"Was weg ist, ist weg"

Issue 011 - 2019-04-08

Lesson: When you lose, put it out of your mind and move forward

Today's lesson is too terrible for words. I've told a few of my friends what happened, and each of them was incredulous. How was it possible? How could such things happen to their friend Heinz?

I use Infusionsoft as my CRM and my Java Specialists website is hand crafted with Java / JSP / Servlets / etc.

I have a lot of marketing strategies. This puts me in front of tens of thousands of programmers every month.

Here are some figures:

• Slack Team: 8k
• Teachable School: 9k
• Udemy: 4k
• Twitter: 10k
• Java Newsletter: 70k
• Entrepreneurially Newsletter: 1k
• Fitness Challenges: 1k
• Webinars: 2k
• JCrete: ??k
• Partnerships and conferences: ??k

When someone sends me an enquiry, I send it to my SPAM submission filter. It prevents obvious SPAM submissions. I do not want to use the "click on all the images with bridges" filter. Someone sending me an order should get through without proving they are human. Thus the SPAM filter is off in Infusionsoft for all enquiries. I do all filtering on my side. I daresay that my filter is very accurate.

Last summer, I noticed a slow-down in enquiries. Since a lot of my customers were on holiday, I chalked it up to the time of year. As the months progressed, with still a yawning silence on the enquiry front, I was beginning to wonder. Could it be the looming Brexit? Or were my US customers nervous to buy anything not made in the US of A?

Last Tuesday a new client sent me an email. They had tried submitting an order via my website. I had not responded. I tried the enquiry form. It said everything was fine. But it did not go through to Infusionsoft. My heart sank. I frantically checked my system. The last time I had received an enquiry was 23rd July 2018. 8 months of missing enquiries. Big big ooooops.

Technobabble: Infusionsoft plays around with 308 error codes. 308 is a permanent redirect using POST. One page will give back a 308 and then circle back and for the exact same page give back a 200 - success. Java does not play nice with pages like this. It sometimes works and other times not. In my case it was: not. I spent last Tuesday fixing my enquiry forms and adding a bunch of safeguards to prevent similar outages.

The weird bit is that I didn't notice the absence of these enquiries. I was still getting enough orders to keep me plenty busy. Those customers determined enough would email me after a couple of days of no response.

My friend Kirk asked me, "so how many enquiries did you lose?" I counted 167 that had gotten past my SPAM filter. Over 8000 hadn't. Before Infusionsoft I would write ALL enquiries into a database, regardless of quality. I turned that off a few years ago. Didn't think it was necessary anymore.

167 enquiries. Let's assume that even 10% of those were for in-house courses. And let's put an average price tag of 10k on each. Um, no, let's not do that.

My mother grew up in the war. They were refugees for a while and had to leave everything behind, except for the clothes on their backs. She taught us over and over "was weg ist, ist weg". Translated this means "what's gone, is gone". There is no point looking back at what you lost. Too bad. Move on.

I am disappointed that I let down these 167 folks who took their time to write an enquiry into my form.

That said, my life since last July has been fantastic! Instead of running to and fro like a headless chicken, I have spent quality time with my family. We have had enough income from the various marketing avenues to survive. My email address is easy to find. I accept messages from anyone on Twitter. Some even found me on JavaSpecialist.slack.com. Also, people are kind-of used to enquiry pages not working. I'm not the only one with this problem.

Have a fantastic day, and of course, week. I'm heading to Voxxed Days Milano on Friday. Looking forward to seeing that lovely city again.

Kind regards from your friendly entrepreneur

Heinz

Living Entrepreneurially Archive

• 012 - Crashproof Your Business
• 011 - "Was weg ist, ist weg"
• 010 - Fear of Rejection
• 009 - Quality, Reliability, Be Nice
• 008 - Be Prepared
• 007 - Riding School
• 006 - Inner Dynamo
• 005 - The Fuel Light is ON
• 004 - "I filled it in exactly as your father did"
• 003 - The Espresso Machine Guy
• 002 - "Escape is Giving Me Bad Dreams"
• 001 - The Cleaning Fluid Injection Device

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