What I’ve learned about Rick Schwartz and Howard Neu

Sometimes you don’t really get to know someone until you’ve done battle with them. In the case of Rick and Howard, my perception of them has changed forever.

For instance, Rick Schwartz talks often on his blog and on message boards about how he doesn’t want to work. He goes on and on about it so much that the naive could think he is lazy. Lazy he is not. Once a hard worker, always a hard worker. I can best summarize what I have learned by sharing with you all a little story.

While in his South Florida home negotiating our deal the question of roles and responsibilities came up. Rick said, “hold on a second. I want to show you something”. We then walked out to his living room where he showed me jar after jar after jar filled with old hotel room keys.

I was floored because I collect room keys as well. Besides the obvious connection that we both collect the keys I noticed one very big difference. The keys that I collect are credit card size and throughout my travels I have yet to fill a shoe box with them. Great news! I’m still young in the grand scheme of things! Granted they also don’t take up as much space in the box as real keys but still.

Rick’s keys were real keys with the little rubber key chains on them typical of 60s, 70s and 80s hotel rooms. They were a testament to a man that clearly spent many decades as a real road warrior. As they say, this is not his first rodeo. I don’t want to think about how many hours he spent in those rooms with wall unit air conditioners. I’m sure he drove to the hotels too. My road warrior life is a piece of cake considering. Respect.

I’ll never forget those keys and I’ll certainly stick to building my own collection.

Howard Neu also turned out to be someone completely different than I expected. I had known for some time that he’s been a judge, a mayor, a broadway singer and lawyer. His accomplishments were never in doubt but I was also a little bit guilty to think that he may be a man in his twilight who was ready to slow down.

On the contrary. You’d think he was in his 20s when you are dealing with him over real business issues. He has the fire and tenacity of anyone in their prime if not more.

He’s eager to continue to build on the TRAFFIC brand and it clearly shows.

Never underestimate your opponents dear readers. Never.

I’m proud to be associated with them.

P.S. I just heard that there are only around 20 tickets left for New York at the really low early bird pricing. It’s going to be the best TRAFFIC show in years so don’t miss out.

So Damn Shady - The Internet is a Dangerous Place

I’ve been in the Internet business for a while. In my time I’ve met some shady people. To tell you the truth, I’ve spent a LOT of time with some of these people. Buying and selling domains and websites in mass puts you in a lot of businesses after all. At one point I actually started writing a book about some of them but decided on not being the whistle blower.

Without naming names, there are the guys in the download business. These are the guys that install AdWare on your computer. They can pop a window to tell you to buy a stock at 9:30 a.m. or copy every email address out of your Outlook. Hell, they can have 1 million users send 10 emails each so spam blockers won’t detect a single server farm sending 10 million emails. You could be spamming. They can do anything they want because they have an exe file on your box.

There are the phishers, spammers, scammers and theives….

Then there are the people that specialize in billing. They are the ones that run many adult and dating sites. They also do a lot of mainstream stuff. You think they are in the business of selling tits, ass, Sundays in the park or punch the penguin games but they are really in the billing business.

I have a nickname for them. I call them shoe string salesmen. They are the ones that buy an old couple’s shoestring company that has been around for years and has excellent credit and then use the merchant account to sell adult site memberships. They tell the surfers that the site is free as long as they enter their credit card number to verify that they are 18. Buried in the terms of service are multiple pre-checked cross sales. The unsuspecting surfer with a hard-on thinks he’s getting away with something but what he doesn’t know is that he’s subscribing to 3 or 4 other sites as well at $39.95 per month each.

Well, it appears Master Card has finally been shown the light. Clearly they’ve had enough charge backs to call it quits. Maybe Visa will finally follow suit to end this shady practice. As recent events in the global economy have shown, if business can’t police itself government will do it for them.

Look out history, here I come! Did I mention I’m an Obama fan?

You know your kids go to a good school when a U.S. Senator donates tickets to the presidential inauguration ceremony. I just won the tickets at a charity auction.

That, however, was the easy part. The hard part is going to be finding somewhere to stay. I’d really rather not stay outside of Washington D.C. and everything decent appears to be booked.

If you or someone you know lives there and wants to rent their place out, let me know. Now I have to look for transportation.

On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog

Peter Steiner created this famous cartoon on July 5th, 1993 for an issue of The New Yorker. Considering that the first graphical web browser (Mosaic) was launched on April 22nd, 1993, it’s really quite amazing how quickly Mr Steiner “got it”.

It’s not that nobody knows you’re are a dog. It’s actually obvious to everyone when you act like one. It’s that most people think that no one notices their dog like behavior. Therein lies the brilliance of this cartoon which has been published countless times since.

The amount of rude comments I get is astounding. Today, I had someone submit 25 domains all about Christianity but they weren’t good names. They had other keywords in them that I didn’t like and none of the names had any real business opportunity. So, I denied the application the way I usually do by sending a quick reply “Thanks for thinking of me but I’m afraid I wouldn’t be interested in representing these names”. What does this Christian do? He replies with “There isn’t anything wrong with any of the names I submitted. Certainly they are comparable to some of the ‘quality names’ I’ve seen ‘represented’ on your site…so I guess I should just assume you are prejudiced against Christians / Christianity in general or maybe you’re just into porno. Maybe I should get RickLatonaHatesChristians.com”

Here’s one of my personal favorites. Someone submits bestofbabiesworld.com and wants me to list it in the mid x,xxx range. I politely decline. So he replies with “How about these? rickisnowaprimadonna.com, rickthinksheisnowanexpert.com, rickisfullofhimselfandotherthingstoo.com, rickyknowsbest.com, youcancallmedickforshort.com, iamsofullofmyselfthereisnoroomforyou.com and finally gofuckyourselfyouoverblownasshole.com”.

Now was that really necessary? The fact is that I have no obligation to accept any names. I’m running my business the way I think it needs to be run. I’m picky about which names I list and I try to make sure all of the pricing is reasonable. Do I make mistakes? Sure I do. I make them everyday! However, I think I’ve proven that I know a thing or two about a thing or two. Why would these people want to be my enemy?

One thing that I have noticed to be absolutely true is that on the Internet Everyone Knows Who You Are! I’m constantly finding myself doing business with people that I haven’t done business with in 10 years or more. You never know when you will need to talk to someone again about something new. Don’t be a dog because people will remember your actions.

I’ve deleted so many other good ones but I think I’ll add to this post as new ones come in.