Inspired by Verne Harnish, we are adopting a quarterly goal system at Webmail. We’re going to put together, and publicize internally, five goals each quarter. We’re also going to ask each employee to come up with three to five personal goals that they would like to achieve. Each goal needs to be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and…
Zimbra announced via TechCrunch this morning that they now have 6 million paid mailboxes. My first reaction to this was pretty much the same reaction that I had when they announced that they had 4 million paid mailboxes just three short months ago. That reaction goes a little something like this: “BULL-sh*t!” After doing some further thinking,…
With the launch of our new website, we made the strategic business decision to stop selling email accounts with the @webmail.us domain name extension. The minute we did that, we had a ton of people write in asking if they could still buy one as well as wondering why we made that move. The Email Discussion Forum also…
After my blog post yesterday in reference to the recruiting article in the Roanoke Times, an employee sent me the following email: This confuses me a little bit. It almost seems like this “check everything you have out there and judge you by it” stuff doesn’t really match our actual attitude. If you take 50% of the…
Several people this week have asked me, “Why did you all redesign your website? The old one was perfect.” Well, most everyone who asks this question doesn’t really go past the homepage and for the most part, doesn’t grasp how powerful of a marketing tool a website can be. For us, it’s our bread and…
Spam sucks. Everyone hates it. And unfortunately, when people think of spam, they think of email. I can’t tell you the number of articles I’ve read in the last few years proclaiming that because of spam, email is useless and will soon be replaced by chat, text and instant messaging, wikis, blogs, RSS, social networking, and…
I’ve blogged before about why I believe it’s difficult to keep great people in Southwest Virginia. One of the reasons I believe it’s a challenge is because the social scene isn’t as great for young people outside of college as it is in other parts of the country. That is something we just cannot deny….
When we relocated Webmail in August 2004, I immediately realized how fragmented the professional community was here in Blacksburg. There are a lot of really smart, motivated people down here but there just really isn’t a place where professionals conglomerate, hang out, and network. So I decided to start a group called the New River…
Things have been going great at Webmail for quite some time now. We’re experiencing healthy growth on a month-to-month basis and things continue to get more exciting every day. But while things are going great at work, things haven’t always been so rosy. Likewise, there are other aspects of my life and side projects I’ve taken…
Eight years ago (wow, has it been that long?) during my sophomore year at Virginia Tech, I realized that I was going to run out of money and wouldn’t be able to afford my next semester of college. With tuition, books, car payments, living expenses, etc., my high school savings account was drying up quickly. Luckily,…
We broke our single day sales record (based on the volume of orders) yesterday for the second time since we launched our new website. We broke the record while I was at the New River Network Professional Mixer and so of course, I told some people about it. Someone asked me what the record was…
I was contacted by a senior at Northeastern University whose advanced organizational communication class is studying blogging. We did an interview over email with regards to blogging and specifically, the purpose of our company blog at Webmail.us. They asked some good questions, so I figured I’d share the Q&A; here. Why did your company begin the blog? We…