Comments for Startupism.com

Comment on No Sleep or Another Name for… by Serge

Serge — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 20:54:25 +0000

Get some sleep Alex! lol

Comment on No Sleep or Another Name for… by Jessica Mah Meets World » Citizen Marketers (”When People Are the Message”)

Sun, 29 Jul 2007 08:28:07 +0000

[...] not in the service business, you might as well quit now. My co-founder Alex just posted a nice rant on Startupism, mentioning his ideas for building virality into our business venture through the topics discussed [...]

Comment on On Software and its Features by Eugene Varshavsky

Eugene Varshavsky — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 00:46:49 +0000

I have learned to expect thought provoking, engaging, and highly informative statements and posts from Alex. Keep up the good work, my friend, we are listening (and reading).

Comment on On Software and its Features by software developers

software developers — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 05:30:25 +0000

Well said. Every new software should include a solid marketing research behind it.

Comment on Facebook Users’ Collective Buying Power (a mini-rant) by Aaron

Aaron — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 18:29:44 +0000

I think the adoption of any monetized Facebook features will take a while, mainly because Facebook still has the glow of a free, useful social tool. I can imagine them getting this right, and I can imagine them failing miserably by clouding up their fairly clean interface and featureset with brazenly money-grabbing apps and schemes.

And now, we can begin the countdown until long-time Facebook users are copmlaining about the good old days when Facebook didn’t want their money and it was free… a refrain that I’ve seen on a web site I was personally involved with many years ago. (Possibly more on that later – it was a pre-Web 2.0 music sharing and review site that never quite caught on and ran out of money… and is facing a relaunch and closed beta right now after four years of downtime.)

I can imagine them making a lot of money without alienating their users through micro-transaction features, possibly including the goofy kind of features that the Something Awful Forums use to raise a extra money in small chunks – like buying somebody an insulting custom title or paying for a cheap banner ad promoting a nonsense product or idea or linking back to a profile or discussion within the site.

Then again, I can also imagine a barrage of flirtatious gifting of profile accessories to sorority girls by overeager males with a few disposable bucks and the bizarre expectation that buying a girl a 16X16-pixel gif of a rose will get you a free walk to second base.

I’m not sure how much money that feature makes Hot or Not and other personals sites, but I’m sure eventually we’ll see a ‘Getting Rich Via Microtransactions for Dummies’ book on shelves soon. Or maybe they’ll sell it online in chapters for two dollars each.

Comment on Facebook Users’ Collective Buying Power (a mini-rant) by Siqi Chen

Siqi Chen — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 02:33:15 +0000

This is pretty spot on. I’ve heard from more than one person in the web community complaining about how tough it is to sell to the Facebook demographic, how low their attention span is, how overhyped the platform is, etc etc. These criticisms are short sighted in my opinion.

The real problem with Facebook right now is that there isn’t anything to buy on Facebook, so of course they aren’t buying. There are a lot of crappy widgets and not a lot of good applications, so of course you have churn. These are product problems, not demographic problems. I’d bet my bottom dollar that there are at least a few dozen companies working to attack this very moment, right when the blowback is screaming “overhyped!”

In any case, even assuming all of the above is true about the Facebook demographic, it would be premature for any company to dismiss Facebook with “The facebook demographic doesn’t do such and such.” The right question is “How MUCH of the Facebook demo DOES do such and such”, and is that a large enough market for my business?

In most cases, I think the answer is probably yes.