Ryan Mickle

formelle: Objects Mécaniques Beauty, weight, texture,...

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 16:41:58 -0800

formelle:

Objects Mécaniques

Beauty, weight, texture, craftsmanship. Eat your heart out, Ikea.

davemorin: “Take the competition seriously, but not yourself.”...

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 13:44:47 -0700

davemorin:

“Take the competition seriously, but not yourself.” - Richard Branson

"Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people."

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 16:01:59 -0700

“Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people.”

- Eleanor Roosevelt (via alexpenny)

nevver: The Copyranter

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 17:23:11 -0700

nevver:

The Copyranter

WSJ: When Free Isn't Always the Right Price

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 09:56:00 -0700

WSJ: When Free Isn't Always the Right Price:

I think I like my title better. :)

When free makes your product suck

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 09:00:00 -0700

Marco Arment, the founder of Instapaper and former CTO of Tumblr, had some interesting comments on the recent dissent on Twitter, compliments of their new “dickbar” feature. As I read it, I realized that Twitter is turning the corner from a beloved, worry-about-making-money-later company into a just-barely-tolerable advertising machine.

Twitter is entirely free. It depends on selling Promoted Tweets, “Promoted Trends” (oxymoron, anyone?) and Promoted Accounts. I remember when Robert Scoble was begging for a paid account on Twitter. He wanted to pay for a (finally) reliable service. Instead, Twitter has chosen to kill off third party apps and sites that essentially do what theirs do, and connect it’s revenue pipeline to Madison Avenue.

Rather than create value and charge for it, Twitter (and its users) fell victim to the startup mirage that is “free”—aim for world domination growth… then hit them with a dickbar once they’re hooked.

Twitter is still a powerful and useful tool, but it is choosing to monetize by way of degrading its users’ experiences. Kind of like traditional media, and how’s that working out?

Most startups are encouraged to subsidize the growth of their whiz bang, insanely useful product simply to get as many users hooked as possible. While yes, this can be the quickest path to more users, it often leads to expedited failure, missed potential, or pulling a bait and switch on your users.

Common outcome 1: Your startup runs out of money

This is the most likely outcome. If you don’t get enough users to impress investors who are betting on meteoric growth, or make some dough, you’ll run out of it. Good luck and godspeed on that one.

Common outcome 2: Your product gets bought and then turns into a steaming pile of suck

Remember Dodgeball, Delicious, Flickr, StumbleUpon? Their outcomes were all pretty similar. Each was a promising startup that feel short of its potential as a direct result of its acquisition. The only thing accomplished by Dodgeball’s acquisition is that it temporarily chained Dennis Crowley to a desk where he could not create his dream company. He left to create Foursquare and Google had to buy Slide to figure out “social.” Meanwhile, Yahoo will sell Delicious to anyone with $1-2MM. I think the deal may even include a box of Cracker Jacks. And StumbleUpon is on it’s second wind after getting bought back from eBay, after never figuring out what to do with it (surprising?). [1]

Common outcome 3: Your users get bait and switched

The common approach to building a web startup is to subsidize use to maximize growth. Web applications are increasingly cheap to build and usually involve near-negligible per user variable costs. Therefore, many choose to create the expectation that their service, in its entirety, should be both free and useful, then renege on that promise later. But, as a user of a service I value, charging for it actually reassures me that it will be around as my reliance it grows, building trust and loyalty (e.g. the stuff it takes to build the next Google).

Maybe your product shouldn’t be free

This is a thought exercise, not a hard-and-fast rule. But why not build a startup that offers a better experience when the user pays for it?

There are plenty of great role models for the type of product that both prints money (which investors like) and create real, scalable value for their users. Airbnb is a great one. I was actually astonished to hear how few users the service had when it closed it’s seed round, led by Sequoia. Airbnb is not a cheap service—it gets a piece of the action from the buyer and the seller. Yet if it were free, users would likely value the service less.

Another great example is Github. While it was offered in beta for free, Chris and Tom started getting emails saying “I love GitHub. Can I start paying you guys now?” They’ve got a great business now and are having a lot of fun. I’d recommend watching Tom rub it in at his Startup School talk last year, if you weren’t there or haven’t seen it.

Smugmug is yet another great example in which cost was actually a differentiator in the super crowded photo space. And Animoto similarly built an awesome product for turning photos into music videos. You might even argue that its users, such as Mike Arrington, become even louder evangelists of the product to validate the price they pay for the service. And Dropbox has found astonishing success in focusing all of its attention on creating a valuable service that’s worth your money.

—

[1] On occasion, the product and community survives and is properly nurtured. Reddit is a great example of this, having grown to a billion pageview per month site under the ownership of Conde Nast (and also would have been a thriving, awesome company today, independently).

Huge thanks to Ed, Hoisie and Nacho for their feedback on previous drafts of this post.

10 things I wish I could tell my 25 year old self

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 22:47:00 -0700

10 things I wish I could tell my 25 year old self

What do you want to do before you die? I was turned onto this by...

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 15:10:00 -0700

What do you want to do before you die?

I was turned onto this by a friend a while back, but it is just as or even more relevant today. It’s never too late to find the energy and strength to just do those things you’ve always wanted to do.

Watch video
Open calendar
Go do it

"Craigslist has more traffic than Amazon or eBay. Amazon has 20,000 employees. eBay has 16,000..."

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:31:21 -0700

“

Craigslist has more traffic than Amazon or eBay.

Amazon has 20,000 employees.
eBay has 16,000 employees.
Craigslist has … 30 employees.

”

- Tom Peters (via gtmcknight)

How to conduct your own annual review

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 16:06:57 -0800

How to conduct your own annual review:

A common problem among overachieving freelancers and entrepreneurs: setting outlandish professional and personal goals every year and actually staying focused to realize every last one of them. Try this to conduct your own annual review.

(via Taylor McKnight)

"When you get to my age, you’ll measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to..."

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 16:19:46 -0800

“When you get to my age, you’ll measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you. That’s the ultimate test of how you’ve lived your life.””

- Warren Buffett’s 10 Ways To Get Rich (via billyb) (via gtmcknight)

Starring Jack Black as Jesus. Awesome.

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 18:45:44 -0800

Starring Jack Black as Jesus. Awesome.

Ice Ice Baby, in the spirit of the holidays. Enjoy.

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 10:25:34 -0800

Ice Ice Baby, in the spirit of the holidays. Enjoy.

5 Things Happy People Do

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 15:23:00 -0800

5 Things Happy People Do:

Don’t take it from me, take it from Oprah (or at least her site):

Find your calling
Design your life to create happiness
Remove “if only” from your vocabulary
Invest time in close friends
Give yourself permission to be happy