Happy Foursquare Day! How Foursquare Built a Cult Brand

April 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Manicured Nails With Foursquare Badges

Today is Foursquare Day (4/16…get it?) and there are celebrations across the world to celebrate the startup. These aren’t being planned by the startup themselves. Rather users who love the service took it upon themselves to plan the day and events literally spanning the globe. This is a marketer’s dream, and not a lone incident – Chicago planned a birthday party for more than 200 people in March, users created buttons that reflected Foursquare’s badges, I once dressed up as a Foursquare scout for Halloween, etc. What’s more is that Foursquare’s top competitor – Gowalla – seems to lack the passionate user base. Certainly, Gowalla has an ever increasing user base, but it seems to lack a community committed to do the marketing for them.

As a marketer, I’m fascinated by this. What is Foursquare doing that small- and medium-sized businesses can embody in their own marketing techniques. This is what I can ascertain but would love to know what other people think:

1) Instantly Sticky – Foursquare was instantly sticky when it launched at SXSWi last year. People were running around trying to claim leaderboard status and rack up badges. This time last year, I almost wrecked my liver and wallet trying to trounce Eric Wu (@ewu) off the Denver leaderboard. When Foursquare first launched and first adopters started using it, they were typically the only ones in the city using it. So you knew who was in your city’s leaderboard. The competition for mayorship was among friends. Without realizing it, they were instantly using gaming theory to reward users. Do you understand how to reward your users and customers?

2) Limited Access – Foursquare was a scrappy startup so they couldn’t launch universally. This meant while about 15 cities got access, the rest of the first adopters had to watch…and watch…and watch. While we were battling it out for the leaderboard and our badges, the rest of the United States dreamed of the day they could get the douchebag badge. I remember Wayne Sutton (@waynesutton) being excited every time he went to a Foursquare city. What can you do to add exclusivity to your offerings?

3) Seasoned Entrepreneur - Dennis Crowley (@dens), one of the cofounder’s was a previous entrepreneur of a similar startup (Dodgeball), and he had been around the block previously. He knew how to work SXSW and being a very early adopter, he knew the reporters and the influencers. I’ve seen what having well connected entrepreneurs has meant to Trada and even what it meant with the launch of SimpleGeo, a fellow Boulder startup. While companies can’t help having well connected entrepreneurs, networking and connecting with influencers matters when building buzz. What are you doing to work with the influencers in your community?

4) Interaction with Users – As stated previously, Foursquare was scrappy with two founders – Dennis and Naveen (@naveen) – so the founders were the customer service department. A year past launch, and you’ll still frequently see both of them respond to complaints from users. Not only are they accessible to their users, which users love, but they’ve stayed closely tied to user feedback. They take it in stride too. I’ll never forget when one user talked about no longer using the service, and Dennis responded with something along the lines of, “No worries. My job is to make Foursquare so good, that you’ll want to join again.” He knew not to be afraid to hear his baby was ugly. When Chicago threw its birthday party, they bought a 100 shots for the party attendees over the phone.They legitimately love this community. How closely does your top management interact with its users?

People often act as if buzz and passion are WordPress plug-ins – incredibly easy to build-in – and it is extremely complex to build a passionate community. Foursquare serves as an excellent case study of building buzz. What am I missing from this list? What makes Matt Hessler (@fasterstill) and Niel Robertson (@nielr1) battle it out for mayorship of Trada?

Filed Under: SMB Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: , ,

Review: Bing iPhone App

April 15, 2010 By 1 Comment

Given the recent creed from Steve Jobs that iPhone users weren’t about search, they were about apps, now seemed like a good time to check out the Bing iPhone app. Plus, when I was at SXSW Interactive, they provided me with free water and complimentary rides to woo me to download it. The Bing iPhone app had had more than a million downloads and launched a slew of new features last month.

What I loved:

  • Movies: Nice clean listing of playing movies that I can click on to find available playing times an nearby theaters. Slick.
  • Restaurants: Allows you to easily narrow down your choices to a vegetarian restaurant in Boulder. Also slick.
  • Call-feature: Local results displayed a phone symbol making it easy to call the place you were looking for. Much better then the results that come up in Safari.

What I hated:

  • Maps: The map feature includes advertisements. So a search for “Efrains Boulder CO” also lists out another Mexican restaurant and an Italian restaurant. For the directionally challenged, having those advertisements mapped out is frustrating. Plus, the markers for organic and paid results are the same color, so you can’t separate them. Again, frustrating.
  • News: It’s a vanilla feature and feels sloppy seconds compared to Google News. I’d like to able to sort the categories easier.

Overall: I expected to hate it. Google and I have a long standing relationship, but I really liked the user experience that Bing delivered on the iPhone. Certainly room for improvement, but this is an app I’ll actually use again.

I’d be interested to see how the paid search listings in the Bing iPhone app drive traffic. The call feature should be an excellent indicator of direct sales leads. Has anyone else used the Bing iPhone app? Am curious on what other people think.


Filed Under: Advertising Tagged With: ,

How Battlefield Bad Company 2 Relates to Paid Search Experts

April 15, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I must admit that I am a gamer: I love the ability to rank myself with other players across the world. From these rankings I tend to learn that I’m getting thoroughly beaten by a 15-year-old in The Philippines. Lately I have been playing Battlefield Bad Company 2, and their ranking system looks very similar to PPC and Optimizer Community Stats:

Above are three different players with instantly comparable stats. I can immediately see that each player has been assigned a level of achievement, which distinguishes a hierarchy.  But I can also determine, looking closer, that this has been influenced by each player’s style and the amount of time he has contributed to the game.  There are two pieces of these mini dashboards that I found extremely interesting that could work for ranking Optimizers.

At first glance anyone is able to tell that this person is ranked 31 (on a scale of 1 to 50), and their progress moving towards the next rank. With higher rank, players are given progressive access to new weapons and gadgets. Looking closer into the rest of the dashboards it is easy to see the raw numbers that have contributed to overall ranking of this game player. Why can’t we do this with our Optimizer Community? PPC generates all kinds of raw numbers: clicks, impressions, conversions, quality score and average position, just to name a few.

With this there has been much discussion around the Trada office about how good an optimizer is, how to display their rank and how there really is not ranking system in the SEM space to rank PPC experts.  Sure, a PPC expert can pass the Google Advertising Professionals Exam or get SEMPO certified. But do these certifications demonstrate that you know how to create long-tail keywords, write quality ads (and know how to test them) or build campaigns that effectively execute an online strategy?

We are working on a way to come to one singular ranking through a formula: gathering several stats together. If Electronic Arts did it with Battlefield Bad Company 2, how hard can it be to do it with our Optimizers? The singular score may not tell the whole story, but in tandem with supplementary stats it could illustrate an Optimizer’s style, skills and, also important in a marketplace like ours, areas for improvement.  This would be valuable to the Optimizers themselves, as well as advertisers and the company itself.

Looking at the game, EA had to make some major decisions about how stats contribute to an overall ranking. Spending anytime in any of the EA forums some players were OK with the system, however, it doesn’t take long to find players that have gripes about specific stats and what they mean.

Can Trada accurately and visually represent the whole story of an Optimizer by ranking them?  What stats are most important to be considered a successful Optimizer and at what volume?  And can we implement a ranking system without stepping on a lot of toes?

?

Filed Under: Trada News Tagged With: , , ,

How Trada Works: A Great New Video That is Instructional and Sort of About Knitting

April 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

As a writer, I feel that I ought to be especially skilled at explaining things.  So it was humbling to come to Trada and struggle, initially, in describing what Trada does to anyone who is new to the concept of paid search.

It’s a complicated idea – and in my first weeks here, it was an explanation that involved a lot of gesticulating and saying “It’s a lot cooler than it sounds, I SWEAR”.  I was fascinated by the way my colleagues described our marketplace to novices: while picking up wine for the launch party with our Community Manager, Nada Alami, I listened to her make a convincing case for Trada to the guy behind the counter.  I liked the way she started from the very beginning.  “You know when you type something into Google, and ads appear?”

When I took on the role of video-maker, my first order of business was a comprehensive-but-basic video whose purpose would be: to explain the complex idea that is the Trada marketplace.

I wrote up a little script, and the casting process began.  The first person this Casting Director auditioned was hired on the spot.  It was Niel Robertson(@nielr1), our CEO.  As it turns out, I didn’t even need to outsource the knitting props:  Niel had a whole box of needles and dozens of skeins of yarn in his closet – remnants of a long-forgotten “knitting phase”.  It was a delight to watch our CEO plop down in front of an ad-hoc green screen and proceed to ineptly knit the world’s homeliest scarf.

We hope you enjoy the video!

Filed Under: Trada News

Twitter Tracking: A Major Hole for Advertisers

April 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Okay – so I am a social media fan now. I got it before but since the launch of Trada (@trada) and some boot camp training from one of our Social Media Managers, Elaine Ellis (@elaineellis), I’m all in. The other thing I am all in on is metrics, metrics, metrics. Everyone at Trada knows that I am adamant about measuring everything. Each department has weekly metrics they must compile, set targets for and comment on publicly at our weekly company meeting. I learned my love for metrics from Tonya McKinney (@tonyamckinney) who I worked with at my last startup. Her basic mantra was “if you can’t measure it, you shouldn’t do it”. I think this applies really well to very young companies who are quickly trying to learn what works and what does not. If you can’t measure it, find some things you can measure first.

Here’s my gripe about social media. You can’t actually measure it very well. Let’s start by declaring that the thing I’m trying to measure is conversions (advertiser, agency, and optimizer leads) on the Trada website.  I want to know how many of them I got and where they came from. This is easy because we have Google Analytics running on our website and GA tells you where your leads come from. It does this by extracting something from the underlying browser request called the “Referrer.” When you click on a link, your browser not only asks that new website for the information you requested, it also tells it “oh and by the way the link was clicked on OriginalWebSite.com/start.html.” Google Analytics sees this information when a browser asks for pages from your website and it records it and organizes it. When you ask Google Analytics “Where did my traffic (and thus conversions) come from?” it’s just using this referrer information to tell you.

So here’s the problem with social media measurement. Because of URL shortening (e.g. tinyurl, bit.ly, etc..) there is one layer (or more) of indirection between the actual origination page of the link and a visitor getting to you. Because of this layer of indirection, you can’t actually see the direct effect from social media to traffic and conversions. Take an example from our launch where Twitter users retweeted articles about us (we got about 2,000 retweets so this is important traffic for us to understand). A Twitter retweet would look something like:

“Congrats @trada on the funding announcement http://bit.ly/aTwEnZ” (thanks @MelissaHourigan!)

When a user clicks on this bit.ly link (let’s assume they do this directly off of Twitter) here is the path it takes:

  • Twitter.com
  • Bit.ly redirector
  • Mashable article about funding (http://mashable.com/2010/03/18/trada/) or whatever the article is
  • Trada.com
  • Trada lead generation form
  • Trada conversion tracked “thank you” page

When you see this appear in Google Analytics it looks like Mashable was responsible for the lead because that’s the actual Referrer to the site. While it is in a sense (the content was interesting enough for someone to click through to Trada and sign up for a demo), it doesn’t really attribute the social media origination and originator. This is sort of like not counting an assist in hockey and declaring the last person to touch the puck before the goal as the one that matters.

What I can’t figure out is why these URL shortening companies don’t provide me the capability to track conversions back to them and then give me the referral information so I can attribute back to, at least, the source site (e.g. twitter.com) that the original reference came from.

Why this confuses me is that by definition this is easy for them to do. They get the inbound traffic to their redirector (e.g. their server on their domain). At this time they can third party cookie the user (this is how all conversion tracking systems work whether it is Google AdWords, Trada, or any other type of advertising or affiliate mechanism). Bit.ly then would give Trada an image pixel or javascript conversion tracking code snippet to put on our conversion pages. This image tag causes the user’s browser to request something from bit.ly again, thus allowing them to see if they already cookied that user and tying the original link back to a conversion event. This is pretty standard stuff these days. Even if I had to log into bit.ly to see conversions and get referral data, this would let me peer into the value of social media much more clearly.

Upping the ante, now that Twitter has launched its online advertising platform, metrics matter more than ever. If you’re Starbucks paying for a sponsored Tweet, you want to know not only how that Tweet is driving traffic but better understand how all mentions of your brand are resonating and driving site traffic. These metrics actually should have been in place pre-launch of any kind of advertising platform.

At this point, I am hoping that someone comments on this post with “Niel, get a clue, bit.ly already does this. But I’ve searched around and can’t find anything about it.” So here is my plea: URL shorteners of world, please implement this feature. Its critical to social media tracking, is common practice (you’re not doing anything suspect and new), and it adds immense value to the service you offer. And yes, I would pay you for it (whoa! a financial model for URL shortening!). I’m happy to be a beta tester for anyone that wants to take the leap!

Filed Under: Advertising, Social Media Tagged With: , ,

Twitter Introduces Online Advertising

April 13, 2010 By Leave a Comment

“How can you be a sell-out when the high art in question is Twitter? Can you be the Bob Dylan of Twitter? “You know who always kept it real?” - John C Mayer

This is the question John mockingly asked in early 2009 after he pretended to receive endorsements from his Tweets from advertisers such as Campbell’s Soup. Fast forward a year, and Twitter has introduced featured tweets and an advertising strategy.

My first reaction? Like a Facebook relationship status: It’s complicated.

Advertisers can pay for Promoted Tweets, which is supposed to be similar to Google Paid Search results. Simple enough. When a business wants a particular Tweet to reach a wider audience, that tweet will become a Promoted Tweet and will rise to the top of relevant search results, irregardless of what time it was Tweeted. What’s more, to stay at the top, the Tweet must resonate. Determining what is resonating on Twitter will involve an algorithm that will continually be tweaked including the number of retweets, etc. This gives advertisers another complicated algorithm to figure out but the advantage will be given to advertisers who are already engaging on Twitter.

What a Sponsored Tweet Could Look Like (image courtesy of AdAge.com)

Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) of the Altimeter Group has one of the best blog posts on the changes to the Twitter ecosystem. Let this quote stick with you on what he thinks will advertisers will do, “Flail. Many will try to buy their way in and obtain resonation without asking why a tweet resonates.  Will fight over top searched terms in Twitter, expect a lot of contests to promote tweet engagement.”

Ultimately, small- to medium-sized businesses are far more likely to reap benefits through Twitter by being engaged with the people talking about them rather than buying their way to the top of search results.

Think Starbucks Want to Sponsor Chris Dixon's Tweet?

 

Filed Under: Advertising, Social Media Tagged With: ,

The Barn Raising: Hackathon at Trada

April 13, 2010 By 3 Comments

Trada Works Together to Raise a "Barn" (Photo courtesy of Cindy)

Have you ever heard the term “hackathon”?  Odds are you haven’t, so I’ll explain: a hackathon is a software engineering team event typically involving the rapid, collaborative development of software.  Recently, at Trada we conducted our own hackathon, although being the refined and sophisticated team that we are we decided to expand on this theme of “hacking” software.  We involved the entire company in our development event. We called it a “barn raising” because like a good old fashioned barn raising, we brought together all able-bodied members of our corporate community (that’s all 16 of us) and, like craftsman, set out to build a lasting, valuable new feature for the Trada marketplace.  There was no “hacking” here.

Let me tell you a little about the “barn” that we raised…

To run efficiently, the Trada marketplace requires a robust community of paid search experts (we call them optimizers).  The diversity and both breadth and depth of skills of this community are critical to the success of the marketplace.  Campaigns need creative thinkers who can come up with unique keywords and compelling ad copy – all priced optimally – to meet advertiser’s goals.  We want to provide incentives to Optimizers to do their best work and to recognize them when they excel (and when they do not). We also recognize that recognition occurs in many forms. So, with these principles in mind, our main focus of the barn raising event was the development of basic Optimizer Profiles.  Within the Trada marketplace optimizers would be able to expand on their personal profiles by sharing their skills and interests.  Their profiles would include performance statistics (e.g., keywords with clicks, conversions) and an inventory of achievements in the marketplace.  Our initial plan was to make all optimizer profiles public, allowing optimizers to complete their personal information if they chose but requiring the display of their performance statistics and achievements.

Building this functionality is only part of the barn-raising event.  In addition to the typical software requirements gathering, user interface design work, coding and testing that is fundamental to software development, we also considered all cross-functional impacts of this new capability.  There would be marketing and sales tasks to coordinate.  We would want to publicize the new capability in blog posts.  We’d need to communicate with our advertisers and optimizers about the new functionality and explain how it can be used.  We also want to begin the process of exploring how to expand on the functionality by seeking direct feedback from our end users – both advertisers and optimizers.  All of these activities – in addition to the development of the feature – were part of our barn raising.

We set out to do all of this work, including the complete development and testing of the new functionality, in a single day.  We made great progress, but it took a few extra man-hours to complete the development work and another half day to fully test optimizer profiles.  Our hope is that optimizer profiles will encourage optimizers to focus on improving their performance (since it is now quite public).  We expect optimizers to enjoy the pursuit of recognition for their achievements.  And we plan to evolve and enhance this functionality based on the feedback we get from our users.

One of the goals of this modest project was to get everyone at Trada to work together solving the same problem.  We specifically tried to mix up our roles and get as much cross functional experience as possible.  For example, I worked with Anna Sawyer (@annafsawyer) on how the new capability impacts our website strategy and on the creation of related blog posts.  We had account managers helping define software requirements and sales people helping author communications to optimizers and advertisers.  This was a fantastic team building experience.

The barn raising was a big success.  We developed important new functionality, completed all cross functional deliverables related to the new functionality and had a blast while doing it.  And we all got the chance to step out of our traditional roles and experiment with different tasks – all while working more closely with people whom we don’t interact with as much on a normal day. It was an excellent experience, and we’re certain to do it again.

Filed Under: Trada News Tagged With: , ,

What We Are Reading

April 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Dan Prepares For Our Continued International Expansion

Want a summary of what you’ve missed in the last week when it comes to paid search, small business and startups? Welcome to our weekly roundup. As always, feel free to shoot us recommendations on what you’re reading at elaine at trada.com.

And for fun – First Camera, Then Food – shows the evolving need for humans to document and share more aspects of their life, specifically food.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Product Launch Versus Market Launch

April 8, 2010 By 2 Comments

The blog post on staying in stealth is generating debate and a great conversation about playing your own game. Harry DeMott asks Stealth Mode Redux: Are you building a moat? and Brad Feld (@bfeld) wrote New Thoughts on Stealth Mode (Foundry Group is an investor in Trada.) When the blog post was first posted, Eric Ries (@ericries) Tweeted “This blog post conflates product launch with marketing launch: “The Stealth Mode” http://ericri.es/cAeoY7 (see http://bit.ly/DontLaunch)”

I wanted to clarify that Trada didn’t conflate product launch with a marketing launch and shot Eric an e-mail. Thought it would be of interest to other startups, so I wanted to share on this blog.

Eric,

Great post – I found it via your tweet about the blog I wrote . I actually couldn’t agree with you more, and I’m somewhat surprised you think I conflated product launch and market launch in my article. While I equated coming out of stealth mode to market launch, most of my arguments were actually intended to convey exactly the same point as yours: don’t confuse product launch with market launch (e.g. don’t build infrastructure until a market launch, spend your time working on your product – if you can’t handle the results of market launch you shouldn’t do it).

We actually broke Trada into a number of segments during the 18 months that we stayed in stealth mode (I defined the end of stealth mode as market launch but product launch happened inside those 18 months by the nature of the activities we performed). For what it’s worth, here is the path we took.  Perhaps some of your readers will find it interesting. I’m not saying this is the right path for every company but I think it worked very well for us. I think you’ll find that we basically 100% agree with every argument you made in your article.

Pre-funding: -2 months

The core team to be (6 people) sat in a conference room every Thursday for 4 hours and poured over what we thought the right product would be, the issues we’d face, how to scale, the customers we wanted to focus on, etc.

We also did extensive market research. I built a due diligence packet of 35 interviews with all members of the eco-system we were playing in (advertisers, agencies, PPC experts, technology companies) which I used during fund raising and then as the basis for product direction. We made some big changes pre-funding just from these interviews and what we learned.

Prototype Build: 0-2 months

We went heads down and banged out the first version of our product. I look back now and I can’t even believe we got any results from it at all, but we did. My team rocks: they steel threaded the first version of the whole app in 10 days soup to nuts. It was definitely ugly but it worked. What we did mostly was figure out where all the development landmines would be by building this steel thread.

Market Research (side 1 – ppc experts): 2-5 months

Our marketplace has two sides: advertisers and PPC experts. We ran a number of internal sessions over months working very closely with over 43 PPC and subject matter experts by the time all was said and done trying to understand what those users of our system would need. We actually wrote another blog post about this experience (http://bit.ly/a3Mxon). We took a pretty fresh approach to this, one I have never done in any of the companies I have built so far. We simulated the other side of the market with real advertiser campaigns that we internally funded for our own blogs and affiliate accounts on Commission Junction. So we had an end-to-end system running but only needed to focus on one user-type at a time

Also – during this time we put up a splash page on Trada.com with nothing but a vague logo graphic one of our optimizers (PPC experts) made for us one night.

Market Research (side 2 – advertisers): 5-8 months

We found about 10 advertisers that took a try on us and put real budgets and real campaigns into the system. We’d already had a group of PPC experts from the previous segment to work on their campaigns and all our staff did too. We worked very closely with advertisers in the same way to understand what they needed, what was working, etc. And a number of times when we fumbled the ball, we refunded some or all of their spend. Having real campaigns with real sales going on and real earnings coming to optimizers was critical for us.

We implemented Salesforce.com at this time to start tracking leads and working on the sales process. We revamped our sales presentations and customer onboarding docs numerous times.

Product Stabilization: 8-12 months

We spent most of last summer solidifying the product’s basic features and trying to understand the data in the market. Lots of pivot tables and data analysis. Lots of mistakes, learning, ops challenges, etc. We tried to lay the basic infrastructure for monitoring and managing a scalable app. We also continued to bring in new advertisers into the market, approximately one a week. We found new advertisers through our network and referrals from PPC experts and existing advertisers. Foundry (our VCs) and our angels were awesome about trickling in early beta-testing (but paying!) advertisers.

At this point in time we did a deep dive on the financial systems and model in our market. We’ve invested a lot of effort (engineering and otherwise) in deeply understanding the financial model of the business. We literally did forensic audits of our systems for 3 months, refining our close and reporting processes each time. (I never want to have to reconcile 300 lines of credit card charges with a payment gateways batching reports again.) The running joke was “what will we see new this month.” The first time you have to do a credit card refund it actually is a pain in the ass if you want to track it all correctly from a GaaP perspective.

Product Maturity: 12-15 months

After a summer of analysis we decided on a short list of must-have features before we could really launch the product. At this time we also decided to define (and start to measure) metrics in all departments so we’d have an iterated set of core metrics for the business. We religiously update and track and discuss these metrics every week even if they jump all over the place, and we don’t even know what the targets should be yet. Andy Grove would be proud.

We revamped the website at this point in time to say a little more about what we were doing (but still very vague).

Market-Launch Automation: 15-18 months

The last 3 months before launch were a mad scramble to build not only a few new features we learned we needed, but a raft of administration, operations, and infrastructure capabilities that would be required to handle inbound lead generation from launch. We implemented ZenDesk, revamped SFdC, and created detailed market reports, notification systems for users and customer and optimizer onboarding (we have a fully integrated SurveyGizmo system for certifying our PPC experts before giving them access to the marketplace).

At this time we also started marketing experimentation. We revamped the website once again to be much more complete about our message. We ran paid search campaigns (in Trada of course), content network campaigns on Google, Yahoo, Bing, display through AdReady, Facebook campaigns, LinkedIn campaigns, email drops, list buys and call downs and email sponsorships. We learned an immense amount by trying all these things and by baselining our metrics across marketing, sales, account management and ops. I wrote another blog about some things we learned from this process (http://bit.ly/9Md0QY). As a side note, you’ll find that all the blog post we wrote are a direct result of our learn fast, fail fast, iterate quickly approach to everything (product, engineering, process, ops, finance, sales, marketing, etc.)

We also put together a social media program, pre-wrote about 35 blog entries before launch, revamped Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. across the company (hence why I picked up your tweet!).

Oh, and we got a phone system too.

Launch: 18 months and 2 days.

And then we called TechCrunch. We’ll that’s not totally true – we have a very complete PR approach including tier 1s, long lead, short lead, bloggers, social media, etc.  You’ll see more of this happen in the next few weeks as we try and leverage the momentum we gained at launch into a longer-term platform of inbound and outbound leads for the business.

My point here is not to pat my team on the back for all the work they did but to distinguish further for readers exactly what you’re talking about in your post. Product launch (which happened over many organized stages for us) and market launch are vastly different things. When we launched, we had 75 customers, had been running live for 15 months, had infrastructure to scale (we’ve double the spend in our market in the last two weeks as a result of launch) and have the next 6 months of features and scale already planned. Because we baselined departmental metrics over 4 months ago and switched our organizational model about 3 months ago to independent department managers we now have a very good idea of the effect of launch, the growth rate, and where we go from here. Oh and by the way we did this all for very little money. If we had spent $3M or $5M we’d maybe have learned 10% more in that timeframe (but we would have thought we’d learned 2x). Our crowning testament to being lean and moving fast is our Styrofoam cubicles (hand built by our VP Eng/Ops Michael Lawless), so sales people could make sales calls in silence. We live the lean startup mantra daily. Part of this (which was the whole point of my article) is knowing where to spend your time, resources and money and in what order and magnitude to do them.

To your point about differing views on this, the article I wrote is one of three coming out between myself and our investors. We had the stealth or no stealth discussion every month from month 3 of the company. I resisted heavily for all the reasons you listed above (and I put in my article). Brad Feld and Seth Levine will be weighing in with counterpoint on this soon. Either way, they were phenomenal investors to support me running the game plan we did at Trada. Time will only tell if this was the right path, but I agree adamantly that product launch and market launch are vastly different things (and should be treated as such).

Filed Under: Trada News

Three Things To Keep In Mind About iAd

April 8, 2010 By 7 Comments

"Well Eric, here is how we plan on destroying you on April 8" (photo courtesty of Gizmodo)

Today Steve Job announced several new improvements to iPhone OS 4, including the introduction of iAd. The introduction of the iAd platform and the words coming from Steve are fighting words to Google and its ad network.

“On a mobile device, search is not where it’s at, not like on the desktop. They’re spending all their time on these apps — they’re using apps to get to data on the internet, not generalized search.”

With the introduction of iAd platform, here are three things you should keep in mind.

1) Excellent design – Like everything Apple does, good design will be at the heart of iAd. As Apple claims on its site, “apps can feature rich media ads that combine the emotion of TV with the interactivity of the web.” The question is – will emotion and design turn into results? The iAd platform promises to create interaction within the ads. An example for Toy Story 3 will allow users to obtain information about the movie, play games and more.

2) Massive network – There are more than 150,000 apps in the store for the iPhone or iPod Touch representing a massive and highly-targeted network of consumers with an expendable budget. However, temper that enthusiasm. Only 30% of people who buy an iPhone app actually use it the day after it was purchased, according to Pinch Media. With developers seeing 60% of revenue from advertisements, you can be assured that many will be eager to try the platform.

3) Lack of experience - As they admitted themselves, Apple isn’t experienced in the world of Ads. As another slug to Google, they referenced a recent attempt to purchase AdMob, which Google ultimately snapped up. Apple has a lot of catching up to do, but will likely keep at it until they’ve got it nailed.

Filed Under: Advertising Tagged With: , , ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »