Trouble in PPP Land

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Over the years I've had the privilege of working with various companies. Each one had its unique style of management. One was a copier company whose owner considered himself a shrewd businessman. He turned out be nothing more than a shady salesman. He would make promises to the customer about their newly purchased copy machine. I would then have to go in behind him and explain that the machine was not capable of the features promised. I must have done a decent job in satisfying the customer's concerns because we rarely had a machine returned. I worked for another company that must've had a plaque hidden somewhere. If you could have found it, it would have read "Why test? That's why we have customers." In each case, the support people worked to do a good job, the development teams did everything they could to ensure a quality product. In the end, it was upper management's decisions that would sabotage all that good work.

After this week's chaotic adventure with PayPerPost, I'm wondering if something similar hasn't taken place. Right now, PayPerPost support and development teams are doing everything they can to fix the fiasco caused by the software rollout done earlier this week. There is a lot of talk on the forum about the troubles bloggers are having. But no one is really addressing why such issues would be allowed to happen in the first place. Here's my guess: It seems that PayPerPost management has made promises of segmentation features to advertisers. In order to secure the advertiser business as quickly as possible, they released features that had not been properly tested. As a result, many bloggers were unable to post about advertisers' opportunities. It almost seems as if management was thinking along the following lines: we now have a large base of bloggers , some that cover the more demanding requirements of our advertisers (known as segmentation). If we delay rollout of segmentation, we may lose advertisers dollars. If we go ahead and proceed with the rollouts now, many bloggers won't be able to post but we have enough that will be able to. We can fix any problems as we go along and have the advertisers business immediately.

Could this be the case? PayPerPost does have some serious investors behind it now. Perhaps they had to decide between doing everything right with a delay on ROI (return on investment) or to have a quicker ROI by using a system that is somewhat functional. On the one hand, they risk losing advertisers who are their source of income. On the other hand, they risk losing bloggers who are their source of expense. Despite the wailing and gnashing-of-teeth from frustrated bloggers, a couple of things are obvious:
- When PayPerPost makes promises to advertisers, they are committed to those promises regardless.
- PayPerPost now has a sufficiently large base of bloggers that will allow it to weather any disastrous impacts to that base.

I have no idea what went on in Florida. I have no idea why they didn't release one feature at a time to ensure quality. This post is just my pure speculation about a business that I want desperately to succeed. I could be wrong. I often am. Then again, a hundred years from now, who is going to remember this event? Certainly, not me. In a thousand years, I doubt anyone will care. For now, this is definitely an Adapt, Adopt and Improve situation for the bloggers and for PayPerpost. And I selfishly want all of us to survive this.