Cory Watilo

FolioHD went down this week due to some server problems. I happened to be in Paris, approximately 5,642 miles away from where the servers reside in Los Angeles. This tends to be a problem when you are physically nowhere near the data center and when you can't fix things remotely. The remaining two days of my vacation were spent on spotty, unreliable wifi, emailing with customers and working with vendors and contractors to bring the site back online.

During the process, I received hundreds of emails from customers. I would lump these customers in three categories:

• Those who asked when their sites would be back online. Totally understandable.
• The entitled customers who tell me how I am hurting their business, that this is unacceptable, they are infuriated, demand refunds, and tell me they will be going elsewhere. (I actually referred many of these customers to a competitor of ours.)
• And then, few and far between, are the empathetic customers who are compassionate, more than patient, and understand we are working as quickly as we can to fix things.

When something doesn't work as expected, it's normal to become irritated or angry. (I remember when our electricity was out for about 3 days back in 2002. I wrote an angry tirade to Southern California Edison on my blog at the time.)

But having experienced being on the other side of an outage now, I figured I'd share a little bit about how I've spent the last 48 hours.

• Found out about the downtime, began to diagnose the issue
• Started answering customer emails
• Diagnosed the problem, weighed possible solutions
• Sent out a mass email to recently active customers telling them we're working on the issue
• Decided on a solution, started calling vendors over Skype (from Paris)
• Replied to all sorts of customers asking for status updates
• Selected a vendor, asked a very kind friend to pick up some hard drives from our data center and drive them across town to the data recovery facility
• Coordinated the purchase of new hardware to be overnighted to the data center
• Discussed status updates throughout the night with our data recovery team as they worked to save data
• Continued responding to angry emails
• Flew home
• Landed, picked up hard drives from data recovery facility
• Drove them across Los Angeles to the data center and plugged them in
• Got the site back online
• Emailed active customers to inform them of the news and explain what happened and what was going to change to make sure this didn't happen again
• Started issuing refunds and credits

The last two of days of my "vacation", I got maybe 3 hours of sleep in total. I slept with my phone in-hand, waking up to every vibration to check on status updates from our data recovery team and to triage anything urgent.

Throughout the whole process, I received several emails that were quite encouraging:

"I really appreciate your upfront and clear communication regarding this incident. Your professionalism does not go unnoticed."

"I am certainly glad that you all were able to get FolioHD back I'm action! Although it was tough, you all did an exceptional job with keeping us all informed. I am more than sure that from this conquered hurdle, FolioHD will reach new heights that will align and even exceed what you all have envisioned."

"Great communication through out your down time ... and I can tell from your email above that there are genuine, interested people at work behind the scenes, which prompted me to put this email together. Keep up the good work and all the best for 2014! "

Too often, people think of websites as machines and not people. What encourages me about these emails is that these customers actually understand that every harsh word spoken to a company is actually read by someone who has invested blood, sweat and tears into the product, and instead of using their words to tear down, they chose to be positive and understood this fact. I totally understand the frustration of those who rely on us and those who speak their mind about it, but when it comes down to it, I hope they can understand that I am just as frustrated as they are, and that their harsh words only take me away from trying to fix the root of the problem. They don't see the 22 hours days people like me put in to get things back in order.

The next time you email somebody who runs a website, keep in mind that you're dealing with normal people. Speak with civility and respect. Your words are far more likely to be heard than those who act entitled and fly off the handle.

As a business owner, I cannot count the number of times I am solicited for products or services, or by recruiters looking to work with us. Over time, you learn to tune them out just like we all do with junk mail.

But last week at Preact, something far different happened - far superior to cold calls and cold emails. We received a packet on our doorstep from a private banker at Wells Fargo. This was a cold outreach from her, but she had taken the time to learn about our company and do her research before contacting us. And the way she did it was genius: finding things important to us and mentioning them. Case in point: on our Company page, there's a reference to our near-religious love of Taco Tuesday. So what does she close her note with? "I <3 TACOS! Maybe we can meet Tuesday?"

This is the way to build relationships. Even if we're not in the market for a private banker at this point, some day I will be, and you know who will come to mind first.

Something similar happened recently after I posted a job online. Most applicants reply to a detailed job posting with a simple canned response. But I received an email from a candidate who took the time to go line-by-line in my job posting to respond to everything I wrote. In fact, he took so much time and put in so much thought to his email that I actually felt obligated to respond immediately and thank him for taking the time. Even if he wasn't the most qualified person, I'd feel more inclined to give him a closer look simply because he took the time to do something to stand out.

And when it comes to selling yourself, your product or your service, standing out is the name of the game. But amazingly, it isn't rocket science. Take the time to be personable and to do something meaningful and you'll have a leg up on the competition.

Dirty political tricks are finally starting to affect normal people, and I couldn't be more excited about it.

Because Republicans won't pass a bill to fund the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration decided to "make life as difficult for people as we can" and has barricaded public monuments, national parks, views of Mount Rushmore (you can't even pull over to the side of the road to take a picture of it - see picture below), and more recently attempted to block access to the ocean in Florida. That doesn't much sound like the "hope and change" we were sold on. To me, it sounds like politics as usual - maybe worse than we've ever seen before.

For years, the American people have lost more and more freedom and prosperity to a type of tyrannistic government that looks very similar to the government that America was founded to escape from in the first place, but it hasn't really affected the average, every day person... until now.

Now, the Obama administration has even decided to block access to public property that isn't actually funded by the government.

"You do have to wonder about the wisdom of an organization that would use staff they don't have the money to pay to evict visitors from a park site that operates without costing them any money."

This week we also saw the Affordable Care Act exchanges launch. Americans finally began to see first-hand that government healthcare plans are costing 2-4x more than their existing plans with less coverage, and people are pissed.

The government is starting to interfere with people's daily lives, and Americans are finally starting to wake up. I just hope we do something about it before it's too late.