Tony Wright -

Considering Y Combinator (or any seed funding)?

Feb 22

[Timely note! We're hosting a Y Combinator Meetup in Seattle on Thursday Feb 25... details here!]

March 3 is the deadline for YC’s Summer 2010 session. I figured that I ought to throw my thoughts out there on the decisions that lead up to the application, the app itself, and the interview process that follows (if your app makes the cut!).

Making the Decision to Apply

First off, I think the most important thing to emphasize as an entrepreneur is that you should optimize for your chance of ~~success~~ a meaningful exit, NOT the magnitude of it, should it happen. It may seem like selling for millions to Google is a foregone conclusion given how brilliant you are, but it’s not. Startup success is a tough slog with lots of randomness outside of your control. If you can trade a little bit of equity to nudge up your shot at success by a few percentage points, you should do so. Thankfully, YC from this perspective is a no-brainer. No one can argue that it doesn’t improve your shot (with the amazing mentoring they provide, the investor introductions/credibility, and PR bump), and if you calculate YC’s take is if you sell for $100m (divided by the number of founders), it isn’t too painful.
Think about what you’re building, what market you’re playing in, and whether it’s appropriate for venture financing. I think I recall reading about someone applying who was proposing to build an app to manage Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. While there’s probably a business there, it’s pretty unlikely that the pen-and-paper RPG market is going to be the next big thing to change the world. Pick a big market– or better yet, pick a small market that can eventually morph into a huge market (like classifieds for San Francisco, selling books online, or an online garage sale).
Read everything here and make sure you agree with some of it, but don’t be afraid to disagree with some of it either!
Do something bold. You aren’t going to be thinking to yourself on your deathbed that you really should’ve taken less risks. YC is a blast. You get to meet amazing mentors, other great startup founders, and a few fairly impressive robots.
Consider how committed you are to your idea/market, your company, and your co-founders. YC has plenty of flips, but the majority of ‘em seem to be going concerns for years. Can you get excited about what you’re doing (and who you’re doing it with) for 7 years?
Do a gut-check on your team. Do they have the rough ingredients necessary to kick ass? If the better mousetrap you propose to build is going to be better because of an amazing UI, make sure you have a great UI guy. If you’re doing a vertical search/UGC play, make sure someone is at least a little interested in SEO. If you’re going to sell software to businesses, make sure someone is willing to sell stuff. And, of course, if you’re tackling something with big technical challenges (like most of us are) make sure you have some great hackers.

The Application Process

Read Paul’s essays. It provides good insight into what’s important to him (and YC). Reading Founders at Work is a good idea, too. It’s a great book and shows you some patterns for startup success.
Remember that the app is a sales pitch and focus your answers on the things that are important to YC. The biggest risks to YC are:
- That you don’t have the chops to build something good. The best way to deal with this concern is to show them something good that you’ve built. Preferably several things, and preferably things that you’ve built with your co-founders.
- That you’ll get bored/discouraged and quit. So try to work in examples of times when you’ve persevered despite significant obstacles.
- That you’ll fail to make something that people want. So do what you can to show that you’re in tune with the market you’re proposing to serve. You can be a badass hacker with unflagging dedication, but if you don’t/can’t understand your users, you’re probably not going to be a big win for YC.
Don’t be too shy or too arrogant to sell. I remember reading a comment on Hacker News that said, “My code speaks for itself.” No, it doesn’t. At least, not to investors, customers, employees, reporters, and the zillions of other people out there you’re going to have to sell to.
Get working on your software ASAP. If you apply with a functional product (or even a launched product that people love), you remove a lot of the risks listed above.
Get working on the YC app ASAP. If you’re unsure, apply! The app takes a few hours and it’ll help focus your thinking if nothing else.
If possible, make sure that your whole team is ready to dive in whole hog. Starting something up is a commitment to your founders and to your new investors. Having a team member who has other commitments can be a source of contention.
Hack the system! Every session I get emails from people asking me to review their apps. I usually do. I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t do this… YC founders are people who wrote successful applications and spent at least 3 months getting repeatedly kicked in the junk by Paul Graham and friends. I’m sure we must know something about how YC thinks that might not be obvious. If you can’t bring yourself to ask a stranger for some time, how are you going to raise money after YC? How are you going to hire your first employee?

The Interview

I don’t recall the stats on how many applications make the cut, but if you get asked in for an interview, congratulations! Now get to work building something (hopefully you already have).

Get started on a demo. If you walk in and start monologuing, you’ll fairly quickly get interrupted and asked to start showing stuff.
The “demo” will be less like Steve Jobs and more like Guantanamo Bay. You’ll be derailed almost instantly and peppered with questions and objections.
Have a backup idea that you’re comfortable talking about. I know several founders who were essentially told, “we don’t like that idea. Do you have any others?” This may be a test of how much you love your idea as much as anything else. Founders who refuse to pivot often die from it. It also might be a test of your ability to have good ideas. If they don’t like your idea OR your backup, they might los faith in your ability to grok what people want.
Practice. Ask 10 smart people to name 10 things that will make your idea fail. Have good responses for those objections. Don’t practice a speech. Don’t practice a 10 minute demo, practice little 1-2 minute chunks of a demo that you can string together if they leave you alone. Practice individual talking points and responses.
Be willing to be wrong but also be willing to disagree. YC doesn’t want lapdog PG fanboys(and girls!), but they also want people who are coachable and willing to learn. Don’t be afraid to say, “That’s one of the things we’re going to have to figure out, but we have a few ideas.”
Be dynamic and energetic. You’re a storyteller here. Your job is to get YC excited about your business. Make them believe that it (and YOU) are an investment opportunity. Work on eye contact, not talking to too fast, and thinking on your feet. Have someone role-play an aggressive interviewer.

That’s about all the advice I have. I’d close with this point– very very very few YC founders wouldn’t do it again in a heartbeat. It’s a killer experience and it’s certainly a needle-mover during the most fragile part of your new company’s life. Applying is cheap in terms of time and rewarding even if you don’t get asked in for an interview. Do it!

Freemium Founders: Start Charging for Things Today!

Feb 12

I tend to disagree with 37Signals on a mess of things. Like a lot of successful internet pundits, they deal in absolutes and hyperbole. There’s no middle ground and there’s no “…well, it depends”. That’s just not as linkbaity. It’s probably not as fun, either.

But there’s one place where I wholeheartedly agree with ‘em– if you’re in the Freemium game, start charging for your software. Right now. Yesterday, in fact. Should you put a price tag on just any web service? Absolutely not. Kayak shouldn’t charge to find you a flight and (if the rumors about their success as a leadgen platform are true) Mint shouldn’t charge you to organize your personal finances. But if a big part of your revenue plan involves charging for premium services on top of a free product (freemium), you should start charging as soon as possible. Here’s why:

Price signals value. Where you set your price emotionally sets a value for your product. What that means is that amassing a gigantic pile of enthusiastic free users isn’t going to result in a big pile of paying users when you turn on your premium features (or worse, move some of the features behind the “pay wall”). In fact, it will likely piss off a lot of users who have grown accostomed to getting something for nothing. During the Y Combinator experience, I got a chance to hang out with Joe Kraus (founder of Excite and later Jotspot) and the fellas from Wufoo. Both had horrifying anecdotes about asking a bunch of free beta users to start paying for their software. The conversion rate was awful. When we first turned on our premium offering, we were struck by the same thing. We opened the floodgates for paying customers and found that almost none of our free users made the switch. So even with your pile of zealous free users, you’re starting from square 1 in the premium game– you’ve already convinced your current userbase that the fair price for your product is “free”.
I mentioned this in the comments but I wanted to promote it up here as well. *”Take a minute and answer this two-part question:*

“1. Is the percentage of African nations in the United Nations higher or lower than 65? 2. What is the percentage of African nations in the United Nations?

This was one of the queries that Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman posed in their 1974 paper in Science called “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” It turns out that the answer you provide to the second question is heavily swayed by that first question. The average estimate for question two was above 45 percent. When question one was lowered from 65 percent to 10 percent, the average estimation of question two was dropped to 25 percent. ” Source (pdf)

Your free beta anchors your perceived value at zero and it’s a bitch to climb out of that hole.
Speaking of Square one… You don’t know nothin’ about square one! Charging people money for software is a whole new set of skills that you quite likely don’t have. What do your paying customers REALLY want? What do you put behind the pay wall versus in front of it? What do you give your free users? What kind of free trial should you offer? Will a referral program work for your business? Does your value proposition resonate most with individuals or businesses? Big biz or small? Can you make adwords work for your business? What works on an adwords landing page? Will a salesperson be valuable for your business? Where do your leads come in? Telesales? Direct Mail? SEO? SEM? Viral/word-of-mouth? The problem with all of these questions is that the answers don’t transfer across markets very well. What might work great for my market/product might perform terribly for yours. The sooner you start investigating this stuff is the sooner you start being smart about your market.
Getting people to sign up for a free service doesn’t mean that you know they’ll spend money on it. There are lots of clever ways you can ascertain whether someone would REALLY buy your product. You can put up fake adwords ads, you can cold call people, you can throw up a permission marketing page and try to get attention for it, you can do a focus group, you can ask some pricing experts, and more. But nothing is a perfect substitute for having a buy button next to a price and seeing if anyone actually clicks on it. And they generally won’t. At first. So start learning!

We’ve been at this for almost two years and I have very few big regrets. But my biggest regret as an entrepreneur is not starting on the path of charging customers sooner. It’s taken us about a year to get pretty good at it, but we’re still learning new stuff about our customers every week (we’re pretty darn grateful to have customers who are generous with feedback).

Some additional fabulous reading on the topic of when to charge can be read on Sean Ellis’ blog here. Sean basically contends that you shouldn’t charge at all until you are certain you have product/market fit. In the comments, someone expressed concern that product/market fit isn’t real until there’s a price attached to it. Here’s Sean’s response:

I agree that price is part of the process of figuring out if you have product/market fit. I’m basically starting with the price of zero. If people aren’t that disappointed to see the product go at zero cost, then we already know that any cost above zero will very likely also result in people not being that disappointed to see the product go. Once enough people consider it a “must have” at zero cost, then the next step is to figure out a price that generates the most revenue for every thousand people that try the product.

This is an interesting thought, but I’m not convinced. I remember hearing that Wufoo and Jotspot both had pretty passionate free/beta users. I could be wrong, but I’d wager that they would’ve had a solid number of folks who would state that they’d be “very disappointed” if they had to give up the product. Nonetheless, they came up pretty empty when asking these users to start paying up. The difference between product/market fit for a free product and product/market fit for a $5 product could be a lot farther than you think. It might be a few iterations or it might be a whole new product.

But where I think Sean is absolutely right (to be fair, I think Sean is brilliant– you should subscribe to his blog!) is that you need enough customers to be able to measure and improve your product. If you can’t acquire/retain 100 paying customers, perhaps you should stick with a free/private beta.

Design your Blog like You’d Design a Product

Feb 08

When I decided to take a weekend and focus on my blog I realized one big thing:

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.

Startups with Something to Believe In

Jan 07

I went to an informal Seattle startup CEO dinner a while back and it was an awesome opportunity to talk candidly about the problems that early stage products face. Someone remarked to me afterwards that a lot of people in that room had already “made it” (financially speaking). That’s one of the cool things about being a startup founder. There were plenty of folks in the room who put on their pants one leg at a time. There were some other folks who sip Pinot Noir while they have two pant-assistants dress them. But (with a few runaway exceptions) many of them were facing the same challenges.

I had a lot of takeaways from the dinner, but the biggest came from two comments by CEOs in two unrelated conversations (these are paraphrased with a bit of hyperbole tossed in).

Comment #1: “My biggest concern is that we’re on a long road. And it’s going to be a tough slog. We’re going to be dragging our asses uphill for years with a still uncertain future. With that to look forward to, how can I hold on to my best-and-brightest stars when they could take an offer from [insert megacorp] and double their salary overnight? Or they could hop onto another startup that isn’t at the ‘slog’ stage yet?”

Comment #2: “Sure, the downturn has effected our startup. But we’re all working together on stuff that we want to work on and we’re working with people that we really want to work with. If we end up making less money, it really doesn’t matter much.”

The huge challenge is that we are constantly telling ourselves, our teams, and our customers that great stuff is in on the horizon. But the reality is, bad shit is coming. There are going to be huge and gutwrenching bumps in the road and times where the company feels like it’s going to auger in. The thing that can pull a team through these rough spots is belief in SOMETHING.

Something amazing happens, I think, if you can cross the chasm from people getting paid to work for you company and people getting paid SO THEY CAN work at your company (I think that concept came from Tandy way back when– can anyone confirm?). As founders, I think it’s easy to dismiss this possibility. “That might work for people who ooze charisma,” we say, “but it won’t work for me.” Or: “You can only pull off that kind of passion if you have a world-changing product with a runaway growth rate– not for something so mundane as what we’re working on.” Bullshit. Look at companies that actually inspire the founders, employees, and customers– there’s WAY more variety than you might suspect.

So here’s a stab at how startup founders can get creative and (hopefully) inspire.

a dragonslaying startup (killing inefficient incumbants, like Redfin is trying to do)
“business religion” startup (like Zappos, FogCreek software or 37signals– where the products isn’t something the team gets THAT excited about building, but the “business religion” and/or lifestyle of working there is magical)
The “we’re going to change the world” startup. Steve Jobs once said to John Scully (then CEO of PepsiCo), “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”
“we’re going to get filthy rich” startup (this feels scary to me– seems like people will jump once there’s a bump in the road… and there is almost always a bump in the road).
A “family” startup. My first company had this– just about everyone in the company was really close to everyone else. We had regular gaming night, fun social events (that everyone WANTED to come to), etc. Loyalty can definitely help folks through the aforementioned “bad shit”. This is the biggest reason why solo founders quit more often. It’s always easier to quit when the only person you’re letting down is yourself.
Succeed, loudly and publicly. Nothing inspires more than setting tangible business goals (that everyone buys into) and actually knocking them out of the park. Want to see a role model here? Check out Balsamiq’s Blog.

The math of working at a startup rarely works out– people get paid less to do more. You have merely adequate benefits and lousy job security. With VERY few exceptions, the journey to liquidity is long and is by no means a sure thing. So you have to offer piles of intangibles that make your best people say, “Yeah, I could get paid another $50k across the street– but it wouldn’t be worth it.”

Did I miss any motivations? Why do you work at a startup when you could be making way more money elsewhere? Or, if you work at BigCo, what would it take for you to take a 30% pay cut?

Twitter isn’t a Social Network

Dec 29

One of my biggest frustrations with Twitter is that it’s a pretty clumsy mechanism for 2-way conversation (IM style) as well as “one and a half way” conversation (commenting on a tweet that may or may not elicit discussion). I posted a tweet the other day to see what other people think:

I quickly got two responses from two people whose opinion I really respect (@sacca and @andrewchen).

@Sacca’s Response: “@webwright Speaking for myself, it seems like that could induce some lame behavior in asymmetric networks.”

@andrewchen’s response “@webwright inline replies work best in 2-way friending environments. Otherwise ppl you don’t follow show up in your main feed”

I found myself vehemently disagreeing with them, so I figured I’d blog through it as an product design exercise. Disclaimer note: armchair quarterbacking is easy. The Twitter team (note: @sacca is an investor/advisor) has more brain cells and a helluva lot more time invested in designing Twitter than I do– I have no illusions that a little rumination over Christmas makes me smarter than they are. I also know that there are (were?) some technical hurdles. For a while, Twitter wasn’t TOO good at understanding when an @ tweet was actually a reply, and which tweet it was replying to. Still the case, or no?

So here are some ideas for your consideration. I’d love to hear what folks think in the (delightfully threaded) comments.

1. Twitter would do better to think about their site as a content/microblog network than as a social network.

This is my fundamental disagreement with Andrew and Chris’s response. They’re thinking of Twitter like a social network with asynchronous/2-way friending (maybe it’s because the media is constantly comparing them to Facebook?). It isn’t, IMO. In fact, I think Twitter would have more success if they acted more like WordPress.com (or LiveJournal?) than like Facebook. Twitter followers aren’t friends. They are subscribers. The people you follow aren’t people you know– they are microblogs that you find interesting. Twitter is a fabulous distillation of blogs and an RSS reader all rolled into one. It’s 10x easier than blogging. Following is 10x easier than subscribing via RSS (and following is a lot more grok-able than RSS to begin with). But they’ve crippled/marginalized one of the key features that make blogging so damn sticky (for bloggers and readers)– comments and discussion.

2. The problems of Chris, Andrew and (to a hugely lesser degree!) me are not the problems that most Twitter users (or bloggers) have.

To many/most Twits/bloggers, they are doing it because they want to be heard. I remember when I first started blogging what an absolute rush it was to get a comment on my blog. Heck, it still is. Similarly, I confess to checking my @replies fairly often. Is anyone listening? Did my breathtakingly insightful/amusing tweets result in anyone replying or retweeting? I think this changes when you get to the follower count that some celebrities enjoy (Chris, who mentioned above that inline comments might result in too much noise, has ~1.3 million followers). Similarly, there are some pretty famous examples of prominent bloggers shutting OFF comments… They’ve transcended the “I just want to be heard” problem of most twits/bloggers and have graduated to the “holy crap, discussion is a nightmare to manage/moderate” problem. My guess is that the higher up you get at Twitter, the less the product managers empathize with people who have less than 100 followers, who often feel like they are talking to an empty room.

3. Regardless of whether you want Twitter to be a social network instead of a content/broadcast network, it’s more VALUABLE as a content network.

First of all, look at Twitter’s big pile of 4th quarter revenue (high five, Twitter!). That’s for content. That content would be more valuable if it was richer. Let’s take Paul Kredosky’s “Dishwasher” scenerio, discussed on Fred Wilson’s blog. He’s looking for a dishwasher and finds that Google’s organic search results are lousy. I empathize– after a 6 month home remodeling effort, I am aghast at how bad Google is once you move outside the realm of the “linkerati“). Paul searches for a dishwasher, and now that Twitter content is featured in Google results, he sees a tweet that says, “Just got a new Bosch ScrubGunner Dishwasher installed today. Amazing!” That tweet would be way more useful if it also had associated with it the three @replies that said stuff like “The ScrubGunner starts off strong, but has a record of exploding about 3 months after you buy it”. Added bonus– this would make Twitter’s permalink pages quite a bit richer in terms of indexable content, which would increase traffic dramatically. Permalink pages with lots of comments could actually be VALUABLE pages.

Even taking the search deals out of the equation, Twitter is a consumer web service and its stock and trade are things like pageviews, # of tweets, retention cohorts, return visits per day, etc. In short, it wants lots of addicted users using it a LOT. Nothing does this better than conversation and Twitter is lousy at conversation. There are very few emails I open more reliably than the Disqus comment notifications for my blog, the WordPress.com notifications for the RescueTime Blog, or Facebook telling me that someone has responded to one of my status updates. Further, nothing brings me BACK to a blog like a reply to my reply. Take a look at Fred Wilson and Neil Patel– they pretty religiously reply to every commenter on their site and it generates return visits, more (valuable) content, and happier “customers”.

In short, if Twitter made conversation easier and noisier, it’d help engagement, retention, and growth (or that’s my guess anyways). New users would graduate from the “empty room” feeling quicker.

4. To keep things simpler, they should consider punting retweets for replies/comments.

Retweets are interesting and certainly help Twitter and API-wranglers understand the value/popularity of a tweet. But they don’t feed the core need that Twitter is filling for most twits… To feel HEARD. Further, the retweet feature is simply too smart and assumes too much understanding of how Twitter works. I’d wager that if you took 10 “newborn” Twitter users and asked them to explain retweets, you’d get a fair bit of confusion (humble hat tip to Twitter though– I can’t imagine retweeting being implemented clearer than it is). Comments/conversations, on the other hand, are as old as the Internet. People grok that right out of the gates.

Beyond just “grokability”, retweets just aren’t as approachable as replies. While Facebook’s “like” feature is the lightest way to endorse a status update, the retweet FEELS heavier. It’s saying, “I like this– and I like it enough to broadcast it to others”. I personally @reply folks about 10x more than I retweet them (and I imagine I’m not alone). If this is true for most people, who not focus on enabling what most of your users are doing more often?

Discussion would also help with user discoverability. @replies are often a source of followers for me (replies to me as well as others when I bother to dive into the clickfest necessary to track a full conversation on Twitter).

5. How I’d implement inline discussion on Twitter.

Obviously, comments/discussion would accelerate the number of tweets dramatically, so I think slamming them all into the main feed might be bad. I’d:

- Add the text “11 replies to this Tweet” as a gray link at the bottom of any applicable Tweet (when shown in a stream) to i
- Add threaded replies on the tweet’s permalink page. So Tweets like THIS ONE would actually be rich/interesting/engaging conversation and clickthrus to tweets from search engines would actually have more meaningful content.
- present @replies that are actually replies to other tweets as part of a conversion. So the “in reply to…” text below reply tweets could be a bit richer/more enticing, like “reply to @username (13 other replies)”.
- Maybe present a “thumbs up” or “like” button (a la facebook) for light endorsements of a tweet (easier and less noisy than “I agree” or “this is awesome” comments). Would this be better than a retweet option?
- Allow people to turn off the above display of @replies if they want.

Twitter is obviously a public IM client/chatroom for some. For others, it’s a microblog broadcast platform. For still others, it may actually be a social network. But I’d contend that serving those first two audiences FIRST (by making conversation easier) would create happier users, gut-punch their early attrition problems, and create a more valuable business. What do you think?

(You should follow @sacca and @andrew_chen and maybe even me on Twitter!)