Most businesses have 9-5 business hours.  It’s not necessary that you post business hours on your site.  And responding to customers during business hours may be difficult, depending on your day job, service or technology.

Why does this have to be limited to normal business hours?  Because emailing your customer at 9pm will give the impression that you’re a one-person show, or you’re emailing from outside the US.  If they think of it in a positive light, they may just think you have excellent customer service.

If there are customer inquiries that force you to check something in the database, it may be not be possible for you to do so during the day.  You could check this in the evening (when  you get home) and then send out a prepared email from your smartphone the following day during a break at work.

If you have a CRM you can log in to and check from your smartphone during a break, and then compose an email and send, then you may be able to handle most support calls during the day.  You may not be able to handle calling customers, but usually an email is enough.  For receiving/making calls while protecting your identity, read up on these:

• Get a Phone Number for your Startup
• Calling Customers from your Home

If you need to get back to a customer after hours and it can’t wait until the next day (like an emergency bug fix) then contact them and explain that you would have gotten back to them sooner but your office staff was out of the office for an event.  Yes, it’s a lie.  And no, I don’t do business this way, but I used to.  But it’s better than getting back to them the next day, especially for urgent situations.

Next post: What the fax?

Like any “real” company, you’re probably publishing a phone number for your customers.  For the stealth startups out there, and those who are running a business from your home, services like Kall8 or Grasshopper make this easy by providing an 800 number that can ring your home number or cell when people call.  you may be dumping these to voicemail and calling customers back later.  If so, you customer sees your home number or cell number on caller ID.  Doesn’t sound too good, does it? 

So how do you keep your real phone number anonymous and still your customers from your home or cell number?  Read on for the solution.

When I need to return a phone call (which is pretty rare because most people e-mail instead of calling), I use a site called BluffMyCall.  The service allows you to place calls from any phone, and the caller ID that is displayed is the number you specify.

To use the service, you purchase minutes (credits), starting at $10 for 60 credits.  Once you have credits, you use their form to enter the number you wish to call, a phone number you will use to make the call, and the number your wish to display on caller ID (see screenshot below).  Then they call you on the number you specify, and you’re connected to the person you wanted to call.  Since the call is initiated through BluffMyCall’s phone system, they control the caller ID display.  Fascinating.

This screen is from my account:

There are a number of other interesting options:

• change your voice (male, female)
• recording your call
• send straight to voice mail (the phone tag continues…)
• mobile application (for BlackBerry and jailbroken iPhones)

If you’re looking to protect the privacy of your phone number, this is the way to go.

Next post: making money in your business on day one

Today’s question: “We’re doing a datacenter move in order to handle more capacity.  How much of this should I tell the customers, and to what degree?

Answer: Communication with the customer on important moves that may impact their service is always a good idea.  You don’t want to get angry phone calls or email.  Now you don’t want to say that you’ve been limping along on one server that has been overtaxed for 4 months, because then you just look negligent and irresponsible, even though it’s true (you lazy punk).  But telling them there may be a little downtime and that it’s for the best will let the customers know you’re responsible.

This would make a good tweet on Twitter, a Facebook update, and blog post (do all three, many people may only be using one of these media).  Putting these notices on services outside the realm of your site is wise, because if your site is down for maintenance and there is no way for the customer to know what is going on, they may panic.  But if they can see a message on Facebook or Twitter while your site is down, then they can relax.  This is also a great place to tell them when it will be back up: “Taking longer than expected.  Another 30 minutes and service should be restored.”

Now as to how much detail… For a server move, you could put the basics:

we are improving our service to you by moving to a new datacenter that will allow us to provide a faster website and handle many more customers

is fine and enough.  But if you want to “geek out” a bit, you can add this afterwards:

Nerd note:

Our new datacenter is at Rackspace.  We’ll be rocking our own rack of 10 1U servers, each with 40GB RAM, 4 quad-core Xeons, with a NAS capable of 300TB of data, blah blah blah…

Hope you enjoyed this “Ask SND”.  If you have questions about your own Startup Next Door that you’d like to ask, contact me and you may be next.

Next post: how to call your customers from home

I discovered Earth Class Mail.  They offer a service that gives you a new mailing address, and any mail arriving at that address is automatically opened, scanned, and available for you to read/shred online.  It’s a fine service for constant travelers, recreational vehicle users, and others who are always on the go.  No need for the neighbors to collect your mail for you.

When I signed up in 2007, the pricing was $9.95/month, and I paid yearly.  But I had to cancel last December because the price had doubled.  The basic plan offered is now $19.95/month.  Here are the pricing details.

You can select an address in one of many large US cities, and you may choose a street addresses or a P.O. Box.  To me, a street address is more conducive to a business address.  Street addresses require an additional fee, based on the city.

You may have seen the company featured on MOJO’s “Start-Up Junkies” where they followed the company and its founder through their journey.

So why did I cancel?

I had come out of stealth, and my customers knew that I wasn’t a big company, so even though an address would have been nice to have, it wasn’t really needed to keep up the charade.  And over 2 years no one ever sent a letter.  It was nice having that address, though, in case someone needed to send me something.

Next post: why you should never see a credit card

I mentioned yesterday about a service that will record a professional voicemail greeting and phone directory for you.  Today I’ll go over a service that offers professional voice recordings exclusively.

Voice123 (homepage plays audio automatically) was first mentioned to me by Josh Guttman when we were preparing a product demo for Surphace s4 and were in need of a voice-over.  The service offers a wide array of voice actors who offer their dulcet tones to suit almost any purpose: radio ads, product demos, voicemail greetings, commercials, presentations, movie trailers, audiobooks, and more.

Search their talent database by voiced age, gender, languages (61 speak Italian), years of experience, etc.

The pricing depends on the project, but here is a sample of prices from their pricing page:

Something to keep in mind is that that the voice-over talent may charge more if your recording is expected to make you quite a bit of money.  A recording used in a nationwide commercial for a product will likely cost many times more than the same length recording used in a local commercial or voicemail message.

Depending on the voice talent, you may need to pay partially in advance, but in many cases you’ll pay on delivery of the final product.

Quote from Josh:

Voice123 is a great app for voice casting.  A niche market but extremely helpful and easy-to-use tool.

Stealth tip: If you want to hide your voice for a demo (I did this) it’s a good way to go.  It’s much better than using an audio tool to change the pitch of your voice (like I did – ugh).

Next post: rolling out your server

Back then, I was running other startups and didn’t want them to be tainted with the privacy hole I had left, so I gave them a new company umbrella name (ReadyPrompt) and kept everything separate.  I didn’t want anyone to track me back to the other web property, out of fear that they would discover that it was just me, and link me back to the mess I had made.

If you feel you need to do this too for your startup, you’ll need to make sure you have covered your tracks:

• private domain registration
• a different company name
• different mailing address
• different support e-mail
• separate phone number
• in extreme cases, a separate IP for your sites (putting your sites on different servers)

This is what they call “opsec” (operational security) in the Army (I was in there).  Don’t allow snippets of your activity out because an interested party can take these snippets and piece together your plan.

What you may discover (as I did) is that there are no interested parties that care enough to put the pieces together.  You’re not Apple, ya know.

Image courtesy USDoD

Next post: Exposition on the significance of the retweet

I’ve changed the privacy tag to “stealth”, and changed “Private Enterprise” to “Stealth Startups”.  This should lessen the confusion.

Next post: Cross-startup stealth

Back when I ran my startups under the veil of secrecy, I had to manage my secret identity, and did it pretty well.  This post continues in that regard for those who want to keep their privacy while running startups.

For those who have been reading about me a bit, you know that it’s just me and there is no office space or employees involved.  In order to keep up appearances that I was a large, capable enterprise, I made up a list of my companies and their “employees”.  Each employee had a special role and I would make e-mail aliases or e-mail accounts so that they could correspond with customers and third-party services.

Here is an example of the list, with e-mail addresses removed:

PhotoGrinder & ReadyPrompt
Support: Alex
Dev: Trent
both use [email address] or [email address]

zKorean
Support: [email address]
  Daniel Weber – weekdays
  Kristina Leonard – nights and weekends

Product Manager: Mike Kauffman (product demo)

Administration: Leslie Bird [email address]  (referenced by eFax)

Marketing Coordinator: Spencer Croft [email address]  (email campaign signup at MailChimp)

President: ?

As you can see, it doesn’t need to be fancy, just needs to have enough info to keep your story straight.  It also helps you manage a lot of e-mail addresses for fake employees.

I suggest that if you’re going to use this approach to not make an e-mail address or alias until you need it, in order to keep it a manageable list.

If you’re reading this and thinking that this is just awful, there are good reasons to hide. Read more about that here and here.

Hope this helps those of you running stealth startups!

Next post: making great site mockups

I had registered with GoDaddy, and they offered the option to make the registration private for an extra fee, about $9 per domain. What they do is register your domains, but set the registration contact information as Domains By Proxy (DBP). They then connect your GoDaddy account with DBP and you’ll have a separate login for that.

So when someone looks up the WHOIS information for your domain to see who owns it, they get Domains By Proxy’s contact information. If the person wants to contact you, they send an e-mail to the contact e-mail address and DBP will forward it to you. I think they also scan for spam before forwarding.

If you manage dozens of domains, this can become expensive quickly. But that’s the price you pay for privacy.

Next post: I’m a startup rancher

As I mentioned in a comment yesterday:

Your business can be completely legitimate and honest, and still be closed-door style.

There are a number of reasons to run a business closed-door:

• Sometimes you’re working on a secret project that could have nasty repercussions if your boss found out
• Some software companies will “own” anything you build in your off-time, in assumption that you built it using their intellectual property (I’ve heard)
• You need to keep privacy for your family’s safety
• You don’t want the attention
• You need to keep the appearances that you are a large company in order to build customer trust in the solidness of your company
• You need to keep the appearances that you are a large company in order to leverage business deals

The closed method is a spectrum, with degrees of how much information you give out. I’ll be giving advice on protecting your privacy using the closed door option from time to time, since I’ve had experience with it.

A few of the many things I’ll cover to help protect your privacy are special private methods of:

• domain registration
• setting up a phone number
• getting a real mailing address
• keeping your story straight

So please be patient and I’ll get to them over time.  I don’t want to bore others with 2 weeks worth of posts about it.  So I’ll interweave them in the postings over time, tagging them with the stealth tag and the Stealth Startups category.

Are you going closed door? If so, what are your reasons?  You can comment below and post as Guest.

Next post: choosing an optimal business name