“Not to mention the new iPhones coming out next month. That was a plug.” READ MORE
Over the recent holidays I woke up one morning to an unwelcome present: one of my websites had been hacked! Being the holidays, it took longer than normal to get help to fix the rest of the site. Finally, after two days, we were able to get everything fully functioning again. It was costly, both in terms of time, money and worry. But I breathed a sigh of relief. Little did I know that the problems were not over … yet. What the hackers wanted Throughout it all, I kept wondering, “Why would somebody hack my site?” It is purely a content site. The site databases contain no customer information, no credit card numbers, no confidential data of any kind. There is absolutely nothing of value for a hacker — or so I thought. At first I chalked up the incident to somebody’s idea of a sick joke … mere vandalism. Over the ensuing four days, I was soon to discover what the hackers had really done to my site. Deleted files and a messed-up design were just the tip of the iceberg. Search engine boosting is the goal The real purpose of the hacking was to boost search engine rankings. The latest trend is that hackers hijack legitimate sites to use them to generate links to other sites to increase those sites’ rankings. Even Al Gore’s climate blog was victimized by hackers to boost search engine links. In my case, a script had been loaded on the shared server that my site resided on, generating hundreds of hidden pages on my domain. These were pages that I had absolutely no idea were there until, looking at my Technorati.com account, I saw thousands of new links suddenly come in overnight from spam sites pointing to those pages on my domain. The anchor text in the links used words such as “oxycontin” and “cute ringtones” and similar junk that I knew could not be legitimate links to my site. The fake pages on my site were in turn automatically redirected to pharma, ringtone, and adult sites to boost those sites’ link weight. In addition, we found dozens of hidden links in the main pages of my site to ringtone, pharma, and adult websites. You could not see these links on my site’s pages using a standard browser. Also, we found some rogue PHP code designed to generate even more hidden links if the first group were removed. They also managed to insert bogus links in my blogroll and elsewhere in the site — this time in plain view. Presumably links were scattered here and there among legitimate content with the hope they would be overlooked. What it means for small business websites You’ve heard of defensive driving? Well, welcome to the world of defensive Web publishing. If you thought your site was safe just because you had nothing of value in it except some content, think again. Even small business websites and personal blogs are not immune from this kind of attack. Your site indeed does have value to hackers — as a link-generating drone. How to protect your website The toughest part with hacking attacks is that you may not even be aware that your site was compromised. Or it may take a while (in my case, four days) to figure out the full extent of the damage. Remember that you’re not as helpless as you may feel. Taking these steps can help protect your site or blog: Educate Yourself — The single best way to watch out for hacking activity is to know what to look for. Read up on hacking activity so that you can be a proactive site owner and spot suspicious activity or avoid it in the first place. Bolster security– Arrange for regular backups of your site code and any databases. In the event of a hacking you probably will need to revert to an earlier backup. And remember, prevention is the best protection. Have your webmaster perform a security audit to check specifically for vulnerabilities. And observe good security practices as a site owner. Keep up to date with software upgrades, which often fix known vulnerabilities. Change passwords regularly. Limit access to your site – for instance, in the case of a blog, do not allow unknown users to register themselves as authors. Check your code regularly — Occasionally check your site code. In your browser, Click on the “View” menu, and then choose “view source.” This will open up a little window where you can easily see your code. Look for links to sites you do not recognize. Look also for HTML code stating “display:none” or using the word “hidden.” Both codes mean what they suggest: that links are being hidden from casual view. Maybe there’s a legitimate use for such HTML in your site – but then again, it may be the work of hackers. Check your link counts and standings — Use tools such as Technorati.com or another link-popularity tool to keep tabs on inbound links. One telltale sign of a hacking: a huge jump in link counts seemingly overnight. Keep an eye also on your search engine traffic. If traffic dries up overnight, that may be another telltale sign. The search engines WILL penalize your site for having hidden links (Google doesn’t know if you are a victim or if you inserted hidden links intentionally). Have your webmaster check your server logs regularly, too – or learn to do it yourself. Get qualified help — I’d love to say that any reasonably intelligent business person can recover from a hacking. But most of us would be kidding ourselves. I never could have scoured the code and cleaned up the hackers’ crud without the help of my skilled webmaster and telephone support of my Web host. Unless you are highly confident of your own technical skill, get qualified help. Be a little paranoid – it’s OK. It just may save you from a hacking or help you recover more quickly. For more information: To educate yourself to spot suspicious activity, read the white paper, Trends in Badware 2007: What Internet Users Need to Know. For those who have blogs, subscribe to: Blog Security. Symantec offers a helpful Security Response blog. To search to see if your site has been flagged by Google as compromised, visit: StopBadWare.org Anita Campbell is a writer, speaker and radio talk show host who closely follows trends in the small business market at her site, Small Business Trends.
Over the recent holidays I woke up one morning to an unwelcome present: one of my websites had been hacked! Being the holidays, it took longer than normal to get help to fix the rest of the site. Finally, after two days, we were able to get everything fully functioning again. It was costly, both in terms of time, money and worry. But I breathed a sigh of relief. Little did I know that the problems were not over … yet. What the hackers wanted Throughout it all, I kept wondering, “Why would somebody hack my site?” It is purely a content site. The site databases contain no customer information, no credit card numbers, no confidential data of any kind. There is absolutely nothing of value for a hacker — or so I thought. At first I chalked up the incident to somebody’s idea of a sick joke … mere vandalism. Over the ensuing four days, I was soon to discover what the hackers had really done to my site. Deleted files and a messed-up design were just the tip of the iceberg. Search engine boosting is the goal The real purpose of the hacking was to boost search engine rankings. The latest trend is that hackers hijack legitimate sites to use them to generate links to other sites to increase those sites’ rankings. Even Al Gore’s climate blog was victimized by hackers to boost search engine links. In my case, a script had been loaded on the shared server that my site resided on, generating hundreds of hidden pages on my domain. These were pages that I had absolutely no idea were there until, looking at my Technorati.com account, I saw thousands of new links suddenly come in overnight from spam sites pointing to those pages on my domain. The anchor text in the links used words such as “oxycontin” and “cute ringtones” and similar junk that I knew could not be legitimate links to my site. The fake pages on my site were in turn automatically redirected to pharma, ringtone, and adult sites to boost those sites’ link weight. In addition, we found dozens of hidden links in the main pages of my site to ringtone, pharma, and adult websites. You could not see these links on my site’s pages using a standard browser. Also, we found some rogue PHP code designed to generate even more hidden links if the first group were removed. They also managed to insert bogus links in my blogroll and elsewhere in the site — this time in plain view. Presumably links were scattered here and there among legitimate content with the hope they would be overlooked. What it means for small business websites You’ve heard of defensive driving? Well, welcome to the world of defensive Web publishing. If you thought your site was safe just because you had nothing of value in it except some content, think again. Even small business websites and personal blogs are not immune from this kind of attack. Your site indeed does have value to hackers — as a link-generating drone. How to protect your website The toughest part with hacking attacks is that you may not even be aware that your site was compromised. Or it may take a while (in my case, four days) to figure out the full extent of the damage. Remember that you’re not as helpless as you may feel. Taking these steps can help protect your site or blog: Educate Yourself — The single best way to watch out for hacking activity is to know what to look for. Read up on hacking activity so that you can be a proactive site owner and spot suspicious activity or avoid it in the first place. Bolster security– Arrange for regular backups of your site code and any databases. In the event of a hacking you probably will need to revert to an earlier backup. And remember, prevention is the best protection. Have your webmaster perform a security audit to check specifically for vulnerabilities. And observe good security practices as a site owner. Keep up to date with software upgrades, which often fix known vulnerabilities. Change passwords regularly. Limit access to your site – for instance, in the case of a blog, do not allow unknown users to register themselves as authors. Check your code regularly — Occasionally check your site code. In your browser, Click on the “View” menu, and then choose “view source.” This will open up a little window where you can easily see your code. Look for links to sites you do not recognize. Look also for HTML code stating “display:none” or using the word “hidden.” Both codes mean what they suggest: that links are being hidden from casual view. Maybe there’s a legitimate use for such HTML in your site – but then again, it may be the work of hackers. Check your link counts and standings — Use tools such as Technorati.com or another link-popularity tool to keep tabs on inbound links. One telltale sign of a hacking: a huge jump in link counts seemingly overnight. Keep an eye also on your search engine traffic. If traffic dries up overnight, that may be another telltale sign. The search engines WILL penalize your site for having hidden links (Google doesn’t know if you are a victim or if you inserted hidden links intentionally). Have your webmaster check your server logs regularly, too – or learn to do it yourself. Get qualified help — I’d love to say that any reasonably intelligent business person can recover from a hacking. But most of us would be kidding ourselves. I never could have scoured the code and cleaned up the hackers’ crud without the help of my skilled webmaster and telephone support of my Web host. Unless you are highly confident of your own technical skill, get qualified help. Be a little paranoid – it’s OK. It just may save you from a hacking or help you recover more quickly. For more information: To educate yourself to spot suspicious activity, read the white paper, Trends in Badware 2007: What Internet Users Need to Know. For those who have blogs, subscribe to: Blog Security. Symantec offers a helpful Security Response blog. To search to see if your site has been flagged by Google as compromised, visit: StopBadWare.org Anita Campbell is a writer, speaker and radio talk show host who closely follows trends in the small business market at her site, Small Business Trends.
Over the recent holidays I woke up one morning to an unwelcome present: one of my websites had been hacked! Being the holidays, it took longer than normal to get help to fix the rest of the site. Finally, after two days, we were able to get everything fully functioning again. It was costly, both in terms of time, money and worry. But I breathed a sigh of relief. Little did I know that the problems were not over … yet. What the hackers wanted Throughout it all, I kept wondering, “Why would somebody hack my site?” It is purely a content site. The site databases contain no customer information, no credit card numbers, no confidential data of any kind. There is absolutely nothing of value for a hacker — or so I thought. At first I chalked up the incident to somebody’s idea of a sick joke … mere vandalism. Over the ensuing four days, I was soon to discover what the hackers had really done to my site. Deleted files and a messed-up design were just the tip of the iceberg. Search engine boosting is the goal The real purpose of the hacking was to boost search engine rankings. The latest trend is that hackers hijack legitimate sites to use them to generate links to other sites to increase those sites’ rankings. Even Al Gore’s climate blog was victimized by hackers to boost search engine links. In my case, a script had been loaded on the shared server that my site resided on, generating hundreds of hidden pages on my domain. These were pages that I had absolutely no idea were there until, looking at my Technorati.com account, I saw thousands of new links suddenly come in overnight from spam sites pointing to those pages on my domain. The anchor text in the links used words such as “oxycontin” and “cute ringtones” and similar junk that I knew could not be legitimate links to my site. The fake pages on my site were in turn automatically redirected to pharma, ringtone, and adult sites to boost those sites’ link weight. In addition, we found dozens of hidden links in the main pages of my site to ringtone, pharma, and adult websites. You could not see these links on my site’s pages using a standard browser. Also, we found some rogue PHP code designed to generate even more hidden links if the first group were removed. They also managed to insert bogus links in my blogroll and elsewhere in the site — this time in plain view. Presumably links were scattered here and there among legitimate content with the hope they would be overlooked. What it means for small business websites You’ve heard of defensive driving? Well, welcome to the world of defensive Web publishing. If you thought your site was safe just because you had nothing of value in it except some content, think again. Even small business websites and personal blogs are not immune from this kind of attack. Your site indeed does have value to hackers — as a link-generating drone. How to protect your website The toughest part with hacking attacks is that you may not even be aware that your site was compromised. Or it may take a while (in my case, four days) to figure out the full extent of the damage. Remember that you’re not as helpless as you may feel. Taking these steps can help protect your site or blog: Educate Yourself — The single best way to watch out for hacking activity is to know what to look for. Read up on hacking activity so that you can be a proactive site owner and spot suspicious activity or avoid it in the first place. Bolster security– Arrange for regular backups of your site code and any databases. In the event of a hacking you probably will need to revert to an earlier backup. And remember, prevention is the best protection. Have your webmaster perform a security audit to check specifically for vulnerabilities. And observe good security practices as a site owner. Keep up to date with software upgrades, which often fix known vulnerabilities. Change passwords regularly. Limit access to your site – for instance, in the case of a blog, do not allow unknown users to register themselves as authors. Check your code regularly — Occasionally check your site code. In your browser, Click on the “View” menu, and then choose “view source.” This will open up a little window where you can easily see your code. Look for links to sites you do not recognize. Look also for HTML code stating “display:none” or using the word “hidden.” Both codes mean what they suggest: that links are being hidden from casual view. Maybe there’s a legitimate use for such HTML in your site – but then again, it may be the work of hackers. Check your link counts and standings — Use tools such as Technorati.com or another link-popularity tool to keep tabs on inbound links. One telltale sign of a hacking: a huge jump in link counts seemingly overnight. Keep an eye also on your search engine traffic. If traffic dries up overnight, that may be another telltale sign. The search engines WILL penalize your site for having hidden links (Google doesn’t know if you are a victim or if you inserted hidden links intentionally). Have your webmaster check your server logs regularly, too – or learn to do it yourself. Get qualified help — I’d love to say that any reasonably intelligent business person can recover from a hacking. But most of us would be kidding ourselves. I never could have scoured the code and cleaned up the hackers’ crud without the help of my skilled webmaster and telephone support of my Web host. Unless you are highly confident of your own technical skill, get qualified help. Be a little paranoid – it’s OK. It just may save you from a hacking or help you recover more quickly. For more information: To educate yourself to spot suspicious activity, read the white paper, Trends in Badware 2007: What Internet Users Need to Know. For those who have blogs, subscribe to: Blog Security. Symantec offers a helpful Security Response blog. To search to see if your site has been flagged by Google as compromised, visit: StopBadWare.org Anita Campbell is a writer, speaker and radio talk show host who closely follows trends in the small business market at her site, Small Business Trends.
Compared to years past, personal computers are dirt cheap. Ten years ago, the big pricing breakthrough came with the era of the “sub $1,000” computer. Now, that’s the mid-range price point between the high end models that start at $1,500 and up and the increasingly more common sub-$500 PC. So why would a small or mid-sized business owner even give a second thought to just upgrading the company’s computers? Two reasons come to mind. First, the economy is shaky and uncertain. Second, while a $500 computer may sound like a matter for petty cash, it adds up fast when it’s multiplied by dozens, if not hundreds of employees. Computer experts like Dan Gookin, author of PCs for Dummies give the average computer an expected lifespan of four to six years before requiring replacement. For those business owners watching their bottom line closely these days, here are some tips to stretch those PCs from four years and closer to six. Gookin recommends taking the following steps: Get an external hard drive. They’re plentiful and cheap, costing as little as $150 for five gigs. “The idea is you want to back up your stuff. The hard drive is usually the first thing to go or wear out. So if you’re pushing the limit with the hard drive, you better keep that safety copy of your data,” says Gookin. Add more memory. Memory, too, is cheap and for a small investment of perhaps less than $100, a slow moving desktop can work a lot faster making an employee’s time more productive. Gookin also points out that memory for older PCs are inevitably cheaper than when it was first purchased. That makes a good case to upgrade memory as you need it and not pay top dollar for it up front upon purchase. Dust bunnies are not a computer’s friend. At least once or twice a year, turn off the PC, remove the hood and check out the dust that has accumulated inside. Dust insulates the tower making it hotter inside. It also blocks up vents (which also increase the heat inside). Overheated computers burn out and don’t last as long. Blow out the dust with an air cannon, but don’t stop there. Make sure you use a mini vacuum to suck it all up, as well, so it doesn’t just resettle somewhere else within the hardware. With apologies to Al Gore, leave the computers on at all times. “This is a controversial one,” admits Gookin, who argues turning computers on and off dramatically changes the range of temperatures inside the box. Cycling heat and cold naturally causes parts to expand and contract. It stresses the solder joints, loosens chips, connectors and expansion cards and can even cause parts to crack and break over time. Avoid software upgrades. How badly does the employee need all the latest bells and whistles on Office 2007, for example? Newer versions of software often require more memory, faster chips, and perhaps even an upgraded monitor or graphics card for optimal use. “Minimum requirements listed on the software packaging don’t mean it will necessarily run on your computer, just crawl,” says Gregory S. Nelson, a technology advisor for small businesses for SCORE out of the Naples, Florida office. Routine maintenance Business owners know it’s time to bite the bullet and buy new computers when the old ones either no longer work or work so slow lost productivity becomes a greater expense than just buying a new system. While adding more memory is the most obvious way to speed up the older machines around the office, there are other relatively simple maintenance checks that will pump up your PC’s, as well. Clean up the registry editor. You know it’s bad when you hit the on button in the morning, go down the hall for coffee, check the mail, say good morning to your colleagues, return to your desk and the operating system is still booting up. Chances are the computer has too many programs in the registry editor firing up during boot up and thus slowing down start-up. How-to: “Purging out all the unnecessary programs starting up along with your computer is not for the faint of heart,” says Nelson. This is a time to definitely leave it to the IT person or at least use a software program to do the heavy lifting. The way to find the registry editor (on Windows) is to hit “Start”, then “Run.” Type in “regedit” and hit okay. On the left side of the pop-up screen there’s a long list of options. Buried in that list are all those programs that are set to boot up along with the operating system. Also, uninstalled software tends to never be completely uninstalled. Remaining files are typically hiding out in the Registry Editor waiting to be cleaned out. Defragment your hard drive. Think of all those thousands of files sitting on your hard drive as books sitting on a shelf. A file gets used and then re-shelved back with the others not quite as tightly packed in and with tiny gaps left between each one. “Defragging” the hard drive means taking out those fragments or gaps between files, similar to pushing all the books back together tightly on a shelf leaving more room on the shelf for future additions. How-to: This is a task just about anyone can do. Click on “Start,” then “All Programs,” “Accessories,” and then “System Tools” where disk defragmenter is on the drop down menu. Click on it. A pop-up screen offers two buttons: analyze and defragment. The analyze button will quickly give you a report on the need to defrag and what programs have the most fragments. “Even when it recommends defragging is not necessary, sometimes it helps anyway,” says Nelson. Nelson says e-mail is usually the biggest culprit for generating fragments. If any area is over a thousand fragments, go ahead and defragment. When you do buy Eventually, all businesses have too. Again, the maximum lifespan to expect out of any PC is about six years. So when that day arrives: invest in desktops where it makes sense. Laptops get more wear and tear faster due to their portability.
Twenty years ago, the ritual of the corporate presentation underwent a revolution: PowerPoint. Since 1987, this Microsoft program has been lampooned by everyone from Dilbert to The New Yorker. It’s been decried as evil by Yale professor Edward Tufte, in his famous screed, “PowerPoint is Evil,” published in Wired. It’s even been banned in some corners of corporate America, as Scott McNealy, then CEO of Sun Microsystems, did back in 1997. Despite its Rodney Dangerfield-like reputation that it gets no respect, PowerPoint at the same time has become all but synonymous with the word “presentation.” Love it or hate it, nowadays very few people would even consider getting up in front of a room without it. Even Al Gore doesn’t leave the house without his .ppt docs. “If you went back to 1987 you’d find it’s essentially the same program with that slide sorter view. Each version since has just added extra stuff on top. After 20 years of PowerPoint, people are ready for a change,” says Cliff Atkinson, author of “Beyond Bullet Points,” published by Microsoft Press. Countless executives who groan at the mere mention of PowerPoint would agree: it’s time to pump things up. Primarily, there are two ways to do it. Take a more creative approach in designing your PowerPoint presentations. That, and investigate some of the newer technologies and applications that integrate with PowerPoint to create a richer, more multimedia experience with your audience. Bullet points and boilerplate templates are so-o-o 1997 As his book title would suggest, Atkinson is not a fan of the overused and abused bullet point format and he’s an expert definitely worth listening to on the subject. Atkinson produced the courtroom PowerPoint presentation for the attorneys of the winning plaintiffs in the famous $253 million Vioxx judgment against Merck. Fortune magazine at the time credited his PowerPoint as instrumental in winning the case describing it as “frighteningly powerful.” Here are some of the ways Atkinson suggests in taking a different approach. (He’ll have to forgive our format here). Simplify, simplify, simplify. Too much information on the screen is perhaps the biggest mistake made in PowerPoint. Atkinson recommends having only one thought written like a newspaper headline or in a short sentence per slide. Set the mood and tone. Does your presentation come with a sense of urgency or excitement about a new strategy or product, problem-solving, pioneering a new direction or the tone of a very formal briefing? Pick a color palette that will help set that tone. Make sure you don’t stray from the palette with a color that doesn’t match. Make key slides stand out with a specific color from the palette. Don’t use that color with the other slides. Weave content into a narrative. Storytelling is a format that hooks in everyone. Like a good story, develop your presentation with a setting, a conflict, the characters involved, and what’s at stake. Think of the details in terms of “Acts” letting them unfold in a way that builds up to the solution that comes at the end. Storyboard on paper first. That’s right: low tech, before high tech. Atkinson contends it’s often easier to conceptualize on paper, rather than on a computer screen. Put pencil to paper first, and then use that as a guide in designing your slides. Make it human. “A presentation should be a conversation. Incorporate interactivity. The media should be transparent and not distract from you,” says Atkinson. One other tip: when you’re saying your most key thought, cut the PowerPoint to black. It will jar every set of eyes in the room away from the screen and force them to focus on you. Gear up While PowerPoint hasn’t changed much over the years, new technologies that integrate with it have. Here are a few that can help make your presentations more engaging: Audience response systems. A number of vendors, such as Turning Point, sell or rent equipment that enables you to give all the audience members a keypad. You can poll the audience in real time with their answers aggregating into bar graphs, pie charts, etc. right into your PowerPoint. Try a game show format. This is especially effective in training presentations. And again, there are numerous vendors to choose from who offer a combination of software and audience response gear to turn your presentation into a high energy quiz show format with the audience. Learning Ware is one such company offering a software package called GameShow Pro 4. Additionally, they offer ring-in pads for participating audience members to hit just like contestants on Jeopardy. Slicker production value. Presentation Pro offers a number of PowerPoint-compatible solutions to make your presentations more eye-catching, including studio quality graphics and 3D transitions, software to incorporate video and sound and even a program to capture mouse movements to replay for demo purposes.
Letter From Silicon Valley “What separates us from other competitors is passion.” – CEO of a now-defunct online natural-products retailer, October 1999 “I have learned from those mistakes, and I am passionate about the need for campaign-finance reform.” – Al Gore, speaking about campaign-finance legislation, March 2000 “I am passionate about delivering B2B E-commerce solutions to my clients.” – Web consultant who once dated my friend Ellen, December 2000 Passion. A lot of people have been throwing that word around the past few years, and not all of them live in Silicon Valley. Needless to say, the three passionate gentlemen quoted above were all looking for new objects of affection in 2001. So I was skeptical when I received an E-mail from Jim Leff telling me about his community Web site for food lovers, Chowhound.com. The E-mail included a review from the Boston Phoenix newspaper that said that Chowhound exhibited “a burning passion rarely seen outside of the Middle East or the Napster controversy.” Jim was writing to say that he enjoyed my column and that my references to sushi, sand dabs, and other seafood consumed at various milestones in the history of my former company, Gazooba, made him think I might be a closet chowhound. Jim also noted that we played the same musical instrument. “I have really clever and ambitious biz plans but could use some trombone-brotherhood commiseration,” he wrote. Since I was heading to Long Island to see my family at the time, I cleared one afternoon to meet with Jim, who lives in Queens. Before leaving San Francisco, I visited the Chowhound site ( www.chowhound.com), where I learned the difference between a chowhound and a foodie. As Jim had suspected, the chowhound label fit me like a lobster bib. “Foodies fuss endlessly about ingredients, a fixation which strikes chowhounds as sheer culinary materialism,” the site explained. “Chowhounds can be spotted at Lespinasse insouciantly swirling their merlot but, unlike foodies, we have not the slightest compunction about stopping for a really great slice on the way home.” We met in Manhattan, and over large bowls of Korean beef soup, Jim told me that he wanted to make money from the site and was growing desperate for either a bright idea that would pull in revenues or an investor with deep pockets. Chowhound was attracting about 16,000 regulars worldwide (plus another 100,000 occasional visitors), and Jim was shelling out $600 a month for Web hosting. He was funding the payments and his apartment rent with money he was making as a food writer and jazz trombonist. Jim said that when he founded Chowhound with a tech-savvy buddy, in 1996, a revenue model was the furthest thing from his mind. Already a professional food writer, Jim knew there were others who wanted to pool grassroots restaurant knowledge rather than rely solely on professional critics or Zagat. “For years I had met fellow chowhounds in furtive circumstances, whispering tips at bagel counters,” Jim said. Now, in the spring of 2001, just when the Web was at its least welcoming, he wanted to turn his hobby into a business. Jim was hopeful about an upcoming trip to San Francisco, and not just because he’d be able to score his favorite potato chips at La Palma Mexicatessan in the Mission. A Chowhound regular who also happened to be a recent hire at a famous Silicon Valley law firm had signed up Chowhound as his first client, then egged Jim on to create a business plan and get venture capital. Another Bay Area fan was offering to write the business plan, and two chowhound rock-star programmers were going to “semidonate” their services. With the Nasdaq in tatters, I was doubtful about Chowhound’s ability to do an equity round, but Jim remained confident. “Andy, I know you’re connected enough to know that there’s about to be a huge wave of investment in consumer-oriented content sites,” he told me. I wasn’t sure whether he was kidding or whether I was just really unconnected. Jim flew out here a few weeks later. He reserved a banquet table at R&G Lounge, his favorite Cantonese place in San Francisco, renowned for its chicken, and invited 10 people who had offered to help, guide, support, counsel, and connect him. The woman who had volunteered to help with the business plan was there and turned out to be a fellow Wharton alum whom I had met once at a party. Other entrepreneurs who were present were either chowhounds or friends of chowhounds. The chicken was everything Jim had promised. And things were so bad on the dot-com scene that nobody wanted to talk about anything except the food. Some of my fellow diners had been laid off or were about to be. No one was encouraging about the possibility of Chowhound’s getting funded. For Jim, his guests’ frankness was a harsh-tasting morsel he was loath to swallow. “As anybody will say, the hardest thing in business is when you’re in relentless mode,” Jim explained later. “You’re pursuing an end in spite of everything, and people are saying it can’t be done. I’m thinking of those Japanese guys in the jungle thinking they’re fighting World War II in 1975. Now I understand those guys so well. It doesn’t just switch off.” Later, over beers, I did my best to drag Jim out of the jungle. I told him that venture money might not be the best thing for Chowhound anyway. I recounted the time at Gazooba when our VCs rejected a buyout offer that they had deemed insufficient. “They want a home run, a billion-dollar company, and they want it quickly,” I said. “They’re OK if 9 out of their 10 companies strike out trying to get there.” Jim dreamed of building Chowhound into an international brand for restaurant and food information, but I suggested he throttle back. He finally allowed that if he put a business plan together, he could probably round up a few hundred thousand in angel money, enough to hire some people and print Chowhound-branded restaurant guides. Jim seemed deflated but thankful for the straight talk. When I checked in with Jim again a few months later, he was still using trombone and freelance-writing money to pay Chowhound’s bills — now $800 a month to support 20,000 regular users and 3 million page views. One minor bit of progress was that he had identified a personal weakness of his that was impeding any major bits of progress where the site was concerned. “Here’s the deal, Andy,” said Jim. “I hate asking for money, and I’m bad at it. I’m proud of what I did with the site. But I’m like one of those weight lifters who forgot to work on his legs. I can’t spend the next six months of my life just schmoozing investors and trying to get checks from them. It’s just not what I do.” Like a battle-scarred soldier watching a new recruit struggling in the field, I want to help Jim write his business plan. But if and when Jim wants help, he’ll ask for it. Meanwhile, a generous chowhound has offered to front him a couple thousand dollars to produce Chowhound merchandise, which Jim hopes will recoup the $18,000 he’s spent on the site so far. Chowhound buttons will read, “No, I would NOT like some freshly ground black pepper on that.” And Chowhound “passports,” with sayings such as “Thai equals spicy, spicy equals Thai. I love spicy real Thai food!” written in 10 languages, for example, will let the waiter know that “you mean business and want the real shit,” says Jim. Jim was also working on the pilot episode of a Chowhound television show. “It’s going to be a game show for savvy diners, sort of a reality-TV thing,” he says. He plans to shop the show around to cable networks and hopes the exposure will do for the Chowhound brand what he once thought a big investment would. “My model, strangely enough, is Martha Stewart,” Jim says. “We are the anti-Martha Stewart in terms of what our content is and who our audience is. But the business model is the same. Get people who are disenfranchised — who have never had a voice in the media speaking to them — make them superloyal, and give them content across all media. It’s about focusing this community of people who are always tirelessly searching for something better. And the only reason it works is because I’m one of those people.” Time will tell if Chowhound will make it as a business. If it does, look no further than Jim Leff’s passion for the reason why. I told him to keep in touch and mentioned that I’d be in New York soon. Could we get together and catch up on how things were progressing? “Yeah, we could do that,” Jim said. “But will you have time to eat?” Andrew Raskin is the cofounder and former CEO of Gazooba Corp. (now Qbiquity Corp.) and a contributing writer for Inc. He will drive a long way for good fatty tuna. Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.
