A few months ago I moderated the panel at Ultralight Startups. We discussed adding social functionality and behavior to your website.
Here’s the video:
Click here for info about the original Ultralight Startups event.
May 24th, 2010
Stop pricing your web app like you own the company
One of the hardest things about running a business is setting prices. Even if your product is a web application.
I love that most people launching businesses online are following the freemium model. For the really niche apps that are emerging, this gives everyone the chance to “try before you buy”, and often is actually enough for people to start using the product. It’s smart from a business standpoint, and kind from a customer standpoint.
The mistake I’ve been noticing a lot lately IMHO is the leap to the first price point. I keep coming across apps that go from 0 to $12 or 0 to $20. $20 a month is $240 a year!
First, think about how often most products get used. Something like email, you use hourly. An app that let’s you sign up for events, maybe weekly. But how often do you encode a certain kind of file? Or update your website’s static content? Or have an online conference? Sure, there are people who will do these things daily, and those are your power users. Great. Charge them through the nose. But when someone’s using your service once a week, is it worth $20 every month to them? Probably not. Because your app is so specific, that one task does not match the entry price.
Second, let’s talk about perceived value. I watch Netflix daily, and pay $15. I could pay less. My email, calendar and RSS reader are all free, and I use them daily, if not hourly. There’s infinite discussion online about free, so I won’t go into it here, but if someone is only going to use your app a few times a month, and the stuff they use daily is free or cheaper, the value to them is skewed. They’re not gong to pay you $24.95.
You know how much time and effort and money you’ve put into developing your web app. It’s worth at least $20 a month to you. You know what? Your customer’s don’t care. If you’re one person, or a company of a thousand, it doesn’t matter. It’s about what your product is worth to your customer.
Obviously, I’m not advocating making everything free. I’m not even suggesting lowering your prices. Instead think about what you could offer the casual user for $10 a month? $5? Could you even charge $5 a month for what you’re now giving away for free? I think you’re leaving money on the table.
Business 101, sure, but I bet you’re losing some customers, or at least losing money, but not charging a little bit for a more basic service.
May 10th, 2010
My new favorite web app, FollowUpThen, and how it made me love gMail
All the cool kids use Gmail. I’ve had accounts for years, but have rarely used them. I use my own domains, and when Google finally introduced accounts for business, I looked into it. I’ve always loved the idea of threaded emails. But I find it clunky in Gmail, and the whole app is slow to me. I’ve been using fastmail.fm for years, and because everything is a page refresh, I just open lots of windows. You can do that in Gmail, but it’s not as nice… Anyway, I’ve never loved Gmail. And I had my way of working.
A month ago I finally made the jump. I decided I could be a grown up and revise my email habits. I moved over for techy and nontechy reasons. The techy reasons involve cleaner headers and better spam handling. The nontechy reasons include integration with the other services, and a great address book that syncs with my iPhone.
It’s been rocky, but an okay experience. The plusses and minuses have been about even. I’ve really had to change the way I think about email and organization, and I struggle with that.
The biggest thing is Gmail uses tags, which I love. However it use them instead of folders, which I find clunky. You can emulate folders, but it’s just not the same. I lose emails. It freaks me out that everything is in one folder. Some get tagged, some don’t, so emails don’t land in the “folder” I expect them to be in, and then I can’t fnd them.
A couple weeks ago, I had an idea of reminders to help me not lose emails. Okay, I still lose them, but what if they popped back up at the right time? It turns out this already exists, as a really well built FREE service called FollowUpThen.com from Internet Simplicity.
When sending an email, BCC the service when you want a reminder, and it pops back up, on the same thread. If there’s an email thread I want to put off till Tuesday, I’ll forward it to tuesday@FollowUpThen.com, and then archive it. The thread pops back up on Tuesday. Perfect!
So now I worry less that emails will fall out of my field of vision, and subsequently I’ll forget to follow up. I follow up on ideas, conversations, deadlines, invoices, anything. Like so many good things, it’s dead simple, free, and works well.
I can’t recommend it highly enough.
May 3rd, 2010
User question: Monetizing a content driven site
I received an interesting question via email:
I started a site that’s free, though you must register. So far the only means of monetizing it has been through selling ad space in our digital edition which goes out to all registered users. All articles get press releases, posts on at least 200 linkedin groups, face book, socially bookmarked, digg, Redit, at least 10 others, etc. I would like to be able to increase traffic, registered users, sales and if possible see if there are any other potential streams of revenue.
The site has lots of great content, so here was my response.
It sounds like you are well established (or on your way) as an authority. There are lots of ways to use knowledge and people seeing you as an authority. The three that come to mind are paid, premiere content, books and education.
Look at NetTuts for premiere content. They offer a lot of great, free tutorials on a number of subjects, and then a monthly subscription grants you access to exclusive tutorials. If some of your news or posts would be worth even $10/mo to someone, use that.
You could also (or alternately) take previous posts, polished up, combine them with a few new posts and publish a book. JoelOnSoftware (affiliate link) and 37Signals’ Rework (affiliate link) are a couple examples. Not everyone wants to read lots of separate posts, especially online. Also, if you’ve got a following, people are often happy to “support” by buying your book.
Finally if your site offers some how-tos (I couldn’t tell offhand), you could sell your knowledge in lessons. This is great, especially if there’s a potential curriculum to using the knowledge, or the process of using the knowledge takes months or year. Check out the Micropreneur Academy.
I’m borrowing a lot from great ideas from Chris Brogan, Copy Blogger, and many other s I’m not remembering right now. Did I miss anything?
March 8th, 2010
Build web apps like you were going to franchise them
One of my favorite small business books is The E-Myth Revisited. It’s a small book, but pretty heady and introduces some great ideas. One of my favorite ideas is that you should build a business like you were going to sell it as a franchise. Even if yre not going to, it makes you think about efficiency, the re-usability of any moving part, and to look at the whole thing without you being present.
I realized this week that we can apply the same principle to building web apps. For a while now, as I build sites, I look at any functionality as a potential library or separate web site. This is 37Signal‘s Sell your By-product idea, but taken one step further and think of each idea as a business idea.
This makes me write cleaner code, do things the right way, take time to abstract things out, and comment better. All this with the idea of making the best possible product (both for the customer, and for the business owner), and that other people will be seeing and working with my code, probably without me being there to explain it.
March 1st, 2010
Lessons I’ve learned: Never delete anything.
I have learned a very hard lesson.
The quick version is that I wrote a bit of code that, instead of deleting a single record from a database, cleared the table in the database. Yeah, oops. And this script was tied to a button that any user of a web application might click. While this might sound like a great subplot to Lost, it’s terrible for a web site.
Twice. People clicked it twice, and emptied all of our data. I was able to restore a backup once. We lost a lot of hard-earned information.
We all write bad code. Why I’m truly kicking myself is that I elsewhere in the application I’d been using Active/Inactive flags (“Click here to delete this item” marks the “Active” field to 0. “Click here to restore it” marks the “Active” field to 1.) rather than deleting records. I should’ve done this for all of my tables. Why I didn’t was a snap decision while coding, and of course I now regret it.
So I’m determined to never delete anything. Or overwrite it without a backup. For example, in another web app that writes XML files, I’m copying the existing files to a folder with a time stamp before overwriting them.
People talk about how cheap web space is now, and how fast our server are. There’s no reason to ever get rid of data. This holds true for building web apps.
This is a new “best practice” for me. I keep a short list of rules so I will never make this kind of bad “quick decision” again.
February 15th, 2010
Do politics play a part in the services you pay for?
When I first heard about Mozy a few years ago, I jumped on it. It was great. Since then, I’ve found their service has slowed down, and makes my computer run slowly.
So recently I tried out Carbonite and really like it. It probably isn’t any faster, but I like that I can see what files are backed up, and it doesn’t seem to slow down my computer. So I switched, and as I write this, 43% of my 137Gb of data is backed up.
But then yesterday my girlfriend showed me a funny clip of Glenn Beck (as in, he does his thing and we laugh at him). In the middle of his rant, he does a plug for Carbonite.
My jaw dropped. It’s probably a smart demographic to go after, and I guess I take it for granted that tech companies are generally going to be liberal. But it hurts. I do not like Glenn Beck, and do support most things he does. Why should I support companies that give him money?
Now I’m honestly conflicted. I know it’s “just business” but I do my best not to support companies like Walmart that I think are not doing good. Do I keep using Carbonite?
Do you let politics influence whether you hire/pay for services?
February 9th, 2010
Using an uptime monitor
An uptime monitor is a service that acts like a visitor to your site to check if your site is up. You can schedule the service to visit your site as often as you like. I find five or ten minute intervals to be comfortable without using a lot of bandwidth.
They hit your site and notify you if it’s down. Depending on the service you can get an email or SMS text message when your site goes down. They use different servers around the world and can also tell you how fast your site is delivered.
It’s reassuring to know if your site down and start doing something about it. Don’t count on your hosting company. I recently had an issue with a site being unavailable, but because it was a network issue and not a server issue, my hosting company wasn’t aware of it. My monitoring system notified me and I was able to create a support ticket immediately.
I highly recommend pingdom.com. They offer a free version that’s everything you need.
February 1st, 2010
I will be moderating the panel on Designing Social Websites at Ultralight Startups this Thurs, Feb 4, 2010
This Thursday is gearing up to be the biggest Ultralight Startups ever. If yre not familiar with ULS, it’s one of New York City’s best meet-ups for small business start-ups. It happens every month and always proves to be useful, educational and fun.
The next meetup is Thursday, Feb 4 at 6.30PM. This month the panel will discuss Designing Social Websites, and features some heavy hitters. I’m pleased to announce I will be moderating. For more details including who’s on the panel and to register visit http://ultralightstartups.com/newyork/social-design.html
So I need your help! What questions do you want me to ask about integrating social features into your website?
http://ultralightstartups.com/newyork/social-design.htmlDesigning Social Websites
January 26th, 2010
The difference between a website and a web application
The phrase “web app” is second in my vocabulary now only to to the word “cool” or “like”. I’m a little obcessed, but for me, having the web full of “web applications” is a culmination of why I became a web designer and developer.
And because I’m “in the web space”, I hear the phrase “web app” a lot, too.
But then a friend asked me, “Is a web app like a web site?”. And after a few minutes of trying to explain, I retired to my secret lair to spend a little time writing about how I see the difference.
To most people, a “web site” is an umbrella term that encompasses just about anything you see in a browser. Most people are familiar with it like that. But I think of it now as a site that’s static, informative without being interactive. If yre a nerd, you’ll say “Web 1.0″. Information like product information, resort brochures, a musician’s landing page. To think of it in terms of marketing, a web site like this is all about the site owner. Here’s my web site telling you about me.
A “web app” on the other hand, is all you, about the user (sorry, I know we’re not supposed to use that word anymore) and interaction. It doesn’t have to be social interaction, just the user interacting with the web app. It helps you accomplish a task, which could be managing my finances, interacting with friends or as simple as finding information.
I would consider most web sites that have more than a basic search to be web apps.
What do you think? How would you differentiate the two?
