Being wise versus being smart (3)
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jeremyliew (53)
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Great post today from Sim Simeonov about being wise vs being smart that I’ll quote in its entirety since it is so short: There is a set of interrelated concepts I’m fond of reminding entrepreneurs about but I’ve never found a really good way to summarize them into a sentence that conveys the right meaning and tone. Here are various renditions: * Be different, not best * Do less, not more * Go around a ...
Facebook selling digital gifts at a $35m run rate (11)
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In January of this year, we estimated that Facebook was selling digital gifts worth $15m per year. We based this estimate on an analysis of the number of each gift available each week over a 7 week period. Facebook creates a certain fixed number of each type of gift. When the number remaining for any particular gift drops below 100,000, Facebook displays the number left. (The most common size runs are 100,000 and 1,000,000 but ...
Using a virtual world newspaper to enhance in-world community « Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog (5)
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The LA Times notes the popularity of the Club Penguin Times: The Club Penguin Times … is more widely read than New York’s Daily News, the Chicago Tribune or the Dallas Morning News. And it’s not even 3 years old. But this weekly “newspaper” isn’t tossed onto driveways or sold at newsstands. Rather, it’s an online publication distributed to the estimated 6.7 million monthly users of Club Penguin, a snow-covered virtual world visited by more ...
Game developers on social networks can expect $1.20/mth/Daily Active User (5)
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Inside Facebook has a terrific interview with $uperRewards, one of the two major CPA ad networks for social networks (and increasingly outside of social networks as well). [Offerpal is the other major CPA ad network for social networks]. In the interview the $uperRewards team give some great stats and advice for game designers: On who to focus on when thinking about monetization: You should support all kinds of players well, while remembering that your hardcore ...
How to interview key hires (6)
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Startup founders often need to hire people into areas that they don’t know anything about. This can be a technical founder hiring a VP marketing, a business development founder hiring a VP Engineering, or a product management founder hiring a VP Ad Sales. Often these hires are some of the most importantthat a company makes as they fill the holes in a founding management team. There are three things that you should test a potential ...
BestBuy launching prepaid cards for online games (1)
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Although some still doubt that free to pay games have a viable business model, this month’s launch of game cards at Bestbuy may change some minds. Reports Virtual Worlds News Stardoll, Meez, AdventureQuest, and Gala-Net have all partnered with GMG Entertainment to launch individually branded prepaid cards at Best Buy. The Meez card will come with an exclusive virtual good, and Stardoll, which has previously worked with GMG Entertainment, is expanding its prepaid offerings to ...
When can paying people become counterproductive? (7)
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I’ve posted in the past about how points can be used to drive user behavior. Last week the Washington Post explored when play becomes work, and talked about some of the downsides of using rewards systems: More than three decades ago, Edward Deci, a social and personality psychologist at the University of Rochester, found the first experimental evidence of a phenomenon with wide relevance to the way most Americans conduct their personal, professional and social ...
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adam said:
The implication for social media and user generated content businesses is that creators create for love, not money, and that paying them with money may in fact be counterproductive. Instead, creators want adulation.
How to capture your user value proposition (9)
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In the past I’ve written about encapsulating your business plan for potential investors in an executive summary, or even more succinctly as a high concept startup pitch. This is helpful for communicating to angel investors and VCs, but it doesn’t help you communicate to new and potential users of your product why they should try your site. Whether you plan on acquiring new users through viral growth, SEO, SEM or banner advertising, the basic principles ...
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David said:
Good advice.
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francine said:
I can never get entrepreneurs to do this properly. They launch into a long story, and assume that some ad agency (post-funding) will help them through this later.
How to implement reporting and analytics for your startup (10)
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Andrew Chen has a good post on how a startup should think about implementing analytics that I think applies to companies of all sizes and is worth reading. He notes: In general, a philosophy on the role of analytics within a startup is: If you’re not going to do something about it, it may not be worth measuring. (Similarly, if you want to act to improve something, you’ll want to measure it) Don’t build metrics ...
Is Social Media a business? (7)
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I am a fan and subscriber to the paper version of Technology Review, but was disappointed in their cover story in the current edition, where Bryant Urstadt looks at the current state of the social network sector and concludes that social networking is not a business (free registration required). The article essentially looks at CPMs in the current business (which are low), concludes that revenues are low relative to traffic, and it might all just ...
Why do kids and tweens buy virtual goods vs why do teens buy virtual goods? (3)
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A recent post on KZero, asks, “Will luxury brands drive the growth of virtual goods?”: … tweens and teens (KT&T) will play a big part in the growth. This group has ‘less of an issue’ paying real money for virtual goods - their decision-making process does not take into account its a virtual good - they just want the product and see technology as invisible. So worlds targeting KT&T (kids, tweens, teens) clearly have a ...
7x more interest in free to play games than subscription games (3)
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Worlds In Motion summarizes key findings from the new Parks report on gaming. Of the 2,000+ online gamers polled, only hardcore gamers were found to be interested in subscribing to an MMORPG service, whereas “social, dormant, and leisure gamers all show significant interest in a free-to-play, microtransaction-based model.” The study’s numbers show that 14% of gamers currently not playing MMORPGs would be interested in playing them if they could for free, while only 2% of ...
Online video CPMs are north of $15 (2)
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TV Week reports on a new report from the Diffusion group on video advertising: Professional Web programming yields very high CPMs, the report found. The CPMs for long-form online content are $40 today and will reach nearly $46 in 2013. Meanwhile, CPMs for short clips are clocking in at about $30 and will rise to a little over $34 in five years. The CPMs for user-generated video will have the smallest rise, from only $15 ...
How Kosmix employs enterprise 2.0; a guide for other startups (4)
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Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Lightspeed portfolio company Kosmix, posts about how to stop email overload and break silos using wikis, blogs, and IM. We hit the email wall at my company Kosmix recently. When we were less than 30 people, managing by email worked reasonably well. The team was small enough that everyone knew what everyone else was doing. Frequent hallway conversations reinforced relationships. However, once we crossed the 30-person mark, we noticed problems creeping ...
How many A:B tests do I have to run before it is meaningful? (8)
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Inside Facebook has a good post about how to not screw up your A:B testing that is a useful reminder about how many tests you need to run before you know that the results are statistically significant. The author notes: How many [tests] do we need to declare a statistically significant difference between [a design leading to action success rate] of p1 and one of p2? This is readily calculable: * number of samples required ...
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Sue said:
Good explanation of a misunderstood process.
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Satyajeet said:
Interesting...
Post mortems on two failed startups from their founders (10)
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Monitor110 recently shut down after raising $20m over three rounds. One of the co-founders wrote a portmortem of Monitor110, highlighting 7 mistakes that the company made: 1. The lack of a single, “the buck stops here” leader until too late in the game 2. No separation between the technology organization and the product organization 3. Too much PR, too early 4. Too much money 5. Not close enough to the customer 6. Slow to adapt ...
People like to have fun. Who would have thunk it? (4)
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There has been much handwringing about how silly facebook apps are, and how it would be so much better if they were more useful. But Facebook users have voted with their mouse buttons, as the O’Reilly report in May showed: According to a Medialets survey, it seems that iPhone users have voted in exactly the same way, with almost half iPhone apps being games or entertainment: Girls (and boys) just want to have fun.
