World Wide Webmail

It's hard to "be the customer." Toward this end, one of the things I've done is create a variety of email accounts with different web mail providers, to see what it's like (and if it works!) to be invited and spanked by email. In a way, Linkspank is meant to build on email, but exactly by virtue of that its points of entry and departure for most people are their "regular" email inboxes.

Some trivia that I've discovered along the way:

• There is a great divide in speed between Gmail and the rest (AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, Hotmail). Gmail is fast, and everything else is REALLY SLOW, with the possible exception of Yahoo!
• AOL still says "You've got mail!" That's kind of cute. Even better, it pings when you have a new message.
  
• Gmail's spam filter is amazingly good, Yahoo's is good, and the rest suck. MSN/Hotmail has encouraged us to jump through all these hoops which STILL lands Linkspank mail in the spam folder! They have more false negatives, but also more false positives than Gmail.
  

Just some observations from one fellow. My observations were biased, not because I favor any service but because I wasn't a "real" user in a lot of ways. But the general case appears to be very strong for Gmail and also for Yahoo!. The fact that Hotmail users outnumber Gmail users is a testament to the power of inertia -- and possibly the random effect of marketing by technology companies.

"In the absence of capital, creativity flourishes."

The Spankathon

Next up on the contest front is not a contest, but rather a Spankathon. It's not oriented around spanking prowess, but rather being a believer in linkspank and putting your email invitations where your mouth is.

How it works:
* You make pledge for new users that you'll invite, and a prize to go with them.
* Pledge prizes range from a Linkspank T shirt to a Nintendo Wii.
* Then you invite your friends, making good on your pledge and earning your prize.

I've bounced the idea off some people and gotten some preliminary pledges to build a little momentum before publishing to the site. So far the response has been positive. People like it in particular (a) if and because they already like Linkspank and wouldn't mind having more of their friends on there and (b) because they know that, if they can get their friends on, they can get their pledge prize - they don't have to beat someone else or get lucky.

"Your generosity keeps our organization alive."

...as opposed to Invitation Only

In a way, the Spankathon is the opposite of another popular way to get the word out, which is having an "invite only" service. People have often suggested to me that Linkspank go the way of Gmail's early days and extend accounts based on invitation only.



I was never sold on the idea for the spank. Invitation only made sense for Gmail because Google had tons of users who would have wanted to try Gmail, and with too many users their beta phase might well have been overwhelmed. Linkspank has no such problem because we don't have the #1 search engine! By the same token, I think Gmail should have come out of invitation only as soon as it was robust.

The other reason for doing invitations only - to make a service seem exclusive - seems like crap to me. Maybe this tactic had its time, and that time is passed. But it seems too artificial, too transparent to me these days. Linkspank is recreational and it's not supposed to be exclusive. It's a place to hang out, not a Sky Bar, but a Cheers.

Next Up

As I said, early tests of the Spankathon concept have been promising. We'll see how it continues to develop!

As for the title of this post: I think it's too easy to focus on "needing" to get money for a startup. The Tipping Point is a big reminder to the contrary: focus on small things and experiment to get it right. Money can actually distract from that process. Linkspank will need to get funding to grow into something big, but at the current stage it has been quite fun (and I think quite correct) to experiment with the contests and now the Spankathon.

updates on various schemes

Shirts. Linkspank T-shirts came in today. After a long analysis of what schwag would work best, I came back to T-shirts. I only ordered a few at first. They are American Apparel, 100% cotton, black, generally bad-ass.

Map. I have been playing a little bit more with Linkspank's map functions, which have kept a very low profile to date. Some people love the map as a way of seeing who spanked who for a particular link. Right now I'm looking at the map as a way of browsing friendship connections and the spread of Linkspank itself. (If you have not seen the current map feature you can find it in "more..." in the menu under a link.)

Spankathon. For my next step I'm considering a "spankathon," in which participants pledge to bring in a certain number of friends and we have a little billboard charting our overall progress, and pledgers get prizes for hitting their goals. Still testing that idea out.

Two Exciting Statistics

Here are two facts suggesting that baby Linkspank (still under 1,000 users) has a bright future:

1. 91% of linkspank's registered users have visited the site within the last 30 days.
   
2. Since March, the average number of (linkspank.com domain) page views has been 10 page views / visit.

Interpreting the Numbers

Note that the 2nd metric does not include clicks to spanks - which is obviously the heart & soul of the site. So many a user visits his inbox, clicks ten or so links, and leaves rather happy, with only 2 page views.

It's exactly for this reason that I believe most people put too much emphasis on the "page views / visit" metric. The same people who obsess over this metric also (correctly) set the goal of letting a user do whatever he's trying to do with a minimum number of clicks.

The same applies even to page visits. Plenty of people out there visit myspace exclusively now for the purpose of viewing friend requests by spam bots. Even when you visit a site for a more legitimate reason (approving a linkedin request or seeing something written on your facebook wall) you may have slightly mixed feelings about being there.

By cross-checking with other metrics we can infer a lot about user happiness - but it's a sophisticated line of reasoning which is always left out in the metrics comparison game.

Another Sweet Statistic

Here's another great number: the "average spanker" has sent 5 invitations to the site. Now, the distribution is skewed (plenty of people have not invited anyone, while a few people have invited lots of friends) but this is a good indication that someone likes the site. After all, it's tough to get someone to invite friends to a site he doesn't like :-).

Conclusion: people who try linkspank like it well enough to keep using it. We just need to get the word out and get people trying the site...

Linkspank has no competition.

Linkspank has no competition. I'm totally serious. Really, I mean come on, what's the competition?

Ok, I'm kidding. In talking with me, one of the things people are most obsessed about is "competition." So I've had the opportunity to think about it and talk about it and so it's an Inside Linkspank kind of topic.

bring it, biatch

How I Don't Think about Competition: Laundry List Comparison

Don't create a list of companies that seem reminiscent of Linkspank and worry about whether they are "already doing" what Linkspank is doing, and whether we "need" something like Linkspank.

thinking inside the box

In my opinion, that is the DEFINITION of thinking inside the box. :-)


How I Do Think about Competition: Consumer Opportunity

Start with the customer. Competition is forever a secondary business question - second to the user and what the user wants.

Thinking about people is how good stuff gets started. I started working on Linkspank because I remarked to myself,

You know, Andrew, procrastination is too much work, it's not as fun as it could be, and it's still really primitive. When I get an email forward, I have no idea where it came from and I don't know whether my other friends saw it. Wouldn't it be nice to know that?

(one man's dream come true... or on the way at least)

(and again)

Also, despite search engines and websites, it's still way too hard to find all the good stuff out there. There are videos that hit the web and are viewed by 3 million people in a week. How do you know what they are, which of your friends are watching them? and it's just too hard to find the stuff you are really going to like - especially new stuff.


When I go to YouTube, I know there's a lot of great stuff. But it would be way better if I could see what my friends were watching, what they liked, and if I could share things with them more easily and save it all to watch it and share it later.

There are all kinds of ways to share links - you can email them, "share" on sites like YouTube, Break, eBaumsworld, you can post on MySpace or share on Facebook, and there are all kinds of techie sites like stumpleupon, digg, delicious, etc, -- but I've tried all these things and I just am not that impressed. Sharing is too technical, too much work, and you still can't do half the stuff I want to do.

Basically, all the stuff out there sucks. And I can imagine a site that doesn't suck. Maybe I should try to make that. Wouldn't that be fun?

And that's how I got started. We created a "customer manifesto" of sorts. And we had a team of people and we researched the idea. We found that Linkspank (as it would later be called) would not be for everyone, but that there was a real opportunity.

there must be a better way

You can only talk about competition in my opinion once you have an opportunity to do something new in mind.

Now, if the opportunity is real, then by definition your competition is failing in some way. They aren't addressing the opportunity, or not that well. Take Digg, which is a great site but suffers from both issues. First, it doesn't really address sharing with friends in any real way (it's a "wisdom of crowds" application, not a friends site or social network). Second, it doesn't really address it right - it's too techie and hasn't grown beyond a slice of the web population.

Even though lots of people have been working at this problem, they have not solved it yet. People still share using email above all - and while email is ok, it's easy to imagine a better world for people who share more than like a couple links per month.


No Competition is Usually a Bad Sign

If there is a real opportunity, then you should expect competition. If there is no competition, you either don't understand the market, there is no market, or you're WAY ahead of everyone. (Of the three, the last is the best, but it's still a rough place to be.)


So How Do You Know if You Can Compete?

If you're competing just on speed, don't bother. The trick is to solve the problem better! And in a rich, interconnected way, as explained by Porter's concept of strategic fit.

To my mind that means, the more complicated your problem is, the better chance you have at being able to compete - if you can solve it. :-).

Just one competitor's thoughts.... ante up.

some latest musings on prizes

With about a week left in the current contest we're looking at what it has done for the community. Aside from being fun and spanky, the contests are great for getting people engaged with the site and getting them to invite new spankers.



So far during this contest I'm inferring that the iPhone is an exciting prize to people... but is it $300 more exciting than a Bose SoundDock? Probably not. The SoundDock appears to be a better prize for most people - exciting enough to get some people spanking, and "no strings attached" - all you need is an iPod. it may even be exciting if you already have one. But apparently not so with the iPhone - though it's more valuable, there are more reasons not to want one.



It's hard to test the relative efficacy of the new prizes in part because other variables are in motion too (ah such is life). For example, many spankers are b-school colleagues who are vacationing before their real jobs, so they are barely online. It will be interesting to see if their activity spikes when they start work, as would fit our data so far (office workers use more consistently than students).

In the future there will be fancier ways to choose among a wider array of prize options, and this should delight everyone.

As for spankers inviting their friends... it appears so far that although spankers are motivated by prizes, and this might lubricate the process of getting invitations out, they still need pretty direct encouragement to invite people. In other words, saying "dude, invite people to my site" may be more effective in the end than an iPhone! Although having BOTH helps :-). Of course we analyze this stuff on an ongoing basis with all kinds of crazy quantitative and qualitative methods.

Linkspank has moved...

...into the billionth dimension.

actually, from chicago to

Cambridge, MA, home of tech geniuses, revolutionaries, people who like to think outside the box and who aren't afraid to spank others.

next steps: some more users, a little funding, a couple new team members..