Want to be a billion dollar company? Get 28mil users

Posted on October 28, 2009 by amit

Business models on the web are undergoing a massive transformation. Originally mimicking the print industry (advertising revenues based on circulation numbers), we are now only beginning to explore real value adding, revenue generating opportunities which leverage the real-time, social, location-aware, collaborative nature of the web. While there are companies who are strategically concerned with building a profitable enterprise from the getgo (like 37signals, Zynga), there are many others who are concerned with building great products, attracting a huge user base and figuring out the home-run revenue streams later (most notably: Google, FB, Twitter).

There’s a ton of factors that come into play when choosing which route to take (do you have money? can you take the risk? are there obvious monetization opportunities now? by forgoing these are you putting yourself in a better position to capitalize on larger opportunities down the road?), but let’s assume for a sec you are in the user base game. How many user’s do you need to actually make some money. Here’s some back of the envelope stats (please take these with a grain of salt, some numbers here are estimates):

Site	Valuation	Number of Users	Revenue	Revenue per user per year	Valuation per user
MySpace	Bought for $580mil (2005)	100mil	$200mil (2006)	$2	$5.80
Facebook	$10bil as per latest investment (2009)	300mil	$300mil (2008 estimate)	$1	$33.3
Twitter	$1bil as per latest investment (2009)	9.8mil (unique monthly 2008)	0-not that significant	$0	100/(9.8*12)=$8.50
YouTube	Bought for $1.65bil (2006)	20mil (2006)	$0	$0	$86
SNAP – Facebook App Maker	Public Company Market Cap: $10mil (2008)	5.5mil	$1.75mil (2008)	$.28	$1.81
Google	Public Company Market Cap: $173.57bil (2009)	144.293mil (unique monthly 2008)	$21.795bil (2008)	$12.58	1723570/(144.3*12) = $100.23
Yahoo	Public Company Market Cap: $23.42bil (2009)	141.956mil (unique monthly 2008)	$7.208bil (2008)	$4.23	23420/(141.9*12) = $13.75

Some Observations:

There’s a big difference between market cap, investment round valuation and acquisition price, for the purposes of this exercise I combined them. There’s also a difference between registered users, active users, monthly unique visitors, etc… I needed someway to make comparisons, I’m smushing stuff up to draw comparisons.
I should probably add a few more companies like Skype, Paypal, eBay, Amazon, etc… to make this less search and social network focused.
Google crushes it $12/user/year damn dude…
YouTube founders are extremely lucky to get that kind of exit
Valuations and revenues don’t seem to be related (surprise)
Across all these companies the average revenue per user is: $2.87 and average valuation per user is: $35.62. Want to be a billion dollar company? You’ll need approximately 28mil users (I’m kidding… sort of)

What do you think? Is it better to play the userbase game or find ways to monetize immediately? Any way to make the above numbers more accurate? Any other conclusions you can draw from this data? Would love to hear from you…

Resources used:

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2008/10/Top_50_US_Internet_Sites
http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/annuals.cfm
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/15/boom-twitter-more-than-doubles-unique-visitors-to-93-million-in-march/
http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
http://investor.google.com/fin_data.html
http://www.investorplace.com/experts/douglas_mcintyre/articles/twitter-facebook-myspace-value.html
http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=283
http://mashable.com/2008/01/16/snap-interactive/
http://247wallst.com/2007/02/16/googles_revenue/

bahut hi jaldi / too soon

Posted on September 29, 2009 by amit

ive been meaning to write another one of these for a while, due to the raging success of my last poem. special thank you to my editors/roomates manoj and general briggs.

bahut hi jaldi

woh baag mein beti thi
jawab ki inthezar mein
“mere bina mat jao”

woh thokar khaya
dheere se hasaa
“mujhe dosh na do”

usne fal kha li thi
woh chai pee liya tha
khoobsurat… andha… krodh

translation:

too soon

she was siting in the garden
waiting for an answer
“dont go without me”

he stumbles
laughing softly
“do not blame me”

she ate the fruit
he drank the tea
beautiful… blind… anger

Comparison of Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

Posted on September 24, 2009 by amit

The first step of any social influence marketing plan should be to listen – not just what people are saying about your company, but about you as a person, your competitors, and key trends in your industry. I’ve been spending some time recently looking at a lot of different social media listening tools. The factors I believe are important in this type of tool are:

The number of sources indexed – Twitter, Technorati, Youtube, etc…
The number of results
The quality of results – How many are actually about my search term vs. spam
Sentiment Analysis – Are the mentions positive? Do people hate me? I wanna know…
Trend Analysis – Can I see spikes and ebbs in mentions? What about by locations?
RSS – Can I get an RSS feed of this (this is critical for real use)
Email Alerts – Can I get a weekly report emailed? Can I get an email of mentions a day increase above a certain threshold (or dip)?
Widgets – Can I display all public mentions on my site?

Below is a brief comparison and analysis on my findings of the free services (a post on paid services will be coming soon)

Yahoo! Pipes

My initial plan was to use Yahoo! Pipes to create an RSS feed of mentions across the major sites (Twitter, Google Alerts, Google Blogsearch, Technorati and Youtube). I was pleasantly surprised to find many people had the same idea and extended it far beyond the major sites to include: Backtype, Techmeme, Boardtracker, WordPress and many others. Sweet! I ran the seemingly most popular version for the term “codechef” (one of the projects I work on) and was quite disappointed with the results. Only 33 results? Where are the tweets? Aright, time to investigate. I fired up the Yahoo! Pipes editor and was immediately regretting it:

Er… Ok. While in theory Yahoo! Pipes looked like the perfect tool for this, trying to extend or modify a pipe isn’t very easy. Also you are passing query parameters dynamically in the URL, if they underlying site makes a change, you won’t get results and might never know. Rather then trying to develop and maintain this myself, I realized there must be a lot of other people who want to do this.

SocialMention

SocialMeniton is the best tool I came across. It indexed all the sources I expected (plus some I didn’t), gave the best results (in terms of both quality and quantity), provided tools for aggregation and analysis and had a really cool widget:

You can filter based on source (blogs, photos, videos, forums, etc…), sentiment (view only negative mentions), keywords, users, etc… Super cool. Also the analytics, number of retweets, authors, last mention, average time between mentions is awesome. It’d be nice if the photos were shown as thumbnails in the full list of results (they are when you click on photos), but that’s a small thing.

Here’s a embed of their real-time widget for everyone’s favorite rapper (mesmerizing):

Collecta

Collecta was better then most but still lacking critical features to be considered seriously. It displays search results in a Twitter style stream (and also shows thumbnails of images). Also gives a nice preview of blog posts and articles:

Though without an RSS feed of results or tools for aggregation and analysis, this isn’t likely to be useful.

WhosTalkin

The last app I came across worth mentioning is WhosTalkin. Although this tool is also lacking RSS feeds and analysis, the site is fast and friendly. It’s easy to filter across results and is nice for a one-time search:

Conclusion

Currently it seems like SocialMention is far ahead of it’s competitors though this field is rapidly evolving and new players come in daily. Here is a summary of the tools described above:

	Yahoo! Pipes	SocialMention	Collecta	Whostalkin
Sources Indexed	As many as you want to configure (most popular “firehouse” has 40)	80+	Not mentioned, though I saw all the big guns	50+
Number of Results	33	124	45	130
Quality of Results	No spam	No spam	No spam	10% Spam
Sentiment Analysis	No	Yes	No	No
Trend Anlysis	No	Not really	No	No
RSS Feeds	Yes	Yes	No	Coming Soon
Email Alerts	Real-time and daily	Daily	Nope	Nope
Widgets	No	Yes	No	No

Next week I have demo’s of a few of the paid tools, to see what they can do, that we can’t do on our own. Know of any tools I missed? Have a different opinion? Let me know…

Who Needs Estimates?

Posted on September 17, 2009 by amit

Last weekend, I participated in and helped organize the CodeChef TechTalks. In Bangalore, we had a birds of a feather session where the question was asked, why do we need estimates when developing software? Here’s my take:

No one is good at estimating - I’ve never met anyone who can consistently, correctly identify how long a development task will take. In the case that you do manage to complete a task within your estimate, it’s most likely you’ve added a 50% buffer (i.e. which in essence is saying you have no idea how long it’ll take)
Estimates cause stress - The developer tells the project/account/product manager that a feature will be done in 3 days. The manager tells the client it will be done in 6 days (they of course add another 50% padding). 6 days later the feature is buggy, doesn’t work in IE and is no way client ready. Everyone is angry and pointing fingers.
Estimating takes time - It might take half a day to figure out all the nuances of a particular feature and account for everything that may go wrong before an estimate can be given. This time is better spent developing working software.
Estimates reduce the quality of software - “I gotta get this feature out the door tomorrow, there’s no way I’m writing tests that will help me update and maintain the system down the road. I’m hacking this together so I can watch football on Sunday.”

If you ask most managers, the reason they want estimates is to: make sure projects are on-time, measure return on their investment, see if they require additional/fewer developers, help prioritize new features, and to help plan with other teams.

I don’t really buy it though. It seems like all the reasons above can be accomplished without estimates. Instead, the focus should be on “are we consistently delivering value through short incremental releases at a sustainable pace?”

When we talked about this as a group (almost everyone was a developer), they said this all sounds great, but how do we convince our company to scrap estimates? We didn’t really come to any consensus but some interesting suggestions included:

Release code to production often - Instead of working on a feature for a month, then at the end of the release finding out the a client requirement changed, or that the implementation wasn’t as per their expectation, release code often and get feedback quickly.
Deliver software in thin, vertical slices - In most typical construction projects you work on the foundation, then put in steel beams, then put up some walls, insert windows, put in carpeting, etc… Once the entire building is mostly ready, can people start moving in (I have no idea if this is actually how buildings are built, you get my point though). In Bombay I’ve seen some constructions projects in which they will finish a section of the building completely, before they start on the next floor/wing/etc… People can start living there (deriving value), as soon as that piece is done.
Focus on customer happiness not features - If you get your clients/customers involved, are transparent about your process, get feedback early and often and demonstrate constant progress, everyone should be happy, right?

One of the joys of working at a products company is that we don’t have clients making ridiculous demands (like asking us when stuff will be done ). Certainly in a service company it’s a lot harder to pull this off. Instead of drafting a proposal for a certain set of features delivered at a fix price in a fixed time period, maybe moving to a monthly retainer is better for both parties (though this definitely requires a high level of trust and maturity).

If the post above doesn’t convince you, my buddy Naresh wrote a better post (with some very interesting comments) here. What do you think, are estimates a necessary evil?

The Problem With Facebook

Posted on September 2, 2009 by amit

I came across an article today in the NYTimes describing how people are starting to leave Facebook. While the author’s claims are anecdotal (certainly the numbers indicate impressive growth), I found myself silently nodding in agreement at some of her points. The author outlines the feelings of being a stalker, concern of ownership of data, the “corporatization” of the site, the concern over FB’s tracking on 3^rd party sites and the uselessness of it all, as reasons people have recently left the site. While I’m not ready to jump ship yet, I have noticed my FB use has drastically decreased.

In the past few months I’ve found that my newsfeed has less relevant information, mostly from people I don’t care about. I’m big on Twitter, the updates I get are personal, social and professional. I’m able to learn new stuff about the web world, keep up with my favorite artists and (to a lesser degree) connect with friends. The updates in my Facebook feed are largely spammy quiz results from girls I went to middle school with (Sorry Laura, I don’t care what Twilight character you most resemble). Maybe I should only accept real friend requests, maybe not.

Now it seems like FB is trying to compete with Twitter head on, by making status updates public and adding real-time search. Personally I think this is a terrible idea. I use Facebook and Twitter for different reasons. Facebook can differentiate itself by being the place I go to stay up with my “real” friends, plan events and share photos. Create more useful communication applications (like video and group chat), give me better ways to share my photos and videos (like embedding slideshows) and cut down spam by 90%. There are huge opportunities for Facebook in location based services as well.

I understand that Facebook needs to make money, and sees real-time as a huge opportunity, but they should focus on Facebook connect (already 10k+ sites using it). Want profit? Spread your tendrils across the web, become the universal ID then the defacto payment system for the web. Create an app store (I’d pay 99 cents for Mafia Wars) and allow microtransactions (25 cents for some more poker chips).

Don’t be Twitter, that’s not why we came to you in the first place…

Measuring the Success of Social Media Campaigns

Posted on July 28, 2009 by amit

Why should businesses engage in Social Media? In the end, the goal of all marketing is to increase sales/conversions. But only in rare examples can a company point to their social media marketing efforts and indicate a direct correlation with sales (one exception is Dell Outlet on Twitter). Companies should engage in social media to increase:

Reach – create buzz, get new customers, create awareness
Reputation and influence – become an authority/thought leader, improve sentiment
Engagement – improve customer and brand loyalty

But how do you determine if your campaign is successful? First you need to determine your objective. If you have a new product launch, you probably want to build some buzz and create awareness (Reach). If you have added new features to your product, you will want to measure it’s effect on user engagement/loyalty. If your goal is to increase your influence and reputation, you can start aggregating content or create your own (via a corporate blog for instance).

This is a rapidly evolving field and the tools and metrics used to determine success are changing quickly. Don’t be afraid to throw away metrics, the most important thing is that you start tracking. Below I list some methods for objectively measuring your success.

Measuring Reach

Visitors – The number of people visiting your site and the source of that traffic. This can be measured using standard web analytics tools like Google Analytics. If you want to benchmark against peers/competitors use tools like Compete/Alexa.
Number of Friends/Followers/Fans (applies to Facebook, SlideShare, etc…) – I don’t believe Twitter followers is a good metric to measure since there is a lot of spam. Much more important is quality of visitors (i.e. one Oprah or Michael Arrington is much more valuable then 1000 followers). Measuring 2nd degree relationships (number of friends of friends), is much more valuable (albeit more difficult to measure).
RSS Subscriptions – Feedburner
Links – When sharing links, you can use tools like bit.ly to determine how many people have clicked on it. Just add a + to the end of any bit.ly link (check out my self-referential example: http://bit.ly/16GZ6x+).

Measuring Reputation and Influence

Number of public mentions (Blogs, Twitter, Facebook) – To measure public mentions on blogs you can subscribe to an RSS feed for your company/product/brand/name on Google Blog Search. For public mentions on Twitter subscribe to an RSS feed from Twitter Search. For Facebook, use Lexicon (this is more interesting as a tool to compare against your competitors, though they are undoubtedly improving this tool and I’m sure will add a y-axis soon).
Incoming links (SEO) – This is the primary way Google measures the authority of pages when ranking search results. Use tools like Google Webmaster Tools, Xinu Returns and Technorati to track these.
Comments about you on other sites – Since Google doesn’t index comments on blogs (most often), you can find out using tools like BackType.
Retweets – Twitter Search
Unsolicited positive mentions – I love this metric, there’s not much you can do to actively improve this, but if you are tracking it and are open, transparent and engaging your users properly, people will speak positively about you.

Measuring Engagement
You can use standard web analytics tools (Google Analytics) to measure:

Visitor Loyalty – The number of return visitors over 1 month
Recency – The number of return visitors over 1 week
Duration – The length of time spent on the site
Actions – The number of actions taken on the site: downloading, posting, commenting, playing, etc…

The absolute numbers are not important. Track these numbers month over month and look for an upwards trends.

Off-site engagement metrics include:

Facebook – You can use FB insights to measure the number of actions on your fan page: comments, likes, wall posts, etc…
YouTube – Youtube has it’s own analytics for measuring video plays.
Trendrr – Trendrr is an awesome tool which let’s you measure public mentions and music/video plays across a variety of sites.

In short there is no easy way to measure your success across social media. Sure there are short cuts like Twitalyzer, which is nice for at a glance metrics, but if you have the time coming up with your own set of metrics is far more valuable. This all assumes that your brand is small enough that you don’t get thousands of public mentions a day. If you do, you’ll have to call in one of the big boys like Visible Technologies or Sentiment Metrics.

Anything I missed? Anything else you track? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments…

Cost of living comparison: Mumbai vs NYC

Posted on July 9, 2009 by amit

Here are some rough cost of living numbers comparing Mumbai and NYC - some research was done but this is mostly anecdotal based on my experiences. The below monthly expenses assume you are living very well. I am erring on the high side.

Item	INR/USD Cost in India	INR/USD Cost of Item in NYC
Apartment Rent (Assuming a nice 2 bedroom, 2 bathrooms, fulltime watchman, balcony)	45000/900 per month (in Andheri)	150000/3000 per month (in Midtown)
Domestic Help (Cook & Maid)	6000/60 per month (7 days a week)	1500/25 per hour
Driver	8000/120 per month (6 days a week/12 hours a day)	1250/25 per hour
Dinner + few drinks in Top restaurants (5-stars)	2000/40 per person	5000/100 per person
Weekend trip (travel + accommodations)	To Goa: 7500/150 per person (offseason)	To Miami: 30000/600 per person
Cell Phone (expensive data plan + plus a few hours of talktime to US/Europe)	2500/50 per month	3500/70 per month
Cable TV (200 channels)	400/8 per month	2000/40 per month

Item	INR/USD Cost in India	INR/USD Cost of Item in NYC
330ml can of Coke	20/.40	62.5/1.25
A meal at a decent Restaurant	200/4	600/12
Movie Ticket	180/3.60	512.5/10.25
Big Mac at McDonalds	65/1.30	125/2.50
Levis Jeans	1800/36	2000/50
Levis T-shirt	600/12	1000/20
Visit to a specialist in a great hospital	600/12	10000/200

Estimated Monthly Expenses	INR/USD Cost in India	INR/USD Cost of Item in NYC
Apartment	45000/900 (in Andheri)	150000/3000 (in Midtown)
Driver, Maid, Cook	6000/60	Yeah right
Cell Phone	2500/50	3500/70
Internet/ TV	750/15	3000/60
Eating out and drinking 3 nights a week	12000/240	30000/600
Movies once a week	720/14.40	2050/41
Groceries (monthly)	7500/150	15000/300
Clothing & Shopping (Assuming a few new pants and shirts a month)	10000/200	15000/300
One long weekend trip (including Flight accommodations)	10000/150	30000/600
TOTAL	88970/1779.4	248550/4971

If anyone disagrees with me here, feel free to comment and let me know how this can be improved.

Slides from Social Media Training Sessions

Posted on July 8, 2009 by amit

Last week I gave a few training sessions to new joinees in our company covering Social Media, Online Advertising and Analytics. From talks I’ve had with new joinees, I’ve found this information isn’t covered in college/graduate coursework. I’m planning on turning this into a longer course and teaching at one of the business schools here.

Part 1: Introduction to Social Media

View more presentations from amitklein.

Part 2: Twitter, Facebook and Social Data Portability

An Intro to Social Data Portability

Posted on June 21, 2009 by amit

Social Data Portability allows you to bring your friends, interests and relationships where ever you go across the web. For users, it means not having to create a new account on every site, and having immediate access to your network of friends. For businesses, it gives you more demographic insight into your users, as well as let you leverage the popularity of existing social networks to promote activity on your site. In this post I will discuss the strengths and differences between Facebook Connect, OpenSocial and Sign in with Twitter and show a few examples.

Facebook Connect

Simply put, Facebook Connect allows you to build a Facebook application outside of Facebook. You can integrate with Facebook’s authentication, retrieve profile information about your users, allow your users to find their friends who have “connected” with your site, as well as selectively publish actions to a user’s activity stream. Developing a Facebook Connect application requires software development chops but gives you access to Facebook’s 200m users. Digg and CNN both demonstrate different approaches to integration.

CNN
CNN offered a live video stream during Obama’s inaugration. It included a Facebook Connect application which allowed users to sign in with their Facebook credentials and participate in a live global chat.

Chattin' bout Barry

The participation numbers are staggering. According to Mashable:

1. 600,000 status updates posted through the CNN.com Live Facebook feed
2. Facebook averaged 4,000 status updates per minute during the broadcast
3. 8,500 status updates were posted during the first minute of Obama’s speech
4. “Millions” of people logged into Facebook during the broadcast

These numbers would’ve never been achievable if users had to register with CNN to participate. Recently, the Whitehouse has taken a cue and announced a similar application for it’s live video events.

Digg
Digg’s Facebook Connect implementation allows you to link your Digg and Facebook accounts. Each story you digg, shows up on your activity stream (for all your friends to see). For Digg, the beneifts are immediate, more people will see that I am digging stories and click back to the site.

Signing Into Facebook Connect

Digg story on my Facebook activity feed

Facebook Connect is now also available for the iPhone. This is huge and will create a whole new world of mobile social applications.

OpenSocial

OpenSocial is similar to Facebook Connect but allows you to build applications that run in orkut, MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, Ning and Yahoo! and other 3rd party sites.

Virgin Global Row
The Virgin Global Row is a one crazy dude’s story about circling Antarctica in a boat by himself (and raising some money for charity). OpenSocial integration allows you to login, connect with other people who have joined the site, and push your actions on the site to your various social networks.

Open social options

Google Friend Connect
Google has also release a set of plug n play widgets based on OpenSocial called Google Friend Connect. Currently there are about 10 widgets available including sign-in, comments, polls, reviews, events and recommendations. This is cool because it allows anyone to quickly and easily incorporate social elements to their site (no coding required).

Sign in with Twitter

Yep, you guessed it, sign in with Twitter allows 3rd party sites to publish activity to your Twitter stream. One example of this is Spymaster (the Twitter game which equally amazed and pissed people off).

Spymaster
Spymaster is a game which allows you to go on missions, raise money, buy weapons and attack other spies (Twitter users). Success is based on how many of your followers play the game and how often you send out updates through your twitter stream. IMO the game is pretty boring although it is undeniably attracting a huge following and a really nice example of a successful viral campaign.

Bribing you to tweet about your activities

Real time spymaster activity

Conclusion

There’s a big battle over who will become the defacto social OS of the web. In the future sites/widgets/apps will be social (and location aware), the question is where your data will be sourced from. At this point Facebook is clearly in the lead, but Google has deep pockets and Twiter is making huge strides. As Facebook and Twitter launch payment platforms, the opportunity to monitize through social ads and microtransactions presents a huge opportunity. Got friends?

http://virginglobalrow.com/

Finding a Job Abroad

Posted on June 4, 2009 by amit

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” — Mark Twain (RT will lerner)

A few people have asked me recently how I was able to find a job in India while living in New York. I’ll share my experiences and give some tips which will hopefully be relevant for anyone looking for a job.

One day I woke up and decided I wanted to move to abroad. It didn’t really matter where, on a whim I picked India because it sounded cool and Hong Kong since my parents had lived there and I had some contacts. The first thing I did was the traditional job board seek and apply.

Lesson #1: It’s tough to evaluate and seriously consider a candidate from half a world away: The response rates I got from the job boards sucked. I probably applied to 100 jobs and maybe heard back from 1. Not very encouraging. I realized that this wasn’t going to work, I either needed connections or to pack up my bags and move and try to apply for jobs locally. I wasn’t quite ready for drastic measures quite yet (but I was getting close).

Lesson #2: Use your network, but don’t force it: Next I started reaching out to trusted people in my network (family and friends) and asked if they had any recommendations. I was put in touch with some interesting people, but nothing was a great fit. 50% of the people I spoke with seemed like they were doing me (or my connect) a favor by talking to me, and the other 50% I felt like I was talking to just because I had no other alternative (and didn’t want to offend my hook-up). The best conditions for getting a job is when you have an “in” and you are suitably qualified and passionate about the job. In my case I only had two out of the three. I spent a few days thinking about it and decided on another approach.

Lesson #3: Forget a job profile, find a great company: Rather then looking for a particular job, I started trying to figure out which companies I would love to work for. I did some research and came up with a list that included interactive agencies (based on my most recent work experience), web startups (including a local search company and an advertising network), VCs and various agile software companies. I came across Deloitte’s list of Fastest 500 growing companies divided into region and investigated every company. Finally I contacted the owners of special interest groups (like The Agile Softare Community of India run by Naresh Jain), asking for any advice.

Lesson #4: Go straight to the top: I did as much research about these companies as possible put together a list of the top 50 companies I wanted to work for, and rather then apply for jobs through the traditional channels, I found the name of their CEO and emailed them directly. Emailing a CEO is a good idea: first off it shows some “chutzpa,” second if you are good, they can create a job for you, third when a CEO emails a hiring manager and says check out this candidate, they listen. Luckily, CEO’s of companies are usually pretty easy to find, though their email addresses aren’t always. The old “guess the email address” trick usually did the job. Either find contact info for someone at the company and copy their email address format (first.last@company, first.last initial@company, etc…), or just guess a popular format. I was able to hit the CEO for pretty much every company I found. Response rates (especially for smaller companies) jumped dramatically.

Lesson #5: Land one interview: This is the hardest step. In my case I got lucky, an agile software consultancy who I really admired (let’s call them ThoughSmirks), had offices in NY and were hiring in India. Wow’d ‘em in NYC and they agreed to setup an interview with me in India. Boom, just like that I had one concrete, legitimate interview lined up with a company I liked. I setup a tentative itinerary and bought some plane tickets (on my own dime). Now with travel dates in hand it was a easy to lock up other interviews. Through the people I was in talks with and the CEO’s of companies I was emailing, I had a bunch of phone interviews and setup 7 in-person interviews for a 9 day trip to Mumbai, Goa and Bangalore. The companies varied in terms of size, culture, vertical and location, and just like college I had some “safeties” and some “long-shots.”

Lesson #6: Get the offer – think later: When I got here and started talking to people my views totally changed. The company I was most excited about ended up being a little boring, something didn’t resonate well. During the interview I started questioning if this was the right move for me. The interview is not the place to think about this stuff: you’re an actor – smile, laugh, be smart, get the offer – do whatever it takes. You’ll have plenty of time to think about this later.

Lesson #7: Money isn’t the most important thing: I was lucky and was able to get multiple offers. This really allowed me to evaluate what was important. Despite liking one company in Bangalore, I hated the city (you’re tellin’ me bars close at 11 and there’s no live music?). Goa was awesome and the advertising agency I got an offer from was cool, but as my Dad said, even in Darfur they pay you more (Money isn’t everything but hey a man’s gotta eat). In the end I really liked Mumbai and was really impressed by all the people I met at Directi although my role wasn’t exactly defined at the time of joining, 7 months later I’m extremely happy with my decision.

Lesson #8: Enjoy: In the end moving abroad has been a really great experience for me. I’ve been challenged professionally and personally and feel like I have grown tremendously as a result. I have many friends who have taken the plunge (from teaching english in China, Vietnam, Peru, South Korea to selling ice cream in Thaland to peace corps in West Africa), and not a single person I know regrets it. It isn’t for everyone, but those of you feeling pangs of restlessness, what are you waiting for, the time is now…

Amit Klein

Figurin' it out…

Want to be a billion dollar company? Get 28mil users

bahut hi jaldi / too soon

Comparison of Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

Yahoo! Pipes

SocialMention

Collecta

WhosTalkin

Conclusion

Who Needs Estimates?

The Problem With Facebook

Measuring the Success of Social Media Campaigns

Cost of living comparison: Mumbai vs NYC

Slides from Social Media Training Sessions

An Intro to Social Data Portability

Facebook Connect

OpenSocial

Sign in with Twitter

Conclusion

Finding a Job Abroad