Things I Learned When I Didn’t Get the Job

I haven’t blogged for the past couple of weeks.

Normally I don’t offer up any reasons for that because frankly, it usually makes for a boring read and is usually laced with stale promises that I most likely won’t keep.

But this time, I’d like to share with you what’s been going on, what I’ve learned from it and how I hope to come out ahead because of it.

Long story short, I’ve been in intensive talks with Jared Spool at User Interface Engineering to fill a newly created position in which I would become “Director of Community Management” or, the title I preferred, “Chief Blogging Officer”.

We had lengthy conversations and IM sessions in which we discussed how I might fit in, how working there might impact our friendship, what really needed to be accomplished at UIE, etc.

I prepared and presented a proposal and was preparing for the final meeting when Jared took me aside and let me know that at this point, they don’t want to proceed with the new position, as they are so busy with implementing (and profiting from, I might add) a number of the ideas I brought to the table over the past eight months while consulting for them, that they don’t really have the bandwidth to take on yet another person and the resulting set of activities I would put into play.

I was deeply disappointed, to say the least, so I licked my wounds and sulked for a few days, got over it, and now I’m back to my old self, cooking up entrepreneurial schemes and planning for the future.

While going through this whole process, I learned — or should I say, RE-learned — a lot of things about running a successful business that I had completely forgotten… or thought was no longer relevant.

UIE, you see, is based heavily on a single asset: they have a mailing list to which they email a weekly (sometimes twice weekly) newsletter to by the name of UIEtips. Every single bit of marketing they do goes through that list. Every dime of revenue they take in comes from that list. They take extremely good care of that list, as you might imagine.

They have an annual conference every fall called UI 11 or 12 or 13 or whatever that particular year’s version is. They charge a healthy amount to attend that event, and hundreds of people do, every year. For an October event, they begin marketing to the list (and selling conference tickets) in April… and year after year, they pack the event, having to actually turn people away who dare try to sign up in September.

Over the past year, they have added theWeb Application Summit coming up in January in Monterrey, CA, have been conducting Virtual Seminars, reports and may have a special highly vertical Summit coming up next spring (that’s maybe… if they have the resources). And they’re doing a GREAT job doing all of it!

Wow!

What my job would have been is to build up their Brain Sparks blog to a frequency of 1-2 posts per day, hence growing the readership, and focus on using that to build the total number of subscribers by 25% over the next year… which would have a great impact on sales if these were indeed the quality of people we were looking for and more importantly, were looking for a company like us to solve their problems.

When I came on board at UIE as a consultant, I was under the impression that email lists were going the way of the dodo bird. What with RSS giving people virtually commitment-free access to their content (no hassles with unsubscribes) and spam making the process of actually succeeding at getting through the filters and in to a subscriber’s email inbox, I figured email had DIED as a marketing tool.

But I was wrong. Dead wrong. And UIE is walking, talking proof that I was wrong.

Email lists are an extremely viable, if not superior, marketing tool for selling products and services online.

You can be assured that all the entrepreneurial ventures I’ve got cooking in my head right now will rely heavily on email to sell the products and services I have in mind.

And I relearned that from this process I just went through… which I perceived originally as a failure, but turned out to be a stepping stone.