Category : Interviews
Manufacturer :

Posted by: Major on 2001-04-23 00:00:00

Motive: In an effort to give you a better idea who the individual retailers/vendors in our Overclocking Equipment Pricelist are, we've decided to do interviews with all of them. There will be about one interview a week, so it'll take a little time to get through all of the (currently) 68 retailers. But we'll be sure to include both the well known and the not so well known in our coming interviews. Most of the questions will be the same in all the interviews, but if the retailers have anything specific, we will ask about that as well. First out is an interview with Humphrey Chen (aka Da HeadNut!) who run PCNut.com. Here's the interview: You recently moved across the country, why, and how did it go ?

In search of a better quality of life and weather of course, especially after a nasty stormy winter we have had back in NJ [Ed. New Jersey] (I was so glad to give away our snow shovel)! Also, cost of new home, warehousing, and labor is much cheaper in NV [Ed. Nevada]; and we are closer to most distributors & manufacturers we do business with in CA [Ed. California]. Besides the fact that Henderson is the fastest growing city in the US. For a good reason, as people (that we have met so far) are wonderful here, and the local economic development agency bent over backwards to accommodate our relocation to their city. How did the move go? Overall I guess it went okay. Moving both your home & business across the country has proven to be hell. It cost us much more than anticipated, and little details like having all utilities [Ed. gas, electricity and water in the new home] turned on were forgotten by yours truly! And thanks to our car movers (AutoLog.net), our cars didn’t arrive until almost 3 weeks after we got here; God knows where they took the cars to before bringing them here.

PCNUT.COM was founded back in January 1996, but primarily as a high-end custom system builder. However, as our business grew, we started to resell name brand components as well, to increase our purchasing leverage with various vendors & distributors. In the summer of ’98, the magical Celeron 266/300A chips surfaced in the market. They proved to be very overclockable, so we decided to offer a pretested OC Combo to our customers. Being one of the pioneer vendors to offer pretested combos, word got out very quickly; and we have been known to be the premier OC shop since then.

I am not arrogant enough to say that what we do and offer here nobody else could; as there are other good resellers out there as well, offering similar products to ours. However, I can safely say that we have been doing this longer than most, offering top notch products & services, and can do it as well if not better than others. We are often the first in the market to offer particular hot chips, combos, and products. As we devote quite a bit of resources in testing & product developments. We have always delivered more than we promised & advertised, unlike some (copy cat) vendors out there. J We would rather absorb the loss by not sending out marginal products, as our customer’s satisfaction is our number one priority.

All over the country and world, and we have customers from various walks of life. Our customers ranging from a newbie, average Joe, to super techno geeks. From small business, to Fortune 500, government agencies, major universities, as well as military. I guess our average customer is someone who cares about quality of products they purchase, the level of customer service they receive from vendors, and can place their trust in the vendor they deal with.

To continue the growth of PCNUT Computers, Inc., by expanding our product offerings, hiring the best technical staff. Seek out related business opportunities, and perhaps spinning off some specialty shops in the near future (stay tuned!). We have also received numerous emails and phone calls from Nevada residents, urging us to open a retail chain in the state; which is being considered as well.

We do not sell anything that we will not use ourselves. Although small, my staff and I are all hardware geeks. Therefore, we test each product we carry thoroughly, often have them tested by our affiliated hardware review sites as well; before deciding if we are going to carry the particular product. We source some products from distributors, but we are trying to increase direct sourcing from manufacturers to reduce cost, shorten the time to bring new products to market, and offer direct feedback to the manufacturers.

As a smaller shop with lower purchasing volume, we focus more on the quality of products & services; therefore, we can’t afford to price-match against some of the vendors on the net. Besides the fact that some of the low price vendors often like to make their money by charging outrageous amount on shipping.

Four right now, and hopefully when economic condition improves, we can afford to hire more staff. Besides my lovely wife Cheryl, who is a sales & marketing pro; rest of us are geeks, we love what we do, and it shows in our quality of products & services.

Absolutely! I will bet that we have higher percent of return customers than any online computer shop out there. Over 60% came back year after year, for their upgrades, or to buy new parts/systems for their families and friends. We also have quite a few regulars (that orders all the time), who will only shop with us for their computing needs; even though we don’t carry everything they want (but we will special order for them).

It’s a wonderful community that I have established friendship, relationships and work with for a long time. Some of those webmasters were PCNUT customers, or friends from the net, before their sites were even launched. So they have dealt first hand with what kind of products we offer, the type of person I am, and how we take care of our customers. All of them work extremely hard, to bring us the latest news, previews and reviews from computer industry, and we are honored to be able to support their efforts the best we know how. Also, as a small internet-based computer shop, we have very limited marketing budget, and can’t afford big-buck advertising like the big boys can. Therefore, we have to rely and count on word of mouth referrals (from happy customers), as well as links and plugs from reputable review sites, to keep us alive. It benefits them to send their viewers to shops they trust, and it benefits us to have well read & informed readers as customers.

Well, it’s 1AM PSF [Ed. Pacific Standard Time], and I am still working. Although we do have regular office hours, 5 days a week; my staff (without asking) often works 7 days a week, countless hours per day. Personally, my work hours have been between 12-14 hours/day, 7 days a week since day one. The price to pay for being your own boss I guess. I reply to about 3000 emails per month, and handle most sales calls during business hours.

We have a dedicated tech support guy based out of the Chicago area, which handles most of the support requests via email and phone (voice mail system). He usually works around the clock, 7 days a week; a very thankless job, and he is very good at it.

Well, IMHO there are way too many OC shops out there, but there are only a handful of them including us that have been around long enough to know all of the scoops, be trust worthy, and be around in 12-24 months. It is a well informed marketplace, so I trust those shops that do not take care of their customers will go out of business soon enough. I am not too concerned with their existence, but more concerned with the unfortunate customers who are victims of such shops. For the rest of the industry, I believe there are enough pies to go around for all reputable shops.

We are almost there on the site revamp, just going through final beta testing of our new shopping cart system, and making some last-minute changes before we launch. Also, I have briefly mentioned about a spin-off of PCNUT.COM, which will be announced soon I promise. The current economic and market condition prompted us to be more cautious than aggressive with our expansion goals.

My system you mean? It’s nothing too leading edge, as I spend 99% of my time doing email and cruising the net; so anything more would be a waste. The core system consist of a P3-700 overclocked to 1.05GHz, 256MB of Mushkin Rev. 3, Leadtek GF2 Ultra 64MB, IBM DeskStar 30GB, Pioneer 16X DVD, Yamaha CDRW, SB Live, ZIP, Altec speakers, and Iiyama Vision Master Pro 450 19” monitor. Both my techs got more computers than I know what to do with.

Yes, I would like to thank all customers, friends and affiliates that have supported us over the years; we wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for your support. And for others, who haven’t given us a try, please do! We may be nutty, but we offer top-notch products and services, and you can check out our reputation on ResellerRatings.com.