Yesterday, I had two conversations with two entrepreneurs that yielded the same idea for building a user base from scratch: start with an incredibly narrow niche.
Kevin's advice was was to use something as specific as before and after photos of solar panel installations on homes as a way of drawing traffic from Austin-based homeowners. Currently the city of Austin heavily subsidizes solar panel installation, which creates a lot of demand for them in a liberal city like Austin. However, there are those who object on aesthetic grounds. Your Neighbor's Place can be an intermediary to help people gather information on the debate. All I need are some good photos, perhaps provided by a friendly solar panel installer, and a way to access interested homeowners, such as their home owners association. Not a bad idea. Everyone wins: Installers get more exposure, and home owners get access to the information they need to make sound decisions for their communities. And Your Neighbor's Place gets exposure to homeowners who may find it useful.
The second idea came from Eric, who is a college student working away at his own startup. His suggestion was to target students, many of whom are moving into dorms for the first time as I type this. Another great one - dorms are terrible, and could use lots of help. Perhaps a "best dorm room" contest is in order. Accessing incoming college students is a little trickier than HOA's, but still more than doable.
We'll see if either of these ideas pans out, but I like that both are free and that the effort to exposure ratio is good. I'm all ears if anyone has any similar ideas - email me if you do or just leave a comment.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Bootstrapper's Dilemma
Often, there is a distinct point in the life of a bootstrapped company where it is alive, but hardly kicking. It's a time when you have a real product, but no real customers. Your budget is constrained, so it's hard to get customers. Word of mouth is what you want, but it takes mouths to do that. So how do you get those initial customers? How do you get that all-important but elusive "critical mass"?
This is precisely where Your Neighbor's Place finds itself right now. The site is up and working. Search engines know about it, but aren't sending much traffic - you can count the search traffic to date on two hands. I have users, but only a few. Drumming up initial users to a bare site is tough work. Often it feels like you're begging people, one by one, to do something that they don't have much interest in. Sometimes, that's exactly what you're doing.
The hope, of course, is that once I make it through this tough period, the content will be built up enough so that random passers by will be interested enough to browse the site a little and check back later. Eventually, some of these will post pictures of their own and I will have secured the critically important organic growth that I'm now seeking.
But how? AdWords crossed my mind. I suppose that if I'm patient and frugal, I can get some pretty cheap clicks to the site. But it will be rather expensive no matter what, because until I have a critical mass of content, the conversion from clicks to posters will likely be frighteningly low. Would it work? Probably, but not on my budget, and I'm not sure it's a good gamble anyhow. The cost per poster could be pretty high. I think it's too early for paid traffic.
A great option for those who can afford it is BzzAgent's Frogpond. Although I haven't tried it, I did have a short talk with one of their salespeople. If you have something on the order of $10k, their program sounds like a great idea - you get a few thousand users who are interested in giving you honest feedback on your site and a giant stack of data for your money. Sounds great, but way out of my budget, and frankly, I don't think I'm ready for that kind of scrutiny. There are probably still some pretty obvious problems to fix. Again, it's too early.
The problem with these money-based solutions is that you're spending money to go down a path that in all likelihood is the wrong one. Your Neighbor's Place will change. I don't know how yet, but it will. Pouring money on it only to find out that I need to start over isn't very efficient, and as a bootstrapper I just can't afford that level of experimentation.
Another alternative is just to wait and do nothing. This might work, but it will take forever, and I don't have forever.
A third alternative is what I have been doing - all the free promotion I can muster. This tactic is romanticized by lots of entrepreneurs, especially bootstrappers, as the golden path. Meh. I think it's a horrible path that's tons of hard work for very few rewards. It's only marginally better than doing nothing. But it is better.
So here we have the bootstrapper's dilemma. Do you slog it out, wasting time and energy, or just give up and blow some money on what is likely the wrong solution? Neither is particularly appealing.
Emotional stability is key in times like this. It is easy to give up too soon. But then, I knew this was coming, and that's helpful to keep focused. Email by email, user by user, promotion by promotion, I'm working towards a point where more options will open up to me.
This is precisely where Your Neighbor's Place finds itself right now. The site is up and working. Search engines know about it, but aren't sending much traffic - you can count the search traffic to date on two hands. I have users, but only a few. Drumming up initial users to a bare site is tough work. Often it feels like you're begging people, one by one, to do something that they don't have much interest in. Sometimes, that's exactly what you're doing.
The hope, of course, is that once I make it through this tough period, the content will be built up enough so that random passers by will be interested enough to browse the site a little and check back later. Eventually, some of these will post pictures of their own and I will have secured the critically important organic growth that I'm now seeking.
But how? AdWords crossed my mind. I suppose that if I'm patient and frugal, I can get some pretty cheap clicks to the site. But it will be rather expensive no matter what, because until I have a critical mass of content, the conversion from clicks to posters will likely be frighteningly low. Would it work? Probably, but not on my budget, and I'm not sure it's a good gamble anyhow. The cost per poster could be pretty high. I think it's too early for paid traffic.
A great option for those who can afford it is BzzAgent's Frogpond. Although I haven't tried it, I did have a short talk with one of their salespeople. If you have something on the order of $10k, their program sounds like a great idea - you get a few thousand users who are interested in giving you honest feedback on your site and a giant stack of data for your money. Sounds great, but way out of my budget, and frankly, I don't think I'm ready for that kind of scrutiny. There are probably still some pretty obvious problems to fix. Again, it's too early.
The problem with these money-based solutions is that you're spending money to go down a path that in all likelihood is the wrong one. Your Neighbor's Place will change. I don't know how yet, but it will. Pouring money on it only to find out that I need to start over isn't very efficient, and as a bootstrapper I just can't afford that level of experimentation.
Another alternative is just to wait and do nothing. This might work, but it will take forever, and I don't have forever.
A third alternative is what I have been doing - all the free promotion I can muster. This tactic is romanticized by lots of entrepreneurs, especially bootstrappers, as the golden path. Meh. I think it's a horrible path that's tons of hard work for very few rewards. It's only marginally better than doing nothing. But it is better.
So here we have the bootstrapper's dilemma. Do you slog it out, wasting time and energy, or just give up and blow some money on what is likely the wrong solution? Neither is particularly appealing.
Emotional stability is key in times like this. It is easy to give up too soon. But then, I knew this was coming, and that's helpful to keep focused. Email by email, user by user, promotion by promotion, I'm working towards a point where more options will open up to me.
Monday, August 25, 2008
Why I won't pay for SEO
The oddly but effectively named Vanessa Fox. Nude, discusses "white hat" vs. "black hat" SEO. Despite what you're about to read, I absolutely love Vanessa Fox. Nude. It's on my must-read list.
However, I want to focus on the last paragraph where white hat SEO is defined:
That so many SEO spin doctors rely on the "great content" card shows me that they don't really have anything worth selling. If SEO consultants could truly game the search engines in ways that wouldn't get them banned, wouldn't they stop telling me to write better? Probably. But instead, they say, in effect, "All we can do is make sure your site is visible to the search engines, the rest is out of our hands." That's great (and true), but not very valuable. I can make header tags and alt tags and page titles for free. What I need is insight into how the search engines work and where they work poorly so that I can crack them open like a thief and steal their secret nectar. But SEO gurus never seem to know that stuff. A great SEO guy is like a bond trader - able to see movements and market inefficiencies where others can't, and thereby gain an advantage, all the while staying on the right side of the law with his ethics intact.
I propose we rename SEO to SEBP - Search Engine Best Practices, because that's all it is.
However, I want to focus on the last paragraph where white hat SEO is defined:
So what is white hat SEO? The panlists [sic] agreed it was about creating quality content — being the most relevant result for a desired query.This very popular take on SEO is total horse crap. Search Engine Optimization is not about producing good content. It's about getting content in front of as many relevant people as possible by means of a search engine. It's about my crappy content to coming up ahead of someone else's great content. This definition is 100% backwards.
That so many SEO spin doctors rely on the "great content" card shows me that they don't really have anything worth selling. If SEO consultants could truly game the search engines in ways that wouldn't get them banned, wouldn't they stop telling me to write better? Probably. But instead, they say, in effect, "All we can do is make sure your site is visible to the search engines, the rest is out of our hands." That's great (and true), but not very valuable. I can make header tags and alt tags and page titles for free. What I need is insight into how the search engines work and where they work poorly so that I can crack them open like a thief and steal their secret nectar. But SEO gurus never seem to know that stuff. A great SEO guy is like a bond trader - able to see movements and market inefficiencies where others can't, and thereby gain an advantage, all the while staying on the right side of the law with his ethics intact.
I propose we rename SEO to SEBP - Search Engine Best Practices, because that's all it is.
Y Combinator Legal Documents
Thanks to the Startup Lawyer (Ryan Roberts), I'm now aware that the legal documents used by Y Combinator are available for download. This is particularly interesting to me because I believe that a distinct disconnect has emerged over the last few years where venture capital firms swelled with money just as internet startup costs began to plunge. The result, of course, is that some VC's struggle to find effective ways to deploy their piles of capital, and that entrepreneurs can't quite figure out how to fund their companies with digestible amounts of money. As a result, we've seen the emergence of two phenomena: More organized angel investors and groups like Y Combinator.
I don't know if either of these investor types will fill the gap that I am seeing (if, in fact it exists - I have no actual data to support my theory - just anecdotes). I do know that it's much more in line with what I want to see as an entrepreneur. I don't need $5 million. In fact, I can't quite figure out what I'd do with more than $50,000 or so. As I continue to bootstrap Ninth Yard, my hope is to develop a need for cash investment. If and when that happens, I suspect that VC's won't even be a part of the picture, for reasons that I've been through before. But angels or Y Combinator-style firms may be.
I don't know if either of these investor types will fill the gap that I am seeing (if, in fact it exists - I have no actual data to support my theory - just anecdotes). I do know that it's much more in line with what I want to see as an entrepreneur. I don't need $5 million. In fact, I can't quite figure out what I'd do with more than $50,000 or so. As I continue to bootstrap Ninth Yard, my hope is to develop a need for cash investment. If and when that happens, I suspect that VC's won't even be a part of the picture, for reasons that I've been through before. But angels or Y Combinator-style firms may be.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Online Ads Aren't Quite the New Tip Jar
Seth Godin has a post up this morning proclaiming that online ads could be the new tip jar. Boiled down to a sentence, he's stating that if you like someone's writing, say thanks by clicking an ad.
The implications of that behavioral change when applied across the entire web are pretty big (not necessarily good, but definitely big). But he left out one pretty important point: advertisers aren't interested in paying for tip-clicks. So while I'm all for supporting people who write great stuff on the web and distribute it freely, please do make sure you're interested in an ad before you click it, or at least pay attention to what you just clicked. Bouncing off without so much as viewing the page isn't too far from click fraud.
In other words, make sure you're tipping with your own money (or attention).
UPDATE: Seth predictably got a lot of email on this one (he is the master, isn't he?), and has a follow up post that better explains the concept he's exploring.
The implications of that behavioral change when applied across the entire web are pretty big (not necessarily good, but definitely big). But he left out one pretty important point: advertisers aren't interested in paying for tip-clicks. So while I'm all for supporting people who write great stuff on the web and distribute it freely, please do make sure you're interested in an ad before you click it, or at least pay attention to what you just clicked. Bouncing off without so much as viewing the page isn't too far from click fraud.
In other words, make sure you're tipping with your own money (or attention).
UPDATE: Seth predictably got a lot of email on this one (he is the master, isn't he?), and has a follow up post that better explains the concept he's exploring.
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