I've been thinking about when and how to release and push out Linkspank's new toolbar / Firefox extension, which is really cool and quite well received by its small number of users so far. The question is “when and how to launch.”
For at least a few years, Google has advocated an approach to product development whereby you release your product at an early stage and then “iterate” - make improvements as users demand them and improve the process. Google has been voicing this mantra for a few years. This approach to designing a piece of software works best when you're building something simple and you can change it easily (the web is good for that). The philosophy is not too far off of the ideas espoused by 37Signals.
But also taken as a truism is what Malcolm Gladwell has to say in The Tipping Point. Small changes (say, in an Internet site) can make a big difference. Tipping-point thinking implies that your average cool website with a couple thousand users, like Linkspank, may be just a few crucial changes away from explosive growth.
Google's product philosophy and the tipping point meesage have something in common: tweaking. When you iteratively develop a product you have released, you're making pretty small changes. And in searching for the tipping point, you are trying to find the devilishly minor changes in your product that can take it from zero to sixty. You can think of iterative development as a way to search for the tipping point.
Here's a flipside, though. Part of the underlying message of the release-and-iterate idea is that people overestimate the risk of release. “If you get fairly close to the right product,” Google means, “your users will help you close the gap more efficiently than you would have done otherwise.” IF, that is, the customers know what they want; but as traditional marketing does a good job of showing, customers generally don't. And as the tipping point argues, it can be tough for anyone (designer or user) to identify that the small changes that are going to be crucial. That's in contradiction with Google's idea.
Moreover, the mere fact that small changes are critical according to the Tipping Point undermines one of Google's messages: that there is a low cost to release. Who are we kidding? Releasing a product always has a risk. Any potential user who turns away from your product may not turn back, so any time you to go them there is a risk.
It's easy for Google to proclaim iterate-and-release now that the company has a huge user base and a pervasive brand: they can easily tap into pre-zealous users, and if they alienate some users on some products, there are still billions of Google users out there for the following iterations.
The early days of Google – the development of search – was similar to release-and-iterate in some ways, and different in others. The founding duo was informal and agile when it came to making a product and trying it out. Nevertheless, the “releasing” they did in the early years was pretty cautious.
Release-and-iterate is not an answer in and of itself; you have to think about the risk of launching in terms of your resouces, and what you hope to find or achieve in your iteration (perhaps the tipping point).
Soon I will write about the Facebook invitation bonanza that you may have noticed, but today I'll just drop a note about a current project.
Linkspank Version 2, coming in a couple weeks, will feature a "New Google." How's that for a bold promise? It's called the "New Google" for two reasons. First, it's not Google, so if it's any form of a Google it's a new Google. But there is a second and better reason to call it a Google, which is that it is going to be a Google (search engine) for "new" stuff.
We are testing the search engine and it's already totally sweet. It does something that is really obvious and needed, but for some reason no one is providing it right now. Hence I'm predicting you'll be all over it. To prove me right or wrong, stay tuned to this blog. And get prepared to pump it up to your friends and stalkers when it comes out.
The winner of the contest for the iPhone or iPod Touch has been determined and will be announced this week. The result was delayed a bit massively by my staycation + vacation in August but I'll work on getting the Appledom into the hands of the new Spankmaster as quickly as possible.
Personally, my Blackberry Curve + iPod Touch combo has been working pretty well for me. The Curve has actually given me a couple little problems (trouble with my Blackberry account; some crashing as well, due possibly I think to my Google talk application on it) but I'm retaining hope that it will be the perfect device with an improvement or two on my part.
I will affirm strongly that, if you're often in the presence of wi-fi, the iPod Touch is a sweet sweet thing to have, especially if you don't have iPhone. I have some beefs with iTunes and Apple, but the iPod Touch is SO great at lots of stuff (as is the iPhone!). If you haven't checked out Pandora for the iPhone or Touch, you really oughta do that. A little investment in Pandora goes a long way and I will heap praise on Pandora in an upcoming post.
In business school Dick Thaler taught us about the representativeness bias, which could be crudely stated as the bias of over-weighting everything you're familiar with when making judgments, estimates and guesses about stuff. Dr. Thaler convinced me in class that we all fall prey to this bias far more often and with a greater deepness of error than we imagine, even after the bias has been explained to us.
Dick Thaler taught us about representativeness bias
For people in the tech industry, the representativeness bias can lead to (1) an over-estimation of the penetration of a product or service, either in awareness or usage, and, on the flip side, (2) an under-estimation of potential market sizes. As someone in the tech industry, you are a techie and you know lots of techies. Hence when all the techies you know start using a website, say Twitter, you overestimate how much people use Twitter or even know about Twitter. On the flip side, you underestimate how much Twitter has at stake to win by capturing the uncaptured market, or how badly some other service could thrash Twitter by grabbing the uncaptured market.
less of a big deal than people say (though I wish them luck)
To stick with Twitter for a moment: how many people use Twitter? About a million. If they were all in America (which they aren't), they would number 1 American out of every 300. Hey, that doesn't sound like very much! How much of the remaining 299 out of 300 Americans do you think have heard of Twitter? Hint: *much* less than half! In other words, no one knows about this service, given that it's supposed to be something that any old person with a phone and friends can enjoy. Now, I like Twitter. But this is a service that is supposed to be as neat and as of general interest, as, say Facebook, which has 80 million users. If you needlessly chop a huge portion off that number to be "conservative," you have a potential market for a Twitter-like service of 50 million people. So, in user accounts, Twitter has penetrated 2% of its potential market. Basically, it's sucking big time. You'd be inclined to ask yourself if it's designed wrong, marketed wrong, or environmental factors are against it. Some conclusions: (1) Twitter is overhyped; (2) the idea of trying to build a better Twitter is undervalued. Now I don't mean to pick on Twitter exclusively. It's true for any site you like, to varying degrees. You can even say it about Facebook. Facebook's membership -- again even if you inflate it by counting everyone as an American -- compromises about a quarter of the country. That's a heck of a lot of people. But it's also outnumbered 3 to 1 by the non-Facebook users. For a site whose goal (according to me) is to be entertaining enough to compete with sitting around and watching television, it's a massive but still quite incomplete advance.
With a relentless focus on the mass market, Jobs avoids the representativeness bias of techiedom and can think big, score big
A great example to the contrary is the iPhone. As you may recall, Steve Jobs made some pretty bold sales forecasts for the iPhone before it was launched. If iPhone had been viewed in terms of the "smartphone" market, Jobs would have seemed crazy. But he was thinking correctly. You could say that the smartphone market was like Twitter - cool, but nowhere near the size it was supposed to be. He wanted to go for the real market, which was more of a Facebook type size (to continue the analogy). Of course, don't go saying that "everyone" knows about the iPhone now! ;-)
This logic inspired my foray into Linkspank. A tech insider may think of the competitive arena for link sharing, social news, or whatever you want to call it, as saturated. But the reality is quite the opposite. One of the biggest sites in this area - Digg - has only a few million users. Compared to the size of the market -- for really any person you likes YouTube, reads news on the web, or gets or receives email forwards is a potential user of such a site -- Digg is a little sniveling baby.
It IS true that the small minority of people who use Twitter, for example, may be different from the other 97-99% of Americans in some meaningful way... but I'll leave that point alone at this time.
Here's another, slightly more fun example. You know those "viral videos" on YouTube and elsewhere that "everyone" has seen? The all-time most viewed video on YouTube, the Evolution of Dance:
It has been viewed about 90 million times, which is say about 90 million people. By comparison, an estimated 140 million people view some part of the Super Bowl each year. So, while it's impressive, it still falls a bit behind the Superbowl Halftime Show (estimating, since that's not what the previous figure refers to). And that is the number 1 video - the number of views drops off VERY quickly as we go down the list. Still in the top ten is the "laughing baby video, which has a mere 50 million views:
It's pretty funny, and a lot of people have watched it, but unless you live on a special techie-only planet, you know more people who HAVEN'T seen this video than you know who HAVE seen it. Fewer than 1 in 6 Americans has seen it (once again, with my grotesque the-world-is-America math).
People like to talk about the magic of a technology that has enabled 50 million people (if views = people) to watch something filmed casually in someone's kitchen. And it is magical, I agree. But looking at the numbers closely turns the viral video concept a little bit on its head. Our popular notion is that something catches fire on the web and then "everyone" sees it. But the reality is that sharing is still rather inefficient, and it's more right in many respects to think that "no one has seen anything." :-)
Linkspank addresses this problem in a few ways: it lets you share more videos and links with your friends, without inconveniencing them (since they can manage their Inbox and email settings). You can also see which of your friends have already received a spank. So rather than being a part of the problem, be a part of the solution (haha): join the spank and spank this page to your friends, so they can read this nifty article... and catch up on the Evolution of Dance and the Laughing Baby.
I took my hacking, raspy self to Waltham today and pitched at an "investor roundtable" hosted by Deloitte. Launchpad and Atlas were there, and some other folks. DFJ and Spark were supposed to be there but I don't believe they were.
Summary: they conceded that they weren't part of the target market. I also noticed that they weren't too well acquainted with the market space. I am routinely baffled by how little people understand online advertising. Meanwhile, the guy who thought he knew the space suggested (inadvertantly) that I instead build another delicious - which is a deeply troubling suggestion on a variety of levels.
Anyway, to resume the summary: I think they weren't 100% understanding what Linkspank is. And how can you invest in something you don't understand, right? Agreed. They suggested that I go look for a younger angel investor, which I think is a good call. (The investment I'm looking for is $200-500k, depending on timing and other factors, so it's borderline between angel and group of angels or institutional.)
Internet Site = Must Do Demo
The thing I puzzled over most was whether to include a demo in the pitch. It's the Google way of doing things and I was always sold on that. But I was dissuaded from the idea over the last week, by the fact that my practice pitch listeners didn't want to hear the pitch.
In retrospect, I think it's absolutely true - none of these guys want to see a demo. But it's laziness on their part not to want to see one, and it should be my job to force them to see it. Considering investing in a consumer Internet business without seeing the site in action is like considering investing in an ice cream shop without tasting the ice cream. If you wanna do it, go ahead, but seriously.
So, I think in the future I will insist on a demo, even if this means requiring a presentation time of 30 min (without questions). I know that's longer than the norm, but it's fine because I don't want to do business with anyone who won't take a look at the product.
The need for a demo was underscored by the fact that Linkspank's on-paper stats are astonishing, and they still had trouble winning the group over. With no PR, we've grown to 1300+ users. 67% are active in a 2 month period, with 8+ invitations to join the spank sent out per user. The average session on the site in December was 3.7 hours. The business makes sense on paper. There's not more much I could have told them statistically to convince them without having already had a thriving business :-).
Next Steps
The only part of the outcome I disliked was the idea that no one on the East Coast would have the vision to invest in this idea. I was hoping to get outside the box a little by putting Linkspank here instead of there. But (so the story goes), while there are plenty of techie and visionary people here in Cambridge, they aren't angel investors but rather poor kids.
At any rate, next steps are to look a little more globally, and reach out to angel types and get their advice. It will be fun, because I love talking about the business and I'll get some more meaningful interaction with cool people. And I'll insist on the demo :-).
Last spring, I had the opportunity to study Linkspank Marketing with my Marketing Communications classmates. We did a thorough study of marketing tactics for Linkspank. We came to many interesting conclusions. One conclusion was obvious and yet still striking: it was that viral videos are far and away the most effective way of reaching people online. People know this, yet we were still amazed, in the financial model, just how superior is successful viral video is compared to any other form of advertising, marketing or other expense to get peoples attention
Our experience in creating Linkspank TV made it relatively simple to create a viral video. We already had a team in place to create videos and to create video content.Bur TV show is different strategically from the viral videos. Our TV show is intended primarily for current users of our site.For this reason it makes sense that our television show would be more mainstream, less risky than our viral video, which in turn would be more offensive and more risk taking. Why? Because on one hand, for our television show we have dedicated viewers that we want to keep and make happy. On the other hand, our viral videos have to cut through a lot of noise out there and reach people who are not yet spankers but who should be spankers.
Viral videos appear to have indicated that the main way to cut through the clutter is to be so offensive that you stand out. Or probably “outrageous” is a better word, because viral videos don’t seem to have to be NSFW. To act on this opinion, a viral video is going to play a key role in our public launch this month. We have created a video that we will be sending to our users and and asking them to forward to their friends.
Viral videos are hard to make "stick" or make successful. But I don't think the failure rate is the real deterrent to companies - it's the cost of failure. A weird or outrageous video will alienate some viewers, maybe even many viewers.
Here I think it is key to have a strategy, if you have a strategy that is your guide to determine what you do and even what detail of what you do.I think a lack of strategy is why more companies don't create videos – they don’t know where to start. Do we make a funny video? What should do your video be about? Who should it reach or impress?The world is much more open probably, in that of conservative traditional advertisement.Linkspank, on the other hand is a young startup with a crazy name. We don't mind being weird and we might not mind even being defensive at least sometimes and it wrong as we are too offensive.For our company, this represents a big opportunity.One reason companies have trouble creating viral videos is because they are constrained in a way that we are not or at least should not have to be. That constraint is that big companies are reluctant to do weird or offensive things – while viral videos are actually usually maybe almost as a rule weird and offensive at least to some people.
In my opinion (and this has been my opinion for a long time) it is much more important to win over a small number of users—rather than simply not to alienate the larger audience.It is true that our site has special appeal to a great audience and I would like to be able to serve that large audience. But in this early stage it is important to target and win over early adopters, who will appreciate unusual messages more.
This might lead you to ask, as Linkspank grows, will its communications and brand become more mainstream? I think the answer is yes, to a degree. It is important to evolve to accommodate growth, but is also important to maintain our own identity. Part of my personal agenda is that I would like to create a vibrant large community but that I do not want to grow the community beyond its natural size.I think many successful websites have been pressured to do this to keep growing, and while they have proven that it is possible, I still would contend that it is not necessarily good business.But I shouldn’t be getting ahead of myself – it’s still time to make crazy YouTube videos.
It's been in the news that Facebook is giving you tools to de-clutter your profile layout. Fine. (People who listen to the Linkspank blogs will recall that I was predicting this kind of thing a while ago.)
But the "clutter" of applications has been an issue for a few months and particularly with notifications.
Meanwhile, Linkspank is building its facebook app - The Real Version. In doing so, we've bumped up against the second issue: notifications.
Who can send a notification or email to whom within an app, and how? You'd think that's a pretty straightforward, important, basic question. Well, in fact this question has a non-straightforward, confusing, answer:
Holy crap.
(Note, it says confidential but at the page where I found it it appears to be pasted by the source.)
I give facebook a lot of credit for their willingness to take bold action to protect their user experience. The flip side is that the boldness has created that table. Wow.
People want to be able to play around and try games and applications. But they also want a simplified AND organized stream of communications. Not easy to do. This is part of why Linkspank is "sticking to its knitting" and will only build in features that touch the core idea and "ecosystem" at multiple points.
Anyway, regarding the facebook app, we'll be phasing it in starting on Monday hopefully.
My New Year's Resolution: To work *no more* than 35 hours per week.
I'm back from a Christmas / New Year's vacation. It was the first real vacation I've taken since this time last year.
Good vacations make me feel like this.
For me, vacation is like exercise - it can be hard to get myself to do it, but afterwards I'm always glad I did it. I was pretty relentless this time around about not working. I slept copiously, feasted, watched many movies (including star wars II-VI, lots of The Office, cartoons and some Planet Earth), did some fun reading, a lot of yoga. And yes - I did go on Linkspank, but I kept it in moderation so that it would not blend into work :-).
So, I am forming some New Year's resolutions. I used to think they were stupid but two things changed my mind: first, since I'm coming off a vacation I've had time to think and get perspective; and second, in business school they taught me about the psychology of commitment and the power of making (and writing, even blogging) them. (If you write something, and especially if you make it public, you're more likely to do it.)
My new year's resolution:
To work no more than 35 hours per week.
It's important to me for many reasons. First, I believe it helps overall outcome of your work. I have had a good mix of experiences for my age, of working hard, not working, and being around other people working, many of whom are leaders in their fields. And from my experiences I'm convinced that, in most jobs, there is little worth doing by one person in 60 hours per week that can't be done in 35.
Moreover, working less keeps me nice and mellow, gives me time to pursue my hobbies and chill with the people I love, and additionally fuels the creativity and big ideas which I think are the start and stop of any entrepreneurship.
Finally, working a bit less will give me more time for spanking. And that is the most relaxing and stimulating way I know of taking a quick break, and staying in touch with out-of-town friends and family. :-).
Here are Four Lessons from our facebook app experiment:
1. Lots of facebook users are willing to install apps... but many of them will hide the profile box and all the other stuff.
2. Lots of facebook users have never installed an app. (I believe this segment is largely college students actually.)
3. People often install an app and that's it - they don't know what to do or what it does.
4. People want to be able to spank their facebook friends. They don't care much about the features of our baby app (sharing recent spanks on your facebook profile, or promoting your spankathon pledge).
Our Linkspank toolbar is turning out to be the greatest and baddest weapon since King Arthur's Excalibur. It's going to be completely nasty. Get ready. Prepare for your life to be changed. Coming soon for testing in FF during November, with IE to follow in December.
Our Linkspank TV team had its kickoff meeting today. I think we have an awesome team and I feel lucky to be working with such skilled, creative, chill dudes and dudettes.
The goal: create a pilot (or some pilot segments) by end of October or early November. It will be a bit experimental and we have no need to be perfectionists about this so we can move fast.
Before I described some of the segments we were thinking about. For now, we're going with a "video montage" (summarizing the week of spanks), a "superlatives" section (again, regarding the week of spanks), and a "street report" (a variation on the oh so so classic theme).
A little part of our Video Introduction to Linkspank
Ok, so may it's not the greatest site demo EVER. But I'd put it in the top 95th percentile.
How to make one the way we made this one:
1. Explain what your site is to dozens, hundreds of people, verbally. In doing so, your pitch and explanation will evolve naturally to becoming increasingly effective - and you'll learn what people need to be explicitly told about your idea. Everyone helps you in this step, because you want your idea to be clear to anyone.
2. Create a positioning for your site. This is marketing mumbo-jumbo. People who actually know marketing and don't pooh-pooh the 3C-4P framework are useful for this step.
The reason you need to do this step is that it helps you figure out how to convey your message. Should your demo be slick or goofy? Is having a caveman in it a really dumb idea? Once your positioning is set, it provides the answers magically to all of these questions.
3. Storyboard the demo/video introduction. Pretend you are a cartoonist (even if your demo won't involve animation, as ours does). Long before anyone draws cartoons, they create "storyboards" describing, in excruciating detail, what happens in each "scene" of your demo. If this process sounds too creative to you, remember that you can always do it in Powerpoint.
4. Get a Flash artist/animator to executive your demo. Once you have the storyboard, you can show it to candidates and discuss whether they are the right person for it. In our case, we needed someone who knew flash and who could draw, but e.g. javascript skills were not required.
Notes:
+ This process has creative components - how do you make sure it goes well? The answer is to put as much of the creative work into step #3 by storyboarding everything in exquisite detail. You should let your Flash artist help you improve the idea in step #4, but any gaps in your description are areas of risk going forward.
+ Despite doing our homework, we have no way of being sure at this point how our audience will react to our site demo. But I will say confidently that if your site demo appeals to everyone, and everyone thinks it's unqualifiedly great, then you may have failed to stick to step #3 and maybe you created something too generic.
Just sharing my experiences! Don't forget to share your wisdom back with me ;-).
The team is almost formed - we're working out the details. This is slated to be a weekly, low-budget show viewable via YouTube or another source. It will highlight some of the best spanks of the preceding week.
Here are some of the segment concepts we've tossed around (how's that for openness!):
1.Commentary on Recent Linkspanks.
Example: let’s replay this video, “Snake coughs up entire hippo” and attain a deeper understanding of what’s going on J.Also commentary on more serious spanks, so this could vary a lot in tone.
Comparable to shows that comment on viral videos.Talk show quality.
2.Lightning News.
We actually report the news.Maybe a headline blitz – all the week’s news in 30 seconds.
Comparable to real news + MTV news or something.
3.Interview: Viral Video Creator.
We track down and interview the people who have created popular spanks.
Comparable to a talk show / news.
4.Interview: Portrait of a Spanker.
We interview prominent Spankers.Who is the mastermind behind KidBaby?How did he reach Level 5 with such a low quality rating?Do we think he’s in the running to win the secret Spankathon prize?
Comparable to ESPN sideline reporting.(How did it feel to score the winning touchdown?What will it take to win next week?)
5.Street Reports.
We interview people on the streets and review local establishments.This is usually pretty fun.
Comparable to : that geography quiz video.
6.Caller Segments.
We let people call into the show and discuss a concept that we just shared or something from last week.
Comparable to : radio or TV talk show.
7.Reporting and Analysis of Current Contests.
We give John Madden X and O diagram – type analysis of current contests- who’s winning, how, predictions, analysis, opinions.
Comparable to : ESPN shizzle.
8.On-Air Games
Game show type activity oriented around linkspank, with opportunity to win points on Linkspank and/or sponsor prizes.
Comparable to : game shows, Linkspank itself .
9.Workplace disruption missions
Visit spankers in their workplace or try to convert bored workers to the spank.Try not to get sued!
Comparable to : nighttime TV skits, YouTube stuff.
Development began and almost completed today for a baby Facebook app for Linkspank. It will hopefully debut next week.
I would bet any sum of money that if you were to guess what the app did, you'd be wrong! :-). I'm trying something slightly different from what the sites most similar to ours (as if any other site could be placed in the same category as linkspank) have been doing. To be discussed more later.
I must say, the development environment is great. Wow! I personally don't think the open apps environment is strategically the best move for facebook (I know I'm a lone warrior on this) but I must give the development environment, tools, and wiki big props.
As part of my quest to sign up for every free service available on the Internet, I joined Pandora yesterday and checked it out.
On joining, I received this email:
An interestingly uber-personal, reply-right-to-this email approach to serving your customers. I personally thought it was really cool to receive Tim's email...but I am not sure that a similar approach would make sense for Linkspank. Pandora, after all, is not really about befriending people.
When linkspank was getting set up I thought a lot about Tom on MySpace. The idea of having a real person at the company automatically be your friend is a pretty brilliant one, I think. But the idea seemed (and still seems) a little passe to me now. People are less psyched than they used to be about friending someone online who they don't know.
Out of all this came the Spankdroid - an admittedly bizarre creation. Basically, we decided to have a mascot, rather than an actual person, be our spokesperson. This idea is little used on social networks!
The idea is that if you make friends with the Spankdroid, you then get messages from him about contests and so forth. Spankdroid is also like a little helper whom you can email with questions.
We did a lot of consumer research and determined that a robot wearing an Uncle Sam hat resonated perfectly with our users. Ok, maybe not :-). Rather, we do know that Linkspank is different, and it prides itself on doing things that big sites are afraid to do.... so we have a robot spokesperson.
Try to tell me, right now, in ten seconds, what supposedly makes Gmail better than Hotmail or Yahoo!.
If you can do it, then in my opinion you are a rare individual. Because I have rarely heard Gmail's value proposition explained well. That would include Gmail's site:
Big list, little meaning
These four things about Gmail are not particularly unique, compared to Yahoo! and Hotmail (although some of them used to be).
Here's my answer: "Gmail, the first web service that allows a layperson to be as fast and efficient as an expert user of pine and other tools in a Linux environment."
It's a pretty simple idea, but it's hard to explain to people. Pine is very geeky:
Comparing something to Pine may not be desirable
Sometimes simple things are hard to explain to people, if they aren't familiar where you're coming from. And if you're coming from a different place from your users (and as the designer of a technical product for laypeople, that's always true), it's hard to know what will be clear to people.
Lost Features, Lost Users
I'm not picking on Gmail - I like Gmail a lot, and so I'm writing from experience. I have a lot of experience explaining keyboard shortcuts, search syntax, and filters to people in Gmail.
Also, I remember what it was like to first start using Gmail. It was a new environment. Yet now, it's so simple... to people who know it ;-).
Parlez vous Spank?
I've been thinking about the old "Gmail challenge" because I keep discovering how many Linkspank users - even people who obediently, regularly check their inboxes - don't understand what a spank is or how to do it.
(So if you're among them, don't feel bad.)
As I always do, I'm blaming it in part on UI issues, and a solution is in the works. But the challenge does not disappear with a good UI. (After all, Gmail's UI is pretty good.)
It's really a new concept, which savvy UI and tutorials can educate on, but which is still new... even if it's very simple.
My new mission: get people to understand what a Linkspank is.
Like I said, new UI is on the way. Until then, the best way is to try :-), and maybe refer to our primitive tutorials (especially the first two):
One of the most fun things about running the contests is the satisfaction of giving people their prizes. I have been able to hand some prizes over in person -- like djperry1973's iPhone, Naytrain's Bose Sounddock, nrogers' Sounddock, and MrZach's Apple TV.
Prizes are fun.
The Jawbone may have the makings of a future Linkspank prize.
I'm not sure if people would bust their humps spanking for a few weeks to win a Jawbone. But it might make a decent prize for something like the Spankathon. It's a bit cheaper than some of the other prizes, so maybe we will give away a few more. Many spankers are corporate types and hence they may salivate over this product. What do you think?
One other reason I was looking at the Jawbone is that the time is approaching to spruce up Linkspank's preview, which doesn't do any justice to the site. The Jawbone demo is awesome, and while it's a very different product from Linkspank, it's good inspiration.
Governing a large country is like frying a small fish. You spoil it with too much poking.
Spank Tzu may have written:
Governing a small startup is like playing with a large pinyata. Beat the crap out of it.
In other words, I am often pushing changes too quickly to be able to measure their effects scientifically, or let things take their course fully. :-)
Today's experiment is a further push with menus. I am proud (so far) of some of the recent menu changes described in this previous post, but I still faced a problem: the browse menus on the right weren't being noticed by people.
The problem seemed to be that the menu was located to the right of the page:
Browse menu at the right of the page
... where spanker eyes were not travelling to.
So let's try the menu on the left side...
Browse menu at the left of the page
Along the way, this inspired a shortening of the dark gray box at the top left, which was probably warranted anyway. (With regards to the other post, note the formatting of this menu somewhat like Facebook.)
The main trade-off of putting the browse menus on the left is that they have eliminated the "random profile" listings and the Spankathon/contest reminder. But I want to experiment with more sophisticated ways of sharing information about people and the contests in the context of the home page anyway... hence the experiment is underway! I'll get back to you on whether people browsing behaviors change.
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. :-).
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