***Note to readers: if you haven’t seen Black Swan/The Social Network there are some spoilers below.
I don’t go to the movies much, but by some miracle I’ve managed to see both The Social Network and Black Swan in the past few months.
And what I found striking was that they were kind of the exact same story.
They are both stories of young, relatively unformed and untested talent and the journey of an individual learning to transcend himself/herself in order to produce something amazing with the help of a more seasoned/flawed mentor.
Relentless determination, it seems, has an interesting effect on the body – both physically and emotionally, and each protagonist undergoes a sort of transformation over the course of both films.
The industries that provide the backdrop – technology and the arts – are both incredibly cutthroat and revolve around a sort of idol/celebrity culture with very very few “elite”.
Yet I can’t help think about how the brilliance and talent of each main character is interpreted by the audience. Seems that Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg is seen as mostly arrogant, though heroic in his willingness to do “whatever it takes” to realize his vision for Facebook. Alternatively, the adjectives ascribed to Natalie Portman’s Nina Sayers lean more toward the pejorative – “delusional”, “eccentric” or just downright crazy.
Now of course much of this has to do with the stories themselves. Black Swan surely is much darker than the Social Network, and perhaps the physical determination (ya know, eating disorders, abused and disfigured feet, etc.) required to become an amazingly successful ballet dancer are more unsettling than the more mundane mental anguish of your average programmer phenom.
After seeing both I went back and read Manohla Dargis’ review of each in the New York Times. Why is it that Sayers is vilified while Zuckerberg is celebrated? Dargis describes Zuckerberg as “Quick as a rabbit, sly as a fox, he is the geek who would be king…he’s also the smartest guy in the room, and don’t you forget it” while Sayers “looks more like a child than a woman, her flesh as undernourished as her mind”.
Sayers is “a contender, but also a martyr to her art.” Surely one could say the same thing about the tech startup world – the amount that you give up to build a company can not-unrealistically be compared to martyrdom, yet for some reason it’s never described that way.
I wonder if it’s simply that we as an audience prefer to see the plight of an artist as tumultuous and that of an entrepreneur as inspiring. To me they were simply different stories of focus and achievement and the way that these qualities manifest in talented people.
If anything, they were each a reminder that technology is much like the arts – we engage with it hoping for a kind of transcendence that precious few are truly able to deliver.
Sometimes when talking to people about YC I get this reaction: “hey, I’d love to apply but I am sorely unqualified and don’t even know where to begin.” As the summer has officially ended and I’m back in NYC I just wanted to put it out there that every single YC founder, at some point in time, was totally unqualified for YC. So if you want to be YC female founder #15 but don’t know where to start, here’s a handy list. Or if you are a 21 year old white male hacker, you might find this useful too. But anyway.
These are simply some of the observations I’ve gathered about qualities I saw among my fellow founders. I have no insight into the application process other than this useful document that is publicly posted.
So, the tips:
1. Build some shit. Make something people want. Start today.
It’s not a secret that the YC Mantra is “make something people want”. So, umm, you should start. Don’t know what people want? Guess. Or ask. What you’ll find is that people want A LOT of things, and the majority of people are way too lazy/busy to make these things themselves. The first website I made was an ecommerce website that was ugly but functional. I did the entire thing myself and became an SEO expert. Getting people to click on my ugly site, and then buy stuff from it was this totally surreal experience. People wanted what I was selling.
I find many of the YC founders in my batch have similar stories.
You do not need to have a computer science background to build a website. It is figure-out-able. Once you figure out the basics you just move on to the harder stuff. And then you realize that you probably should have just sucked it up and majored in CS to begin with. But whatever. Seems to me the most accomplished entrepreneurs start out making ugly, barely-functional stuff. And then they get better. That seems to be the pattern.
2. Learn to *love* rejection.
You’re a nobody. If you think you’re a somebody, you’re probably wrong. One of the most useful things I heard (I believe it was on an episode of “This Week in Startups”) was one guy who said his return rate for cold emails he sent was around 10%. Yep, that’s about average. If you ask 100 people out for coffee and even ONE agrees to go with you, that’s one more coffee than you’d get by doing nothing. Net win. And once you get past people not returning your emails, there are all the other types of rejection – people who think your business sucks, doubters, griefers, haters, etc. Personal and professional rejection should be thought of as part of the cost of doing business.
3. Master the “Give then Ask” Mantra.
This piece of wisdom comes from Gary Vaynerchuk. See above – you are still a nobody. And being a startup founder requires asking people for shit. So how can you ask people for stuff when you have nothing to offer? Saying you have nothing to offer is crap. Remember the story about the dude who traded a red paperclip for a house? The favor economy, like craigslist, is inefficient. This presents an attractive arbitrage opportunity for you, Ms. Nobody.
Here is what you can offer: talent sourcing and customers/exposure. The two hardest things for any tech startup are finding good engineers and getting traction. So if you can help on either of those, the founder will be eternally grateful. Don’t try to become a recruiter, but start getting to know a bunch of engineers/CS students, keep track of who has what skills, and who’s unhappy at his/her job. While many tech people do this naturally, those who are outside the industry don’t know that keeping a list like this (whether in your head or actually on paper) is one of the most valuable things you can have because it takes a long time to compile and most people are too lazy to do it. You might never make a match, but if you ever get the opportunity to it is awesome.
The second thing is customers/exposure. Startups are not getting written about in major publications all the time. Remember: “no one cares about your startup.” So if no one cares about your startup, no one cares about anyone else’s either. So be the first. Pick some recently-launched startup that you find interesting and write a lengthy blog post about why you think it’s changing the world. Not like some 300-word reblog of a TechCrunch article. Sit there and think about it and do some research. Then write 1000-1500 words and make sure it’s insightful. Send it to the founders of the startup and post on Hacker News and Reddit. Post it on your Twitter and Facebook, even if you have 1 follower (your mom) and 1 friend (also your mom). Here’s the thing about quality content: there’s surprisingly little of it on the web and if you write good stuff people will find it.
Do these two things and DO NOT ask for anything in return from anyone. Just start doing it. I promise it will be worth it.
4. Stalk Hacker News like a mofo, make insightful comments.
PG says in the YC Application Tips that they look at your comments on Hacker News. This is not a lie. I would recommend spending 30-45 minutes a day for a one month period studying Hacker News. Read every article on the home page, read every comment. Then, start making comments. If you’d prefer to just lurk that’s fine, but there’s nothing like the first time some asshole tells you how incompetent you are on HN. It’s a rite of passage. And if it doesn’t help your YC application, it will give you an excellent background on the tech industry as a whole.
Remember that Hacker News is a system, which means it’s game-able. I don’t mean in all of the lame ways – PG has protected it pretty well against spam and sketchy behavior. Instead, I mean there are certain patterns that, if you stick around long enough, you’ll start to notice and can potentially exploit for points. Here’s a freebie: the HN audience is uber-highbrow and likes longer articles on weekends. When new stuff gets posted on the Atlantic website, submit an article that you think would be interesting to the HN audience. Slam-dunk front-page candidate. Also, anything rant-ish from Jason Calacanis is another good bet.
5. Research
There is insane amounts of data on the internets about startups and building great technology businesses – Quora especially has become a good source of data for startup-related research. I would also recommend Delicious searches, AVC, and all of PG’s essays.
The most useful for me has been listening to the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcasts. I would listen to at least 20 of them. That is 20 hours of your time, a non-trivial commitment, but listening to those stories was the single biggest reason I decided to apply to YC.
By far the most valuable thing you can do for your application is talk to other YC founders. There are over 400 alums at this point, if you cannot track down one to chat with you, you should probably reconsider doing a startup. YC founders are among the most accessible group out there – you just have to ask. Crunchbase can be really useful here.
Anyway, I hope this is helpful to those of you applying this cycle or whenever in the future (like all anecdotal advice, no guarantees on whether any of it actually works).
Even if you’re not ready to apply now, that doesn’t mean you won’t be ever.
It’s fitting, I think, that my final entry on this blog is about how I am experimenting with a paid email newsletter. Perhaps business school had more of an effect than I thought.
For me, starting a blog was an experiment to see if anyone “out there” would be interested in reading what I had to say about various technology and startup-related topics. And I mostly wrote about what I wanted at first. I knew the maximum audience for what I was writing about was maybe a few hundred people anyway.
But then this weird thing happened that I like to call “page view whoring” (PVW), where I started to scheme about how to up my page view counts instead of just writing about some weird topic that I thought was interesting (bit.ly speculation, anyone?). PVW is a vicious cycle where you realize that effectively monetizing your content means you have to appeal to a wider audience, dilute your voice and probably alienate your early adopters – the ones who appreciated your niche content to begin with.
I don’t even run ads on this blog! It wasn’t about money right away. But it WAS about motivation. Why was I putting in the time to write stuff? Well, for non-ad-driven blogs they usually start out as a for-the-love side project and then the good ones can turn into branding tools for the authors who leverage “their brand” in some creative way (shilling products to their audience, lead gen for various businesses, “deal-flow”, speaking engagements, book deals, etc.).
But I don’t want to build “a brand” – I just want to write about kind of weird stuff that I like and have people appreciate it. And the PVW was starting to creep me out. Like, “If I write something about privacy and Facebook it will get some points on Hacker News!” And then I did. And then it did. Turns out you can get pretty decent at PVW if you put your mind to it.
And that’s when it stopped being a purely for-the-love side project.
It became “Hey! 5000 page views this month! If I can just get that to 10,000 maybe I can start making money from this” and that was the moment when I agreed to dilute my message for the sake of maybe making a little cash off this side project. I hate admitting this in public, but it’s true: I am a fucking capitalist.
My hypothesis is this: by introducing the money part at the beginning of the cycle instead of the end, one can avoid the vicious PVW cycle. When I heard about Sam Lessin’s new side project Letter.ly, I was intrigued.
The model is just a bit different, but I think awesome. You state your price (mine is $2/month) and people can pay it if they want to subscribe. Not a new idea necessarily, but extremely well-executed and easy to set up.
Example: John Gruber gets 3 million page views at Daring Fireball and charges $4500/week for sponsorship. I only need 9000 subscribers to make the same amount of money, which coincidentally is probably the maximum number of people who’d be interested in what I have to say anyway. It’s just as much work to get to 9000 paid subscribers as it is to get to 3m page views, but the paths are *very* different. I think mine will probably top out at maybe a few hundred, but the drastic difference between 3 million and 9000 is notable.
I am already starting to see the difference – I feel a true sense of responsibility to my new subscribers – to produce something that I think is quality niche content and that’s mine. I am only writing for people who care enough about what I have to say that they paid for it, which creates a new sort of incentive cycle that to me is more likely to produce interesting stuff. It’s also a new way to filter an audience – effectively eliminating those “off-the-Google” spammers who stumble on your blog and try to hype Viagra in the comments section. And for those of us this far down the long tail, it’s an interesting option.
And isn’t it bizarre that switching *away* from the free model might be a way to keep niche content truly niche? The internet surprises you sometimes.
**Sidenote: I don’t think this model will work AT ALL for big media properties. Paywalls for publications like the NY Times are, I think, likely to fail. But that’s another post for another time.
Ever since Inc. Magazine wrote that profile on Plenty of Fish, I have found dating websites totally intriguing. They take one of the life’s most difficult and unscientific problems and apply the web as a band-aid. They’re sometimes money-printing behemoths, and on occasion people do really find love through these sites. The market is insanely crowded, but the market for l-o-v-e, it would appear, can support nearly infinite entrants.
When my friends Bryan Muir and Alex Hsi told me they were doing some “research” on dating sites, I was all about it. Digging around in the world of dating sites is fascinating. I saw sites ranging from the high-brow-nerd-friendly (OKCupid) to the more sketchy borderline-porn-hookup sites like WouldYouHitThis.com. Many are derivations of earlier giants like HotOrNot and Match, but there are a lot of interesting and original concepts floating around as well.
However, I have yet to find someone who can adequately argue against the assertion that the real rulers of the online dating world are Facebook and MySpace. It seems that MySpace (and before that Friendster) is/was really the best dating site, mostly because it never defined itself as such, and thus escaped a lot of the stigma attached to calling yourself a “dating” site.
But the crop of borderline-digital-natives that built MySpace up to the giant it is (was?) I believe made a more deliberate distinction between the way that “flirting” functioned in the online and offline worlds. Remember – the MySpace power users were not the nerds who had been BBSing since back in the day, but mostly a bunch of normals whose offline life was probably more exciting than their online one (come to my concert! look at the club i am promoting!).
I think, though, that the tastemaker/power-user profile has changed. The new influentials in the world of social networking are the 18 year-olds whose sexting habits garner much attention, the ones who are the subject of histrionic laments about the effects of the internet on social development. For these true digital natives, the line between online and offline existence is much less discrete than even 5 years ago, and the idea of “socializing” on the web has become a huge blur of friending, connecting, poking, messaging, gifting, voting-up, etc. What happens when the “like button” appears next to people’s faces?
Since most people agree that MySpace is kinda done (erm, sorry MySpace), I was passively wondering about what will be the next MySpace-type site to emerge.
Enter Badoo (not to be confused with Baidu, the Chinese search engine).
Full credit to Bryan and Alex for finding it, and for telling me almost nothing about it except that it was “the best.” Although TechCrunch describes it as “a social network popular in emerging markets like Russia and Brazil”, I think it’s much more than that. A summary:
- Badoo has 60+ million members in other countries, only a tiny fraction are in the U.S.
- Their customer acquisition emails are incredible. Imagine getting an email like this:
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Badoo <noreply@badoo.com>
Date: Mon, May 10, 2010 at 8:22 AM
Subject: You promised Badoo
To: XXXXX
A promise is a promise
You promised us yesterday that you would upload a photo today.
Please don’t make us beg.
Upload photos of yourself now!
If clicking the links in this message does not work, copy and paste them into the address bar of your browser:
http://badoo.com/access.phtml[rest of url clipped]
Thank you,
The Badoo Team
- They have, from what I can tell, implemented a lot of Zynga-like strategies to make their product appealing and addicting. They make good use of location and FB connect, and have an auto-bot that starts and contributes to conversations for you. The bot sends messages that look like they’re coming from other people, but really it’s just Badoo. No wonder it’s stuff that simultaneously improves the service. Example: “Hey Amanda! Are you really hiding from the police?? If not, please add a photo ”.
- They are rolling in cash. Raised a $30m series A back in 2008. Who raises a thirty million dollar series A? Yeah.
- Their business model is crazy interesting. Basically, you can pay to have your profile listed under “featured profiles”. Except you never enter a credit card, you just put in your cell number and they charge you through your mobile bill. Obscuring the flow of funds = sketchy but likely very effective. And having a featured profile does lead to a spike in profile views which creates a nice little ephemeral dopamine boost. “I’m blowing up on Badoo!”. That said, I am done with the featured profile section – the experience of females on any sort of social networking site, especially a borderline-sketchy one, is another post for another time.
So why is Badoo the next MySpace? I think their particular set of features is the right combination of appealing/compelling to a group of influentials who will propel more widespread adoption. While the site has started to get some traction in the U.S. my gut is that it will really spike in the near future. Could it be possible that a social site popular in a place other than the U.S. could make waves here? I think yes. Or at the very least, the site will continue to get clicks from me with its clever emails and temptations of short-lived fame.
Can you really call it a “first post” when it’s simply a new blog, and not actually your “first post” in the world of blogging? Up for debate. Until today, I wrote a blog called “Save Me From B-School” about, well, my experience at business school. The trials and tribulations of a startup-junkie in an MBA program makes for riveting reading. You should probably check it out. I have recently graduated, and while I wondered if I should continue with the other blog, sometimes fresh starts are necessary. And nothing like that first bill from the U.S. Government Direct Loans department to remind you “you’re in the real-world now, kid.”
So welcome to my new blog, Mom (and others?). Looking forward to hearing from you.
First of all, I’m moving my blog. I oscillated quite a bit – right when I’m starting to get the right Google juice I give up? Yes. I have always been a huge fan of clean slates – how else are you supposed to know if you can build yourself back up again? So after graduation, my blog will be the much-less-witty http://amandapey.tumblr.com. See you 7 readers over there.
Right, graduation. The last one I experienced was 2005 from undergrad and I can’t say I am any more sure now about my future than I was then. I certainly had no job then (what employable skills does a 21 year-old History major have, exactly?) and spent the summer following graduation lying around my parent’s house wondering how I could take over the world while still watching 3-4 hours of daytime television. Not so successful. This is when I learned an extremely important life lesson: nothing productive EVER happens when you’re living with your parents. So I headed to Beijing to stir up some trouble.
After some time in Beijing figuring out how to do basic things like eat and buy train tickets, and a stint in Austin, TX I found myself at MIT in August 2008, ready to drink some more academic kool-aid.
Two years later, and I’m not dreading graduation like I was before. Maybe it took an extra two years of school (some of us are slower than others), but I am pretty excited to land in the startup world with no structured “career path.” Instead, this summer I’ll be living in a rental house near Stanford working on cool web stuff. It is going to be amazing, and it will be nice to get back to “survival mode,” academia was beginning to spoil me.
But there’s something about putting on a cap and gown – it’s one of the few American traditions that people still keep pretty sacred. As my third graduation, this may be the first one I am actually excited about. Not because I have any more of a plan than I did before, but because I have finally learned that uncertainty is something that should be cherished.
All of the commentary around the recent Facebook announcements from their f8 conference has been really fascinating (Senators care?), specifically the relationship between the new FB and privacy. It just seems to me that FB is under absolutely no obligation to provide any sort of privacy protection to its users. It’s an opt-in service. It’s free to sign-up and their site is awesome! Photo sharing is so fast and all my friends are on there!
If their business model is to take my data and do whatever they please with it, I have almost no negotiating power to tell them to do otherwise, except maybe delete my account and try to convince my friends to do the same. Like any other business, if you don’t like what they’re doing you vote with your feet.
I don’t think “privacy is dead”, but I do think that just like in the real, physical world, privacy is expensive. And the internet is moving that way.
If you want to eat at a restaurant in a room all by yourself, you have to pay extra for that. If you want a house that’s so secluded that you can’t see any of your neighbors, you pay for that too. If you want your phone number unlisted? Extra $$$. Security systems, big hotel rooms, etc. etc. etc. all require cash.
So then how is it that privacy on the internet is anyone’s obligation? I love privacy and I love all those internet business that don’t sell my email address to porn and Viagra peddlers. But they don’t do that because they have to – they do it because it has been a competitive advantage to do so and telling your users that their data is safe with you is a way to get more users (and in my opinion part of what makes the internet great).
While Facebook started out by exploiting this desire for privacy, I think they’ve realized that it’s just not a sustainable business model – privacy costs money, yo! And living in an internet utopia sponsored by Digital Sky Technologies just can’t last forever.
What this change has created – in my mind – is a very unique opportunity that I’m sure many savvy entrepreneurs will exploit. As much as I hoped the internet would continue to remain this amazing force where privacy is assumed and valued and treasured, I think that – just like in the physical world – privacy will become something strictly available to the haves, and there will be this new kind of “digital-divide” where instead of just an issue of broadband access, it’s a divide centered around the types of services that you use and their level of privacy.
It’s an unsettling thought, because for me the reason why I love the internet as an industry is because of its quirky dissimilarity to real-world businesses, and I really hoped it would stay that way. Guess I was wrong.
Seems to me the tech startup world and the music business have more in common than either would probably like to admit. They are hit-driven businesses. Like record companies, venture capitalists invest in 10 companies hoping for one huge hit. I’m not sure what the numbers are in the music business, but I imagine they’re similar. VCs are, in certain ways, like music agents – though instead of hanging out at smoky bars and high school talent shows they lurk around hackathons and Stanford. But there’s a similar hunt for “one-in-a-million” stars and certain investors who seem to have an almost sixth sense for hit-makers.
So in these hit-driven businesses, is there anything other than just “general gut” that can point to winners? Since I fall more on the tech side, I can’t help but think that there has to be some way to mathematically model the future popularity of a service. This post is the beginning of that quest.
Of course by “model” I don’t mean manipulate real, actual metrics like number of users, daily active use, angle of hockey-stick growth curve, etc. – any intern with an Excel model can do that. It’s more subtle than that. Instead, if you can somehow ascribe numerical value to the non-measurable attributes of a startup (or perhaps a musician) that might give a more complete picture of future adoption.
In the academic world, I have seen this refered to as memetics – the growing field that uses principles from several disciplines to gauge how quickly something will spread.As one author describes it: “At the center of this overlap lies cybernetic theory, but it also entails strategies from marketing, psychology, social networking, cultural analysis, rhetorical principles, and biological theory, (specifically viral and epidemiological models).”
For these qualities – I’m not really talking about useful but boring services. I’m much more interested in those few products that for whatever reason do a good job of capturing attention/consciousness (ahem, Twitter).
In other words, is there a way to quantify je ne sais quoi in the world of consumer tech? I suppose there are worse ways to spend a Sunday.
I came up with a list of levers/attributes that I believe contribute to popularity. The next step would be to take these qualities and begin to assign values – though I’ll leave that for another, far nerdier post. Here’s the working list – and I’m definitely looking for more suggestions:
Product:The product itself is extremely important – I hope the rest of the post does not indicate that I think otherwise. All of the established product prinicples – about making something people want, cherishing your users, finding product-market fit, etc. all apply.I suppose I am more trying to debunk the “build it and they’ll come” idea that the fight for users begins and ends at the product stage. From what I’ve seen as an outsider, this is far from true.
Tech: The tech cannot suck. The product must work and it should be fast. Every single dollar spent on amazing engineering talent is worth it.
Market Trends: Macro trends are important – there are certain general umbrellas that investors, journalists and consumers will find compelling. Don’t pursue niches that are overexposed – which right now is group-buying (Groupon knock-offs!), social gaming (Zynga) and location-based social networks (Foursquare). Instead, find a niche where there are indicators that it will be a huge market. If I knew what these were I’d be starting businesses in them, but talk to any investor and they can give you some theories.
Early Users: This is incredibly important. There’s a great post from Tara Hunt about how many marketers assume that if you just spam the “influencer” types that that can make a product. That’s fine, and sure I’d love it if Beyonce wants to endorse whatever I’ve made, but it seems like it’s actually better to get more rabid fans early on and court the influencers later. (Have you read “1000 True Fans” yet?)
Internal and External Storytelling: Two angles here – how the startup tells its own story and how it presents itself to the outside world, and the second, and perhaps more importantly, how the product/company’s story is told by third-party sources – whether that’s early users, journalists, or just a person-to-person interaction at a conference or in a coffee shop.
Graspable Depth: What I mean here is that your service has to be complex enough to be interesting to early-adopter-types who have “seen it all” but simple enough to be appealing to your average consumer. Wolfram Alpha suffers from too much depth, while the plethora of group-buying sites are now uninteresting.
Rawness: Perhaps I have saved the most important for last. I wasn’t sure really what to call this, but it’s that pang of guilt and curiosity that comes when you see a new service that is somehow mold-breaking. Do you remember the first time you signed on to Facebook?When you saw that the person in your math class loves Wes Anderson movies as much as you? Previously, this information was only attainable through person-to-person contact (there were other social networking sites, yes, but it wasn’t the same sort of feeling). There’s a certain excitement in an interaction becoming automated.Or Chatroulette. Did you really think I’d write a whole post about popularity and not mention Chatroulette? The first time you see it, you’re like “I SHOULD NOT BE LOOKING” – but you do anyway. It is the willingness to sit at the intersection of appropriateness and lunacy – that is what I mean by rawness.
I think there’s this big misconception in the tech world that good tech can save you. If you make your site faster or use the hotttttest new web framework that that will somehow make up for the lack of other attributes (this is related to “product-market fit” in a way). I don’t buy it – amazing technology is assumed.I would relate it to the whole Lady Gaga phenomenon – her music on its own is pretty pedestrian, but her willingness to embrace ridiculousness and create a story around herself that shows both depth and actual musical talent has propelled her past pop musician to superstar.
So what will be the next mega-hit in the world of consumer tech? If I had a few million bucks, my money would be on Blippy. Sure, tech-heads already know that the company has some interesting buzz, but to me the case for Blippy is more complex than just general chatter coming from all the right places. When I look at the list above, it all seems to fit – the rawness of looking at someone’s financial history, the interesting macro talk around financial and social data, especially in light of the recent Mint acquisition, the simplicity of sharing your accounts combined with the gravity of what it actually *means* to do so, the evangelism around the product and the fact that their tech seems to be awesome (though I don’t have any info on whether it actually is or not).
The seven qualities above are just the beginning – I’m very interested in feedback and criticism on popularity modeling. With startups, looking beyond the product itself is difficult and not always a productive use of time, but to me it’s where you can find all the most interesting indicators of future success.
A friend with a particular gift for web wisdom once told me “there are only two ways people will find your site: through Google, or because someone tells them about it.” I subscribe to this assertion (of course “someone” includes aggregation sites and other trusted link collectors) and also believe that if your site is worth talking about, Google will respond to that as well.
I saw a link to Ling’s Cars last week on Twitter and stared in shock and awe for a good 10 seconds at the website. Animated gifs, FOR SERIOUS. It took me an additional 30 seconds of pretty concentrated analysis to decide whether the site was a farce, a scam or maybe-just-maybe a site that actually leases cars? You can take a look at the image below, but that’s just a small taste. Click the link. Go ahead, I dare you.
That was just the beginning. In the hours that followed, I realized that Ling’s Cars is actually totally effing brilliant. I find myself sometimes so sucked into the rounded-corners gospel that I forget no one really notices that stuff except for *other design snobs*. I think good design is extremely important but I’m starting to realize design and usability aren’t as tied together as I once thought.
So why is Ling’s Cars awesome? Thoughts:
Authenticity
Car salesman have a (often well-deserved) reputation for sleaziness. Every time I interact with a car salesman, I am trying to pinpoint how exactly I am getting screwed, and for how much. Ling’s whimsical site prompts the opposite response – all the “shiny objects” prevent the buyer from going on the offensive the minute he/she lands on the site.
Did everyone see Jesse Schell’s awesome talk from DICE last month about “Design Outside the Box”? I think it’s relevant here – start watching at about 12:00, where he talks about authenticity. The most interesting quote:
“Gilmore and Pine put forth this interesting concept, that the most valuable thing in products today is ‘are they real?’ ‘are they authentic?’…we live in a bubble of fake bullsh*t, and we have this hunger to get to anything that’s real.”
If nothing else, Ling’s Cars is authentic – you can tell it’s a real person behind the site and not just some SEO factory. Perhaps you missed this quote: “Note: I live inside this website Monday to Friday 9am-6pm, to give you the very best service and make your experience a happy one! – I am Ling, accept no substitutes.”
Entire video here:
Insane Understanding of Importance of Referral Traffic
After I found the site, I was curious to see what the smart folks at Hacker News thought of it. So I posted this thread and within 30 minutes, Ling had found the link, responded and emailed me. A personal email. From Ling.
I think many web business owners underestimate the importance of referral traffic, especially traffic that comes from sites that aren’t search engines.
Personal Attention
Given the quote about living in the website, the personal email I got from Ling and the piles and piles of customer letters on the site, it is clear to me that Ling really takes good care of her customers, in a genuine way. If I ever need a car in the UK, guess who I am going to call? Perhaps it’s not directly “conversion” but it’s that step before conversion - “awareness”- that’s just as important.
Give The Customer What they Want
The reason why Ling’s Cars was getting so much attention on Twitter a few weeks ago was likely tied to this presentation from the 2010 Online Marketing Summit (start at slide 54). After doing some research I also found a blog post that speaks about the usability win of the site.
I think something the site excels at is giving people what they want. It’s surprisingly easy to navigate and find what you’re looking for.
Trust
There’s been a bunch of interesting academic work done on how to build trust on the internet. Anyone can throw up a PHP template and call it a day. But to really build trust you have to make it clear that there’s a real person on the other side of the tubes, and that they’re not going to just take your money and give you some snake oil. Like authenticity, it seems like building trust with your audience right from the beginning is important.
For some reason, who knows why, I trust this woman to give me a good deal. I just do.
Anyway, back to my original point. In a market as saturated as car sales, good luck trying to SEO a term like “lease cheap cars”. Even if you had all of Mechanical Turk back-linking you 24/7 you’re not going to win that game. Instead, Ling has made her site memorable. I told a few friends about it, and now here I am writing a whole post about it.
Oh, and if you google “lease cheap cars” on google.co.uk (the site serves only the UK market), guess which site is #1.
First-mover advantage (FMA, not to be confused with FML) is one of those things they teach you in business school as *doctrine*. Be first, or don’t bother. This leads to much malaise when, upon coming up with, say, a brilliant idea for a mobile coupon business, hopes and dreams are shattered when it becomes known that hordes of other entrepreneurs are working on the same idea.
I have been thinking about how FMA applies to web startups, and after some thought, I now believe first-mover advantage is a myth in the web world.
If the premise of FMA relies on the fact that a first-mover will gain resources and advantages that later entrants will not be able to match, then these advantages have to be compelling enough to warrant fighting to be first. And I’m not sure they are any more.
Argument below. Thoughts/criticism welcome. Put this together pretty quickly (and highly unscientifically) so I’m sure there are lots of holes.
1. Moore’s Law and speed.
Moore’s law is one of those “golden rules” in the tech world. Everybody looooves to cite it. Moore’s law is to tech nerds what Foucault is to philosophy junkies.
It’s because there’s a lot of brilliance in Moore’s law. As I understand it – the real brilliance here was the observation that technology progresses much quicker than people would think possible (or more accurately, that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 24 months).
If you think about how this plays out in the consumer world, it means that consumers will become socialized to adopting more advanced technology faster. So the amount of time it takes for a market to develop, hit a peak, and become saturated (say, photo sharing) is shrinking.
How does this affect first-mover advantage? Take a look at my lovely graph below. If a technology markets develop more quickly, this will seriously reduce the potential upside for a first-mover. The top graph is what we think is FMA, the bottom is what I believe it really looks like.
If this is true, the potential upside you can gain from FMA is shrinking.
2. Underestimated importance of initial users (adoption) and marketing.
I know a lot of entrepreneurs who have the “if you build it they will come” mentality. No one will admit to this, obviously. They talk to you all day about marketing and user acquisition, but it seems like very very few web startups actually do this well.
Initial users are the ones that will evangelize your service and make it zeitgeisty and remarkable. I saw this great video last night on the importance of “first followers” and how they help to create mass movements.
Sharp marketing and committed users have nothing to do with FMA and seemingly everything to do with popularity and adoption.
3. Zero barriers to entry, commodification of apps, low switching costs.
Have you noticed all of those “hey look at what I built in a weekend” links on Hacker News? The ease-of-use afforded by these new slick web frameworks like Rails and Django make it pretty easy and quick to build a site and enter a market.
Web sites and mobile apps are undergoing a process of commodification as they become easier and easier to make, and the move toward cloud-based apps makes the switching costs for the user nearly zero. It’s no longer enough to have a single hit with a single great app.
All of these trends are really cutting into the upside of being first.
4. “Early is the same as wrong”. This is something I heard a lot in Silicon Valley. I don’t necessarily agree – if you are early but are smart enough about your cash to hold on until the market matures, then you’re not necessarily wrong. Seems like the emphasis on being first is flawed – it’s about timing.
The tough part is finding the trade-off. There’s this sweet spot between the first-mover land-grab and market readiness, but you have to hold on until the wave hits. Everyone’s favorite example here is online video – there were plenty of video sites pre-YouTube but they were slow and mostly annoying. The strategic use of flash and rise in broadband internet in homes helped to make the market timing nearly perfect, though with the dominance window narrowing I think even trying to time the market is an exercise in futility.
Market Dominance in the Brave New Web World
So, if not from FMA, where does real market dominance come from?
I suppose in a way I’m making an argument for extreme iteration. But it’s more than that. I think the consumer web industry – similar to fashion and music – is incredibly driven by trends and timing. If you can hit a curve at the point right before widespread adoption, and do this consistently, you will become more invaluable to your user.
See the graph below – the point here is that it’s no longer a single curve and a single market. Instead, the companies that will do the best, in my mind, are the ones that can take advantage of many markets consecutively.
The company that I believe does this best is Facebook. If they had stayed a profile -n- poke site, they’d surely be dead by now. Instead, each product launch happens right around the top end of a curve – photos, videos, Twitter-style-messages, and now talk of geo-enabled features and even “check-ins”.
While FMA as a concept is not dead to me completely – it can be incredibly helpful in many many other markets, to me in the app-driven world of the web (and increasingly mobile too) it just doesn’t seem all that important.
Conclusion: “someone’s already doing this” should be a crappy deterrent.
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