This is a weblog by the i like totally love it team about cool products, company news, entrepreneurship, features and more. You can email us at contact at iliketotallyloveit dot com
What I am finding very interesting is that even with the large and predominant feedback button on the side of our site the number of private emails we are getting on a daily basis outnumber the number of public feedback post made to getsatisfaction.com.
It seems more people would prefer to have a private conversation with us then to add their ideas, questions, problems or praise publicly. I would have never imagined when we created our getsatisfaction account to better manage customer support that visitors would still prefer sending us a private email.
What makes it even more shocking is that our email address is not that easy to find. It is hidden on the about us page under our snail mail address.
I’m rethinking our getsatisfaction support solution and have started playing with a ZenDesk trial account. Our getsatisfaction days maybe numbered especially if it is going to eventully cost us $900 a month to use support.iliketotallyloveit.com.
As a more recent addition to the iliketotallyloveit team, it’s my privilege to start posting on the blog with five products that we loved this week.
Commemorative finger puppets
1) “Dead is the new Black”
Commemorative finger puppets, depicting six well-known figures of public life who passed away in 2008 (Heath Ledger, Yves Saint Laurent and Charlton Heston, amongst others). And since the new year has been here for some time already, you can get them now for $75 instead of $90.
Read & Roll
2) “Read&Roll”
The website behind this product is Turkish but the functionality of “Read&Roll” comes across in any language. Some space on the cupboard or a simple stack of magazines work probably just as well - and yet, we love acknowledging that this product finally lets you store magazines where they are really needed.
The adhesive plaster industry has long offered cute teddy bears and dinosaurs as decoration for kids, so why should grown-ups be limited to the boring skin-tone ones? Exactly, and this is why you can now properly tend to smaller cuts and wounds sustained in the daily fight for survival. And for those moments where the pain is just too much: a free toy is included in the metal tin to help you be strong.
Never Gonna...
4) “Rick Astley Loves This T-Shirt”
While Rickrolling seems so 2008, feel free to dress for the occasion with this t-shirt. In any case, it’s one of the best memory hooks for lyrics you’ll find.
In a past internship, I compiled company brochures about twice a week. The enjoyable part about that actually was packing them all up in dozens in a cardboard box and wrapping it in sticky tape like a pro with a tape gun in the end. So when I read Vat19.com’s definition of “Severe Shipping Envy Syndrome”, I knew that not only am I affected but I also desperately need one of their mini tape guns.
Thanks for your fantastic submissions - having such a great community makes working on iliketotallyloveit that much more enjoyable.
As our team and my twitter friends know, I’ve been obsessed with project management software lately. I’m looking for a better way to collaboratively get things done, especially now that we have 4 people in different parts of the world and we are about to bring onboard a new programmer.
The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done about three years ago and it had a dramatic effect on my productivity. I must admit, I read the book and it did nothing for me. It was only after the second reading six months later that I really got it.
The big paradigm shift in my thinking was to work backwards from a desired outcome, e.g. send out our first newsletter and then mind map to create possible tasks to successfully reach that outcome, e.g. compile a master list of our members.
GTD for an Individual
Since reading Getting Things Done, I’ve created a system within the Outlook/Exchange/BlackBerry ecosystem and it works fantastic for me as an individual. Sure I get the daily; you should get an iPhone. My answer is typically, I write tons of emails and update tasks, calendar events and even memo’s on my blackberry hourly. I admit the web browser is hands down better on the iPhone and I’d love to learn how to play stairway to heaven on that whistle flute.
My dilemma, along with hundreds of other groups, is that I can’t seem to find a way to transfer this working backwards from a desired outcome into a team setting and continue to use my personal GTD method on Outlook & BlackBerry.
GTD for a Team
Currently we are using SharePoint (click here to see an overview video) as a file hub, message board, task list and wiki. It works great as a meeting place for the team but there is no way that I know of to create outcome based projects like you can in BaseCamp, GoPlan and tons of other project management software. With half of our team on a Mac the negatives of SharePoint are starting to out weight the one big positive; seamlessly integrating with Outlook on a PC.
GTD Experiment
My goal is to build a successful team to help more people find cool stuff, not force everyone to work in the same environment as me, so I have a new idea for the team. Let us use three different project management software methods for the next month. The only thing I am going to hold out on is that we continue to work within the GTD outcome based project method. I’ve already selected SharePoint and ProjectPier as two of the 3 software we are going to test. I will let the team decide on the Third.
The goal is to see where the team gravitates most naturally towards.
We’ll keep you updated on how this little experiment is going and would love your feedback.
Create a document to give any possible candidate a clear vision of our needs. I’m a huge fan of no surprises.
Compile a list of possible candidates that we’d like to reach out to.
Then late last night, while I was searching for a podcast I once listened to about how large merchants like Modell’s have implementated the longtail philosophy, I found these two gems by the co-founder of 37 Signals Jason Fried speaking at Loyala University in Chicago.
He describes exactly what we are doing. Perhaps it’s because I’ve read Getting Real when it came out and it seeped into my unconscious.
After watching those two short videos, do you know any interesting programmers that should be on our our radar? Feel free to link to them in the comments.
Today I moved into a new office space in the historic Mitte section of Berlin. This neighborhood has an amazing vibe. The streets are peppered with interesting shops, young designers, cafés, restaurants and theaters.
It is going to be exciting to build our company alongside other internet startups and be part of the thriving Berlin dot com scene.
As an American that grew up during the cold war, being able to walk to the Brandenburg Gate where Ronald Reagan & John F. Kennedy challened the status quo and made history is especially inspiring.
Like everybody these days we look back at the past twelve months. Without further ado, here are the top 15 products of 2008 on iliketotallyloveit.com (in no particular order):
I love it when a new member, in this case iSimone, submits a unique product that I wish I found and added first but didn’t.
Here is a condom case by Italian Designer Alessi. I didn’t know there was such a thing as a condom case, but it think I know someone who is getting this in his stocking this Christmas.
