Tag Archives: business

Plain, Plain Space, Barley

February 19th, 2013

As you may have guessed from the lack of posts, I’m busy. After leaving Viddler and taking some time to get things in order; I’m busy building Plain, Plain Space, and our first product Barley.

Barley has been a smash hit and it isn’t even publicly available yet. We’ve been overwhelmed by the response. We’ve had interest shown by people and companies in every Internet-connected country on the globe. Literally. Designers and developers are building templates, importers, SDKs and more for Barley already.

We just put out a teaser video, check it out.

My blog will be back in full swing when we convert it to Barley.

How much should I raise?

February 11th, 2013

There is no shortage of opinions on this topic but Wayne Barz takes a pretty good approach to answering, or not answering, the question How much should I raise?

I certainly can’t answer your specific “how much” question in a single 1,000 word blog post.  But I will suggest there are only three main buckets in which to place your answer generally.  Once you’ve placed your trust in one of these buckets, then you can get to work on your specific amount:

  1. “raise no money now, keep bootstrapping” (~20% of deals should do this)
  2. “raise only what you need to get the current job done” (~70% of deals should do this)
  3. “go big or go home” (~10% of deals should do this)

I’m planning on discussing how I decided how much money to raise for Plain once our company has our site and blog up and running (tomorrow, hopefully). But I can say that I am generally taking Wayne’s #2 approach; raising enough to get the current job done and go from there. Although I did have the opportunity for #3 I think it is still early on and we have a lot of unknowns so I see no reason to move too quickly and get over our heads.

Great post by someone who has seen a lot of deals. Read the whole thing.

Stop worrying about being copied »

January 10th, 2013

Nathan Kontny:

“If my idea isn’t worth copying then it’s not a very good idea. If my product or business can’t handle a new competitor, then it’s not a very good product.”

If someone copies your idea for a product it should make you feel validated for having the idea in the first place. Build the best product you possibly can and stop worrying about being copied.

Organizational complexity »

December 28th, 2012

Dalton Caldwell, co-founder of App.net, does some thinking about organizational complexity. He contrasts how a simple demonstration of Artificial Intelligence does not necessarily mean that model is scalable to do more complex tasks. The model needs to change with the growth. The same too with a company. The organization needs to change as it grows in order to best serve external complexities but only when those exist.

How do you determine if your organization is complex before it needs to be?

“When you talk to employees of a large company, it seems as if their entire world is made up of byzantine internal politics with no relation to customers in the external world… a large percentage of every day is spent attempting to navigate ever-shifting politics surrounding the org chart. It would seem that the larger a company gets, the more the company tends to allocate resources towards inwardly focused (as opposed to outwardly focused) issues.”

A company doesn’t even need to be that large before this starts to become an issue. If you’re at a company that talks more about what they will do than what they actually do, that worries about their titles more than their product, or has a bunch of people that don’t know what their job is… you’re already there.

Flickr Premium? »

December 27th, 2012

Danny Nicolas has been keeping up with my Flickr commentary of late about how Flickr should create a more affordable, less feature-rich account type and he has a few things to add:

I feel as if most people currently paying for Flickr Pro don’t take advantage of all the features offered. I might even go in the other direction and have the current Flickr Pro offering become the mid-size account, and offer a more expensive Business account that doesn’t have file size or video limitations.

My main argument for why I think Flickr should make a scaled-down account is more about price than about features. I was a paying Flickr Pro user for many years, as was my wife, and we never utilized the account to the full. Though I’m sure more serious photographers do. However, in today’s market of mobile apps and the services that power them, most people will not pay $24 a year to share photos with their friends. And I don’t think the Instagram generation needs Flickr Pro. But I do think they’d pay enough to make it worth Flickr’s while to create a more affordable account with less features.

Creating a Premium account is an interesting idea and is always on the table for SaaS platforms. But I don’t think that is the right strategy for Flickr. I doubt there are many members that are pining for more features or space or video capabilities. They can go elsewhere for video. I believe there is a goldmine of brand new users that are dabbling with Instagram – to the tune of tens of millions perhaps – that would love a few extra features that Instagram simply does not provide (stats, groups, sets, etc.) and all Flickr has to do is price the account just right, and market it properly, in order to suck them all in.

Again, Danny:

Whatever their strategy for success may be, Flickr must evade further stagnation in order to be competitive. They can’t ignore and leave new markets wide open like they did with mobile. They have the opportunity to become a powerful weapon in the hands of Yahoo.

It is amazing to me that so many people see Instagram as Flickr’s failing. But it is obvious. The people that were the innovators in photo sharing missed the boat. I think the problem is that Flickr became a business very quickly after joining Yahoo! It went from being an innovative product that was really trying to solve problems to a business that needed to make money and innovation sort of was pushed to the side. And the fact that we didn’t hear anything from Flickr for years was mind-boggling. I have no idea what they’ve been doing for the last few years.

Danny nailed it when he mentioned cannibalization. Some of the things Flickr should have done over the last several years were no doubt thought of and even sketched out but perhaps decided against for that very reason. They didn’t want to lose current customers. But they may have to do just that in order to grow again.

Yahoo! needs to invest in Flickr. They need to let the team know they can take chances again. They can try and fail and try again. They need resources, talent, and a someone with a clear vision to run the entire thing.

If Marisa runs Flickr like she ran search at Google Flickr will succeed. If she runs it the way Google+, Buzz, and Wave was run she won’t. And there is a subtle difference between the two approaches. Google+, Buzz, and Wave were innovations, no doubt, but without any real value or use case that was obvious. I remember trying Wave for the first time and having no idea what it was for. The products were perhaps a little too innovative. Instagram isn’t so much an innovation as it a well-designed simple solution that brings delight to people every day. Google search is a well-designed (seemingly) simple solution that brings an amazing amount of value to people every day. Flickr should aim for one of those; delight or value. I’d pick delight.

Instagram backlash is Flickr’s gain »

December 18th, 2012

Tom Warren, of The Verge, agrees with me about Flickr gaining from this recent Instagram policy change:

With a nicely redesigned client and support for filters, Flickr is finally catching up to battle Instagram on the photo sharing front. And its dormant community of lapsed Pro users (who are required to pay a nominal fee each year) could be awakened after Instagram users realize they’re the product of advertisers. It could be a temporary backlash, the same type we witness whenever Facebook adjusts its news feed, but competitors are ready this time and Twitter and Flickr are waiting in the wings for a share of Instagram’s unhappy user base.

He calls what Flickr charges for its Pro account a “nominal fee” and for what you get I suppose it is. Warren states that Flickr Pro users, like myself, will come out of hiding and reup their accounts. That may be true but I don’t think we’ll see new users jettisoning from Instagram and signing up to Flickr as Pro users. I would, however, see them moving over in droves if there were a cheaper account level that stated, simply, that Flickr/Yahoo wouldn’t use their information for advertising purposes.

Your move Yahoo!.

How Flickr can eat Instagram’s table scraps. I’m Instagram’s table scraps. And so are you.

December 18th, 2012

Before I even get started; Flickr can not stop Instagram at this point. Flickr can not beat Instagram in terms of hockey-stick-growth. Even with Instagram’s recent policy changes Instagram is on a trajectory to hit the nearest star and Flickr nor Bruce Willis can stop them now. But, to succeed they do not need to win – they just need to capture as many Instagram-escapees as possible.

Flickr has long since been very good at a few things; sharing, licensing, and interoperability. It is one of the reasons Flickr was included in Anil Dash’s The Web We Lost; Flickr’s API is world-class and the entire Internet can benefit from its rich offerings.

Instagram being bought by Facebook was the first step in the wrong direction in the eyes of many web veterans. And there are more and more web veterans every single day as the web gets older. Web veterans are people that know better. Web veterans know that Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram aren’t the Internet. In fact, they are the antithesis of the Internet. These companies do whatever they possibily can to pigeon hole people onto their websites for as many hours throughout the day as possible. The rest of the web, the real web, tries to solve a problem for people while playing nicely with every other service out there.

Flickr made the first big step in capitalizing on Instagram’s move to Facebook last week when they debuted a brand-new iOS application that has gotten rave reviews from web newb and veteran alike.

However, Flickr is too expensive for people casually sharing a filtered photo from their mobile cameras now and then. Yes, you can use Flickr for free for up to 200 photos but I think just about anyone with a Flickr account would much prefer to have all of their photos available all of the time.

If Flickr were to change their model just slightly – one from a pro backup and catalog solution to one of sharing – they could easily win a ton of accounts that are falling off of the Facebook/Instagram table on a daily basis. Perhaps creating a cheaper account-type that costs, say $5 or $7 per year, would be enough for the web veterans (again, there are a lot of us) to completely jump ship from Instagram and pony up. This way, we would never have to worry about advertisements, creepy data collection, or wondering if our data will ever be trapped on someone else’s servers. And believe me, this isn’t something that is terrible difficult for Flickr to give a shot. They have everything they could possibly need already in place to do this.

Flickr, you’ve already made one step. Take the next step and bring us all back home again.

[discuss on Hacker News]

 

Why founders shouldn’t be the developers »

December 14th, 2012

Swizec explains why founders shouldn’t be the developers:

There’s no getting around that, no matter how good a programmer you are, no matter how experienced, it’s just hard. Programming doesn’t require a lot of attention, it requires all of attention.

I agreed. As much as the founder wants to be the developer they shouldn’t be. I don’t think it means that they can’t do any development. But the responsibility of this task should not rest solely on their shoulders. They can dabble. They can mess around with ideas. Maybe even help put together new prototypes. But leave the production stuff to professionals.

Viddler, now with multi-user sign on »

December 11th, 2012

The Viddler Blog:

Decide who can access your dashboard, setup their own Viddler username and password, and choose what they will have access to in your account. Select who can view and/or manage certain videos or playlists, who can edit account or billing settings, and for those customers with sub-accounts, you can set permissions for accessing these accounts as well, which makes managing your content easier and more productive.

This is huge for publishing organizations that need to allow multiple people within one organization to upload, edit, or manage their video library. Even better, if a single organization has more than one Viddler account (say, for different publications or departments) – they can set up access to each of those sub-accounts as well. The importance of this feature can not be overstated.

Any company doing video publishing should take a serious look at using Viddler if they haven’t already.

Pageview journalism »

December 11th, 2012

Jim Dalrymple at The Loop:

We aren’t focused on pageviews, but rather posting things that interest us. Of course, the hope is that they’ll interest you as well.

This is an interesting topic. And “pageview journalism” is an interesting phrase. The post that Jim links to on ZDNet describes pageview journalism as the act of writing about topics that a writer or editor believes will get the most pageviews rather than writing about what the writer themselves may think interesting. In other words, writing about Apple rumors will more likely generate more traffic than writing about amps. So a publication will focus on writing about Apple rumors. Traffic dictates content.

The Loop, however, has managed to stay true to the author’s interests and still find an audience that appreciates a balanced approach to its content publishing. One that definitely bends towards keeping up-to-date with Cupertino but still finding several off-topic posts as interesting.

Pageview journalism has other nasty side-effects besides just dictating the topics a publication focuses on writing. As we all know it can also have adverse effects on the reading experience of a publication.

For instance, The Loop’s RSS feed is an excerpt-only feed. This forces people like me who subscribe to the feed to visit The Loop in order to read the entire post. I think I understand why The Loop does this; to generate more members (who get a full-text RSS feed) or to generate more ad revenue to off-set those (like me) who are not paying members. It makes total sense to me why  The Loop has done this but it certainly is a direct result of how they choose to earn revenue for their publication.

Of course, this isn’t nearly as egregious as, say, a site that purposefully splits up articles into multi-page layouts to generate more pageviews. Most of the publications that continue to do that crap we’ve all simply chosen to ignore. But it is definitely something that fits under the umbrella term of pageview journalism.

Update; December 17: Jim has tweeted me to say that only the long articles are truncated. After looking, of course he is right. So only the full articles need to be read on their site. Which makes perfect sense to me.

You Just Have To Do Something »

November 23rd, 2012

Jonathan Moore recounts the day he saved his son’s life, then makes this point:

When we are presented with moments of crisis, large decisions or new opportunities often we find ourselves crippled by the lack of knowledge. We justify inaction with our insecurities in not knowing the right way to move forward. Or we trap ourselves in an endless search for knowledge to attempt to reassure our actions.

Paralysis by analysis can literally kill a company. It is an incredibly difficult balance between being reasonable and having balls. You have to have a reasonable amount of balls.

Great post. Dad of the year.

The drain of technology on technology professionals »

November 19th, 2012

Stephen Hackett, who is giving up his iPhone for a feature-phone for a year in an attempt to bring some balance to his digital life:

I think there is a sizable percentage of nerds out there who realize the weight that technology has on our lives, and are uncomfortable with it at times.

Yes, there is. I’m one of them. I’ve tried many different things to help bring some balance to my life between the pull of technology and business and taking care of personal, family, and spiritual matters. Some have worked and others have not. Most of what I enjoy is centered around technology. Even the things I enjoy that have nothing to do with technology I enjoy them more when I bring technology along for the ride.

I’ve always been this way. Fighting against that doesn’t seem to be the course that works for me. Balancing it, limiting it, while finding a way to embrace it has though. Everyone is different, you just need to find what is right for you.

I hope this works for Stephen.

The four seasons of your Startup »

November 12th, 2012

Wayne Barz:

I spend a lot of time with start up companies.   To be specific, I spend more time with start up companies than I spend with my wife.  That is actually true and explains why despite 22+ years of marriage, I think I understand start up companies better than I understand women.  With that in mind, I’ve observed and want to share my thoughts about the evolutionary stages that start ups go through as a framework for understanding them better.  I think this matters for you as a start up company or, perhaps even more importantly, for you as an advisor to start up companies.

Take some time to benefit from each installment as they are all great: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter.

Why did Disney only pay $4B for Lucasfilm, ILM, and Skywalker Sound?

November 1st, 2012

When I first read the news that Disney was acquiring Lucasfilm, ILM, and Skywalker Sound all in one deal I tweeted that I didn’t understand how all of these companies – along with the rights to Star Wars, partial rights to Indiana Jones, Lucas Arts and much, much more – were only worth $4 billion. But I may have figured it out; George Lucas knows they are worth more but wants Disney, and only Disney, to takeover the reigns. And, Lucas will make boatloads of dough on this deal too.

I’m not alone in wondering though. Jason Kottke:

Crazy. A non-Lucas non-prequel Star Wars film will hopefully be pretty great, but the purchase price is puzzling. Only $4 billion?

According to my research Lucasfilm, ILM, and Skywalker Sound have a combined team of thousands of employees. No doubt some of these will not be making the transition to Disney. But this is a solid workforce.

Take a look at ILM’s Wikipedia page. That is some filmography. At my count I see at least three if not five blockbuster releases per year. Depending on how those deals were structured, I’d be surprised if ILM didn’t get some sort of royalties for some of those films long after they’ve debuted. Not to mention the work done on Bluray/DVD releases.

And ILM’s pipe seems pretty full too. They have nine deals in the bag all of which are pretty high-budget projects.

And, even though Skywalker Sound is relatively small, they own the IP for THX and work on arguably the best films released each year. Perhaps they too can structure sweetheart deals.

So Disney, without a doubt, got a steal of a deal. But, we have to look at this transaction a little differently than just looking at the face value because Lucas took half of the money in Disney stock.

The $4 billion was split; half cash, half stock. Disney is promising to make Star Wars a much more international hit. As it stands, a huge percentage of the revenue from Star Wars comes from toys bought in the US. Disney can bring Star Wars to China, Japan and other nations where toys are a huge hit. Just not Star Wars toys. And, presumably, they can do something special in all of their parks worldwide to bring people into the parks. They can also fund, manage, and distribute new Star Wars releases, movies, games, toys – and George Lucas doesn’t have to lift a finger.

Brian Warner:

The fact that Lucas is taking half the deal in stock is a sign that he sees this transaction as an investment for the future, instead of just a quick way to cash out. Considering the fact that Disney’s stock is up more than 32% this year, from a low of $38 to a recent 52 week high of $53 per share, Lucas’ payday could increase by hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars.

So Lucas now owns 40 million shares of Disney. Effectively doubling his personal net-worth with a single signature. Some analysts project they will bank more than $30B on this sale in short order. Their stock is already up two points (that’s $1.8B in market cap) and it isn’t even lunch yet. To Lucas that’s $40M more than he expected. So I guess Lucas knows exactly what he’s doing.

Lucasfilm, ILM, and Skywalker Sound sold to Disney »

October 31st, 2012

The price? Four Instagrams.

Dean J. Robinson:

Lots of people I follow on twitter [sic] (pretty much all of them actually) are Star Wars fans of some description – and the general consensus is that while they are quite surprised by the announcement they don’t necessarily have negative feeling about it. In fact many seem enthused by the prospect of a Star Wars film that George Lucas isn’t at the helm for.

My little tirade on Twitter last night may have been seen by some as an indication that I’m mad or upset about the transaction. I’m not. Well, maybe I am.

If George no longer wants ownership of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, etc. etc., or the companies that have done the sound and special effects for countless films over the last 35 years there is probably no better home than Disney.

I am upset, however, at the current state that Star Wars is left in. A Star Wars without George Lucas is not the same Star Wars. Think about it. A New Hope was a smashing success in 1977. Arguably one of the biggest successes in film history on many fronts. And, economics aside, it is a great Sci-Fi film. Some say that Empire Strikes Back is one of the best sequels of all time. And, aside from the Ewoks, Return of the Jedi was about as good of a trilogy ender as anyone could hope for. And then, a slow plummet. The Special Editions. Episodes I, II, and III simply never had a chance. (By the way, I think Episode III was actually pretty great. The Emperor really comes out looking like a clear winner.) And the Bluray release.

The last thing George did was go in and fiddle with the originals and add Ewok eyelids and emotion to Darth Vader where no emotion was needed. As Dean said some are excited by the prospect of an Episode 7 that he has nothing to do with. I, on the other hand, was rooting for George to come back and make something great since I was very young. And now we’re left with George Lucas never doing another Star Wars. I guess I was always hoping he’d find that same spark he had in the 70s and 80s.

That’s what I’m most upset about.

Hipstamatic was playing the wrong game »

October 15th, 2012

Austin Carr in a retelling of the Hipstamatic story for FastCompany:

“By March of 2011, when Hipstamatic hired its new designer, Laura Polkus, Instagram had already rocketed to 2.2 million users, and was growing by 130,000 users per week. But Polkus says the team largely ignored Instagram. “There wasn’t a whole lot of attention paid there,” says Polkus, who was later let go. “The conversation internally was, ‘Well, we’re completely different. They are a social network, and we are not. Who cares what’s going on with them? We’ll just continue to do what we do.’ But from the public’s perspective, that’s obviously not the way things were seen.”

I’ve seen this in many companies. I’ve been guilty of this stance myself. It is at the brink of competition that one resists it the most. When the world begins to compare what you’re building with what someone else has built you immediately reject that idea, trying to tell anyone that brings it up that you’re different or will be different or want to be different.

But the fact is, the world doesn’t have time to figure out why you’re different on their own. You need to show them. And in order to show them you may need to come off of your existing product roadmap and work on marketing. It isn’t fun – at least not for builders. To take a break from building things in order to make sure that your messaging is right? Eeek. Gag. But that is exactly what you need to do. You need to show the world how you’re different so that there isn’t a question.

But some will go down in flames rather than strive to make this distinction in the marketplace. Using Hipstamatic vs. Instagram as the lens for this argument you can see how the world viewed the two applications in general terms; a camera app that lets you add filters to your photos and share them with friends. Instagram won because it was free, was much easier to use, and had a social network built into the app and didn’t rely on using a social network you’ve built elsewhere.

So, one could say that Hipstamatic lost to Instagram. But that is because they were playing the wrong game. (And, if you read the FastCompany article you can see they spent rather lavishly and had very little regard for running a good business.)

If you back up a little and look at this same argument using App.net vs. Twitter as your lens you can see this same situation happening in reverse. Twitter; free, easy. App.net; costs money, is seemingly the same service. But there is a catch; App.net doesn’t need to “beat Twitter” to be a success. Hipstamatic didn’t need to beat Instagram to be a success. They just needed to clearly define the differences between the applications and aim to be a great, paid alternative.

I don’t pretend to know what the differentiators should have been between Hipstamatic and Instagram but I can say that not being owned by Facebook would have been an excellent start.