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Woot

Typical Puneri (a native from Pune, India) attitude in business is a well known fact. An orthodox Puneri will disregard, disrespect and disown the customer. The customer will come to you anyway because there is no choice for the customer.

In today's Web 2.0 world, imagine what will happen if the same ideology is to replicated on the web by an American company, and yet generate business Happy. Yes, thats possible. Check out the website:
http://www.woot.com/

The tagline says - One day one product.
More interesting is their explanation of why they offer one product per day. Check it out:
http://www.woot.com/WhatIsWoot.aspx

Hilarious!! Isn’t it? All theories about worshipping the customer, listening to the customer take a backseat. All said and done, Woot still manages to do decent business of US$117.4 million (in 2007).
Sample this -

Question:
I see only one item, do you sell anything else?

Answer:
No. We sell one item per day until it is sold out or until 11:59pm central time when it is replaced (see next entry for details). However, each item we sell is in stock and typically ships within 2-3 business days.

Question:
I missed yesterday's item, can I still get one?

Answer:
No. Each woot.com product is discontinued at 11:59pm central time. That's that. Period. We may get more at a later date if we're lucky, but we offer no guarantees, we allow no backorders, and we have no waiting/notification lists. Too bad.

Go ahead and enjoy the full FAQs on:

http://www.woot.com/WhatIsWoot.aspx

 

From the horse’s mouth

We don't brag much about our design process. It is not a rocket science. Having said that, we believe in the culture of openness. Moreover, we haven't yet created anything groundbreaking to protect its intellectual property rights (IPR) :). We intend to share our findings, understandings, processes with the world and would like to get feedback on the same. It’s vital for us to understand the areas we need to improve. Potential and existing customers, design practitioners and students are requested to go through the following set of documents which define our processes, core services, white papers, etc. The benefit to use these documents is completely ours. Do get back to us on what do you think of our documents.

Coming soon...

1. Customer pre-engagement checklist
2. Minutes of Meeting in visual format
3. Before the vision-typing begins
4. A note to design managers
5. Web analytics - a primer

Getting Real

“Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application” – a book written by Jason Fried of 37signals is one of the most significant books one needs to read if you are in the business of software development.

Anyone who aspires to build a web startup, this is a must read. From conceptualizing to shipping the product to the web, be it hiring to defining product milestones, be it a teaser preview or Hollywood-type launch of your product, you need to understand the publishing your product to the web is a different ball game altogether.

Its worthy of our recommendation, go ahead & read it.

Here is the online version: http://gettingreal.37signals.com/