Virality For The Win

Posted on by

Virality is a funny thing. It’s like catching lightening in a bottle.  Very few do it but those that do catch the bullet train. So I am always fascinated by the “science” of virality and studies on the topic.

It’s one depressingly typical minute of the 6.2 million uploaded to YouTube every day: In a Montreal park, nothing much is happening. The camera pans around a clear blue sky, tracing the arc of a golden eagle as it twists and turns through the air. The bird pulls a generous sweep around a large tree, 30 feet or more, shorn of its branches by the bitter frost that hits the Quebec city this time of year. And then things turn from dull nature documentary into snuff film.

The eagle doesn’t continue its elegant acrobatics. Instead, it suddenly picks up pace. The sweep becomes a swoop, and it’s dropping altitude. Eleven seconds into the video, a small boy in a warm insulated jacket comes into frame. He’s sitting faced away, staring into space.

Eleven seconds into the video, you realize what’s going to happen. Eleven seconds into the video, the eagle is 10 feet behind the little boy, and you’re damned if the way the bird’s wings are drawn up doesn’t remind you an awful lot of the way Dracula wraps himself in his cloak before biting. It’s horror-movie stuff.

Except none of it is real. A great read for this weekend.

Startup Identity and the Sadness of A Successful Exit

Posted on by

Jason Cohen is one of my favorite writers. He seems to speak from the same mouth as me, only so much more elegantly. One of his latest, Startup Identity and the Sadness of A Successful Exit, is something I struggle with personally.

My fingers trembled as I fed page 34 of 72 into the fax machine, deftly pressing the head of each page into its creaky jaws so that this shitty cheap-o machine wouldn’t snag two pages at once, slantways, obscuring the precious scribblings adorning the footer of each page where it read: “Seller’s Initials: _______”.

This is what the last six years were all for. All the labor. All the risk. The brave face for the troops. The self-inflicted unflagging optimism despite no evidence to support it. All those sleepless nights worried about making payroll. The care and feeding of becoming an expert in something. The hard lessons you have to recover from learning. The experience you get just after you need it. The inner doubt suppressed for the morale of the team. No salaries followed by low salaries. The “eat what we kill” mentality. The scrounging and scrabbling and begging and fighting the assholes for those morsels of revenue, those crumbs of validation.

It’s over. We did it. I did it. American dream? Check.

The 73rd page spat out confirming the successful transfer of the previous 72.

And then…  sadness.

I haven’t been on the selling side but I have more than once grappled with moving on, with a business that couldn’t pay its bills anymore, but a business I still believed in with all my heart. I hope some day to be reconciling the mixed emotions of selling Infinity Softworks for a hefty profit but know that when that day comes, I will let go with a heavy heart. After 16 years, I am Infinity Softworks, after all, and Infinity Softworks is me.

 

Why Your Marketing Campaign Sucks

Posted on by

I am not a great marketer — more comfortable with business development and product, honestly — so articles on marketing always fascinate me. I’ve been working hard on a new product as I keep teasing you with and as apart of that have been spending a lot of time thinking about the story. Mark Suster wrote a great piece a few weeks ago on why, when building a product, it is better to think about the story then think about the features.

Ever notice how some companies tend to be in the press all the time and your big new product launch struggled for inches?

Mostly it’s because your marketing campaigns suck.

Or more directly – they are likely narcissistic resuscitations of your newest features or bragging points that nobody but your marketing team and your mom care about.

I recommend that companies move beyond narcissistic marketing to what I call “point-of-view (POV) marketing.”

Here’s what I mean …

Let’s start with what it takes for a journalist to want to write a story. Here’s what’s going through his/her head:

  • Is this story “newsworthy” or am I being asked to publish a press release?
  • Do I have an “angle” from which to write the story (first company to do X, company does biggest X, consumer behavior is doing X)?
  • If I’m covering a company can I get evidence of what the competition is doing so the story is balanced?
  • Do I have data or facts to present so the story has legs?
  • Can I get sources to talk on-the-record or off-the-record to lend credibility to the topic?
  • Will I have information that other journalists don’t have (otherwise known as a “scoop”)?

But mostly they’re thinking, “Will my audience even care about this topic?”

The ultimate measure of success for a journalist is viewership so if nobody cares about your shitty little company and the story you’re trying to pitch then the journalist doesn’t want to publish. And it’s their judgment that becomes the ultimate arbiter of this.

And beyond eyeballs they also care about “journalistic integrity” (aka their reputation) so they want to be sure they’re not being gamed. That’s why having long-term relationships with journalists matters and why having people close to the journalist who can vouch for you.

Yes, I took a big excerpt but it’s a long article full of wonderful examples. Well worth a read.

How To Start A Magazine (And Make A Profit)

Posted on by

I know how to write code. I have financial training, too. I can manage a team and focus on the details. I can also see the forest for the trees. But it’s the nitty gritty about what people did to start and build their businesses that really floats my boat. To that end, NPR has a great article on Marco Arment’s The Magazine:

He has 25,000 subscribers who pay $1.99 a month. Apple takes a 30 percent cut, leaving Arment about $35,000 a month.

This cost of putting out the magazine is a bit over $20,000 per month. It comes out every two weeks, and each issue costs about $10,000. Roughly $4,000 goes to writers. The rest goes mostly to copy editors, illustrators, photographers and editors.

How people build and run their businesses is fascinating. I felt, for a while at least with Marco’s Build and Analyze podcast, that I had a front row seat to his successes. I hope this turns out as well as it has started for him.

What Happens When the Marketing Mix Changes?

Posted on by

What happens when you take away one of the 4-Ps? It makes the whole universe of marketing a heck of a lot harder. In essence, this is what has happened in the modern software business and this is why the smartphone world will never end up like the PC world.

If you are not familiar, the 4 Ps are:

  • Place
  • Promotion
  • Price
  • Product

When Apple came out with the iPhone 3G in 2008 it also changed the rules of software sales. By building an App Store, Apple took away one of the 4 P’s, Place, and put all the stress on Price, Product and Promotion. Not too bad, you’d think. Even I was a big proponent at the time. Back in the Palm days we talked about how much easier it would be for customers if there was one single place to purchase apps and download them directly to the device. After all our biggest problem in those days was awareness and our biggest support problem was installation. By having a store on the device that would take away these problems, our world as developers would be so much better. What could go wrong?

Yeah, well, the law of unintended consequences always finds something.

By removing Place suddenly all the emphasis was put on the other three Ps. Since all apps were in one spot, it became clear very quickly that reasonable software prices were not sustainable. App prices began to drop and drop and drop until prices for the average app reached about $0.35 each. With Place defined and Price so low, Promotion became a problem. Where can we each promote our apps and still make a profit when the average app is only a few cents? And how do we promote when the only place people go to find apps doesn’t take ads? So it all comes down to Product.

Don’t get me wrong, some products found their way in this world. Gaming, in particular, has done quite well with its pay-to-play models, where the app can build buzz, become its own network effect, and then build revenue off a small sliver of heavy users. But this hasn’t worked as well in productivity where apps are either a few bucks or, if you really want to be successful, free. Most of these free apps have some way of making money away from the app stores.

I’m only picking on software but this is also one of the major problems with smartphone hardware as well. Once upon a time we bought PCs from a plethora of computer, retail or web outlets. Now, unless you are an Apple customer, you head to your local carrier store. For device manufacturers Place is gone, too. The carriers dictated Price, Product features, controlled all Promotion. Compared to the carriers, app stores so far have been downright benevolent.

What breaks this logjam, at least for the software world? I don’t fully know but clearly business models are changing. Games have started to figure this out. Fewer and fewer of them are fixed price, buy once stuff. Pay to play models are more and more prevalent. The same will be true for productivity apps. The future clearly will be some sort of freemium subscription model. The beauty is these models don’t need to be expensive. The infrastructure is cheaper, the distribution is cheaper. But it still costs money every year to develop and support these products. I hope consumers will adjust.