Organize awesome events.Our all-in-one event management software keeps organizers sane & attendees happy.

I had a dream! A dream where Americans and Canadians could co-exist at the race track! A dream where 5 digit numeric zip codes and 7 character alphanumeric zip codes could find harmony! A dream where it no longer mattered whether you lived in San Francisco, California or Mont Tremblant, Quebec.

That dream became reality when version 3.3.17 was released today and our Nationwide calendar went International. Search on any zip code from the United States or Canada and you'll find events. Even if they are a looooong ways away.

Not bad, eh?

Mark Wyner from Campaign Monitor wrote an informative article about testing HTML email in various mail readers and webmail providers.

We support sending HTML mail in MotorsportReg.com. I have seen some pretty good emails from a few of our customers, particularly ProCup Karting. Are you sending HTML email? If not, Campaign Monitor has published 30 tested templates that you can download and customize for your own emails. Using the "Source" button from the MotorsportReg.com message toolbar, paste the HTML from any of these templates and you can preview and edit it instantly.

With the great power of HTML comes great responsibility! Be careful about over-designing your messaging; remember your members are busy people but don't underestimate the value of good design in your communications.

Not everyone involved with MotorsportReg.com races, but everyone who does should wear a HANS device (head and neck restraint). While there are a handful of other systems out there, this is the most widely used and endorsed.

I recently had the distinction of becoming HANS' first dual HANS device crash while riding shotgun at Buttonwillow Raceway about a month ago. Both the driver and I were fine minus a bruised ego, a little stiffness and a totaled E36 BMW chassis. What this note is about, however, is surprising customer service. "Surprising" and "customer service" in the same sentence is rarely meant as a term of endearment but HANS has it nailed. When we wrote in to order new tethers (which stretch in an incident like racing harnesses to dissipate crash energy), our package included a "Thanks for saving my neck!" t-shirt, HANS hat and handwritten note alerting us to our celebrity status. None of this was expected and all of it was free.

HANS sells an expensive device; we would have gladly paid for the replacement parts but the intense interest in the customer and their wellbeing is what sets HANS apart. That is someone trying to do it better than it has been done before. I call it "surprising" and it's what we try to do every day.

Before I started MotorsportReg.com 5 years ago, I ran a professional services agency that did fairly high-end consulting work for companies like Macromedia, Autodesk, Epson and Yahoo! I started the company with a co-founder in 1996 and with a degree in Mechanical Engineering, I learned about business the hard way.

Especially as many of our customers were exploding dot-coms, I learned that your best customer will stop returning phone calls and start dodging your invoices when $5,000 is on the table. You can imagine what happened when the mutual fund company from New York owed us $30,000 (although in a search just now, it looks like this behavior caught up with them).

I must credit my parents with instilling in me a good moral compass. Although as a youth I had questionable motives and listened to punk rock music, you can hardly call that a permanent belief system or unusual. No, when push came to shove, I'm glad to report that we made the tough decisions and did right by people. When it was easier to slink away and pocket a few bucks, we took the extra effort to correct a mistake or initiate contact to do unto others as I sure wish those companies were doing to us.

That desire, for a better experience, is what has fueled the fantastic growth of MotorsportReg.com. We have added staff, expanded our features, become better at many things and continued to support our customers as though our lives depend on it (and it does!) We've even bought a set or two of race tires.

But that desire doesn't mean mistakes don't happen. And it definitely doesn't mean a world where software doesn't have bugs.

In the last month we discovered two separate issues in our payment processing system. In both cases, we had withheld more money than we were supposed to due to "corner cases" in our system: situations that occur under such unusual conditions that testing doesn't catch them. In both cases, only one customer was even vaguely aware of the situation despite the fact that the bug had been present for 12 months. In both cases, we could have easily swept it under the rug and held onto the cash.

Instead, we found all of the missing monies and initiated separate direct deposits and contacted each customer to explain what happened. Each phone call started with a "gulp" and sweaty palms. Who wants to deliver bad news? Admit they made a mistake? Say they're sorry... and mean it?

We will never be able to prevent every corner case, but MotorsportReg.com customers and users have our promise that we'll always be honest and fix it immediately.

To the customers who urged us to keep their monies because they value MotorsportReg.com so much, we love you too. :)

I can't help but share this little gem we recently received from Andrew Forrest (Porsche Club of America, Golden Gate Region) after evaluating MotorsportReg.com against other registration systems:

"Recently I undertook a systematic evaluation of a number of candidate sites but, as should be no surprise to you, the superiority of MotorsportReg.com along a number of dimensions became apparent so quickly and by such a convincing margin that I abandoned that activity part-way through."

His evaluation sheet was nearly as complete as some of our internal documents - very impressive!

It's been a while so just a quick update - new clubs continue to sign on for the 2007 season and we're also updating our service to be more powerful. One of our favorite enhancements in some time is our new discount system which lets clubs offer special coupon codes to their attendees. The codes are flexible and permit percentage-based or absolute discounts that can be redeemed during registration.

We've also added a new reconciliation center for taking care of refunds and credits after an event has passed. The new ability to store a credit in MotorsportReg.com means handling refunds or assigning a pre-event credit to an attendee is easy.

Closing an event is commonly cited as the least-favorite part of managing an event. Our credit support is the first of three phases in our roadmap to make post-event reconciliation a 10-minute-or-less task that organizers look forward to rather than dread.

On a side note, have you seen the new private labeling in place for San Francisco Region SCCA or BMW CCA Golden Gate Chapter? We're offering this premium feature for free for 2007 to new customers who sign up before January 31st, 2007.

In most professional sports, people refer to the off-season dealing and trading for athletes as "silly season". It's when rumors fly, contracts are negotiated and deals get made. We have a silly season too.

Four years ago when I started this company, I thought that event registrations would be pretty seasonal. Since we have a lot of east coast customers who can't drive as many months out of the year as we can in California, I expected there to be a pretty significant bell curve in traffic.

I was wrong. There is a drop off in traffic but it's a brief six weeks between early November and mid December. During this period three key things happen:

• Board meetings for review & planning


• New schedules finalized


• Jan-Feb-Mar events open for registration

Once new events are listed, announcements are sent and traffic spikes again. That's what makes this our silly season - from now until mid-December is our opportunity to contact, market and sell MotorsportReg.com to organizations. The next two board meetings are when improvements for 2007 could be suggested, reviewed, voted upon and adopted. Although some clubs will switch mid-season, this is clearly the sweet spot when volunteer workloads are lightest.

I hope you'll understand then, when I say we need to cut this note short and get to work!

p.s. - we rolled out a new release with some killer features yesterday that we'll announce shortly but suffice to say, the best keeps on getting better!

I've been writing a lot of marketing materials over the past week and part of that is differentiating MotorsportReg.com from our competitors. A challenge is explaining why our service (in many scenarios) costs more and convincing potential customers that shopping on price alone is risky. "We're better" is hardly a persuasive argument even if that is true.

To make it more difficult, we can't cram a dissertation on best practices into our first email or phone call. But these are critical factors that may eventually cause catastrophe if not checked. So here you have it, my five rules of running an underpriced Internet-based business (or, "What I wish potential customers already knew to look for"):

1. Part-Time Participation - Our competitors are primarily nights-and-weekends operations where the proprietor has a day job in technology and created their system as a solution to a local or regional problem. Most good ideas come from such a process; you find the itch and scratch it. Good ideas with good execution in a suitably sized market will generate enough demand to justify full-time involvement and an organically grown staff will provide a reasonable level of support to the larger customer base. But what if the goal is just a supplemental income? Then minimum effort for maximum gain becomes the modus operandi. The first corner, that of sacrificing service, has been cut.


2. Hosting from Home - At least two of our primary competitors host their applications from their residence over a DSL or Cable connection. This setup offers no protection against any number of things that will happen like power outages, severe weather, fire or something more mundane like the dog chewing on the cables. Operations like these typically have a single computer running their entire application so in case of a hardware or software failure, they are effectively out of business. Serious service providers place their servers in a colocation facility designed specifically for Internet companies that provides diesel-generator power backup, earthquake retrofitting, 100 or 500-year storm readiness, fire systems, armed physical security and Internet connectivity from many different providers such that an isolated Internet outage will not cut off the service. MotorsportReg.com currently uses 4 servers in a Terremark facility in the Silicon Valley with RAID arrays, backups and multiple staff with access to fix any problems. Skipping this step saves the operation between $400 and $4000 per month plus an initial expense of thousands of dollars. It also means your critical data is one mistake away from disappearing permanently.


3. Useless User Interface - Design, the creative skill that makes meaning and communication out of information and data is eschewed by most engineering types. This was the case at an early stage in my career as well. But what separates good (or even "acceptable") from great is a combination of interaction design (how it works) and graphic design (how it looks). Considered by many as "finishing touches", these critical skills are foundations to an easy-to-use and enjoyable application that avoids lots of squinting, searching and frustration. The "right" way includes creating user personas, paper prototyping, usability testing, heuristic analysis and other techniques to elicit the true requirements from your customers and convert them into successful software. The "budget" way is to skip it altogether. Usability schmusability! It's so obvious because it makes sense to me. It worked for Google after all. By the way, how many Googles are there?


4. Anonymous Application Provider - This is like "Part-time Participation" but speaks more to the professionalism of the person behind the operation. Can you find a mailing address? Phone number? Name? Anything? Bueller? Serious companies want you to contact them. We love customer interaction, obtaining feedback, identifying enhancements and so forth. A company exists to solve customer problems using skills the customer doesn't have themselves. But to maintain bargain pricing, it is imperative that you minimize customer contact and your time investment. This usually results in a contact form with no guarantee on response time. Just send your request off into the abyss and pray you get a response!


5. Pay(pal) the Piper - Unless your customer processes credit cards in their normal line of work, they will have no idea how much this costs and how hard it is to do it right. To run an underpriced service, outsourcing your payment processing to a third party like Paypal is a must. It eliminates a major programming challenge and costs less; a big win for everyone! Or is it? Because Paypal is not a bank, it is not insured nor regulated by the FDIC. This means your funds are not guaranteed. This happens rarely, but if your organization was depending on a large check in order to pay a rental deposit and found that the funds were on hold with no recourse, what would happen? What if it was a week? Two weeks? A month?
   

   Processing credit cards is expensive; it requires an application fee, typically a 3-year contract with monthly minimums around $40. Your discount rate is the actual percentage charged on each transaction in addition to a per-transaction fee. This usually looks like 2.5% + 0.30. The catch is even with the lowest base discount rate available of 1.9 or 2.0%, airline miles or other rewards cards are processed at a higher (and sometimes much higher) rate. This is true with corporate, international and other credit cards that many of your customers will use. Suddenly that 1.9% rate is more like 2.5% or 3% on average. Processing credit cards over the Internet also requires an Internet gateway which typically costs another $40/month. Have you ever had a charge on your card you didn't recognize and called your bank about it? Your bank will forward your inquiry along to the merchant and charge them up to $25 per incident, regardless of the outcome. Even with a 1.9% base discount rate, processing credit cards with your own merchant account costs a minimum of $1200-1500 per year. Is it any surprise that so many services outsource your funds to an uninsured and unregulated source like Paypal?

Bottom line - underpriced, understaffed and underserviced web businesses may be lucky for long periods of time but they will eventually meet one of three conclusions:

1. Service degrades due to increased customer demand. It requires full-time attention but the pricing does not sustain full-time staff.


2. Prices go up to sustain full-time staff. Demand grows to the point where it requires full-time attention so prices must meet profitable levels.


3. Infrastructure is left lacking and reliability suffers or results in a catastrophic failure. If the data is unrecoverable, the site will probably shut down leaving customers without a provider or data.

Given that the only successful outcome is to raise prices, wouldn't it make sense to avoid the poor service, downtime and possible failures by starting somewhere more trustworthy?

Have a rule that I missed? You can check the MotorsportReg.com contact page and call us, send us an email or write us a letter and expect a response back within a noted timeframe or leave a comment below.

If you're a racer, some of the best money you can spend is on an open test day at your local track where you fine tune your suspension settings or try something entirely new, looking for that last tenth. Professional web development is, strangely, a similar cat.



We regularly test our application to see where things are working and where they need help. Sometimes we discover the unexpected and other times we confirm or assumptions. We combine this with customer feedback and our long-term roadmap to determine our top priorities.

We have been experimenting with a new testing method recently from Crazy Egg. Their service tracks the clicks on a particular web page and allows us to run A/B tests or generate "heat maps" of click activity to see what is the most popular content on the screen. This feedback helps us understand what users are doing without having to observe each one individually as we would in a usability audit and augments our existing testing.

It's not as valuable as actual usability audits but Crazy Egg provides some of the same information as log file analysis in a more friendly format. Eye tracking software also exists that will watch the retina of a test subject and create similar heatmaps of where people are looking on your screen (hint: they start at the top left...)

Are you interested in learning more about how professionals test and improve web sites? Here are a few resources on the subject:

• Boxes and Arrows - site for usability and design people


• Jakob Nielsen - often controversial but an icon in the field


• User Friendly - a comic strip about usability!

A great bit of news today: SpeedTV.com reviewed our event management service and explored our recent deal with the San Francisco Region of the SCCA. It's quite in-depth and includes two screen shots. Hopefully more SCCA regions will see the success we're having and consider trying us out!