For the past few weeks my two buddies and I have been coding non-stop and last night completed the first iteration of our product. Now it’s time to take a step back, get some people using the app and see if we’re on the right track.
What’s the product?
StoryStack lets people create beautiful digital stories together. Groups or individuals can combine photos, videos, maps, and text to tell rich stories on just about anything – weddings, group trips, cookbooks, design portfolios, and more.
Content on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are consumed individually and are therefor lacking depth and context.
If four of my friends go on a trip together and post their photos on Facebook, there’s a lot of overlap.
Slideshows are old-school, lacking interaction and are generally pretty boring.
How is what you’re doing different from Facebook/Flickr/Picassa?
There’s three main differences:
StoryStack is more then just a collection of photos and text you can add maps, tweets, check-ins, polls, videos and other widgets.
StoryStack is collaborative, multiple people can combine their content into a coherent narrative.
StoryStack stories are consumed from beginning to end creating an immersive, longer-form, contextual experience.
What are you doing next?
The plan for the next week or two is get user feedback and plan the next iteration of the product. Should we focus on themes and improving the presentation layer? Should we build in wikipedia style voting features to make this a platform for large events (like weddings and SXSW)? Is this even a viable product? We’re not really sure. We also want to explore an iPad version.
Are you trying to raise money?
Not really. We think delaying funding as long as possible is the way to go. That doesn’t mean we aren’t interested in talking to investors. We’ve been meeting with some VC’s just to get feedback on the concept and build relationships.
We’ve also applied to TechStars NY and are really hoping to get in. The mentor list looks ridiculous and we think it’s an amazing program.
I want to try it out!
Sure, if you have low expectations and a sense of humor send me an email and I’ll send you an invite to a really buggy alpha (just don’t try it in IE). Feedback on the product or concept is always appreciated.
I’ve been playing Fantasy Football for the last 8 years and absolutely love it. For those who don’t know how it works: you join a league with your friends, draft real players, and accumulate points based on how the players do in real life. Each week you match up against one of your friends, if your team accumulates more points you win the match.
There’s so much to love about Fantasy Sports:
There’s constant interaction between members of the league through a live draft, trades and sh*t talking. It’s a great way for me to stay connected with my friends from High School and College (I play in two leagues).
It makes me a much bigger sports fan by forcing me to read up and watch games I ordinarily wouldn’t care about. I couldn’t care less about the Houston Texans but if I have Andre Johnson and my opponent that week has Matt Schaub, it makes for a thrilling, must watch game.
It turns out I’m not the only one who loves Fantasy Sports:
A 2006 study showed 22 percent of U.S. adult males 18 to 49 years old, with Internet access, play fantasy sports. Fantasy Sports is estimated to have a $3–$4 Billion annual economic impact across the sports industry. ~ Wikipedia
A few weeks ago two of my friends and I were discussing how Fantasy Cricket in it’s optimal form doesn’t exist and came up with an idea:
CricketFaceoff.com will allow fans and their friends to create virtual cricket leagues and compete against each other. Users can manage their team and get access to live scores, stats, scouting reports, news and expert advice.
Considering that in India, ‘Cricket’ is the largest religion with a billion fanatic followers, Fantasy Cricket in the country has great potential.
Fantasy Cricket is at the hub of three dynamic industry spokes, namely, Internet, Gaming and Cricket. In a country like India, where cricket is almost the only sport, and with industry projections putting Internet penetration at an encouraging $300mn and online gaming at $200mn by 2010, this sector is definitely headed towards growth. [Wikipedia]
There are two main competitors: Dream11 and CricInfo. Both of these sites lack:
An online draft system – Currently you can pick the same players on every team without penalty or restriction
Integration with Facebook/Twitter – Sign in with Facebook, Publish sh*t talking to news feed, Vote on who you think will win published to news feed, etc…
We actually went so far as to buy domains (CricketFaceoff.com and CricketSuperstar.com), get a logo (see above) and create mockups for the site. There are two versions, the first is a full-out draft based fantasy cricket site:
The second is a “minimum viable product” pick the winner version. There’s no live draft, less engagement, but still retains a lot of the core elements that we think can be successful:
We have thought through a number of monetization strategies and strategic partnerships but in the end we didn’t have the patience to go through with it. I’d still be interested in pursuing this in the future. Get in touch if you are interested in collaborating…
Editor’s Note: I’m almost embarrassed to say I actually had to play Frontierville and Farmville to write this post. These games send notifications constantly and I wasn’t entirely comfortable with all my friends knowing how my pigs were doing. Therefore, I had to go undercover and create a new FB account under my Indian alter ego: Amit Kumar
Zynga has experienced explosive growth since it’s inception in 2007. They’re absolutely crushing it with:
How did Zynga become such a profit generating, user acquiring, viral monster? Here’s a few strategies that worked for Zynga which you can apply to your business:
1. Build sharing as an integral part of the product
At every point Zynga prompts users to sign up for updates and send notifications (many times crossing the line) through: fan pages/likes, invites, shares, bookmarks, stream publishing, in game messaging, and email notifications. In fact they’re so darn good at notifying ”Facebook had to change their notification policies
Before you even get started playing you’re prompted to:
- Become a Fan/Like (so they can push updates through your news stream)
- Invite your friends (pro tip: make it look like it’s required)
- Share this page on your news stream
- They again remind you right at the start of the game:
Sharing is not an afterthought limited to an invite section, it’s an integral part of the experience. In fact the more you share and interact with others, the more you are rewarded.
2. Create ways to elevate a users status/social capital
One way to think about social capital is we’re all in a certain bucket with each other, and the lowest bucket is maybe you’ll accept a friend request, and the highest bucket is you’ll come over and help me move, or pick me up at the airport,” Pincus told the Wired Business Conference Tuesday. “The question is, is there something we can do to help you move buckets?
While it’s cool (sort of) that I level’d up in Frontierville, I’m not gonna tell my friends about it, but… if I can share with them some of the points I’ve accumulated then that’s a lot more compelling. It no longer feels like spam, but instead that I’m helping them:
Applying this to a web business don’t just give a discount to the user who invites 5 of her friends to the service, let her pass on the discount to her friends (that’s something you really wanna share).
3. Assume you are gonna get it wrong at first
Don’t assume that your product is “the one.” Zynga does a great job of experimenting and making decisions based on data. I love this video of Pincus speaking at Stanford:
Towards the end he is asked if he could go back and share a lesson with himself when he was CEO of Tribes what would it be.
If I could do it all over again, I would have made Tribe a platform to test many ideas of social networking. We tried just one. Oh my god what the hell was I thinking? Just one? At our company we have several hundred tests going on every day and in every game. I would’ve done is made Tribe a platform to test every configuration
This is echo’d by others at Zynga:
Analysis, analysis, analysis. It’s been like that. [In traditional development] It’s just like, “Oh, it’s going to be a great experience,” and this and that. We’ll spend two years down a ship cycle, and, “Oops, I was wrong!”
So now it’s like, “If we do this, I think we can measure that, and here’s how we’re going to measure and tweak it later down the road…” We are an incredibly analytical organization, so we track just about everything. It’s the secret sauce behind all that stuff. There’s a lot of mathematics that go into it
That’s the magic behind what we do. Certain things we do will work, and others won’t. You try new ones, and A, B, C, D, E, F, G testing constant. (Source)
Several hundred A, B, C, D, E, F, G tests going on daily… sweet bejeezus.
4. “Ghetto” test
You don’t actually have to build it to find out if it works.
In the last 5 minutes of the video above Pincus is asked what’s the best way to do market research. His answer – “Ghetto Test”. If someone wants to build, let’s say, a hospital simulator he creates an FB ad that says, “Ever wanted to run your own hospital?” which leads to a survey (or if it’s really ghetto a 404 page).
All Zynga has to do is track CTR and compare it to previous historical rates to get a pretty good idea of demand. I’ve heard a lot of people test demand for a product idea, and A/B test marketing copy using Adwords (you don’t care about the goal, just the intent).
Focusing on products that don’t work funnels attention and energy away from ones that do. Even if you’ve made substantial investments know when it’s time to let go.
We’ve actually made investments into some innovative games that were incredibly hardcore. If you look at Guild of Heroes, for example, we did roll that out. It was a version of Diablo built in Flash, and it wasn’t successful, and we didn’t support it any longer. (Source)
6. Create unexpected moments of delight
Surprise your users through game mechanics, humorous copy, badges, and easter eggs. If you make them smile, they’ll tell they’re much more likely to come back and tell their friends.
One of the really fun and successful features we added is what we call the ‘Lonely Cow’ feature,” said Skaggs. “You can help find it a home, then somebody claims it. You’ll get a brown cow instead of the white cow you had before. Then you milk the brown cow and you get chocolate milk! That’s a ‘moment of delight,’ totally unexpected but cool (Source).
7. Leverage your size to cross promote like crazy
The best customer for one of your new products is an existing customer. If you liked Farmville you’ll looooooooove Frontierville.
They also have a banner at the top of their games calling out the rest of their properties:
Only by leveraging their existing user base were they able to get 100,000 users on Frontierville’s first day.
8. Maximize Trends
Pincus says the web is about repeatable formulas and once you find something that works, it doesn’t break for a long, long time. Think of LOLcats, rickrolling and Google. Nothing that Zynga does is new, but they’ve executed on it tremendously well. They’ve found a formula that works and are bangin’ out hits at an astouning rate.
We are overloaded with information. During the course of my day I email, tweet, comment, post, chat, message, buzz, check in, call, sms, mms, bbm and sometimes (if I’m really lucky) actually talk to people. We are moving towards an ever increasing flood of content (much of it automated) and it’s only gettin’ worse. One day soon everythingwilltweet.
It’s not the the sheer quantity of information that’s the problem (faster flow of information will only help people achieve more), it’s how we send and receive it:
Sending: How do I send out information so that it reaches it’s intended audience only. In the upcoming era of persistent, public online identity, how do I can still share my green-beer, toga party pictures with my friends and make sure potential clients don’t see it? Additionally, I want to publicize my boring social media posts without spamming my friends who I know really, really don’t care.
Receiving: With all this content around how do I make sure that that important stuff gets to me FAST, while the stuff that matters stays buried (until I get really bored or have lots of time to look through it).
The idea that’s been bouncin’ around my head tries to address the second point… enter: sign.al.
I have a dream… that one day my phone will ring when my buddy is callin’ me up to go grab a beer, while calls from vodafone bill collectors stay silent. That my blackberry will only flash in meetings only when really really important stuff happens (like the Mets scoring a winning run). That one day, we’ll be able to ignore the tens, hundereds or thousands of messages that don’t matter, and focus our attentions on the ones that do. Here’s how sign.al would work
You give it all your account information (gmail, facebook, twitter, etc…)
It starts off like any aggregator (Seesmic for instance), showing you a timeline of emails, facebook messages, tweets, yadda yadda:
Aright, now’s where it starts getting cool… after a little while, it moves away from a timeline view, to a priority view. It starts guessing knowing what you are most likely gonna want to read and respond to and starts moving those to the top. This shift is already happening (FB news feed vs time line, Mozilla Raindrop, Xobni for Bberry)
Sign.al can know what’s important by:
Frequency – How regularly you read and respond to individuals
Speed – Of your read/response
Popularity – The number of comments, retweets, likes, and mentions
Proximity – Number of shared connections
Medium – @mentions more weightage the email cc’s?
Geolocation – Are messages from Mumbai and NYC more important to me?
Time of day – Are certain types of messages more important at a certain time?
Content – Am I more likely to be interested in content about the Jets regardless of where, when, how it’s getting to me? (yes)
Recency – Moving away from this but still a factor
Phase 2 – Phone app
Incorporating voice and SMS into the mix of content to prioritize
Different types of notifications instead of timeline: ring for an important sms, vibrate for a somewhat important @mention, silent for a newsletter.
Phase 3 – Setting status (implicitly?): In a meeting, driving, out to lunch, available – Based on this reduce/amplify notification methods. If I’m sitting at the airport bored and normally my phone vibrates for an important tweet, now ring.
Phase 4 – Anticipate – Based on where I am, the type of message, who I’m connecting with, the medium, the format etc… start anticipating how I may respond to them (in a totally not creepy big brotherish way)
Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution’s what matters. Take this idea, build it, I’ll use it and be happy (just be forewarned you need to legal operations in Albania to actually register the sign.al domain name :p ).
As confirmed by TechCrunch, Google today announced that they’ve bough Aardvark for $50 million – brilliant move by the Goog. I’ll get to the why after a little background.
Google still dominates the most lucrative percentage of marketing dollars spent on the web:
But recently they seem scared. Google is a one trick pony, with the Adwords serving as their main source of revenue. They’ve tried over and over to replicat it’s success but have failed miserably with Youtube, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Lively, Orkut and Wave. I visited Google’s New York offices in Jan 2007. The most memorable moment (besides the organic salmon burgers in the cafeteria) was when one of the engineers said that Google was the only site in the world, whose goal was to minimize time spent on it. At the time I was blown away – “Give the people what they want.”
Fast forward to today – for most searches related to products, services or experiential recommendations – Google fails:
Purchasing Aardvark is a brilliant (third or fourth) play into the social arena. With Buzz just released, Google now has a captive audience of 176mil (in Gmail) to test, position and improve social search (before it’s too late). People don’t want to be sold to, but will gladly buy products based on recommendations by people they trust. The line between advertising and content is blurring. The key is being able to monitize recommendations (companies would gladly pay 2% of a product’s price for a sale).
What will be interesting to see is if either Facebook, Twitter or Google is able to do it alone (doubtful – but maybe FB), whether some big-time M&A will happen (Goog buys Twitter), or whether they will be forced to open up to each other, each find their respective niches, and continue to compete on the fringe (likely). What do you think, with Buzz + Aardvark will they be able to achieve monetizable, real-time, social search before FB and Twitter?
There’s no doubt that Google Search is a great product, but aside from some cosmetic changes in how results are displayed there hasn’t been any major innovation in search in the last few years (aright, Goggles is pretty awesome):
There are a number of questions which Google fails to answer:
“where’s the best bagel in new york?”
“what’s a cheap, clean, centrally located hotel in bangkok”
“which DSLR camera should I buy?”
In the cases above, you’re most likely to get SEO-optimized aggregator/review site whose primary motivation is affiliate sales. And forget about finding anything usable to:
“what’s everyone up to this weekend?”
“should I get a tattoo?”
“is business school right for me”
Increasingly, I turn to Twitter and Facebook for these types of questions:
Aardvark is another really nice product that tries to answer these experiential/recommendation type of questions. It’s easy to use (via a chat bot) and gets quick and solid responses. The same question got me three responses within 10 min (here’s two):
(From Rakesh R./24/M/Arlington,US, Re: **cameras**
go for canon 50D with a kit lens to start with . Your body is excellent but lens is OK types. u can always improve on ur lens whne u know what u needhttp://vark.com/z/b41bf (Amazon: Canon EOS 50D)
(From Sam A./M/Dubai,UnitedArabEmirates, Re: **cameras**
Well the best bet would be to start looking at the more popular brands:
Canon and Nikon. Some people also swear by Olympus and Leica (the latter
being seriously expensive), and even Sony. I’d stay away from Sony because
cameras is not their real bread and butter (though I have read some good
reviews regarding their Alpha series). Now I wouldn’t recommend sticking to
the popular brands because they’re better or provide the best value for
money, but rather for things beyond that: availability of accessories,
lenses, repair options, etc. I personally just purchased a Canon D7 and it’s
a really great camera. Though a little on the pricey side, it provides great
value for money. Things like high continuous shooting rate, HD video, etc.
This site helps you actually buy one: http://reviews.cnet.com/dslr-buying-guide/
This website will be really helpful in doing some comparisons: http://snapsort.com/
Enjoy!
Imagine if I could aggregate this data, slice and dice according to my tastes (i.e. 2nd degree relationships within NYC who have bought a camera in the last 6 weeks), compare prices and actually buy this thing from a single application? This is a game changer that could be a devastating blow to Google SEM and forever change the way we buy products and services (though Google’s smart and they’re workin’ on it) . Facebook ::nudge nudge wink wink:: I’m lookin’ at you…
My favorite quote from the excellent video by @equalman (posted below) is:
We no longer search for the news, the news finds us…
In the near future we will no longer search for products and services they will find us
Increasingly though, it’s not just individuals who will be turning to social tools to answer tough questions:
There’s a new tool that can help companies predict sales for the coming weeks, or decide whether to increase inventories or put items on sale in certain stores.
Social data from Facebook, Twitter and the like combined with traditional CRMs will allow you to keep track of buzz, transactions and brand loyalty/sentiment, letting you answer questions like:
What are people saying about my product right now?
How has the perception of my brand changed recently and in what direction is it trending?
Geographically where is my biggest, rapidly emerging and diminishing customers?
Who are my biggest evangelists, in what demographic do they fall in, where are they located?
Who are my biggest naysayers, how can I change their perception?
What is the perception of my product vs. my competitors?
What product features do my (potential) customers want?
Where is my next potential biggest growth market?
What are the trending (in both directions) topics in my industry?
Social CRM is totally hot right now and an important trend to watch this year:
This past weekend I gave my first two lectures at SPJain on paid online marketing. I thought it went pretty well, the students seemed really engaged and interested in the material. The slides, course outline and videos are posted below. I’ve also agreed to do a 6 week course at another business school: NMIMS (more or less following this outline), if anyone has any ideas on how to improve this session or the course outline, please let me know.
Video:
The videos from the actual lecture didn’t come out to well (you can see them here and here). Below is the same session I gave to our team internally:
Introduction
iTunes Case Study – You are the marketing manager responsible for launching the iTunes Store in India
- What are your objectives?
- How do you go about achieving those objectives?
Goals:
- Discuss branding vs. performance objectives
- Discuss differences between online and offline marketing (targeting, measurement, reach)
- Discuss the marketing funnel (Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty, Advocacy)
- Review options for online advertising in relationship to the funnel
Review terminology:
- Impression, CPM, CPC, CPA/L/S, Goal, Conversion, CTR
Methods of Online Advertising
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – Google Adwords Example
- How does Google determine which ads to display to users? Keyword, bid, location, quality score / relevance (clickthrough)
- Why are the bulk of most ad budgets allocated to SEM http://mashable.com/2009/07/08/social-media-marketing-growth/#mb – intent
Ads on Social Networks – Facebook Ads
- Targeting based on demographics
Ad networks – Right Media Exchange
- What is the advantage of purchasing an ad on an network rather then directly on a site itself – Non-premium, performance based, auction, reach
Affiliate Sales – Amazon
- Description of the affiliate model
Email Marketing – Email Brain
- Review analytics for email marketing
- Discuss limitations on reach
Revisit iTunes Case Study
How can you determine effectiveness of online marketing campaigns?
- Demonstrate eCPM / eCPA calcualtions
- Link online marketing metrics to sales
Ask students to come up with a marketing plan
- Split class into branding vs. performance
- Determine goals and budget allocation based on historical results
Measurement and Course Correction
Demonstrate Google Analytics
- Show ecommerce analytics
- Glean insights, create hypothesis based on analytics data (i.e. per visit value of certain states are high, let’s see if additional marketing – online or offline – will help us generate more sale with less spend)
Course Correction
- 3 slides for creative, source and keyword performance
- Discuss actively managing campaigns and getting rid of underperforming ads, sources, keywords
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):
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…
sweet bejeezus.
