New Design

Just to keep things fresh, we worked with Brad, our designer at Vanilla Green, to give the site a bit of a layout facelift.  Many of the content elements on the public pages and in the album remain the same, but the background and container make it feel more like an elegant wedding album.  There’s also a cleaner and more informative front page to explain why The Wedding Lens is the best way to collect thousands of photos are your wedding.

New Plans

Over the years we’ve gotten to understand our customers better and we’ve decided that a Free Trial model would be more fitting to the customer behavior.  There’s now a Standard, Premium and Ultimate plan — each with varying levels of functionality and time commitment.  The plans have been live for a few weeks now and it’s been a very positive response so far.

New People

John and I wouldn’t have been able to execute the new direction without the help of the newest addition to our team — Jenny Fong.  Jenny’s joined us as our Marketing & Business Development Manager.  She has an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and her BS from UC Berkeley (Go Bears!).  Welcome her by leaving a blog comment!

Learn More

If you want to stay up-to-date on all The Wedding Lens news, here are a few links:

• The Wedding Lens Blog – Site updates and tips on wedding planning and how to capture all the memories at your wedding.
• Press releases about the new design and our live chat feature and our new plans (along with the passing of our 300k photo milestone).
• Follow The Wedding Lens on Twitter and Facebook.

Remember, if you know someone getting married, let them know that The Wedding Lens is their best way to effortlessly collect and share full-resolution photos from their family and friends!

Justin

As a small business it’s always important to celebrate the milestones and that’s something we haven’t been good at, but we have definitely been better at celebrating than updating this blog.  Some high level notables:

• Menuism.com continues to chug along profitably.
• The Wedding Lens continues to grow and have very happy customers.
• PickFu, being a lean service, is profitable on it’s own.  We could use more growth here, so let us know if you have an ideas or want to try out a beta account.
• A couple side projects that bring in money but we’re not ready to share

What’s interesting about this milestone is that it feels like an eternity on the Internet and it’s surreal to watch other similarly aged companies fold due to lack of profitability or pressure from VC investment.  People ask us if taking or not taking VC investment was a hard decision for us.  In fact, it wasn’t a decision for us.  Not taking it was sort of the point of the whole venture.  We didn’t want to work for anyone else and we wanted to run our own business.  Sure we haven’t had the budgets of our competitors but we get to work on:

• what we want – restaurant review sites,  online wedding photo albums or a/b testing services
• when we want – passion for projects run hot and cold; if interest drops on one, we just work on the other.
• where we want – at home in LA for Justin, at home in SF for John (and some China last year)

Flexibility and owning your own destiny is an amazingly empowering feeling.  Here’s to 4 more years!

Justin

If you’ve got some new logos you need to a/b test go give it a try!

Justin

In the past few months, I’ve received emails from both AddThis and ShareThis to use their respective sharing widgets on our site Menuism.com.  Since we were already using AddThis, the first email came from ShareThis, asking us to try out their widget.  Not having a great reason not, we gave it a try since it looked like they had some nice financial backing and might be evolving the product a bit more.  A couple weeks after switching to ShareThis, I got an email from AddThis asking why we switched away from them.  I gave him some of the reasons the ShareThis representative gave me about why they were better (newer faster widget, more personalization, etc.) and he countered with their focus on performance and providing an experience that is improved in a measured way.  I decided to give AddThis another try with their updated widget.  Soon after this switch I got yet another email from ShareThis asking why we took them off.

Man, these guys are good at keeping track of who’s using them.   Time to decide, which is going to be?   Both seem to have similar traffic levels and if you look at different websites and blogs the usage seems to be pretty split 50/50.  I read a bunch of articles on “addthis vs. sharethis” and didn’t find anything overwhelmingly in favor of one over the other.  So here’s my crude and unscientific approach to coming to an answer (you may not be convinced after reading this, but, hey, I tried and it’s good enough for me).

The Comparison

Criteria	AddThis	ShareThis	Verdict
The Buttons			AddThis. While they’re both customizable, I find the AddThis button slightly more appealing since it uses the “+” sign instead of the weird boomerang and the small icons of recognizable sharing services makes it clear what the link is for.
The Widgets			AddThis. I like the simplicity of AddThis and I like the categorization of ShareThis. This was going to be a toss up, but I think the clean list of links on the AddThis widget is just easier to scan and use.
Integration	Simple. Post a HTML javascript snippet where you want the button to appear.	More complex.  While you can also just put the HTML javascript snippet in the place you want the javascript to appear, you get faster performance when you put some Javascript in the HEAD of the page first then make javascript calls when you want the button.	AddThis. It takes zero though and 5 minutes to integrate AddThis, while it took me some time to figure out a way to get ShareThis to load without much impact to page load times. Also, the AddThis widget auto-sense where the widget is in relation to the page edges so it’ll either open to the right, left, top or bottom of the button depending on what shows up best.  For ShareThis, you have to be explicit about telling it how much offset to use left or right – that’s not fun. Lastly, when you do the complex javascript integration sometimes the widget doesn’t load if your page isn’t fully finished loading which means clicking the link won’t do anything.
Performance	.0176 shares per page view	.00782 shares per page	AddThis.
Reporting	Each site you want to track needs a separate account.  Tracks activity by type of sharing (bookmark, email, etc.) and also by content, sharing service and continent.	Can track activity for multiple domains with a single account.  Tracks not only widget activity, but also number of button views, times a widget was opened and also the ratio of both of those to page views. Also tracks top content and sharing services.	ShareThis. It’s really nice being able to track multiple domains with a single account and the information about widget serves/page view is pretty interesting.
PickFu Survey	Comparison of which button people would click on.	Comparison of which button people would click on.	AddThis. Feel free to conduct your own PickFu Market Research Survey.

Final Verdict: AddThis

I found that AddThis had the best combination of ease of integration, ease of use from a customer perspective, best performance and least impact on the web page loading times.  It’s a bit annoying to have an account to track reporting for each website you have, but it’s not that bad nor something I check that frequently.

Just my 2 cents for the whole addthis vs. sharethis comparison.  Feel free to come to your own conclusions!

What do you prefer as a user?  What do you prefer as a website owner?

Justin

Their Users:

• Visitors (59 million/month)
  • Anyone who visits, even if they don’t register.  
  • Referred through affiliates, search, word of mouth
  • They believe they have large numbers because of their focus on continually enhancing the user experience and expanding the breadth of services.
• Members (4 million new registered users/month!)
  • Those that have registered for free and given an email address
• Subscribers (1 million paid subscribers/month)
  • 77.2% of revenue from subscriptions
  • $19.06 revenue per subscriber
  • 18% churn (# that cancel each month)
• Paid Users 
  • Users that pay for products/services on a usage basis.
  • 19.6% of revenue

Their Foundations

• Content and services people want (sex sells): Face it, it’s true – there’s money in adult content. They also have “General Audience” sites (i.e. BigChurch.com, SeniorFriendFinder.com), and while they account for a small fraction of the traffic, these “General Audience/Non-Adult” sites account for 8% of the paid subscribers at $16.28/subscriber.  
  
  
• Reliable revenue through paid subscribers: It’s nice when you’re users pay you for a service and you’re not reliant on advertising in come. Will we see more premium membership social networking sites in the future? What kinds of things would you be willing to pay for on a social networking website?
• Strong affiliate network: You’re in a strong position when you can enable other businesses to exist.  Google Adsense is a great example of this.  Their success is your success. 
• Scalable Website Platform and Model: Apparently they can launch their “friend finder” network in any niche as demonstrated by the church and seniors segment.  Even if each new niche doesn’t become a large percentage of total revenue, as long as each segment is profitable then can continue to roll out new niches and incrementally grow the business.  In essence, creating a long tail 1 site at a time. 

The Name of the Game: Conversions

The key for them to make money is to continually increase their conversion rates of free members to paid subscribers.  Pretty much every business comes down to conversions – you just need to figure out what the right metrics are and maniacally improve them. 

Some Interesting Risks They Note

• Decreased content contribution from users: This is a risk for many of the consumer-focused social networking sites today that rely on the uncompensated contributions of users.  Since the value of the sites comes this free content any decrease would be an obvious blow.  If financial compensation is needed to continue the contributions that’ll have a negative impact on the bottom line.
• Inability to diversify and innovate products & services: There’s always new competitors adding the latest bells and whistles and if your site doesn’t keep up then users may leave.  That doesn’t mean you have to implement everything under the sun, but you need to at least make sure the majority of users have their needs met – and those needs do change and grow.

Notable Social Networking Features

• Loyalty Program: Give points to users for participating on the site and allow users to redeem them for things like upgraded memberships or more prominence in searches.  This sounds like a great way to incentivize users to contribute content.
• Cupid Reports: Automatic notifications of potential matches when the member joins the site. This sounds like a great way to push interaction amongst members. 

Interesting Metrics

• # of customer service requests
• # of user actions (images/videos uploaded, messages sent, etc)
• referring link/domain, traffic source
• e-mail domain

That’s all for now.  It’s always neat to peek under the hood of another business to see what they’re focused on and what they’re worried about.  I found the couple of risks I noted to be particularly interesting.  

Any thoughts? What risks are you worried about?  Are you tracking the right metrics?

Justin

2008 brought some great new milestones for us:

• Redesigned Menuism and got it to a nice level of profitability.
• Got The Wedding Lens up and running with a professional design after soft-launching in 2007. Did you know what we’ve stored over 50,000 photos for wedding couples with some couples hitting almost 2,000 photos for their wedding!
• 1st full year of pay from our revenue-generating properties (no consulting necessary – yay!).
• Launched PickFu in less than 2 weeks.
• Launched the Greener Good blog.
• Joined forces with Chuck Templeton to form Delta Beans, LLC, the new holding company for all our properties. 

All in all a great year!  While our properties are now owned by Delta Beans, the two-bit blog will stick around as way to continue to document the experience.  Each day always brings more learnings as we try to grow and juggle an increasing number of projects.  

Personally, here are some goals I have for 2009:

• Document the startup/entrepreneur experience better.  I’m tossing around the idea of doing this in a wiki/e-book format. 
• Be much greener.  Greener Good helps with this.
• Eat less meat and be healthier. 
• Read more.  Books, not blogs.

I’m not even going to try to promise blogging more since I don’t want to make a promise I can’t keep, but you can always connect with me on Twitter and I’ll try to do better about blogging . 

Have a great year!

Justin

What if I told you that you could get 50 answers to your question in a matter of a couple hours, complete with explanations and demographic info?  All for just 5 bucks. Would that interest you? 

If it does, then PickFu is for you!

PickFu is our latest little project.  It’s a simple service that gives you cheap & instant market research into the general Internet-using population.

If you want to learn more, check out the website. the suggested uses, or the demographic info of our users. 

You can also leave a comment if you want be considered for our Beta program.  Beta users get 5 free questions – that’s a $25 value!

We’d love to hear any feedback you have on the service!

Justin

An example of doing a simple A/B test

John on a video conference

On my first day of work at HP back in August of 2001 I met my boss over the phone.  My boss, Mike, worked and lived in Atlanta, GA.  We did weekly team meetings on the phone and used web cams that streamed our live pictures to an internal “hollywood squares” webpage so that we could all see each other.   Over the course of my HP career, I worked with teammates in half a dozen states and numerous countries in Europe and Asia.  The cool thing about the organization I came into was that they were sort of the virtual team collaboration pioneers in HP so we experimented with all kinds of tools and techniques, with one of the most memorable being a virtual party we had where there were break out rooms on the conference lines and games like virtual pictionary using the NetMeeting whiteboard.  Fun times. 

Anyways, this trip down memory lane was spurred when I heard that a former HP colleague of mine, Loyal Mealer, recently put together a nice repository of telecommuting information called CommuteZero.  

In Loyal’s own words:

We created it to share the techniques and tools that make telecommuting and other forms of virtual work productive, easier and even fun. We want to encourage the use of virtual work as a way to improve business effectiveness and productivity, save on fuel, reduce pollution, and improve the quality of our lives. What better way to be green than to leave the car in the garage or avoid that next flight? Plus, you’ll lower your stress and have more time for family and friends.

Looking through the site I see many of the great tips and best practices that we used at HP so I recommend checking it out (blog) if you’re already working virtually or just thinking about it.  

Once you can get in your own virtual working groove, you’ll never want to go back. 

Justin

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open sourcetechnologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

Basically it’s a place where people get together to talk about technology with each other in a fun and conversational way.  There’s very few rules or no preset schedule of topics.  If you want to talk, just put your name and topic on the schedule board.  Topics range widely from talking about multi-threading in web applications, business plans, to whiskey tasting for beginners.  Barcamp LA 6 was free and hosted by Mahalo with a pretty good turnout of about 150 people.  Here are my quick thoughts: 

• Twitter, twitter, twitter.  It felt like there was more interaction over twitter than in person.  As soon as I walked in, I saw dozens of laptops setup on a huge conference table with people twittering and blogging.  Even during the sessions, people were twittering on their laptops and cell phones.  I guess this is easier than talking to people face to face.  You can follow me on twitter here. 
• The introductions are fun.  Amazing that we went through over 100 people in about 10 min.  Restricting the talking time to name and 3 tags did wonders. 
• My favorite session was by Francisco Dao over at The Killer Pitch.  He was a great speaker and also gave out autographed copies of his book. 
• Mahalo has a pretty nice office space.  It’s fun yet not over the top like Rubicon Project’s.

I didn’t get to stick around for the whiskey session, but I’m sure that would have been fun.  Next time!  Barcamps happen all over the world so I definitely recommend checking it out.  It’s free and geeks are more friendly and down to earth than most other types of convention attendees.

Justin

Benefits

• Better posture: I’ve found that you can’t really slouch when you’re standing.  Sometimes I’ll end up putting my elbows on the table while reading something, but that’s the exception rather than the norm.  With a normal desk (or even a stability ball), it’s to way to easy to get into comfortable positions that aren’t that ergonomically great for you.
• More alertness: It’s pretty hard to fall asleep standing.  I’ve done it before (and also fallen asleep mid-sentence), but it doesn’t happen too often  Since my body’s in a much more active position, I don’t get comfortable enough to get sleepy.  Always a good thing while working.
• Breaks from the computer: While working, there’s never a time when I’m constantly typing or reading, there is, on occasion, some thinking that happens.  What’s great about standing is that it’s easy to just go walk around while thinking since you’re already on your feet.  Or if I’m tired, I’ll just go sit down on the couch and think.  Much nicer than staring at the monitor all the time.
• Burn more calories!:  Standing and walking more just burns more calories.  This computer life is a pretty sedentary and unhealthy one – might as well get some extra calorie burning in while you’re working.  Others have tried walking while working (treadmill under the desk), but that seems like overkill at this point.  However, I will sometimes play some upbeat music and dance in place while working

Getting Started
Before you commit to a standing desk, give it a try first.  Find a counter or a bookshelf where you can place your computer and/or monitor in a way that your arms are bent at 45 degrees and your monitor is roughly at eye height. Try it for a few hours a day for a week and see how it goes.  In the beginning, there was definitely an adjustment period for my legs and feet.  My mother-in-law bought me a soft standing pad from a Korean supermarket (I think it was around $10 bucks) that really helps ease the pressure of standing on the floor – and, yes, the pad is pink with a cartoon dog on it.

I’ve been pretty happy with the Utby desk from Ikea (choose “brown/black” from color, and 47 1/4″ from size).  It’s meant for the kitchen so there’s no drawers, but the crossbars make it very sturdy and also make nice foot rests.  Oh, and I’ve got a barstool behind for those moments of weakness and I just really want to sit while working.  Usually, when I’m reading things online. 

If you want to know more, read about them on wikipedia and on the 37signals blog.  Lots of the ones advertised as “standing” or “standup” desks are pretty expensive, so I’d recommend just looking around for simpler desk/tables/bars that happen to be tall.  If you’re handy, you can also try building your own.

Happy standing!
Justin