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I experienced the best form of marketing
Last week I experience the best form of marketing at work. I had written up a comprehensive blog post on the steps we took to make the DeskAway homepage loads faster. Someone put it on HackerNews and by late evening (IST) it slowly started trending to position 8 with dozens of comments.
Teaching people and having them spread the word is by far the best form of marketing you can get. Screw Adwords, banner ads and other attention-seeking tactics.
Below is a screenshot of what our Analytics looked like for last week.
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Where is the time to think?
I notice people tweeting all day (no, they are not using Buffer) - I wonder if they actually get any work done or if they are confusing tweeting to working.
What do we do when we are waiting at the railway station, in the bus, at the doctors clinic or in between meetings? We whip out our smartphones and start checking Twitter, Facebook, Hacker News, Pinterest, RSS Feeds, Quora, Techmeme, <your favorite site/app> etc. Sometimes the confusion is in which of the above takes precedence for those precious 15 minutes that we have.
You see, smartphones are making us knowledgeable (by the amount we are consuming) but taking away the idle time that we used to enjoy where we thought about things, plotted strategies for business or just starred into space and giving our mind/body the much needed break.
Technology should make us feel free.
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Tech Lifestyle: Thoughts on switching to Pocket
While going through my Twitter feed on Wednesday night I came across a thenextweb.com article on Read It Later rebranding itself as Pocket. Sounded interesting so I read through the article and decided to give Pocket a shot. I like the idea of having everything stored in one place. I currently used a combination of Instapaper, Twitter Favorites, Safari’s Reading List, Radbox.me and Gmail to store article/videos that I want to read later.
I opened up my Macbook and signed up for Pocket. I know Instapaper does something similar but what sold me was the user-interface: clean, colorful and fun to use (compared to the b&w UI of instapaper).
So, I gave it a shot… I bookmarked a few sites and youtube videos. What I really liked about Pocket is that it has a seperate section to organize videos and images - this makes Radbox pretty much redundant for me now.
I then downloaded the iPhone and iPad apps and synced them too. Their Safari bookmarket for iOS works beautifully.
In addition, I am going to use it as a bookmarking tool as well. Send articles to Pocket, add tags to it and then click on the tick to archive it (instead of deleting stuff I have already read).
Yesterday I found a super app for the Mac to go through my Pocket - Read Later.
I am going to use Pocket as my “store away for later consumption” tool. One app, less confusion. With so many apps that consumers are bombarded with (most of them being small features) I think we will be looking at consolidating and simplifying our lives by using fewer more powerful apps.
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My weekly analytics Dashboards
I rarely log on to Google Analytics to check how this blog is doing. It would be good to know popular posts, monthly unique visits, bounce rate and time on site. Better, it would be great to have these emailed to me on a weekly basis so I can just check it off the iPhone. Since I use the new version of Google Analytics I came across custom Dashboards widgets that was released in early 2011.
From the Google Analytics Blog
Dashboards in the new version of Google Analytics have been redesigned to be completely widget-based and highly customizable. There are four types of widgets: Metric, Pie Chart, Timeline, and Table. This gives you the ability to choose the visualization that best suits the data you want in your dashboard. The Dashboard uses a three-column layout, and you can customize the layout by dragging and dropping the widgets as you’d like.
So, for this blog I quickly setup a “Snapshot Dashboard” with the most important KPI’s that I want to track.
Then I decided to follow the same method for DeskAway. I went ahead and setup the following Dashboards that email me every Monday. I have taken into account Goals (everytime someone signs up on DeskAway) for each of these Dashboards so I know whether organic is working better than PPC etc. I do have email notifications setup within the old Analytics account but this is far far better.
- General Dashboard
- SEO Dashboard
- PPC Dashboard
- Social Dashboard
- Usability Dashboard
Here are a few sites that helped me setup Dashboards for all my sites…
- http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/dashboard-widgets-on-google-analytics.html
- http://analytics-review.com/google-analytics-dashboard-widgets/
- http://www.newepicmedia.com/analytics/google-analytics-dashboard/
- http://www.seobook.com/setting-actionable-seo-dashboards-new-google-analytics
Every startup must set these up today and get a pulse of what is happening on their site.
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Instagram should thank Apple
At first I was like…WTF…1 billion dollars. That seems outrageous for a 7 member startup that has $0 revenue. I even posted my initial reaction on Twitter.
So with $0 in revenue you can sell for $1 Billion dollars. We live in interesting times.
— Sahil Parikh (@sahilparikh) April 9, 2012
But, then I started to think about this.My initial question was why didn’t Facebook spend less than $10 million (which is still a lot) to revamp (speed up, single-step upload etc.) the part of their mobile app that did photo-sharing. They don’t have a traffic/user problem since a majority of the 30 million Instragram users probably are also Facebook users. So, if they fix their app experience then people might start sharing more photos and they could do away with the Instagram aquisition.
You know what, I am sure they thought about this.
Then came the question of the whopping $1 billion. At first the number seems outrageous. But if you are Facebook valued at $100 billion dollars and waiting to go IPO then this is chump change. Especially, when Facebook would probably skyrocket to $150 billion within the first month going IPO, $1 billion is not much.
So, why did they buy?
To please investors, Facebook has to do well on mobiles (I have read that Facebook is not growing as fast as they should) and Instagram was their closest competition (imagine Facebook without photos!). Instagram had built a strong brand and a very loyal fan following of 30 million users in a year - that is no joke! Their app was not just a photo sharing app. It had soul and brand loyalty. That in itself is worth a lot to Facebook. Besides, their Android app was downloaded 1 million times in 24 hours. If Facebook didn’t go for the kill then someone (Google?) might have beaten them to the punch. It is a high stakes pressure game when you are Facebook, Google or Twitter. Or, it’s all about having the right connections.
Kevin Systrom (founder of Instagram) has been around and well connected…
Here is an excerpt from TechCrunch:
Both Systrom and Krieger graduated from Stanford and were a part of the Mayfield Fellows Program – a joint program between the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and the Mayfield Fund. Most recently, Systrom was working at NextStop (recently acquired by Facebook) while Krieger was at Meebo. Before NextStop, Systrom spent a couple of years at Google, and before that he was an intern at Odeo — the company that eventually stepped aside to give birth to Twitter. Systrom noted he actually shared a desk with Twitter creator Jack Dorsey back in the day, and that Dorsey has been very helpful with Instagram/Burbn.”
And if it wasn’t for the iPhone, Instagram would never happen. Everyone, say “Thank you Apple”.
