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."