I saw this on a mailing list I occasionally read, in a post where a company was looking to hire their first design employee/contractor. I think it’s a big part of why hiring designers is a process that often ends in failure: because most people who aren’t UI experts (heck, most UI experts fall into this camp as well), don’t know when they see a good design.

The challenge, of course, partially lies in the definition of “good design”. Let’s run through a few, in increasing order of importance.

Good Design = Beautiful/Cool Design

In this arena, we might actually know when we see a good design. We often have pretty good instincts on beauty and have a lifetime of training in understanding what other people find beautiful. Beautiful design can be important– but on the web it doesn’t seem to be a necessary element to success. Take the top 50 sites on the web. For a designer who primary considered themselves an artist, how many of those sites would be a source of pride if they were in their portfolio? Designers who primarily seek beauty/coolness often get lost in their own sense of beauty and engage in what I like to call “design guitar solos“– the visual equivalent of the talent-intensive squeeling that guitar pros engage in which only another guitar pro appreciates (or even understands). In the web design world this can range from a nuanced photoshop manifesto with dozens of layers to an incomprehensible JavaScript-powered UI. With great power comes great responsibility– and oftentimes a simple melody is the most effective song.

(note: grabbed from a 1994(!) article post by Peter Morville)

Good Design = Elicits the Desired “Feeling/Motivation”

This brings us closer to a good definition of effective visual design. While it’s not a web site, take a look at Apple’s FaceTime commercial. It’s simple. It doesn’t have the cyborg eyes and spinning globe of apps that Android’s recent commercials do. The design lead on that commercial didn’t get to do the metaphorical equivalent of playing a 12-minute solo behind his head in front of a sold out crowd. No epic visual effects. Just an emphasis on generating emotion– and pretty damn effective as Apple keeps trying to battle their way to the other side of the chasm. (Side note: I think Android’s robot craziness isn’t all that bad– they are currently aiming at early adopter geek-types. Remains to be seen if that’s brand they can pivot away from when the time comes to court “normals”. It wouldn’t be the path I’d choose, though!).

Good Design = Measurably Gets the Job Done

(note: Dave McClure is putting on the WarmGun Conference on October 8th that’s centered around conversion-centric design – Check it out)

THIS is the kind of design that very few people shop for– and indeed, don’t know how to shop for because they can’t “know it when they see it”. As I’d asked in a post WAY back in 2007 (“Do Designers Deserve a Seat at the Strategy Table“), when was the last time you saw a web portfolio that talked about metrics and goals? That talked about how the new design kicked the old design’s ass as far as the numbers were concerned? That talk about an X% SEO lift over Y months? On multiple occasions, I’ve seen uglier designs tromp prettier ones, and we can look at the aforementioned top sites on the web and see that it’s chock full of ugly.

One thing that’s important to note– the experts are wrong just about as often as they are right. As a self-proclaimed expert (!), this is hard for me to stomach, but it’s true. Check out this (somewhat murky) video of the head of Microsoft’s experimentation efforts. There’s plenty of gold here. First, he runs through a couple of design variations and asks the audience (chock full of startup geeks) to guess which performed better. By and large, the audience was wrong as often as they were right. Taking this further, Ronny tells is that the internal experts at Microsoft had similar luck. Said another way, the smartest people about UX and conversion made educated guesses, tested those guesses, and found that their efforts improved their target metric only SLIGHTLY more often than they made it worse.

Good Design = An unseemly mashup of Usability, Marketing, Credibility, and Usefulness

The problem gets worse, because “getting the job done” isn’t just about pure conversion mechanics and A/B testing.

• There’s design STRATEGY (most of the above is about tactical design). Is your designer the type of person who wants to have stategy handed down to him? Or is he the kind of person who is going to agitate for a 2-sided referral program? Or something clever like UrbanSpoon’s Spoonback effort?
• Are they thinking about marketing? Do they think like a user? Do they understand your market? Do they want to? Marketing isn’t just about outreach– there’s a whole discipline around understanding a market, getting their feedback (from user studies to poring through support/feedback email), etc.
• How do you deal with the conflicts between what your business wants the user to do and what THEY want to do? In my opinion, the best businesses have those goals perfectly aligned– but any ad supported site knows that their job is to find exactly how aggressive they can be with ads and pumping page views.
• What about SEO? Content sites need to optimize for SEO. Yes, the first rule of good SEO is quality and linkworthiness. But there are design/markup considerations, anchor text concessions to consider, and more.
• Load time. There are breathtaking studies about the effects of page load time and conversion. How many designers obsess about speed? Not enough, given that adding 2 seconds to page load showed a 4.3% reduction in revenue/user.
• Considerations vary wildly based on the type of offering. Sites that you use every day clearly need to be faster/leaner. Are there sites out there that can afford to be slower? Apple, for example, serves up enormous (and gorgeous) photography on their home page.
• Does the designer love writing headlines? Writing is one of the biggest parts of design– if they’d rather you do all the writing and prefer to work with Lorem Ipsum text, they have a big hole in their skillset.
• How much do they like saying no? At any company larger than a few people, designers meet the “too many cooks” problem fairly quickly. Good design is not only a bizarre blend of graphical, technical, marketing, strategic, and writing expertise– it also requires a healthy dose of political acumen and salesmanship. What are they going to say when Alice swings by their desk and says, “You know what? I think it’d be awesome if we had a block showing our twitter feed on the home page. Maybe with one of those cute blue birds at the top?”

The problem with hiring designers (and the reason that they so often don’t work out as contractors or employees) lies squarely on the shoulders of the people doing the hiring. They’re still looking at screenshots in portfolios and saying, “Beautiful! Wow! This must be our guy/gal,” when they should be looking deeper.

Most blogs are crappy products. And most of my favorite bloggers (the ones that espouse taking design, marketing, testing, and iteration have largely blown off the designs of their blogs To be clear, I think the quality of the blog is almost entirely measured by the quality of the content and not the theme. But blog success is a function of content quality and the ability to turn readers into people who retweet, comment, subscribe, or follow.

Success (whether it’s a blog or a product) is looks a lot like this:

Quality of Product * Success of Marketing * Conversion of visitors = Success

Certainly, outstanding bloggers (or outstanding products) can win on just quality of product. Some of my favorite bloggers (let’s single out Paul Graham (though I think he’d call himself an essayist), Dave McClure, Andrew Chen, and Eric Reis) have blog formulas that look like this:

(great writing = 10) * (great word of mouth marketing = 7) * (no clear call to action, no testing = 1) = 70 (pretty darn successful at expanding their influence)

(Note: McClure might get a -1 for too many font colors! )

My hats off to all of ‘em. They are better (and more prolific) writers than I. But we all know that a little A/B testing can go a long way. We’ve seen that a quick/dirty redesign of an already effective looking page can pump conversion by more than 20%. Hell, we’ve seen that a few iterations of Twitter language (leading to “you should follow me on Twitter”) can boost clickthru by 173%. Could a weekend’s (largely outsource-able) work double a visitor’s chance to become a follower/subscriber, comment, or even read a second post? If you’re starting point is a stock blog theme, I think so.

Here’s what I think you should do on a blog to maximize the 3rd part of the forumula above (and, to a lesser degree, the second part):

• Toss in some social proof. Assume people don’t know who you are and make it clear who you are and why you are important. You’re establishing credibility– why should anyone read what you have to say? Take a look at VentureHacks if you don’t know what I mean. Well played, sirs.
• Figure out what you want your visitors to do. Clearly, you want them to read your posts, but scribble out a stack-ranked list of the actions you want your readers to do and make sure your design supports that. If there’s crap on your blog that doesn’t support that (badges, widgets, etc) pull ‘em. Here’s my list:
  1. Retweet! No way a blog is ever going to have a viral loop, but if a reader likes what they’re reading and wants to spread the word, that’s huge– so encourage it! 1 subscriber is 1 subscriber. A retweet means hundreds or thousands of potential new visitors/subscribers. If my conversion rate on other activities is meaningful, this is my post important user behavior.
  2. Follow me on Twitter. This was a hard call to prioritize over RSS subsription, but I think a lot of people are turning to Twitter to replace their RSS readers. Feels like the right trend. Also, clickthrus on my posts on Twitter results in pageviews– it’s trackable. RSS isn’t.
  3. Subscribe via RSS. Makes it an almost certainly that they’ll at least see my headlines henceforth
  4. Subscribe via email. I dropped this to fourth because I don’t think most of my readership rolls that way, but it’s still a fine way to get content.
  5. Comment. Other than the “game of blogging” (i.e. maximizing reach, influence, audience), the discussion is the big part of why I blog. Bonus points, discussion makes a post feel lived-in and heaps on some more social proof. I’ve ceded the UX of commenting to Disqus, who thankfully does a badass job of encouraging conversation. Further, a comment gives me a chance to talk to the commenter (I almost always try to reply– take a look at Neil Patel if you want an example of a fabulous blog post. He always replies).
  6. Read a second post. In this world, I think getting someone to read a whole FIRST post is a great achievement. If people want to read more, I want to help them do that. But, heck– if they like my stuff, subscription/following on Twitter seems much preferred for both parties as a primary call to action.

Now maybe you could argue that a blog shouldn’t be treated this way. Maybe we’re all blogging to express our feelings, hone our writing skills, and be part of the conversation. That’s fine if that’s true. But look at the degree to which blogging has been instrumental in the careers of folks like the ones I’ve mentioned (as well as Fred Wilson, who says much of his deal flow is because of his blog) and it’s pretty hard to argue against trying to make your blog an effective funnel. Hell, at least spend a few hours and pluck the low-hanging fruit.

At the end of the day, every web site is a funnel and most blogs are pretty damn leaky. Take a weekend and plug some holes.

The more I think about it, the more I’m impressed with software businesses that are great businesses (not just great software). There’s a class of entrepreneur that is product focused (like the folks at Twitter), there is a class of entrepreneur that is business focused (the white-toothed stereotypical biz guy), and there is a class of entrepreneur who is PR focused (I won’t name names, but we all know of startups that seem to thrive simply because of the attention they draw). I think good things happen when you create an outstanding product that has a clear path to monetization– add on someone who is also an attention magnet (like Steve Jobs, who is all three flavors rolled into one) and amazing stuff happens.

A couple of examples

• One you might have heard of– Google. Their outstanding product certainly earned them clear leadership in the world of search engines. But it was Adwords and Adsense that got them to the point where they could feed every employee gourmet meals and do their laundry for them.
• One you haven’t heard of– Autotegrity. This tiny company is finding leads for car dealerships via Google Adwords (among other things). They find people who are looking for very specific things (“blue honda accord”) and offer to get them three competing quotes. They take these leads and sell them to car dealerships (3 times, predictably). It’s a win for both sides and they are staggeringly successful.

One thing I increasingly believe is that the idea of just building something great is a game with much higher risks and rewards. Clearly if you build something that captures attention like Twitter and Facebook, you have the luxury of nearly infinite time to figure out how to monetize what you’ve built. But all of the people trying to build the NEXT Twitter end up in much more dire circumstances. A smallish audience of a few million early adopters a month– an audience which is neither big enough nor unique enough to monetize very effectively. This is no joke– I know lots of services out there that are getting tens of millions of page views and millions of uniques per month that can’t manage to get enough ad revenue to pay a single salary.

So step out of the gates with a strong idea of who’s going to be paying your paycheck and how many of those people you’re going to need to pull it off. If “targeted advertising” is your answer, find an audience that PAYS– that means creating a content site for an audience than some subset of marketeers would chew off their own arm to get in front of. That may mean creating software for weird-but-profitable niches like home remodeling (which commands $20 CPMs last I heard). And it certainly means serving audiences who actually SEE and CLICK on ads (which means that your blog about startups is not going to make you any money, natch).

The key here is that owning a business isn’t about building a product any more than owning a car repair shop is about fixing cars. You’ve got to broaden your vision and bring your passion to bear on stuff like marketing, business models, customer service, guerrilla PR, SEO, and more. It’s hard to name any companies that are admirable who don’t excel at things well beyond product development.

So if you’re supposed to work on everything, what do you work on FIRST?

You should look at your business as a funnel (which, incidentally, is how every salesguy on the planet looks at their sales pipeline). Here’s one that’s in my head all the time:

What’s at the top of this funnel varies on what type of business you have. Maybe it’s page views from organic SEO and SEM. Maybe it’s warm leads from a bank of cold-calling lead-gen folks. And maybe your conversion event is a software purchase (like ours is). Maybe it’s an ad-click. Maybe it’s an account signup. But trust me, you have a funnel.

So when trying to figure out what the hell to work on as an entrepreneur, go worship at the alter of the funnel. That means:

• Measure the hell out of everything. If you don’t know many many new visitors are coming to your site, what percentage of them do something, what percentage of THOSE people, click signup, what subset of THOSE people actually successfully signup, and what percentage of THOSE people are paying you a month later, the first thing you should do is work on metrics. Don’t go overboard, but know your funnel.
• Work your way UP the funnel, not down (if you have the financial luxury to do so). Most entrepreneurs ask “how do I get people to come to my site so it can grow?” The answer most often is down the funnel: the product isn’t providing enough value, communicating clearly enough, engendering enough passion, or causing people to want to tell their friends.
• Seek the low hanging fruit in the funnel. That means that you should seek out where people are escaping your funnel. If you get tons of visitors but no one clicks on anything (high bounce rate, low time on site), chances are your value prop is confusing or isn’t very compelling. You might need to improve the product, but chances are you just have to improve how you talk about it.
• Seek leverage. The lower you attack the funnel, the more it helps. If you do something to improve your retention that will help you forever. If you do something that gives you a boost in acquisition (like a SuperBowl ad), the value will be short-lived (unless you have a true viral loop). Two great retention stats (via Andrew Chen):

  “If each month you lose 8% of your existing users (92% retention) from the previous month, the average use will stay for 12 months. If you can hold just 4% more of your users (96% retention), then they will stick around for 2 years. If you can hold only 1.3% more than that (97.3% retention), they will be in for 3 years.”

  And, if you take a cohort of 1000 users from a month an 80% retention rate means that you’ll have 68 of them after 12 months. If you can get that to 90%, you’ll have 282 left. A 300% revenue boost for that single cohort (and every subsequent monthly cohort!).

• Don’t give up on making your product great. It’s easy to get sucked into data, A/B testing, form fields, etc. But at the end of the day, people don’t just abandon signup forms because they are hard and confusing, the abandon them because they don’t care enough about signing up.

Resources Referenced in the Presentation

Bokardo’s “Designing for Social Traction” Presentation
Josh Kopelman’s Cohort Analysis Spreadsheet

Hat Tip to:
Gladwell’s Blink (has the story about likable doctors getting sued less regardless of how good they are at healing)
The Heath Brother’s Made to Stick (best marketing book on the planet, they talk about the “Curse of Knowledge” and the “Tappers and Listeners” study)

Here’s the full presentation:

Those who argue that Google is a friend to content owners because it sends them traffic overlook the basic law of supply and demand. The value of “traffic” is entirely relative. The more content there is on the web, the less value that content has — because of the surfeit of ad inventory and abundance of free alternatives to paid content — and thus the less value “traffic” has.

He’s right that it’s a supply and demand issue, but he’s wrong that Google isn’t a friend. Newspapers got to be a VERY fat business with a huge expense line because there was a limit of supply. You want written news in your hometown? You’ve got one choice, maybe two if you’re lucky. You want to advertise to people who care about the news? Same choices.

Over the past 50 years, reporting the news SHOULD have gotten cheaper. A flood of journalism grads, word processing and desktop publishing tools, increasingly sophisticated global communication, and cheap syndicate-able news stories when it’s not practical to report it. Over the past 20 years, you’d think it’d have gotten cheaper yet. Why have a press at all? When a story is breaking in Istanbul, why not just find a freelance reporter there rather than fly one of yours over and put ‘em up in a hotel? Need to do some fact checking? Try the internet. Don”t have time to write a deeper article? Link to some content partners in a “learn more” section at the end of your article. Looking around at content startups (like TechCrunch), it’s easy to see imagine cheaply you could run a newspaper. But modern newspapers don’t have that imagination, and if they did they don’t have the agility to get there with huge debt service, huge staffs, and big infrastructure to support distributing dead trees and ink.

The problem with the industry isn’t that Google owns the middleman slot. The problem is that the news industry as we know it is fundamentally inefficient. There were local walls around the supply, and little fiefdoms of news grew fat and happy (and horribly inefficient) inside these walls. Now that innovation has removed those walls, an oversupply of news has spilled into the world and the girth of these news organizations just can’t be supported. This doesn’t mean we should pour the hate on innovation.

Technology innovation is often about making markets smaller/more efficient. It’s taking something that used to cost $50 and making it available for $5, which tends to make innovators rich and incumbents flounder and die. It’s about making music sharing cheap and easy so record-labels can’t get drunk off of the insane profits they’ve been enjoying. It’s about sites like Kayak and Faracast making the market for airline tickets more efficient and less inscrutable.

Google *IS* a friend to the news business. They are giving them a free/huge distribution channel that they don’t have to pay for. There are plenty of small/nimble news startups from the Huffington Post to the West Seattle Blog (my neighborhood rag) that are happily growing and collecting advertising revenue.

There’s clearly a need/demand for news and a clear path to making money with content on the Internet. There’s not much we can do but sit back and watch most of the dinosaurs die, rot or evolve, and watch the nimble little mammals grow up to fill the niches they leave behind.

In contrast, the most recent panel I was on (at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Summit) was with what I’d call “builder entprepreneurs”… All startups with great traction, some funded, but all of the founders were directly engaged with the creation of the product. They designed, coded, played sysadmin, and played all sorts of other production roles for their startups.

The contrast was startling, and it made me think hard about my earlier contention that the “business guy” doesn’t really have a useful role to play in the very earliest stages of a software startup. The first panel had a pile of examples of business guys leading startups to some significant (sometimes dramatic) success.

At one of the other panels at the Web 2.0 conference, Dave McClure (master of 500 hats and 473 font colors– and one of the smartest guys in the game) summed up the life-cycle of a startup in a great way. “There’s the product development phase, the market development phase, and the revenue development– or revenue optimization– phase.” Rings true to me.

So with this in mind, let’s track the value of a “product entrepreneur” over the early life of a company:

Now let’s track the value of a “business entrepreneur” over the early life of a company:

(note: I’m talking about one person’s ability to make a major impact with a startup– I’m not saying that either person is useless at any stage of the startup… And, of course, exceptions abound)

As I’ve said before, the business guy often doesn’t have a lot to do in the early stage of product development– especially if the builders are building something that they actually want themselves. If you’re a bunch of hackers building a simple photo sharing, you don’t need a business guy telling you what the market wants. Of course, if you’re a bunch of hackers building business time management software, you might well need that. Your mileage may vary.

But what I haven’t said before (and what I’m coming to learn) is that the product entrepreneurs have an increasingly marginal role as a startup evolves and becomes more successful. In fact, I’d argue that they are in a rude awakening– they either need to evolve into business entrepreneurs (as Gates and Jobs did, for example– both shrewd business guys) or hire people to play that role (a la Eric Schmidt at Google). Building an asset is the first (and most important) challenge. But finding the customer for that asset and maximizing the revenue/profit is also a challenge (and one that many builders are ill-suited to handle).

It feels like product entrepreneurs are oftentimes “cowboys”. Flying by the seat of their pants, they rally a small team to build a product that people want. It’s no surprise that this is really freakin’ hard and requires a mythical combination of brute force time and effort, insight, customer empathy, and a huge pile of luck. Saddling the product team with a biz guy who chases big customers and locks in the product direction too early can be deadly, as the Wizard points out:

This is one reason I hate to see very early stage companies sign a big customer before the product is baked. You are encumbered by product commitments and customer support before you truly know what the market wanted. You have to be passionate about a customer and the product when you should be laser focused on the product. The customer’s needs and your goals vis a vis the market may diverge. In an effort to show progress, however, the marquee customer is attractive in the belief it will help attract investment (and this may indeed be true). In a previous life before FeedBurner, my founders and I made the mistake of signing a big name customer to a paid monthly contract before we really knew what the product’s place in the market should be. Won’t ever do that again.

The product development phase of company needs product development people and precious little else.

But as the market development phase sets in, builder entrepreneurs are oftentimes increasingly obsolete. It’s no longer time to hurl features willy nilly at your users– you’ve already built something that they like. No you need to measure the hell out of it and turn it into something that they love. You need to iterate on it and turn it into something that confuses 4% of your new users instead of 7%. It means finding a way to tune your viral loop and conquer your SEO enemies to increase the organic flow to your product. And you need to start expoloring the market to figure out who they hell is going to pay for all of this. That means crafted adwords campaigns. That means cold calling. That means price experimentation. That means exploring the world of direct ad sales. Well, it can mean all sorts of things, depending on whether you are a free web service, a freemium product, a pure b2b play or some combination thereof.

But you are firmly out of the world of building products and drifting into the world of iterating a product and exploring a market. And, likely, you’re in the world of sales, marketing, and instrumenting the hell out of your app/site.

As Papa PG says, if you look at the leaders of successful tech companies you see more CS degrees than you see MBAs. That makes sense– geeks are critical to conquer the first (and most important) problem of a startup… Building a badass product. But if you look at these same tech companies, you see CS geeks who’ve actually set aside their geeky roots (though maybe not their geeky instincts) and become very very shrewd business guys. And you also see inferior products kicking the crap out of superior products through better sales/marketing/and distribution.

So to all of you builders out there… Beware! When you reach a challenge in the evolution of your business, the most natural thing in the world is to frame it as a product problem. “If we just build this new feature/product, we’ll be off to the races and we’ll never have to do any of that business crap!”. Keep your eyes peeled for the time when you have to personally evolve and start tackling business problems, or step out of the way and let someone else do it for you.

Disqus is a hosted commenting system (free) that offers a few clear benefits:

• 2 way communication with people who comment. This is the one I care about. Very often, someone leaves an interesting comment on my blog that I want to respond to. I usually do, but it’s unlikely that that commenter will ever know about it… Disqus allows the commenter to be alerted to any replies to their comment, which can continue an interesting conversation.
• Threaded conversation. No-brainer. No longer will I have to say “@PersonName:” to make it clear who I’m responding to.
• Persistent reputation. The biggest problem (IMO) with conversation on the Internet is that the average Joe has trouble being polite– and some people are being impolite and just cruel. I love the idea that Disqus saves everything you say and you can vote up (and down) any comment. If Disqus gets big enough, you could imagine being able to set rules like “no comments from non-registered users who have an average comment vote of less than 1″.
• SEO Benefit. To be fair, Disqus (right now) hurts your SEO on one front. Given that I don’t really care too much about traffic to this blog, I’m okay with that (they are working on an API version that calls the comment content with their API rather than JavaScript)… It’ll be interesting to see if there is an effect on search engine traffic. But it’s not often mentioned that Disqus drops links to your blog (and each post) on your community page (mine is at http://tonywright.disqus.com/ ), which provides some nice positive SEO juice.

Disqus offers quite a few other benefits– the above are the ones I care most about. If you have a blog, check out their tour or just take it for a spin. It’s a breeze to set up!

Like all YC guests, Joe had piles of startup wisdom… One of the things that stuck out to me (which I’d never heard much) was when he said, “when we launched JotSpot in beta, we launched it to too many people.” Huh? Too many users? That’s bad?

But as I look at my current workday, there are times when I wish that we had fewer users.

There’s some common wisdom about usability testing: Beyond 5-7 people, you really aren’t going to get much new/interesting data. There are diminishing returns.

Similarly, in a beta test where you are trying to understand your market, figure out your users, hone your funnel, hunt and slay bugs, and make your product better, there has got to me a point at which you have enough users to get the data that you need. For us, given that we have a web app as well as an installable app for both Mac and PC, our need for a diverse body of testers (in terms of the technologies they use) is probably higher than most. But I have no idea what the magic number is.

But we opened it up. To give you an idea of the consequences of this, here’s roughly the amount of communication that I do in a given day:

• 3-8 emails from our contact form – I respond to every single one of these. Sometimes that results in a follow up email that requires a second response.
• 20-30 feedback emails. We have a tiny form in our app asking for any thoughts a user might have. Even though we say below the form that we can’t respond to all of ‘em (and we point them towards the contact form / support forum if they want a response) I read them all and tend to respond to some.
• 3-5 posts on GetSatisfaction, which weird forum-sorta-thing. We try to respond to all of these, and many times they require some ongoing discussion.

When you add all of this up, it’s a pretty tremendous amount of communication. Say it requires an average of 3 minutes to digest and/or respond to each entity (this is 7 days a week, mind you)… That’s about 2 hours and 10 minutes PER DAY. Every day. Not counting the times that some emails require that I involve the whole team in a solution/discussion. That’s a lot of time for a company where all of the founders really ought to be spending almost all of their time working on development. And, as an effectively bootstrapped company, we don’t really have the budget for support staff.

On the Brighter side…

Still, despite the “costs” mentioned above, there are some pretty huge advantages to launching early and openly.

First off, you get over the biggest early hurdle that can slow most startups to a crawl. I think all founders are terrified that when they finally launch their business, no one will want what they have. So they’ll find any reason to delay it. Maybe they should focus on patents? Trademark research? Clever and innovative stock plans? Business cards? Fancy spreadsheets? Business plans? Marketing plans? Anything at all that will allow them to delay the possibility that people don’t like your app. When you’re out there and getting buried in feedback, all of that other stuff falls away… It’s incredible how much it focuses you on your app.

Second, you get to test your inherent marketability. Do people like talking about you? Do they tell their friends? Do they blog about you? Does your app have any virality? A closed beta really doesn’t allow this.

Third (and most important), in the sea of people who reach out to you is (hopefully) people who LOVE you. We’ve gotten feedback emails that simply say, “I love you” (3 so far!). We get long essays from users talking about their time management strategies and how RescueTime has helped. Literally 1-3 emails a day make me walk on air. Reduce that number to 1 a week and I’m not sure I could manage to make the sacrifices I’m making now to push the business ahead.

Fourth, there’s SEO. No need to get into the nitty-gritty, but starting the campaign of building incoming links and pagerank is something you should start as early as possible.

And, of course, there are nebulous concepts like “tipping points” and marketing momentum… If you hear about RescueTime enough, maybe eventually you’ll try it?

On the balance, I don’t know the right answer… And I suppose it’s different for each startup. I’d love to get other folks’ thoughts in the comments.

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“.

Let’s face it– Google’s search algorithms rock. No search engine has succeeded in creating a system where publishers are incentivized to create high quality content.

You can take the high road, and just focus on high quality content and fabulous usability. Wikipedia did it. It can work.

But the smarter play is usually to know the rules that your playing under and optimize… There are plenty of great SEO techniques that don’t hurt the user experience (or barely hurt it).

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?