In a previous blog post we spoke about the growth and performance of the oDesk Customer Success Team, and the progress we have made this year.

As we experienced a doubling of our case load to nearly 10,000 tickets and chats submitted per month, we also recognized the need for improved internal tools to help us achieve operational efficiency, and meet to overarching goal of better serving our customers. After an exhaustive search of more than 15 help desk software solutions, we have selected the one that we feel best meets our needs, as well as the needs of many of our users.

We are pleased to announce the selection of Zendesk as our internal case management solution. Zendesk’s open architecture and rich APIs were a key factor in our decision. We find the SaaS solution elegant, easy to use and learn, and very robust. We look forward to an early 2010 launch of a new customer support portal, which will make use of the Zendesk platform and enhance the experience for all users.

We believe so much in the strength of the winning team of oDesk and Zendesk that we are also thrilled to announce a deeper partnership that includes a new Zendesk Group on oDesk. Within this new group, oDesk buyers will find tried and tested customer service agents, admins and integrators who are experienced with Zendesk. These approved professionals can help transform your help desk and, more importantly, your business. The strong pool of customer service experts available on oDesk combined with the increasing demand for this type of work ensures the ongoing success of this group – we look forward to great things to come from our partnership with Zendesk!

Moments ago, the odometer at oDesk’s oConomy rolled over. Our providers have earned over $100 million dollars on oDesk – a fantastic feat that has all of us here in Menlo Park cheering.

This rate grows every day, and there will be more work done on oDesk this month than on any other online work marketplace. Period.

In addition to passing this tremendous milestone, oDesk continues to grow 3-5 times faster than any other online work marketplace.

So congratulations to our incredible providers, and to the buyers who have hired them. You guys are changing how the world works!

Contracts are most likely not your favorite part of freelance work. Hammering out a watertight, legally binding agreement can be a bit of a distraction when what you really need to do is get some work done for your clients. So your choices are: operate on a handshake, purchase an off-the-shelf contract, or employ a lawyer to draft a custom one.

While we aren’t lawyers, and wouldn’t presume to tell you how to write your own work contracts, there are a few items that may be worth considering. Below are some of the terms that can cause heartburn when drafting a contract, and how we address them in the oDesk Marketplace User Agreement.

Don’t Stiff Me (Services and Fees) – Determining what work is to be done, and how much to be paid is most likely the crux of your contract.
oDesk’s take: oDesk encourages you to be upfront about your rates, and guarantees payment for hourly work. Providers should act in good faith to complete the desired work, and buyers are obligated to pay for hours spent (within the agreed upon weekly hours) or the agreed fixed price.

I won’t be back. (Termination) – An escape clause can be a touchy subject. Addressing the possibility that the project or working relationship won’t work out can cast a dark cloud over an agreement, but it’s necessary that both parties be protected.
oDesk’s take: Hourly assignments may be terminated by buyer or provider at any time, and the Buyer is obligated to pay for hours worked prior to termination. Fixed Price Assignments may only be terminated by mutual agreement.

Who owns what? (Work Product and Buyer Deliverable) – Assigning ownership of Intellectual Property is important. Who own the source code? What happens if your client hires a third party to modify it?
oDesk’s take: Providers do not retain Intellectual Property rights. Any copyrightable works prepared by Provider in connection with an Assignment for Buyer shall be “works for hire.” Any materials that the buyer provides along with an assignment remain property of the buyer. The provider is obligated to destroy any copies of that material after an assignment is completed.

Don’t borrow without asking. (Pre-existing Intellectual Property in Work Product) – Reinventing the wheel isn’t necessary, but being upfront about what work you are building upon, is. Sure, you can build an e-commerce website at breakneck pace if you develop it based upon an off the shelf CMS, but does your client know about the licensing fee? What about the payment module for their merchant account, are you going to purchase it, or roll your own?
oDesk’s take: If providers wish to use 3rd party software (or other IP) to complete an assignment, then they need written consent of the buyer. This includes open source software. It is assumed that providers will delivered unique IP that then becomes property of the buyer.

Including the Details? (Entire Agreement) - Using your proposal as the basis for, or as an exhibit in your contract can be great for insuring that all the details of project are included, and that your obligations are clearly outlined. Any agreements made through oDesk are considered part of the service contract for that particular assignment, so it’s important to be clear about expectations with buyers/providers, but rest assured that clear effective communication will translate to your assignment’s Service Contract.
oDesk’s take: The Service Contract outlined above, plus any agreements made between buyer/provider inside the oDesk Marketplace are the full terms of the Service Contract for that assignment.

Be sure to also check out the oDesk Policies Page, it provides detail of the information given above, as well as some useful insights in to how to make the most of the oDesk Marketplace.

oDesk Ranks No. 110 on the 2009 Inc. 500 with Three-Year Sales Growth of 1,470%

Inc. Magazine announced the results of their 28th annual Inc. 500, an exclusive ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies. Inc. editor Jane Berentson said of the list: “If you want to know which companies are going to change the world, look at the Inc. 500. These are the most dynamic, fast-growth companies in the nation, the ones finding innovative solutions to problems, creating smart systems, and inventing products we soon discover we can’t live without. The Inc. 500 list is Inc. magazine’s tribute to American business ingenuity and ambition.”

We’re proud that oDesk has been able to join this elite group of companies, and we could not have done it without the fantastic buyers and providers in our marketplace, and the efforts of our phenomenal global workteam. Read the details of our ranking on the Inc. 500 here – and pat yourself on the back. We couldn’t have done it without you!

Here at oDesk, we really enjoy getting visitors. We have a nifty office space, lots of food handy, and you can challenge one of us to a game of ping pong or foosball if you’re feeling lucky.

Recently, we had a nice visit from Paul Sedacove, one of our affiliates and principals at Oggetto Web.  The 17 providers at Oggetto have worked 9,000+ hours on oDesk in the last ten months with a handful of customers.

Paul had great things to say about the help he received from our staff (nice job, Ron and Kendra!), and  Paul mentioned that our platform was ‘perfect’ and had a few very minor suggestions to improve.

Paul left us with a book on Russia, which he signed, ‘from Russia with love’.

We were also visited last week by Elliott Ng, Co-Founder, VP of Marketing at UpTake and founder of CNReviews.com. Elliott brought his video camera, and chatted with our CEO Gary Swart about outsourcing, oDesk, and the global impact of remote work.

The video is also available at The China Business Network at: http://www.thechinabusinessshow.com/special-features/gary-swart-ceo-odesk/2009/07/

Going to be near Menlo Park? Want to stop by and tell us about your oDesk experience? Let us know – we’ll show you around (and maybe even let you win a ping pong game or two)!

Even though the economy has been bad news for pretty much everyone everywhere—unless maybe you’re a bankruptcy lawyer—we see encouraging signs for small and medium-sized businesses in our network. We also thought we’d highlight what that means for providers.

• Providers — We’ve seen dramatic growth in the oDesk provider community, with more than 26,000 new providers joining last month alone. The good news for a buyer is that there are now more than 150,000 providers offering their talents to you. For a provider, the opportunity is to continue to apply for jobs, write highly targeted cover letters, and refine your profile and portfolio, etc.

• Buyers and jobs — There are still more and more job opportunities each month on oDesk as the buyer community has also seen record growth with more than 11,000 new jobs posted each month. The average job size is about 370 hours, a sign of how much companies are seeing value in the oDesk approach. About 27,000 new buyers joined in 2008.

• Value of services — The value of services rendered via oDesk nearly tripled in 2008, and in November we passed the $50 million milestone. More than 2.4 million work hours have been logged this year. These hours show the health of the online workteam concept and our community.

• Categories — Web development and other technical categories continue to explode (hello, iPhone app developers!). We also saw the new writing and administrative support categories grow about 1,600 percent.

• Online workteams are going mainstream, and the mainstream is taking note — oDesk made it to the top of Google trends and made a global media splash, with the BBC, the Wall Street Journal and TV programs talking to oDesk buyers, providers and spreading our message.

• Larger companies/larger teams — we have seen a growing number of larger companies using oDesk. Existing buyers have also increased the size of their teams, hiring providers of different disciplines (tech, administrative, marketing, creative). To support this growth, we released the team admin page and the new staffing console, and we added invoicing/check payment for larger organizations.

Not bad, eh? Individual businesses are tightening their belts, but for those who see the merits of a scalable workforce, this is a great time to be looking for talented providers. The current business climate is drawing more employers to the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of flexible online workteams—a concept that oDesk buyers and providers have been making better every day. And for the providers among us, market yourself well, and remember that performance—and the feedback it generates—is more important that even in this climate.

We wish you continued success in the new year.

We’d like to thank all our buyers and providers for an enormously successful 2008. We hope 2009 brings success to everyone in the oDesk community.And most of all, we’d love to hear how oDesk figures into your plans for a prosperous 2009! If your New Year’s Resolution includes oDesk, send an email to stories@odesk.com to tell us all about it. You could win an oDesk T-Shirt and be featured here on the oDesk blog.

The oDesk Team

We’re already excited for the new year!

We’ll be hosting the first meeting of the Silicon Valley Outsourcing Group on January 9th at 6:30 p.m.

Join us for this Outsourcing Roundtable and share your outsourcing experiences. We’re looking to gather IT professionals and business leaders in the area to discuss the benefits, challenges and best practices of outsourcing.

Never outsourced anything in your life but you just finished Tim Ferris’ Four Hour Work Week and you’re curious about the buzz? You’re welcome to attend, too!

RSVP on our Meetup.com group or check out our event on Facebook. We’ll be serving food and drinks, so come by and learn a little about how outsourcing can improve your company’s performance.

Hope to see you there!

Check out
The Silicon Valley Outsource Group!

When people think of outsourcing, they often think of India. Or Russia. Perhaps the Philippines, or Bolivia.

When oDesk was founded, the idea was to connect small- to medium-sized businesses around the world with providers worldwide who could provide IT services at competitive rates. All around our site are images of globes and mentions of the words “global,” “international,” “worldwide.” Certainly a great number of our providers are international.

So it came as a surprise when we looked at recent data and discovered that U.S.- and Canadian-based providers are the fastest growing group on oDesk (when these two countries are added together).

How did we measure this?

We looked at the number of providers working over a set time period grouped by country. When we last looked at this data, the U.S. held spot number two in terms of the number of timesheets submitted by providers. Add the U.S. and Canada together, and bam, you’ve passed India.

What’s interesting, though, is then to look at the number of hours providers worked each day. Our providers in Asia continue to log in over 50% of the total hours logged each day, while U.S.-based providers log a lower percentage. What this suggests is that while providers in the U.S. are quickly joining our network, they are likely supplementing their incomes with jobs from oDesk (and thus not working a full workday on our site), while providers in Asia, including India, are more likely to be working full-time for oDesk projects.

Still, as U.S.- and Canadian-based providers continue to accrue feedback and work history on oDesk, I wonder whether they will slowly begin to switch to becoming full-time freelancers and we’ll thus see a growth in the number of hours logged by North American providers. We’ve already got some full-time North American-based freelancers on our site — take Keith S., for instance — who’ve left typical jobs and have never looked back.

What do you think? Do you see U.S. as the next outsourcing hub?

It’s that time of the year. People are putting up the Christmas trees, hanging lights outside of their homes, shopping like crazy (or not)… and reviewing their plans for next year.

Yep, it’s time for companies to plan for 2008. Every business, large or small, looks for ways to improve their product and cut costs. While browsing through Business Week, I came across a great article on the topic: Ten Penny-Pinching Ideas for 2008 by Gene Marks. Among his suggestions (geared toward small businesses):

- Set up remote access (we think this is a great idea, too). If someone’s on the road or wants to work from home, they’ll have virtual access to the office.

- Create alerts. Remind yourself of when someone hasn’t paid, when you need to pay bills, when you need to check up on a project or meet a deadline.

- Invest in smartphones (particularly if you have remote workers). Keep in touch no matter where you are (a blessing or a curse, depending on how you look at it.)

Some suggestions we would like to add:

- Outsource your company’s T-Shirt design. oDesk recently needed some new designs for our swag, and rather than bog down our Marketing department, we hired a provider to do the job. About 15 hours and $150 later, we had seven designs to choose from and our provider is now building us a custom Printmojo store.

- Do your own marketing. Check out the Duct Tape Marketing Blog for ideas and tips. Hire a provider to create professional looking HTML newsletters or write press releases and then post them yourself on sites such as this one.

- Outsource your customer service. Staffing a live chat system like phplive.com can be a burden, but plenty of stay-at-home moms and dads in the U.S. have excellent English skills and are looking for work. Consider bringing in reps at $8-$20 an hour to meet your customer service needs.

- Create a blog. Not too familiar with the blogging world? No big deal. Find a Wordpress developer to set up your blog and customize your theme. Content is always king, so make sure you find a writer who really knows your subject.

Good luck on the planning. We hear eggnog and a little bit of mulled wine can go a long way on helping you get through the holidays

Every once in a while we hit a milestone at oDesk that makes everyone in the office stop and say “wow”. This morning we noticed that the 25,000th provider was going to join the network. We watched as the numbers approached this important milestone…

And here she is, our 25,000th provider:

Samantha K., welcome to oDesk!

Samantha and our extensive network of providers will find a variety of cool and interesting jobs on oDesk. Just browsing through the job posts Buyers have put up in the last few days, I found a job listing for a music video, one to write courses for airplane pilots and one calling for PHP/MySQL/HTML experts to create a graphics design website for a banner and magnet company. It’s neat to see all of the creative ways people are using our site.

To give you a sense of our growth, approximately 80 providers join our network each day. Our base of affiliate firms is also growing: currently, about 1,500 providers in our network are part of affiliate firms. In the last 90 days, oDesk providers have made nearly $3.6 million.

But we’re really not just about the numbers. People working in the U.S. and abroad have found job opportunities they would have likely not found locally and Buyers have seen great results. Here are some of the feedback comments Buyers posted on our site today:

“Shibu B. (of the Affiliate Firm Cabot Solutions) did a great job on this project and produced all deliverables on time. We’ll definitely work with him again in the near future.”

“Kostya is an excellent PHP developer and I would be happy to hire him again.”

So good luck job hunting, Samantha (and providers 25,001, 25,002…etc)!

Dmitry Sokolovksy, our QA master, is also a bayan guru, which is a type of accordion.

He recently brought his accordion to the office and played a bunch of his favorite songs. Some really impressive finger work, I’m sure it helps in typing fast on the computer

Check out this video:

I hope you noticed:

The scary cat pictures
My South Asian bobble-head
The wink

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Abid Mohsin

Gary and Brian talk to Robert Scoble about how oDesk works.

Learn how oDesk can help you get hired:

• Interview – 17 min 48 sec
• Demo – 7 min 49 sec

Interview:

Demo:

Here is the blog post on Robert Scoble’s blog. Many thanks to Dave McClure for introducing us to Robert.

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Abid

Who ever said engineers and poets don’t mix?

Enter Matt Romaine, an oDesk fan in Tokyo, with a 10-stanza ode to oDesk.

Here’s an excerpt:

Each 20 minutes, a screenshot appears,
of the desktop for the guy I just hired.
At the end of my day, I can view on a page,
the events of his day that transpired.

But oDesk knows that there’s more to manage,
and throws some treats in the mix,
a vertical bar beside the photo,
counting all his mouse clicks!

So props to oDesk for a wonderful service,
without which my project was hopeless.
Just know that you’ve got at least one fan in Japan,
“making geeks rich and famousâ€?

Thanks Matt for the kind words. Not to nitpick, but oDesk Team captures a screenshot every 10 minutes (not 20).

More on how it works here. Newbies can see Team in action in our video tour, or they can explore the application in our demo.

Our co-founder Stratis, on his recent visit from Greece, shot, edited, produced and uploaded this inside peek at our Menlo Park offices.

oDesk – the Menlo Park office

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Abid Mohsin

oDesk @ Web 2.0 Launch Pad

For all the folks in San Francisco this week for the Web 2.0 Conference, look for oDesk to be demoing on the Web 2.0 Launch Pad tomorrow, Tuesday November 7th.

oDesk was selected as one of 13 Launch Pad companies, from over 250 that applied for this year’s conference. (must have been the flowers and chocolate chip cookies we sent to both John Battelle and Mike Arrington

Look for us to make a few notable announcements tomorrow, and if you’re at the event we’ll be happy to give you a cool oDesk Making Geeks Rich & Famous t-shirt.

Our founder Odysseas wrote this email to the oDesk Engineering team. It offers his perspective on using webcams while working on oDesk.

From: Odysseas Tsatalos
Sent: Friday, October 27, 2006 10:11 AM
Subject: our teamroom

Take a look at our teamroom.

https://url.odesk.com/t0lw

Every morning when I login – seeing our team, seeing the faces of our team makes me smile.

It makes a huge difference to make our extremely distributed team become connected.

When i see myself without the webcam shot I feel loosing my identity in the team I i feel like a computer and not a person.

Thats why even though I work from a laptop and I need to carry a webcam wherever I go – I keep on trying to carry it around.

Maybe one day Dell laptops will come with built-in cams just like these cool apple machines do…

We were talking with Stratis that opening up the odeskdev stream of teamroom/snapshots/webcam to the public could become a strong driver for the adoption of the webcam, memos etc.

Our own best practices can help create momentum and make everybody’s workplace better.

odysseas

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Abid Mohsin

Mr. McClure and I were working on creating logos for some upcoming advertising spots. We needed 125 x 125 picture logos, similar to the ones we put on our sponsorship at GigaOm.

The two logos we ended up using for GigaOm were:

Random aside, between these two logos, “so web2.0 it hurts” out-performed “your geek army” by 2:1, see the Google Analytics screen snap: https://url.odesk.com/28ny

For the new spots, we wanted to come up with other funny taglines. Here is a list of the random ones we came up with:

The winners were “crappy marketing, great code” and “making geeks rich and famous”, like our t-shirt tagline:

We’ll see which one comes up on top for click-through-rate

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Abid

Last month oDesk won an SMB20 award from PC Magazine for innovative use of technology in small business. To be honest, most innovation comes out of necessity — both startups & small businesses need to be scrappy and frugal if they plan to survive.

In a followup online webcast with Jim Louderback, our CEO Gary Swart gave a brief description of several online services oDesk uses internally to help run our business (see slide 4 below). Gary then gave this summary of 7 habits oDesk practices in choosing & using online tools (apologies to Stephen Covey).

lately it’s become easy to find inexpensive hosted solutions that are quite powerful, and can make a real difference for startups and other small businesses as they’re getting rolling. not everything works perfectly just yet, but tools like QuickBase, Skype, Wordpress, and Google Docs can make life easier for folks on a budget.

(note however some free solutions may not survive the next few years of online competition, so it’s probably important to be able to export your data just in case!)

oDesk pix here

Last Friday’s Late Lunch 2.0 was a smashing success, as documented in photos here and here, also nice photos on the PR 2.0 blog.
Thanks to Mark & Terry for bringing folks by to checkout oDesk, and to Jeremiah for the terrific Long Tail writeup on oDesk. A great time was had by all

Geeks. Food. T-shirts.

What more do you need to start a Web 2.0 Revolution?

How about a Late Lunch 2.0 celebration this Friday at oDesk?

oDesk has invited Mark, Terry, Jeremiah, and the whole Lunch 2.0 crowd over to our office in Menlo Park for a massive geek2gether from 4pm-6pm with the best & brightest in Silicon Valley. We’d love to hear about any new projects people are working on, show off some of our latest bits, and just shoot the breeze and help you geeks chow down and fatten up for the fall season.

We’ll also be celebrating several w00ts from the past few weeks:

• We raised $8M from Benchmark Capital
• We won an SMB Top 20 Award from PC Magazine
• We were named one of 13 LaunchPad companies to demo at the Web 2.0 conference

and most important of all:

• We just rolled out Righteous New oDesk T-shirts

(pictured at right)

Want to join us? Great! Just RSVP over on the Lunch 2.0 site, then drop by Friday & pickup one of these soon-to-be-collectors items (free to first 50 folks who arrive).

See you then!

PALO ALTO, CA (September 27, 2006) — Today oDesk (www.oDesk.com), an Internet startup that provides a marketplace for hiring global technical talent and web-based tools to manage remote teams, announced an $8 million Series B investment led by Benchmark Capital. All previous oDesk investors also participated in the round. The new funds will be used to expand market growth and accelerate product development. Kevin Harvey, general partner at Benchmark Capital, will join the oDesk Board of Directors. A top-tier Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Benchmark Capital has been an early investor in leading technology companies such as eBay (EBAY), Handspring (HAND), Juniper Networks (JNPR), Red Hat Software (RHAT), and MySQL.

[read the rest of the oDesk Benchmark financing press release]

Adrian Bye of DM Confidential just spoke our CEO, Gary Swart.

Here’s the interview. Enjoy.

Our friends at mobcode have made another post regarding oDesk. Very exciting that the Work Diary and hourly work model are making remote work relationships more efficient in terms of cost and rewarding good work.

Their post: oDesk is better than RentACoder for small graphics projects

The post reminded me of Logoworks, a place to get your logos, website and other corporate ID materials made quickly and cheaply (indeed Elance has also relaunched itself along those lines, i.e. fixed cost graphics and website design packages). When we revamped the www.odesk.com website, I did a small (the $299 option) logo project with Logoworks to come up with interesting versions of the oDesk logo. Not to redesign it, but use the mockups for inspiration… and also to see Logoworks from the inside. Overall, their site is well designed and the user interface is not confusing. Logoworks gave me initial concepts from 3 designers. I had to choose one of them to continue, and had 2 more revs with that designer.

However, like mobcode, I wish I had more interaction than just a text field to write my thoughts, and I really wish we had a real-time design session. For example, the original oDesk logo was created by Alex Black/turing studio in a 2 hour power session, remote but real-time, with a few people in the company here.

To wrap up, here’s a gallery of some of the logo proofs from Logoworks and Radiopuffin, the design firm that helped us with the new website:

In the end, we stayed with the same much-loved logo, with different colors.

Old logo:

New logo:

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Abid Mohsin

“The office is out people, get over it and out of it.”

Wise words from Nick, the Code Cowboy over at NothingButNoise.

Nick shares our vision of a world where people can work from anywhere they want.

At oDesk, some of us work in an office, while some work at home. Some work in the US, some in Eastern Europe, and some in India. All of use the oDesk platform to work collaboratively. We spend lots of time on Skype and Google Talk.

Nick also has some interesting comments about working with offshore teams, keeping a schedule, and dealing with non-technical customers. Enjoy.

Call me map crazy, but I really like some of the Google Map mashups coming up. I had mentioned Wikimapia in my earlier post. Another one I just found out is quikmaps.

You can create a map and save it and show it on your website. I created a map for directions to our new offices. Check it out below (might take some time to load).

Click on the markers for the information.

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Abid

Technology companies need tech writers—to write help files, user manuals, and back-end documentation. Some tech writers also write web content and marketing material. It seems natural then, that oDesk Buyers working with developers would eventually look to oDesk for their tech writing needs. And they already have! The figure below shows the number of tech writing job openings over the last 4 months (click image to see large version).

CNNMoney.com ranked technical writing as the 13^th best job in America this year, with strong growth and high salaries. Here is a link to the CNNMoney.com report. oDesk has also experienced a recent surge in provider applicants with tech writing experience. As of today, there are 155 tech writers in the oDesk Provider Network, 55 of which have joined in this month alone.

Click here to search for a tech writing job opening.

Click here to search for a tech writer to hire.

Hi guys,

We are about to move to our new offices in Menlo Park, right off the 101 highway (see links to our location below). We have completely run out of space in our current offices. People have been forced to use conference rooms. When I joined about a year ago, we had an even smaller office space, and about 5 of us were stuffed, elbow-to-elbow in a small conference room about the size of 2 cubicles. We called it the Boiler Room.

I ran across this cool mashup of Google Maps to create a map-based Wikipedia. Check out Wikimapia.org

You can search for the tag for our new office location: odesk

Or click here to go there directly.

Here is a Google Maps link.

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Abid

We at oDesk love to serve entrepreneurs. Many oDesk buyers are entrepreneurs, building companies with far-flung teams of talented oDesk providers. As they take their products to market, they’d do well to heed the advice of Joe Kraus, CEO of JotSpot. He makes some great points about how entepreneurs building enterprise applications have a lot to learn from the consumer internet model.
As an aside, we use Jot as a wiki internally. We think it is a great product, though we’d love to see them improve the WYSIWIG editor and add gmail-style autosaving of drafts.

Chad Blodgett is one of the types of buyers we get most excited working with. He’s an entrepreneur. And he’s working on a great cause- helping people make healthier choices through information packaged in an compelling way.

He is a recent convert to oDesk, and comes to us with his share of outsourcing nightmares. His experience with oDesk so far has been top notch, though.

We wanted to point you in his direction because he runs and excellent blog that other entrepreneurs can learn a lot from. Check out this post about tips for improving customer loyalty. Or this thoughtful take away about what can be learned from another entrepreneur’s success.