Ok Chamath Palihapitiya is For Real

This is a random thought, and I'm just a guy in a room watching a video. Palihapitiya is financing the moonshots. It's inspiring. New York Mag's Kevin Roose criticized the heck out of his perspective on government, and he refines that here. But this guy is for real. If you're interested in people with huge ideas, watch/listen to the link below the photo.

http://on.aol.com/video/chamath-palihapitiya--social-capital--in-conversation-with-leena-rao-517991823

The short rundown:
- Invested in a company that can accurately predict degenerative brain disease by tracking eye movement across computer screens.
- Sits in on pitches about mining asteroids.
- Has pledged to give away all the money he makes in his lifetime because it's "not [his]."

Don't Build Social Networks, Buy Them

What do Google and Dave Chapelle's reparations beneficiaries have in common? They buy things "straight cash" because "[they're] rich, b__ch!"

Everyone is saying that Google+ is a huge failure. That there's no reason for it to exist, that it will never compete with Facebook as a destination, etc. etc. They might be right. Why would I shift over to G+? None of my friends use it on a regular basis, meaning there's no interesting content (photos, conversations, shared articles), and the internet's primary utility is the conveyance of content.

So, it's really that question of "why" that looms largest. While G+ can't provide a reason, there are certainly other services besides Facebook and Instagram that can. Naturally, Twitter comes into this conversation. But those are all strict communication tools. Those have been positioned as the holy grail of information tools for advertisers because you can mine what people are saying and thinking. Granted, that's pretty incredible, and the work that companies like IBM are doing in big data and machine learning will definitely shine more insight than we have now.

However, I think that's a little short-sighted. What's most important to advertisers (a.k.a. people looking to get people to spend money on the products they rep) is people's relationship with money, and on what/with whom they're willing to spend. The less popularly considered but more interesting social networks from a business perspective are things like Airbnb, Etsy, and Uber. Airbnb and Etsy are examples of people building relationships with peers and the goods/services the value they can provide one another. Uber is powerful in that it has the capacity to tell you where people start, where they go, how long they spend there, with whom they go where (bill splitting tech introduced a few months ago), how wealthy they are (Uber black cars or UberX, how often do they take an Uber), and more.

Wanna know something crazy? Google just invested $258 million dollars in Uber's most recent financing, meaning they own part of it. Guess what's going to happen in a few years - Google's going to know all the stuff Uber knows. They're going to make it useful to you as a consumer through transportation services that will make the NY subway a relic of the past - a self-driven Prius will deliver you to "Jim's house." You'll pay a monthly subscription fee that might even be subsidized by the government in some kind of environmental/transportation program. Google will throw ads at you like the in-cab systems in NY, except those ads will be deals or sample coupons for local restaurants that are buying on AdWords. G+ will become a repository of all this information and more if/when the G+ Login spreads like I think it will.

GOOGLE PLUS LIVES!!!!!

Google AdID vs. Apple IDFA

Bear with me. I'm just trying to hash out the ad tech ecosystem in my mind, stream of consciousness, because I'm bored.

Ok, if I'm understanding this correctly, Google's maybe coming out with this AdID product which can track user behavior like a 3rd party cookie. They'll offer this to other web and mobile properties so that they can own all user tracking across all devices. Question 1: who owns web tracking today? Is it a compilation of a bunch of different 3rd party cookies? To clarify, whose cookies does a company like Rocket Fuel use?

Apple's already been doing the same thing on iPhones, insisting that all app developers use their IDFA to track user behavior and feed data back to advertisers as opposed to installing cookies. As of iOS 7, they don't accept apps into their app store that use 3rd party cookies. So, why would they accept apps with Google AdID rolled in. Especially given the feud that erupted between the two companies when Google got into mobile OS's.

If Apple doesn't accept apps with Google AdID rolled in, how will Google track people on iPhones when those people are in apps other than Gmail, Google Maps, or whatever other product that Google owns? Statistical modeling?


OOOOooohhh...never mind.

Google's going for all apps to use G+ as the standard login so anytime someone logs into an app on iOS, Google will be able to see that? So, it's not going to act like a cookie that gets downloaded when someone visits a site, they're going to have users activate it every time they use an app. Dude, smart. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

Wow, they're going to have a hell of a hill to climb. Facebook is winning the login battle pretty solidly right now. I guess that's why Fbook hired all the Google people back in the day. They get it.

Google May Make Cookies Obsolete (Mind = Blown)

Ok, don't worry. Not the delicious kind of cookies. Chips Ahoy will still be 1,000 chips delicious. Depression eaters and fat kids everywhere rejoice! Everyone else, you can be as moderately happy as your well-balanced diet will allow.

No, the cookies that I'm talking about are the fundamental layer to all web advertising. They get installed in your web browser pretty much every time you visit any site on this thing called the internet. Maybe you've heard of it. Those cookies either tell only that site (1st party cookies) or many other sites (3rd party cookies) where else you go on the web. That informs the ads that you're served on any given site. When you clear your cookies, the ad servers have no knowledge of what to give you - this is when I get hella ads for Viactiv...

These cookies aren't very good on mobile platforms because a lot of behavior is in app and not in browser. That means that all these ad-tech companies that are going public (click here for a sample) and otherwise raising a lot of money these days are running into monumental problems getting a complete picture of the person receiving their ads as user behavior shifts rapidly into mobile over desktop.

So Google, whose mission it is to collect and catalogue the entire world's information (Josh Gad's character in "The Internship" taught me that), might be taking a stab at replacing cookies. Given that it operates the OS and app store of choice for ~50% of the world's mobile community, it's got a pretty good platform from which to do so. They're also still trying to make G+ happen, but as a universal login as opposed to the destination site they initially tried with. Given the data I saw at numberFire, the G+ login is pretty compelling to users. Maybe even more so than Facebook Connect, which is used in 50+% of mobile apps. Granted, we had an 18-50 American male demo and not these tweens that are defining how tech will be used going forward, so I can't tell you definitively that all users prefer to login with G+ over Facebook Connect.

As this article says, if Google's able to replace cookies, they're not just going to be the biggest player at the ad buying poker table, they're going to be the casino which all other ad buyers depend on. In raising venture capital, you realize pretty quickly that investors want to be sold on this idea of how you become the platform for greater things. That's what F8 is for Facebook, same with Connect. Everyone wants to be electricity and not the light bulb because everyone needs electricity regardless of which brand of bulb, blender, computer, phone... they choose.

So, Google, in a precedented move of genius, can consolidate power and become the entire digital marketing ecosystem, allowing other companies to get some nutrients, but only enough to survive. So much more to say here from a privacy perspective, but later.

For now, let's realize that what Facebook was trying to do with Home is get all users' mobile behavior info. They failed. Apple might try too, but they're not nearly the competent software company that Google is - let's pour one out for our Apple Maps homie. So, Apple + Facebook partnership? Could make sense.

Finally, if the big 5 in tech include Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter, where are Microsoft and Twitter in all of this? Because this is a big freaking deal.

Laws in the New Economy

Start here: http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/20/4751516/ballmer-calls-google-a-monopoly

Ok, so, I never took anti-trust in law school. But hey! I'm going to say something anyways for two reasons. First, it relates to a broader theory I have about the law and the effects that internet companies are having across different areas within the law - corporate, IP, etc. Second, a renowned legal scholar once told my class to simply keep talking if we wanted to get anywhere with our opinions.

Here's my theory: laws were created in a time long ago, in a galaxy far away when the things that we're occupying ourselves with today were completely unimaginable. There are no built in re-evaluation protocols, so we're forced to fight things out according to outdated precedent that might not apply philosophically but governs nevertheless. This is proving to be a problem today and will only become more of a problem going forward as things change more rapidly because of technological advances across a broader array of subject areas. There are additional systemic problems (read: indefinite Congressional terms) that allow rich (i.e. war weary) 90+ year old white dudes to sit in the House or Senate without a real clue for how anything works or even a fighting chance to understand - 'old dog, new tricks'.

Here's the definition of a monopoly according to http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/ (definitely not the authoritative source on all things law, but good enough to inform my thinking in studying for exams, and good enough for our purposes here): An economic advantage held by one or more persons or companies deriving from the exclusive power to carry on a particular business or trade or to manufacture and sell a particular item, thereby suppressing competition and allowing such persons or companies to raise the price of a product or service substantially above the price that would be established by a free market.

Let's dissect a little:
1) According to this definition of a monopoly, what's Google's business/trade? Search? Advertising? If it's search, which is what it seems like Ballmer is saying, maybe there's a case. Although, they have less than 70% market share. Microsoft wasn't touched until they owned ~90% of the OS business. Moreover, they don't charge anyone to search, so, is it a "business or a trade"? If we're trying to make a case on Advertising, they're selling web real estate for people to put up signs. Doesn't seem like they hold anywhere near exclusive power over all web real estate. There are likely more wrinkles to this, but none that really add up, under current law (as I understand it), to suggest that Google has a monopoly.

According to the same source, a trade is defined as: trade 1) n. a business or occupation for profit, particularly in retail or wholesale sales or requiring special mechanical skill.

What have the courts previously defined retail to be? What kinds of cases qualify under special mechanical skill? I don't know. But, basically, lawyers will make arguments going both ways on these definitions, and they'll use various cases from the past that indicate what the court should take as acceptable definitions of these terms.

2) Anti-trust laws were created in response to the railroads and Standard Oil. Sure, they've been refined over the years and stretched in different directions, but the internet and Google are things that were far beyond the scope of thinking. Google doesn't necessarily make money in what were clearly two distinct ways in which people made money - directly selling the good or service for which the primary demand occurs. They're much more like a publisher in that regard. However, unlike publishers, courts have found that they're not responsible for the content that the search brings up, so they're not publishers. Additionally, unlike a railroad, Google's real estate extends outside of the physical constraints of this country and can be accessed from anywhere on the globe at any time of day, so do we have Google submitting to separate standards in each country? Looks like that's what China's demanded, but that's a whole other ball game.

Anyways, complicated issue. Ballmer's going to have to come with a hell of a lot more game than that though. How does he propose the authorities get involved here? I generally agree that it's a net negative to have one view of the world prevail, not necessarily because I disagree with that view today but because that view or I might change at some point in the future. And, make no mistake, Google has a point of view that is expressed in search. At a fundamental level, that point of view is that our individual search streams should be curated according to the types of information we've previously consumed, the people we engage with and the types of information they consume, thereby rendering search results pretty different for different people, but that takes for granted that new, different information might change the way we behave. There are more arguments here, but I'll leave you with that.

Thinking Out Loud About the Future

Today, when we're walking around cities and emailing/Tweeting/phoning, our cell phones have to connect to cell towers which talk back and forth to satellites to get us the information we need. Beaming phone and data signals into the sky and receiving instantaneous reception back is pretty amazing, but it seems totally bandwidth constrained at 2 points. The first point is the device <--> cell tower. The more traffic there is, the weaker the signal gets (why AT&T sucks massively in NYC). A solution is to put in more towers or stronger towers. The problem with that is NIMBYism created and furthered by the idea that cell towers cause cancer. The second constraint is cell tower <--> satellite information quantity and speed. Similar problems. Similar solutions. Similar concerns.

Comcast, TWC, AT&T, Verizon, and Google all provide phone and internet service in our homes and offices. All of them are laying fiber optic cables underground in various parts of the country. Some have laid this fiber optic cable to local nodes (FTTN) that then distribute phone and data signals through existing cable or copper infrastructure. Cable and copper can't handle the same speeds that fiber can, so our download and upload speeds are capped at pretty low rates. Google has decided to jump ahead of everyone, laying fiber directly to the premises (FTTP) in whichever city the company decides to do so - so far, Kansas City, Provo, and Austin. It's great technology that offers download speeds about 100x faster than what we're used to. It's super expensive to put down and will take time to build out.

The real question is why do we need that fast of speeds connecting to the premises? I get that it would be awesome to download an HD movie in 7 seconds, but, honestly, current speeds are good enough (20 mins for an HD movie). In my view, that's not the rub. Imagine what a sophisticated network of super fast hotspots would do for mobile communications. Instead of having to go through cell towers and satellites, in major metro areas with a density of WiFi routers, you could have everyone always on super fast WiFi. I'm probably not visionary enough here, but how does instantly streaming high def video captured by cell phones sound? How else does this change things? I'll have some hypotheses later.

Hacking LinkedIn's Paywalls (Part 1/2)

If there's one thing I've learned over the past couple years in the startup space, it's that most things that are core to top-notch products aren't done mindlessly. The second fact that I'm considering before posting today is that a friend who I respect a great deal told me that the smartest people in the Valley are working at LinkedIn. Given that, today I'm puzzled.

In a biz dev capacity, LinkedIn is one of the most important tools. Just straight stalking people. In that tomfoolery, the things you're driving for are people's names and contact info. LinkedIn knows this, so it tries to upsell me on a premium account by witholding people's last names on their profiles if I'm 3 or more steps removed from them, e.g. today I was doing some research and came across a Brittany G. In theory, LinkedIn has found a great monetization scheme. I need the last name, and I can't find it without paying them. Problem for them is I've learned several ways around LinkedIn's barriers.

Way 1
Without being too efficient, I could just Google Brittany G. and the position she held at whatever company, which is the information that's usually available to me. Low and behold, her name is Brittany Grouchmarxio. And, when I go to her company's site, I can get the email nomenclature (first.last@, or, as is more frequent in startup land, first@ or last@).

Way 2
My process was made even easier when I discovered that by clicking the first person that 'other people view when viewing Brittany G.' Let's say that person is Steve Buckwilder. By looking at the list of 'other people folks view when viewing Steve,' I'll see Brittany Grouchmarxio's name in its full glory. Mission accomplished in one click. Without leaving LinkedIn. Then rinse and repeat with an easier Google for the company name. Figure out the email nomenclature. Boom shakalaka!

My craftiness isn't LinkedIn's fault, but still. Why even put up the front? Why try to upsell me on stuff with SUPER simple hack-arounds? Is it just a convenience thing? Are people really willing to pay for that convenience? If so, that's amazing. And, if so, LinkedIn, I'd love to work with your data team because those guys are ballers for figuring that out.

Caveat Emptor: Data Oriented Marketing Has Limits

The first note here is that I'm a huge fan of analytics platforms and what they enable businesses to do. It's awesome to know that you can break down the behavior of all the folks visiting your site, signing up for an email list, etc and tailor your attempts to engage each group.

I've had a lot of experience riding the wave of a data engine's ability to predict things. numberFire is generally judged, and maybe misjudged, by the algorithm's ability to make a call on a future outcome. That call would help someone win or lose a fantasy football game or a bet. We would always get questions like "Did your system see Colin Kaepernick coming?" or "When Linsanity happened, did you guys know it was going to happen before it did?" Nope, and nope. Sure, after 5 games or so, we'd be able to get a pretty good beat on a guy. But, even then, we would have been totally wrong on J-Lin again - he flamed out when Mello came back and hasn't done a ton since.

Greg Satell contributed a great piece to Forbes that sums up what's going on here. People expect that because you have so much data, you're going to be able to predict everything, perfectly. The problem with that view is that it overlooks creative happenings or a certain moment of genius. Data tries to capture the happenings of the past as precisely as it can in order to give you a probability of certain events occurring in the future. Two things to keep in mind there:

1) At least at numberFire, we were dependent on imprecise mechanisms of capturing past behavior - box scores don't tell you everything you might want to know, but increased camera views coupled with unstructured data mining technologies are certainly helping with that. Google Analytics, Omniture, or whatever other technology you might use will have some bugs in it. Granted, the amount of information those technologies are able to capture about behavior on a website puts box scores to shame, but it's still a point to keep in mind.

2) If you're batting .600 (or for those of you less acquainted with sports, if you're right 60% of the time), you're making money, perhaps even a lot of money depending on how much you threw down and how directly correlated that is to ROI. Real talk, if you're winning 53% of the time in Vegas, you're making money. 53% leaves out 47% of circumstances in which you're totally wrong, in which something crazy happens that nobody, given current technologies, can call.

The point is this: data is great in most circumstances. Most circumstances, however, are not all circumstances. As a marketer, it's incumbent upon you/me to keep that in mind and not stop trying to think about what's missing, keeping an ear to the ground, keeping on thinking and not just computing.

Content Creators: Kings of the Marketing Castle!

Ever since numberFire saw its ability to engage and re-engage users increase exponentially through the addition of editorial content, I've been thinking a lot about the future for writers, musicians, actors, etc. These days, the creation of content for its own business purposes - its sale to end consumers in hard physical forms like CDs, DVDs, etc - seems like a dwindling concept. There are 4 factors compounding that problem:

1) No Viable Payment Replacement: iTunes can't solve the 50% decrease in sales the music business has seen over the past decade. People used to buy entire albums. Unless you were Michael Jackson, Tracks 1 & 2 would hit the top 20. Tracks 3 & 4 in the top 100. Tracks 5-16 were usually garbage outtakes. Despite that, people paid $16-20 for a casette... (Damn you Camelot Music!). At $.99/track, with 2 consumption worthy tracks, you cut that to 12.5% of the money labels used to make.

2) Glut of Professional Content: You can get professionally created content streamed to pretty much any device you want.

3) Glut of Indy Content: Sites like HuffPo, Bleacher Report, and YouTube glorify amateurs and raise them to historically reserved distribution levels.

4) Better Indy Content: If Macklemore and the music business is any indication, the free stuff will improve dramatically over the next few years anyways.

So, why would the consumer pay? He/she probably won't, or, if they do, not very much. I'll argue that when Google Fiber either gets implemented or puts enough pressure on Time Warner/Verizon/Comcast to reinvest in faster infrastructure, movie theaters will go the way of record labels. Home speakers are awesome. Huge, clear displays are cheap. Indy film producers already expect to being really poor for the rest of their lives. The only thing missing is fast load speeds for high def video.

So, if content doesn't make money on its own, what else can it do in a social-capitalist regime? Enter Brian Halligan and Hubspot. Content as marketing isn't a new concept. It just feels way more important today than it was a half century ago. Ad creative has been awesome since the Mad Men. The difference though is that, today, there are many more content channels than there were in the 60's when TV was just getting going with "I Love Lucy" having 70% of all TVs in America tuned in. There are also exponentially more people in the audience trying to connect with brands in different languages with different customs across all these channels. Finally, all those people are way smarter than consumers in the 60's. They have so many resources to call you on your BS marketing drivel, so you're going to actually have to have a good product and authentic representation. This is what's going to rescue content creation.

Obviously, I say this cautiously because content creators won't want to sell out to corporate causes. Thing is though, as I've been able to reason through numerous conversations at Blue Bottle's various locations throughout San Francisco and Williamsburg (Brooklyn, we go hard...for coffee), the problem content creators have with corporations is the view that they lie to advance economic purpose. I'm not sure that's going to fly anymore, at least in as mass a way as it has in the past. Audience resources and demands for authenticity are already impacting the way brands are positioning themselves. So, there's going to be a lot of good, real writing, video, and audio created in support of commercial ends. And, each commercial outpost will probably have to have dedicated specialists conveying its voice across channels because of the real time conversation required. So, as long as companies are making products, content creators should be able to find work! Rejoice!

Paul Krugman's Bitcoin Argument: A Response

I'm not saying Paul Krugman is an idiot. I'm also not endorsing Bitcoin. The only argument I'm making here is that if his most recent ideas on Bitcoin are to be taken as a representation of Krugman's views, he's proven himself at least partially ignorant.

Bitcoin, like many early technologies is just an adoption test right now. Who knows if it will gain mass use or not. If it fulfills a need for a wide enough array of people, it will. That's the basic way in which tech works.

Krugman's argument against Bitcoin, however, is 1) a statement of obvious facts upon which the Bitcoin framework works and 2) ignorant of the way in which technological advances and adoptions have made the world operate.

"...money...is useful only to the extent that other people use it...I guess you could make [the case that we need a new form of money] if the money we actually have were misbehaving. But it isn’t."

1) Obviously people only use money if other people use money. Krugman stating that sketch markets for drugs, weapons, and human trafficking are using Bitcoin because of the distinct advantages it provides those audiences shows that people are using it. Maybe not a huge amount, but, like I said, it's an adoption game right now.

2) Just like people who wanted to watch pornography using VHS before anyone else or the same people demanding online video before anyone else, sketchy markets have proven to often be precursors for mass technological adoption. Magazines weren't really broken in the early 80's, and VHS wasn't really broken in the late 90's. Easy transaction and consumption paved the way in dramatically changing those sketchy markets and the world at large.

I don't defend or endorse people selling drugs, weapons, and humans online. However, the truth is that they're major economic players who will need a way to transact with Bitcoins for more basic goods in the real world. If they want to change the way currencies work to suit their needs, it could stand a pretty good chance of happening.

I Have a Crush on Looker

Last week, every startup blog and every major news organization contributing to the awesome startup fad wrote 1 of maybe 25 articles about Looker, a company that allows Joe Nobodies to query SQL databases with some nice tech. I learned very little through a lot of reading. BUT, I did get to practice my speed reading skills from that 8th grade seminar my parents forced me to take. ALSO, with each article, I affirmed my initial crush on the company. It was kind of like meeting a really cute girl (looks, personality, devilish grin, etc), looking through her Facebook pictures, and realizing that you're in love.

Business pukes like me need data so we can run analytics and form some kind of strategic action steps based on what we find. Of course, we have no effing clue how to actually get all that data because it's inside of databases that we don't know how to access. That's the problem that Looker solves. Right now, someone like me would have to go to IT for them to pull some data from our DBs because they're the only ones with SQL knowledge in the whole company. IT gets pissed because it's a menial task that takes them away from the true purpose of their day (server wiring, or something...JK, but seriously) that, really, I should be able to do myself. Instead of the whole thing taking 5 minutes, because I had to write up a spec sheet, walk over to IT, wait on IT to fulfill my request, get the data back, realize there was a mistake or that something was left out, and have to repeat the process, a simple query could take a ton of time.

Of course, as with all crushes, there's that one issue - kinda weird teeth, eyes that are too close, etc. After talking this over with people who analyze tons of data for a living, it came to my attention that human error messes up the cleanliness of the data. So, even though I can pull all the data, there might be problems with the way in which it was entered. Those problems, like a user entering their name wrong, can be quite painful. However, given that we operate in a web setting with radio buttons, scroll lists, and other pre-populated data fields, those problems can be limited.

In any case, I think Looker is a B-E-A-S-T M-O-D-E improvement in process. Should help a lot of people discover a lot more about their companies and build out smarter strategy. The next level is the actual analytical layer - a lot of people have no idea for stats and don't get how to derive insights from the data even thought their CVs might say they do because they have to. Automating that stuff would be crazy, and I'd love to be a part of it.

Talking Too Much

I read this article yesterday. Check out the first point Tobak makes.

I've sat in a number of pitch meetings. The kind that make you super nervous because you know that you're being judged about as hard as you were in 5th grade when you were trying to ask Meegan Rossi out on a "date" (supervised PG-13 movie watching) while all her friends were standing around the corner giggling because they knew that you didn't know that they knew that she was probably going to say no...

In these kinds of meetings, people tend to talk really fast, a lot, about everything, and without real purpose. "So Meegan, you know, I was kind of wondering, while I was sitting behind you in class, and looking at the back of your head. I mean, it's not weird because your hair reminds me of the sun because it's so blonde, and I really like the sun because of this one time when I was 5, my mom took me to the beach, and you see, I grew up in Pittsburgh where we don't get a ton of sun, so it was really crazy to see the sun..."

The part that people forget to do is listen. In any kind of social situation, unless you're John Mayer talking to Hollywood actresses over the age of 40, people don't want you to talk their ear off. This is especially true when you're in an investor meeting, or in a meeting with a potential business partner. They don't want to hear your life's story. They don't want to hear a ton of tangential bullshit that doesn't matter. They usually ask pretty specific questions that, more than anything else, are great opportunities to ask more questions so you can palatably deliver a precise answer, an answer that's going to get you somewhere. Not an answer that's going to make the person you're talking to fall asleep, or, worse, think you have no idea what you're talking about while you think you're declaring this genius Cicerian monologue.

Actionable advice:
1) Talk less.
2) Really listen. Get to know your audience.
3) Deliver the points you need to gain buy-in.
4) Impress the hell out of Meegan Rossi with your choice of confectionaries because she's at the theater with you.

Don't be Wreckless with Your Email Account

Imagine this, it's early March, on a blustery Boston evening. I'm sitting in a hotel room. Hustling...

That might be confusing. What I mean is that I was sending out emails to 450 conference attendees that our company would be hosting a happy hour at a bar after the conference. I was inviting all of them to grab a free beer with the picture of Jonah Hill as Paul DePodesta in "Moneyball," celebrating my free beer.

We got a great turn-out. Probably about 200 people showed up, and we made a bunch of new friends that night.

The resulting problem is this. Anytime I send an email to anyone employing any kind of spam filter, I risk not getting through because Gmail has now identified my email as being that of a spammer. It doesn't matter that I received replies from practically all the people I sent emails to, thanking me for the kind invitation, and there's not a ton I can do about it other than beg some people at some customer support facility to fix the problem - they're not going to do it because they can't/don't know how/don't care/etc.

Point being, be careful. Not everyone supports the hustle, no matter how genuine it is, and how much enjoyment it might bring to people.

Analyzing a Marketing Idea

"What if we paid for the rest of these guy's kickstarter, provided they embed numberfire content and have upsells into premium from the app?"

This is the kind of question you might come across as the business end of a startup equation. Might be through your own research, and the quote is coming from your inner voice, or might be someone on your team asking.

Off-the-cuff reactions might include:
"Yeah dude! Kickstarter is awesome! Let's do it! Their project's going to be totally huge, and it would be awesome to get involved!"

Or

"That's totally lame."

In my view, everything in a startup, where you don't know if you're going to get fed tomorrow, is a giant cost-benefit equation. If it drives results at or greater than expectation, it's good. If it's repeatable, it's bomb.com, and you may have just discovered your way to your next venture round. If it doesn't get you where you want to go, brush it off like Jay-Z's shoulders.

Here's how I responded. Might be food for your thought:



"You're paying out $X for their Kickstarter project. Let's assess our options.

They've got 550 people pledged. I don't know what the viral rate is. Let's assume it's 0.
Let's say you get a conversion rate of anywhere between 1 (reasonable) and 5% (unreasonably high).

5.5 people = 33 months/user to break even

30 people = 6 months/user to break even

Anywhere between 1/2 a year and 3 years to break even.


Other option is to write some bomb ass articles that you can feed through Outbrain, get a bunch of registrations, make a special email list of all those people, keep sending them emails about Premium until a bunch register.

Let's say you spend the same money there - at a high $/click rate, average conversion to subscriber rate, and average conversion to Premium product rate, let's call it an average of 20 users.

20 people paying our average revenue on our Premium product = 9mo's to breakeven.

Even if you adjust the number of clicks that you're going to generate down, you'll probably end up somewhere around 9 mo's to breakeven. Probably a smarter/surer bet that it's going to happen."