RescueTime

Big News for Me and RescueTime (see you in Silicon Valley)

Nov 15

I’ve posted a lot more detail and accompanying thoughts over at the RescueTime blog… To summarize:

RescueTime has been funded by YCombinator, one of the most prestigious seed-funding outfits that’s out there (in geek circles, anyways). If you aren’t familiar with it, here’s a bit of info. YC was founded by Paul Graham (startup guy, writer, and crazed Lisp advocate) and have been funding very-very-early-stage startups for just a few years. Since they spun up, they’ve funded dozens of great companies including Xobni, Loopt, Reddit, Justin.TV, Scribd, TextPayMe and more (scroll down for a list).
Part of the YC program is that the founders must relocate to Silicon Valley for a period of 3 months (starting Jan 08). During the three months, there are weekly dinners with assorted Valley luminaries. At the end of the three months is Demo day (now, by popular demand, spread to 2 Demo days), where you pitch what you’ve built to a big room full of early-stage investors.
The financial part of the funding is such that we’re still effectively bootstrapping. So please don’t call trying to sell me expensive services of any kind.
We just got coverage on TechCrunch. Neat!

I can’t express how excited I am about the opportunity. RescueTime started as a hobby project to “scratch an itch” that we had. With incredible enthusiasm from our users and a handful of advisers, we’ve been happily dragged into taking RescueTime to the next level.

Seattle 2.0 Startup Index

Nov 01

Every month, Marcello Calbucci diligently posts a list of Seattle Tech Startups sorted by their Alexa/Compete ratings (including details about their movement on the list). The November SSI is out! It’s a great resource and (quite honestly) exciting to see so many Seattle companies doing interesting things. And it’s gratifying to see RescueTime (which is still in private beta, mind you) continuing to climb the list (we’re at #70– well ahead of quite a few funded companies).

Can’t wait to see where we end up when we actually launch.

Of course, it’s important to note that Alexa and Compete are complete and utter bunk. It turns out that most sites/services that try to understand where people are going on the web aren’t reliably accurate. Don’t believe me? Check out SEOMoz’s exhaustive study. Still, just because you can’t trust it doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting. Marcello is smart to include both Alexa and Compete data.

I’d love to see someone create some sort of meta-score… Pull data from Alexa, Compete, Technorati, Comscore, and a few dozen other sources and present the mean/median/standard deviation/etc.

Interaction with WordPress Customer Service… Not so fun.

Oct 19

I’ve been running WordPress for this blog since the beginning. It’s a great platform. I’ve officially been drinking the Kool-Aid. I tell my friends about it. I heard Matt Mullenweg speak (at SXSW last year) and I rave about that.

So when it made sense for us to spin up a little blog for RescueTime (my fledgeling time management software business), WordPress got the nod. Rather than host another WordPress blog, I opted for a hosted WordPress account. WordPress offers barebones options for free, but I opted for a few premium options, making me a paying supporter of WordPress. It felt good.

The other day, I got an email from a few strangers telling me that the PowerPoint deck I had posted on my most recent blog entry (“DIY Web Marketing: 16 Resources for SEO, Social Media Marketing, & Viral Marketing”) was a dead link. It HAD been working (I know several people who downloaded it). No big deal, I thought. Tech glitches happen. As a guy who runs a SaaS biz, I’m quick to forgive on such things. It was inconvenient timing though– I’d just had a speaking engagement at Seattle Tech Startups and the PowerPoint deck in question was my deck for the presentation (I’d promised at the end to make it available– which is why I was getting peppered with emails).

My first step was to log in to see if I could fix it myself. No go. In fact, I couldn’t even log in. It told me my account was suspended.

I dutifully researched their message board (I know how expensive support is, so I figured I’d try to help myself) and found that random/accidental suspension issues were occuring as a result of a recent bug. Ahhh– that made me feel a bit better. When I finally got an email response, I was dismayed.

Your blog was suspended because it violated our ToS.
Basically, we don’t allow blogs created solely for commercial purpose,
or for Search Engine Optimization purpose.
I’ve temporary unsuspended your blog, so that you have a chance to review our ToS,
and clean it up a little bit…

www.wordpress.com/tos

Trying to keep my cool, I replied:

What?

It’s a blog about a tiny web service with 8 or so posts (so far). It doesn’t have any advertisements or any revenue generation capability whatsoever. I mentioned SEO in my last post because I did a little presentation at SeattleTechStartups.com a few weeks back– but RescueTime (http://www.rescuetime.com) has nothing to do with SEO (and, at present, isn’t even remotely a commercial enterprise). I reviewed to ToS fairly carefully and see no violations.

Are you SURE it was purposefully suspended? I’ve read several threads (covering the last few days) that seem to indicate there is a bug going around:

http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=16792&page&replies=5
http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=16787&page&replies=10

It seems a heckuva lot more logical to me that I’m a victim of this bug… I assume that if someone shuts down a blog for a breach of ToS that it would have some sort of note attached to it (to discriminate it from a bugged account)?

Several days have passed with no response. I have no idea if my blog is temporarily not suspended, if it was a bug, or if there truly was a breach that I’m not aware of. The blog is a simple product blog (I know a lot of startup guys who have such a thing– presumably that doesn’t count as “commercial purpose”?). I understand that suspending blogs is something WordPress has to do to be vigilant in the fight against spam, but would an automated notification hurt, citing the ToS clause in question? Given that I was actually a paying customer (not just freeloading off of their free offerings), would it kill ‘em to respond to my last email?

For the record, the blog gets VERY little traffic (thousands of uniques a month is all).

WordPress will continue to be my blog platform of choice– I’m too darn used to their fabulous interface. But (if nothing changes) I won’t be spending money with them again and I certainly won’t be recommending them as I have in the past. As they say, “customer service is the new marketing“.

Everything is Linkbait

Oct 11

First off, for those of you who haven’t been exposed to the phrase yet, here is WikiPedia’s take on LinkBait. The definition doesn’t feel complete to me. I’d probably add a bit of language along the lines of “baits users to bookmark the link” (because many social bookmarking sites convey “SEO link juice”) as well as a bit of language along the lines of “baits users to click on the link” (because Google is dabbling in having link performance on search results pages effect SEO).

For a pile of linkbait examples, you need to look no further than PopUrls, which aggregates the top links around the web (Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Slashdot, etc). You’ll see a lot of commonalities in word selection, title structure, etc. As I look right now, I see “The 6 Most Terrifying Foods in the World” topping Reddit. “30+ Free 3-column Web Site Templates” tops Del.icio.us. “Don’t Mess with the Marine Corp. Calls for Fox News Boycott.” is near the top at Digg.

Getting back to the title of this post… I sent out 700 invites to the RescueTime Beta yesterday and noticed some REALLY interesting data. Before this, invite emails have been opened about 65% of the time (with about 90% of openings resulting in a clickthru). So far so good. I haven’t been thrilled that 35% of people don’t open the email, but it’s understandable given how long it’s been since they’ve signed up for the beta. Hey, don’t blame me– we got a LOT more interest in the beta than we’d orignally imagined we would!

Yesterday’s email, I decided to make a slight change to the subject line of the email. Previously, the subject was “(Finally!) Your RescueTime Beta Invite”. I decided to remove the “(Finally!)”– as we’re working on a business/team offering, I thought maybe we ought to be a touch more professional and a bit less self-deprecating about our beta invite delays.

I was surprised to see that the open rate dropped to about 51% (a pretty significant change). There are other factors at work here– potentially the time of day and the day of the week could change things dramatically… But I tend to think that the culprit is the subtle language change.

Which prompted me to wonder– What if I changed the subject to map to linkbait style? “(FINALLY) Your RescueTime beta invite– Know exactly how you spend your computer time!” or some such? Anyone have any suggestions? I’m happy to experiment.

My thinking about linkbait also made me wonder about page title tags (the SEO-critical bit of code that determines what the window title is and what the link title is on Google search result pages (SERPs, if you wanna get SEO-geeky). When I do a quick search (say for “plasma tvs“) and look at the blue links through the lens of linkbait, I’m not bowled over.

Would results in search engines perform dramatically better if the title tags adhered to the rules of linkbait? Related, could SEO geeks like me craft a title that was linkbaity and still had the right keywords while remaining under the 65 character limit that Google displays? If we could, would it drive everyone crazy to see bombastic claims and top 10 lists on search engine results?

It’s possible that the world of search engine results and email subjects need to be more mundane to be effective. Maybe marketeers have created so much mistrust in these arenas that anything remotely smelling of linkbait will be dismissed as spam. Any thoughts?