I'm currently an Orr Fellow at Sigma Micro which is an ecommerce software company. Our core busines is to sell software to small to medium sized businesses (usually they already have a physical store or catalog) so that they can start selling their products online. We also operate a few of our own websites with our system, and one of those is a clearance website called Last and Final. One of my responsibilities here, along with two former Orr Fellows who have stayed with the company, is to handle all the online marketing for our website.
You may have noticed that the Monday after Thanksgiving, which is now known as Cyber Monday, is a pretty big day for retailers alll around the country. Personally, I think it's much better than Black Friday because you don't have to deal with stuff like this.
I know I had a slew of emails from companies like Apple, Best Buy, etc. about their big deals. We didn't want to be left in the dust so we planned a big promotion of our own. I'll be short on the details, but the basic premise was that we were selling a very limited supply of Nintendo Wii's for a ridiculously good price...much lower than you could find anywhere else.
We promoted our plan quite a bit in our email newsletter and even got picked up by a few of the major "deals" sites. We made sure our website hosting was ramped up so that we could handle a big traffic spike...and then got ready for the big moment when we released the Wii's to our website at 12pm on Monday.
It wasn't a pretty sight (or site) when we realized that our server was down, and we couldn't access the website at all. Our customers of course were experiencing the same problems, and the site kept going up and down as they were hitting refresh and trying to put the Wii in their shopping cart to check out. Eventually people were able to get through the checkout process...the only problem was that the server issues completely threw our backend system out of whack and it took orders for a lot more Wii's than we actually had. We were pretty happy about the buzz we generated about our site, but now we had quite a few angry customers that weren't going to receive what they thought they ordered.
Anyways, the reason I'm telling this story is that it got me thinking that this episode is a lot like the Orr Fellowship. Now, before you start thinking "Oh my gosh, the Orr Fellowship sounds terrible" let me explain what came of the Cyber Monday experience.
First, we gathered a lot of valuable data about our ecommerce system. We figured out a better way to do the inventory check process. We also realized that our server was able to handle that many people on the site, but not that many people on the same page trying to check out the same item. We also got confirmation that our marketing tactics were pretty effective...enough to nearly crash the website. Sure we had some angry customers, but this gave us a chance to reach out to them personally and extend gift cards for their troubles.
As an Orr Fellow you're constantly going to get the kind of invaluable learning experience that we got from our promotion. When you work for entrepreneurial companies in Indianapolis, or any high growth start-ups for that matter you're going to go through a lot of trial and error. None of us here at Sigma had ever run a Cyber Monday promotion before so it's not like there was a 100 page manual on how to do it right. When you're part of an entrepreneurial fellowship, you're going to be put on projects that might feel uncomfortable because you don't know what you're doing. You might even be put on projects that you're not interested in or that you don't think you'll be good at. In these kinds of situations, everyone is going to make mistakes (just like we did by making some of our customers angry). But mistakes are often going to teach you a lot more than success. The fast growing companies that host Orr Fellows know that we're going to make mistakes.
What you learn in this trial and error atmosphere is going to make you that much better off for the rest of your career. We will definitely be prepared for Cyber Monday next year, and I know I'll be more prepared to take on even bigger projects through more lessons like this.
You may have noticed that the Monday after Thanksgiving, which is now known as Cyber Monday, is a pretty big day for retailers alll around the country. Personally, I think it's much better than Black Friday because you don't have to deal with stuff like this.
I know I had a slew of emails from companies like Apple, Best Buy, etc. about their big deals. We didn't want to be left in the dust so we planned a big promotion of our own. I'll be short on the details, but the basic premise was that we were selling a very limited supply of Nintendo Wii's for a ridiculously good price...much lower than you could find anywhere else.
We promoted our plan quite a bit in our email newsletter and even got picked up by a few of the major "deals" sites. We made sure our website hosting was ramped up so that we could handle a big traffic spike...and then got ready for the big moment when we released the Wii's to our website at 12pm on Monday.
It wasn't a pretty sight (or site) when we realized that our server was down, and we couldn't access the website at all. Our customers of course were experiencing the same problems, and the site kept going up and down as they were hitting refresh and trying to put the Wii in their shopping cart to check out. Eventually people were able to get through the checkout process...the only problem was that the server issues completely threw our backend system out of whack and it took orders for a lot more Wii's than we actually had. We were pretty happy about the buzz we generated about our site, but now we had quite a few angry customers that weren't going to receive what they thought they ordered.
Anyways, the reason I'm telling this story is that it got me thinking that this episode is a lot like the Orr Fellowship. Now, before you start thinking "Oh my gosh, the Orr Fellowship sounds terrible" let me explain what came of the Cyber Monday experience.
First, we gathered a lot of valuable data about our ecommerce system. We figured out a better way to do the inventory check process. We also realized that our server was able to handle that many people on the site, but not that many people on the same page trying to check out the same item. We also got confirmation that our marketing tactics were pretty effective...enough to nearly crash the website. Sure we had some angry customers, but this gave us a chance to reach out to them personally and extend gift cards for their troubles.
As an Orr Fellow you're constantly going to get the kind of invaluable learning experience that we got from our promotion. When you work for entrepreneurial companies in Indianapolis, or any high growth start-ups for that matter you're going to go through a lot of trial and error. None of us here at Sigma had ever run a Cyber Monday promotion before so it's not like there was a 100 page manual on how to do it right. When you're part of an entrepreneurial fellowship, you're going to be put on projects that might feel uncomfortable because you don't know what you're doing. You might even be put on projects that you're not interested in or that you don't think you'll be good at. In these kinds of situations, everyone is going to make mistakes (just like we did by making some of our customers angry). But mistakes are often going to teach you a lot more than success. The fast growing companies that host Orr Fellows know that we're going to make mistakes.
What you learn in this trial and error atmosphere is going to make you that much better off for the rest of your career. We will definitely be prepared for Cyber Monday next year, and I know I'll be more prepared to take on even bigger projects through more lessons like this.
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