entrepreneurs in the Pacific Northwest.

The first annual (sold out) event was a huge success, with guest speaker Glenn Kelman, Redfin CEO, starting off the awards with an inspirational speech about humility, taking risks, and sticking to your guns as an entrepreneur.  Many talented start-upers were nominated, which considering the fact that there are over 300 start-ups in Seattle currently, is an accomplishment in and of itself.  The "slumdog millionaire", as many joked, of the awards was online photo editor Picnik, taking home all four of the awards for which they were nominated. 

A highlight for us was being able to chat with Danielle Morrill on the Seattle 2.0 livestream along with meeting a number of potential Kashless fans and partners at our demo table after the award ceremony. We recieved great feedback and some fantastic ideas from the Seattle start-up community, which certainly got us excited to get back to work!

A big thanks to @daniellemorrill, @calbucci and all others whose hard work made this a fantastic event to be a part of.

Well, we have a pretty high bar and a great team.  The job descriptions on-line are broad on purpose.  I have been doing allot interviews and code screenings lately and (with Troy’s help) have decided to explicitly publish five specific minimum bars that we apply during the screening process.  If you want to work at Kashless.org as a Ruby Dev, here is what you will need to have done/do to make the cut. 

The whole Rails stack (2.2/2.3+) – unless you can point to a Rails app you have been responsible for building from top to bottom chances are you don’t have enough experience

 

GitHub and git - you have an account, you've forked and sent pull requests, hopefully they've been accepted.

 

You test.  A lot.  Preferably with shoulda.

 

Stuff that evolves from operating a large Web app -- full-text search (Sphinx, Solr), async job queues (ActiveMQ, delayed_job), DB sanity (foreign key enforcement, migration)

 

Consumed enough APIs to explain the ones you've liked and the ones that were just endless frustration

 

 

Pluses: Happily spent an entire day ‘building a slice’.  Don't need to ask what EBS means or how AWS probably implemented it.  Done role-based capistrano deployment.  Geocoded a million rows.

 

Go ahead, apply, it is fun http://kashless.org/home/jobs

or direct to the Ruby job http://kashless.catchthebest.com/apply/6398/

I am sure everyone but the comatose have noticed that we are playing with the placement of ads on the site during the last couple of weeks.   We hate pushy ads as much as the next guy.  We hate cluttered design.  We hate paying for something (with our attention, our money, or anything else) that doesn’t provide a GREAT value.  A great site should give you more than you give it.  A great site will strike the right balance between clean design, revenue and features.  As we have written before, the only truly sustainable businesses are ones that can pay their bills by providing products and services that people value.  So here we are trying to figure out with our members the right balance to strike which will enable us to grow and continue to provide great service to the community.   The ad trials we have been running (different placements, different sizes, etc.) are one way to keep the cost in $ down to every member.

 

Here are a couple of guiding principles helping guide us here

- Keep a small, lean team.  Small expense means small revenue required.

- Don’t spend marketing money like a drunken sailor (or like most tech start-ups)

- Clean, usable design

- Don’t depend only on advertising (means there will be less of it)

- Keep most things free, price as low as possible only for really valuable things (sorta like Craig’s list)

- Allow Kashless to expand everywhere it makes sense, reach as many people as possible.

 

In part based on these guidelines, here are a couple of things we have decided to NOT DO.

- Have more than three ads units on a page

- Have ads interlaced with the item listings (That REALLY offends me on other sites)

- Require a sign-on to search or browse listings. 

 

Thanks for following our progress.  We will keep at it.  Comments welcome. 

Today in the development meeting at Kashless.org we were discussion our \TALK feature.  Basically the user support forums.  A skinned implementation of Vanilla forums.  When initially setting up the site I added discussion forums because everyone else had them. Also they seemed a good way to do customer support, answer FAQ questions and allow your community to interact with each other.  I installed and maintained them myself.  But then we installed TenderApp for customer support ticketing.  TenderApp is private labeled as well, but has the advantage of single sign-on and integration into our development ticketing process to fix bugs.  So \Talk languished without our attention and requiring a separate log-on.  Last week there were a couple posts there and two e-mails directly to me asking “hey are you guys here?” 

 

There was a dull pain growing in the back of my head.  “Is a half implemented, unsupported feature better than no feature at all?”  “What is the real goal of having discussions forums?” “Is the site better with or without them?”   The feature was poorly integrated into the site without clear goals and lacking company support.  Since we implemented Vanilla we also integrated FaceBook and Twitter which provide some of the community building aspects we had hoped to get through the forums.  It was clear to me that in the rush to check the feature box we had half assed it.  That led to a couple decision points

#1:  Keep current feature implementation? yes/no

#2:  Upgrade current discussion boards for cleaner technical integration? yes/no

#3:  Allocate Customer Service resources to make the discussion boards active and engaging?  yes/no

#4:  Is \TALK fulfilling our customer service goals?  yes/no

#5:  Is \TALK fulfilling our community building member to member goals?  yes/no

 

At Kashless, we like to have pride in everything on the site and be providing incremental member value with each thing we do, so the answers (after lots of spirited discussion) were:

 

#1:  NO, remove \TALK from site

#2:  NO, Vanilla doesn’t allow for single sign-on with our application, has a different look and feel and would require duplication of effort now being devoted to TenderAPP, so upgrading would not achieve any benefit.

#3:  NO, customer service resources are better spend fully supporting TenderApp for customer service.

#4:  NO, customer service is being well delivered through TenderApp.

#5: NO, community building goals are being pursued through Twitter, FaceBook and other applications at this time.  At some point in the future if we can design a well integrated set of features for member to member community building as part of Kashless.org, think about adding it then.

 

I would rather focus on great integration and support for features that provide clear member value than to simply have a box checked on a feature list somewhere.  In this case, taking the discussion boards out is best.

Check out this video that walks you through some of the new features on Kashless!

New Features

Kashless.org continues to receive great local press coverage!

Last Wednesday Martin was interviewed on KKOL's Sound Business with Mike Siegel.

KKOL int. pt 1.mp3
kkol int. pt 2.mp3

Jordan, our new designer is really sprucing things up!  And now with Gravatar support ya know!

Kashless is hiring a new Director of Business Development!

Kashless offers a dynamic working environment, competitive compensation, the opportunity to work on exciting client programs, be a part of starting something from the ground up and making in a difference in your community and environment.

The Director of Business Development, identifies sales, partner, channel, solution provider, and marketing opportunities and delivers against specific industry and vertical market segment targets. The Director originates, positions, and ultimately closes deals which implement compelling solutions utilizing the Kashless.org platform.

Apply here.