smugblog: Chris MacAskill

The last people you’d expect to read a book about diet would be thin, Coke-drinking, bacon and burger-loving young geeks.

But The China Study rocked the house, getting half of SmugMug’s 25 people and 3-dozen of our dearest friends to completely change what we eat. I didn’t dare blog about it for a year because who knew how many people would grow tired of our new diets and quit? Or gain back lost weight…

Amazing, but none of us have. Andy lost 50 pounds and kept it off. Several lost 25, everyone feels better, blood tests improved, and our diabetic friend had his blood sugar drop enough that his doctor reduced his insulin.

I got so fascinated I read a dozen other books and maybe 30 research reports. The books that moved us most were:

Eat To Live

Healthy at 100

The Omnivore’s Dilemma

The bottom line is most of us now eat mostly plants and some fish. Whole plants, not refined. It sounds awful but my 4 kids and their spouses uncovered yum recipes and our tastes adjusted so we no longer crave the stuff we once ate. We’re not hungry, don’t feel deprived, and we all feel we have the best Christmas and Easter dinners ever.

Well… All but Mark. He’s not so fond of veggies yet. And our dogs think we’ve gone insane.

What made The China Study different from a thousand diet books we had always ignored? Data. And compelling peer-reviewed science from people with real scientific stature published in the leading journals.

It’s the most important book I’ve read in 10 years.

The most fun I ever had as a parent was taking Don and a vanload of his friends to The Empire Strikes Back when it opened.

They thought we were going to a Disney movie. They thought Don’s parents were wimping out on Empire because they couldn’t handle it.

When the music started and the curtains opened, Don screamed, pumped his fists, and gave a wide-eyed mouth-open look of delirious joy to his friends.

Which is how I felt when Chris Michel sent me this photo of Don with his lifetime hero, George Lucas. I know that expression… He’s trying to contain his delirium.

How many photos from business magazines can you remember? Execs fuss over their ties, their hair…and their photos are forgotten in a sea of sameness.

Not this one:

I heard Jeff Bezos (Amazon’s CEO) say, “The only real problem in life is to be ignored.” I love this shot of Ahnold because it’s different. You can’t ignore it.

We didn’t think of that when we dyed our hair green and snapped a photo in 2004. We just celebrated being profitable & loving our jobs.

Talk about a photo that didn’t get ignored… We just saw it on page 6 of Business Week:

Thank you Fast Company (and photographer Phillip Toledano) for a great shot of Ahnold. You made my photography-loving day.

My heroes are entrepreneurs. I went to work for NeXT years ago because Steve Jobs was CEO and I wanted to live what I’d read in the books.

What could be more exciting than building Cold Stone (yum!) from scratch?

Never did I imagine that our story would end up alongside the stories of my heroes in a book like the Chicken Soup series.

We’ve been so busy pouring our hearts into SmugMug and doing the right thing for customers, we hardly had time to stop and write about it. But I’m really glad the other entrepreneurs in this great little book did, because their stories are fascinating.

To any SmugMuggers interested in knowing more about how the company started than you can find on our about us page, send email to help at smugmug dot com with your address and we’ll fire off a free copy.

Research firms like InfoTrends say the #1 thing that influences consumer choice of photo sharing sites is whether they’re free. Makes sense.

But a curious thing happened during the last few years: while impressive free sites from great companies like Sony, Canon, Microsoft, Epson, & Adobe lost momentum or closed, sites like Flickr, SmugMug and Webshots—who charge—have grown like weeds.

It’s true: Flickr and Webshots have free versions, but they are very limited. Flickr free accounts let you display just 200 photos.

Photo sharing sites like PBase and Fotki converted to pay years ago and when they did they joined the 1,000 most trafficked Internet sites.

What unintuitive things are at work here?

Here’s the cycle:

1. Getting a free account is anonymous. Posting gross content is so very easy…

2. So companies hire screeners to view every photo and delete bad stuff. Yet some leaks through.

3. The leaks offend advertisers and partners, who flee.

4. They offend users, who drift away.

5. They cause some corporations and ISPs to block access to the site, frustrating users.

6. They discourage good brands, who don’t want their brands tarnished with offensive content, and don’t want the liability. They quietly de-emphasized the site.

Q. But aren’t Kodak and Snapfish doing well and aren’t they free?

Indeed. But they aren’t about easy public sharing like Flickr and SmugMug. You can’t go there and search for photos. They’re about ordering prints & gifts (which they do well).

It wasn’t easy to understand why Yahoo auctions, which were free, bombed—while eBay auctions, which are pay, thrived. Until you saw the content posted on each. Then it was clear.

There are strong parallels with photo sharing.

SmugMug’s mantra for our help desk was shamelessly stolen from Mark Twain, who wrote: “Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”

We do our best to astonish our customers by answering help email in minutes.

We do it by hiring people who know and love SmugMug and its customers. They work full or part-time, from our help center in Salt Lake City, Utah, or from their homes in their jammies.

Ivar, for example, works from Utrecht in the Netherlands. His specialty is helping customize. Barb Gates from Boise, Idaho, has the digital photography fever and came to us by way of our community.

Ivar and Barb are customers who have the passion. They both work (play?) part-time, from their homes, to the delight of many SmugMug customers who receive quick, friendly and knowledgeable advice from them.

Our customers come from every walk of life. What binds them is their passion for life’s memories.

If helping them while sprawled on the couch with a laptop sounds like a dream job, why not drop help at smugmug dot com a line to get more info?

About SmugMug.

That much-read and hilarious blog of Silicon Valley, Valleywag, somehow put me in a hottie contest against Philip Rosedale, who’s very popular and actually maybe a little bit hot.

But you should vote for me anyway! If I make it past this round of voting, they’re threatening to use a really scandalous photo in the next.

In big-time consumer press, you’d think the big brands with big PR departments would steal the show.

But what if the little, family-owned company with only 200,000 paying customers had something completely unique that really mattered?

Fortunately, thanks to our customers, we do: themes & customization.

Many thanks to families like Lee Shepherd’s, who designed several awesome themes and made their family site a model of great customization — and the Wellmans, Jenny C, Dan Porter, and the Knoll Family, whose sites convinced understandably skeptical editors that we should be listed among the biggest names in photo sharing.

And thanks also to customers like Mike Lane, who has been a huge help with themes & customization. We would have used Mike as an example, but it was a consumer magazine who wanted consumer examples.

Making cool 1-click customization available to consumers isn’t easy and my hat’s off to everyone who made it so great.

Once upon a time I founded Fatbrain.com (because great minds think a lot), took it public, and later sold it to Barnes & Noble. It sold books to geeks, along with other stuff geeks needed like Sun and IBM manuals, training CDs, etc.

What made Fatbrain as good as it was is that Amazon was the mother of all competitors, mainly because Jeff is an animal — a very talented one. We had to give it our all to compete.

You might think SmugMug and Amazon to be strange bedfellows after all that competition in my past… Actually, it makes us great partners because I know up close and personal just how great they are.

I’ve been using Amazon S3 for my own personal hobby, Adventure Rider — a forum with 3 million posts and 1500 people online at any time. Why set my own server on fire serving images when we can set Amazon’s on fire? They’ve been incredibly reliable and fast.

Which is why Don has had so much luck putting S3 to work on SmugMug’s 500 million images.

Oh. My. Gosh. If you haven’t tried Dan’s Chocolates, you haven’t tasted True Decadence.

A wonderful customer suprised us with a Dan’s box with this message:

You can send a photo on the box top, so they lifted our photo from the Aboutus page:

A note from Dan warns of conspicuous consumption. It happened to me before anyone else knew the chocolates had arrived…

I have no connection to Dan’s Chocolates other than I’m newly addicted.