brinking.

The Case for the Fat Start-Up

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:39:39 -0400

The blogsphere has been serving up a healthy dose of obvious for the last couple months. So it’s easy to recommend this counter-trend article from Ben Horowitz.

Blik Wall Decals

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 11:05:00 -0500

Blik Wall Decals:

if you don’t work with awesome artists who can decorate your walls like this, try Blik.

Are you building for Google or Facebook?

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:52:00 -0500

Since the beginning of the web, search engines have represented the center point of a users experience with the Internet. I think (and I’m not the only one) that this long-standing trueism may no longer hold. This hasn’t happened since the web overtook AOL, Compuserve, and others, so of course there are many skeptics. But in December Facebook had more traffic than all the Google properties combined. And today the Chronicle wrote about how mainstream news sites are seeing, for the first time, more traffic coming from Facebook than Google.

Being “downstream” of Google has never been contentious - you build a web page and you need to show up on search engines because that’s how people find things on the Internet! Being “downstream” of Facebook has always carried a lot more baggage.
With Facebook, you hear comments that you would never hear about the general web. Things like, “this category is really just for late stage companies,” or the concept of “social network fatigue.” Like there is “web fatigue” or that a category on the general internet would be closed off to a new, innovative, startup. That’s ridiculous.

Of course, the tricks of the trade that worked two years ago have changed, but that is pretty much true everywhere. This was really brought home when a fellow entrepreneur mentioned the other day that Google makes it near impossible for startups to enter a category in SEO. Due to the way Google values “link-aging” and massive sites linking to each other, incumbents are at a massive advantage. In addition, thanks to the mass number of keyword arbitragers, Adwords is no longer the low-cost targetted channel it used to be.

So just for fun, let’s look at what is actually different when you build with Google (ie search) versus Facebook (ie social networks) in mind.

If you’re building your product for Google:

Customer Acquisition - Google adwords, a highly competitive market largely saturated
Activation (getting a unique user) - Google accounts or opensocial, both of which have done relatively poorly in our tests.
Viral/Organic - Search engine optimization, an opaque and constantly changing “primary” channel for potential organic customer growth. Difficult but possible.
Retention - Nothing particular to Google. Search engine optimization?
Revenue - Optionally opt for Google checkout, which has been a mediocre product so far.

If you’re building your product for Facebook:

Acquisition - Facebook ads, a less expensive, less competitive market with better targeting by demographics. Although for strict “intent” like ecommerce purchasing it can underperform. For games like ours it’s a no brainer.
Activation - Facebook connect or authorization flow of fb apps. We saw activation jump by 4x via typical email/password.
Viral/Organic - Feed & invite optimization (viral, viral, viral!), an opaque and constantly changing “primary” channel for acquisition. Very much analogous to SEO, but with more control in the hands of product builders. Although more difficult than two years ago, a much better market to be in than SEO.
Retention - Internal bookmarking, games/app dashboard. Thin but they’ve got something.
Revenue - Optionally opt for Facebook payments. Early, but we’ve seen good results in their alpha and their team has been very responsive.

Here’s the way I see it. Lots of tactics work no matter which you are building for. You can ask for an email address on Facebook or the web. You can charge with paypal or credit cards, etc. It still boils down to whether you are building a great product people want, and that they want to pay for.

My experience in a previous startup selling consumer products at retail has made me think of any “platform” as ostensibly a channel for users. The caveat to all of this is to be careful about how reliant your are on any single channel, whether Facebook or Walmart. I’ve heard of a single Google recalibration to page-rank knocking traffic by 30% or more, and I’ve heard similar about Facebook.

But that doesn’t always mean the most open channel wins, it is often the opposite. The iPhone is much more strict than Android, yet you would likely still pick the iPhone because of the growth of that platform. And the iPhone platform is much more onerous than Facebook in most regards. If you are focusing on “growth” (and who isn’t) - Facebook can’t be beat in the current ecosystem.

The 2009 Whersies

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:47:00 -0500

The 2009 Whersies:

Moments like this make me appreciate the culture our guys have built at Conduit.

langer:

“We have a mailing list in the office referred to as “whereis”, a list everyone on the team emails with status updates if they’re going to be out of the office or leaving early or otherwise away from their desks.

Josh, our VP of business development, just compiled all the whereis updates of the calendar year, and the results were pretty hilarious.

Hands down the greatest work email I’ve ever received.”

Read On

"I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be..."

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:27:00 -0500

“I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all.”

- Author Leo Rosten.

I wish I had this committed to memory for all the times a fellow startup guy complains about how “tough” it is to have a job where they are in a startup, building things they believe in, with people they respect, but have some such problem like the lack of unqualified success. It’s Xmas, take a moment to be thankful, then get back to building.

Hi, My Name Is Mike And I Was A FishVille Addict I’ve never really understood why games as an...

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 10:38:24 -0500

Hi, My Name Is Mike And I Was A FishVille Addict

I’ve never really understood why games as an entertainment medium elicit this kind of cultural shame.

When I was 13 I got really into comic books. I started spending most of my money on it, perhaps all of my spare money. I was showing up at the comic book shop the day a new issue came out. I worked at a comic book store for trade and maniacally collected every issue of my favorite series. It took no more skill to read a comic book than to play Fishville, but it was fun to lose yourself in that world.

It was called a hobby, and it was fun even if the serial nature of the books (”Tune in next week to find out how Batman gets out!”) was meant to keep me hooked. It’s not smoking, or drinking. It is entertainment.

When a person gets into other entertainment mediums he’s a movie buff, music buff, comic book buff, or a sports fan. Think about the pride people have in how much they love music. Somehow people who play games a lot get some kind of shame and then label it a crazy addiction. I’m not sure I really understand or care to understand the cultural elitism.

Don’t worry Mike, you clearly liked having those fish taken care of, and felt bad to let them go to waste. A little escapist nurturing now and then is perfectly fine, I won’t judge.

Goodbye Droid, I'll be Back.

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:52:00 -0500

I bought my first Android phone the day the G1 came out. It lasted three days.

I bought the Motorola Droid and it lasted almost a month, until I finally realized I just couldn’t do it over breakfast with fellow former Droid owner Bijan last week.

First, what is better:

Email, for Gmail users, is the best experience on any phone. Also Calendar, Maps, Google Listen (I love podcasts including TED and TAL), Google Voice, and several others are just better than anywhere else. I also found Android innovating where I wasn’t expecting. Such as a feature to tell you exactly what percent of your battery is being used by what app, or the ability to return purchases from the App Store (ahem, Market) within 24 hours.

The killer (as in dead) feature:

However. There is something horrifically and terribly wrong at the task management level of Android. What you never want happening in any user interface is to initiate an action, and have nothing happen. In a mobile phone, that is even more critical - especially when you wait 10 seconds and then are met with “Force Close?”

How often does this happen? In my few weeks with the Droid it was happening several times daily. Often when doing something as simple as typing out an email there would be intermittent freezing. I disagree with Stewart Alsop’s overall characterization that the hardware is close but the OS doesn’t work — but I absolutely think he nailed the worst thing of all. After four days I picked my iPhone back up and knew whenever I clicked or scrolled it would respond and that makes a huge difference.

That wasn’t the only thing. For instance, apps were generally unpolished, the keyboard is useless, the battery cover falls off every ten seconds, and someone should tell Motorola that no one wants a masculine phone. Even guys want something sexy, a sports car not a Hummer.

But as I was returning my Droid I picked up an HTC Droid Eris and found that it felt great. Also, the HTC TouchFlo approach added all the OS-level UI polish, and some base apps (like Twitter) that I would have wanted. But, alas, HTC has not yet released a Droid phone with a keyboard.

But if HTC, or someone else (Google perhaps) releases an Android phone, with a keyboard, and software updates can manage to keep the thing from hanging then I’ll be back on Android for good.

(ps - do I have to return the t-shirt that arrived today?)

Music Hack Day Boston was one of the better little events I’ve been to in a while. Mostly...

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:06:12 -0500

Music Hack Day Boston was one of the better little events I’ve been to in a while. Mostly because it actually felt like people were getting things done, there was soldering and coding and deals — it felt like the opposite of a chatter-fest. I was happy to have been able to contribute in my very minor way by speaking on a panel about Starting a Music Business.

For those who run events, you should chat with Jon Pierce and the rest of the group about what they did, or read Anthony’s little sum-up of the event.

How To Measure The True Stickiness (And Success) Of A Facebook App

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:05:00 -0400

How To Measure The True Stickiness (And Success) Of A Facebook App:

Just wrote a piece for Techcrunch on predicting the success of a product, the over-dependence on virality, and the nefariousness of Best Buy — all in one compact little post. Plus charts!

What Batman can teach startups

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:56:00 -0400

A little while ago Brad Feld turned me on to the book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Basically, it’s a book, about comic books, that is about entrepreneurship.

I have no idea if this passage is going to translate for those that have not read the book, but it is as good a piece of startup advice at the early idea stage as you’ll hear. The context is that the two main characters, Joe & Sammy, are discussing what kind of superhero to create in the heady days just following the launch of Superman. To translate, think about that energy around creating a social network a few years ago, or a social game right now.

“And no matter what we come up with, and how we dress him, some other character with the same shtick, with the same style of boots and the same little doodad on his chest, is already out there, or is coming out tomorrow, or is going to be knocked off from our guy inside a week and a half.”
“So…” Sammy said. “So…”
“How? is not the question. What? is not the question,” Sammy said.
“The question is why?” Joe asked.
“The question is why.” Sammy said, ”Why is he dressing up like a monkey, or an ice cube, or a can of fucking corn.”
“To fight crime, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes, to fight crime. To fight evil. But that’s all any of these guys are doing. That’s as far as they ever go. It’s the right thing to do, how interesting is that?”
“I see”
“Only Batman, you know… see, yeah, that’s good. That’s what makes Batman good, not dull at all, even though he’s just a guy who dresses up like a bat and beats people up.”
“What is the reason for Batman? The why?”
“His parents were killed, see? In cold blood. Right in front of his eyes, when he was a kid. By a robber.”
“It’s revenge.”
“That’s interesting.” Sammy said, “see?”
“So we need to figure out the why.”
” ‘What is the why.’ ” Sammy agreed.

It’s not the how. What is the why.

"When we were building Flickr, we worked very hard…a lot of what we then considered “working..."

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 09:09:00 -0400

“When we were building Flickr, we worked very hard…a lot of what we then considered “working hard” was actually “freaking out”. Freaking out included panicking, working on things just to be working on something, not knowing what we were doing, fearing failure, worrying about things we needn’t have worried about, thinking about fund raising rather than product building, building too many features, getting distracted by competitors, being at the office since just being there seemed productive even if it wasn’t — and other time-consuming activities.”

- Caterina Fake - Working hard is overrated - Sept 25, 2009

Startups are hard. They require an insane amount of hard work and stress. But I like how Caterina calls out the difference between freaking out vs working hard.

(via bijan)

"What about iTunes? Doesn’t that show people will pay for content? Well, not really. iTunes is more..."

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 09:07:00 -0400

“What about iTunes? Doesn’t that show people will pay for content? Well, not really. iTunes is more of a tollbooth than a store. They offer a convenient list of songs, and whenever you choose one they ding your credit card for a small amount, just below the threshold of attention. Basically, iTunes makes money by taxing people, not selling them stuff. You can only do that if you own the channel, and even then you don’t make much from it, because a toll has to be ignorable to work.”

- - Paul Graham - Post-Medium Publishing

From the perspective of Paul Graham’s description, wouldn’t all virtual goods transactions be “a tax?”

They seem to follow the pattern PG sets up with the iPod. Create an audience that is highly engaged in your product (such as Apple’s iPod, or a social game or MMO) and then offer a convenient set of additional content (music in iTunes, new items in Pet Society, new music and clothing in Loudcrowd). In that case, I’m not sure how you would argue that “even then you don’t make much from it” because there is a preponderance of evidence showing the opposite.

The lifetime value of a paying customer in these models is anywhere between $100-$200. Indeed, well performing social games are charging a “tax” that results in $.50-$1 per average daily active user a month. PG has investments in the space so I’m sure he’s aware of these numbers.

The lesson is not that digital content won’t sell, but that there are different types of digital content — and some won’t survive. There are particular characteristics of the $1b+ in music sales revenue in iTunes. Instead of dismissing iTunes as an abberation, we should study those characteristics, because they are replicable. Hardware is not even a mandatory trait, just a highly dedicated and engaged audience, along with some of the other conditions I’ve discussed in the past.

Best Entrepreneurship/VC Tumblr Blogs

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 10:46:39 -0400

Best Entrepreneurship/VC Tumblr Blogs:

benjaminpalmer:

TUMBLR PARTY! Adding the 1/2 of this list I wasn’t already following. Nice work

Flattered to be included amongst an excellent group. Nice little community forming here, eh?

"The company was on the rocks. We had zero revenue. We had been trying for four years to make..."

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:40:58 -0400

“The company was on the rocks. We had zero revenue. We had been trying for four years to make something work. We were out of ideas.”

- One can never be reminded enough of the “long and winding road” that startups take. Thanks for sticking with it Alex & Eran. We’re looking forward to playing Beatles at the office.

From: How ‘horrendous failure’ led to Rock Band

Only at Google would “near future” just be an...

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 12:14:06 -0400

Only at Google would “near future” just be an estimate. If you want to kill Google, it’s pretty simple, try adding customer support.

The quickest path to $50m in revenue? Build fun.

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:21:00 -0400

The Wall Street Journal has a good piece, based on Christian Chabot’s blog post, about how long it takes to build a technology empire.

Turns out it takes an average of eight years to hit $50m in revenue, which is about the point when you can start thinking about things like going public. And this is for the top 100 largest software companies, so we’re talking about the biggest winners here. One of the most valuable companies ever founded, in any industry, in any country, took 8 years to hit $50m in sales, Microsoft. Oracle took 10. Locally I often point to the timelines of successes like iRobot and Harmonix and the time it took them.

But hey, let’s say you’re still trying to hit the obviously unrealistic five year projections of a typical venture capitalist (unrealistic only from a purely factual, statistical basis you understand), what’s the fastest way to the top?

Thankfully Tableau’s study breaks down the companies by market segment… so I did a little extra simple math. Here were the averages for how long it took to hit $50m in revenue by market segment:

Network (Rackspace, Echelon): 10.6 years
Security (Symantec, Sourcefire): 8.2 years
Database (Netezza, Oracle): 8 years
Content Management (Adobe, Digital River): 7.5 years
Entertainment (Activision, EA): 6 years

Feeling impatient? Don’t start a networking company, start a gaming company. Of course, this is a limited study and breaks with our deep-seeded need to be working on “serious stuff.” But it’s actually not just historical, it seems to be repeating itself right now. At least three Social Gaming companies founded post 2007 will be, or already have, hit $50m in revenue in their first three years of business.

The interesting dichotomy that the data suggests is this: it will take longer than you expect to hit success, and building fun might actually accelerate that path.

"While the members of the Beatles camp may not be avid gamers, they are savvy navigators of culture..."

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 09:09:35 -0400

“While the members of the Beatles camp may not be avid gamers, they are savvy navigators of culture and commerce. With music sales in a freefall and radio’s clout on the wane, the vibrant video game industry is a prime source of exposure.”

- A Fab Four reunion for a new generation

Secrets of the Amazon Cart

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:34:00 -0400

Secrets of the Amazon Cart:

Comprehensive look at the tiny design changes that add up to mattering in conversions, great overview

12% Of Americans Purchasing Virtual Goods

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:46:08 -0400

12% Of Americans Purchasing Virtual Goods:

Study: 12% Of Americans Purchasing Virtual Goods

Design of Playfish Games

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 14:32:00 -0400

Design of Playfish Games