Immad's New World

Heyzap launches! The forming of Heyzap and some lessons learnt

2009-02-04T13:02:00.000-08:00

As most of you already know I recently just launched my latest start-up Heyzap.com with Jude Gomila.

Heyzap is Y Combinator funded (like my previous start-up Clickpass).

Since Clickpass has been in acquisition discussions for some time I have been unable to talk about most of what was going on in my life publicly. I left Clickpass in September and setup Heyzap with Jude , and its been crazy with exciting developments and learning experiences.

For me personally the team is far more important than the idea and I have known Jude for 10+ years. His skills fit great with mine, he has a brilliant product+design sense and works like a machine. We brain-stormed quite a few ideas and quickly decided that we both really wanted to work in gaming. After a few iterations and lots of thinking, the idea behind Heyzap was born.

Since the conceptualization of Heyzap, about three months ago, we have been working non-stop. After launching the work has increased by several orders of magnitude, and the hours I work have become insane. Before a product is launched there is always a little hesitation and concern, regardless of how bullet proof all your assumptions are.

The response has been amazing. We were covered by Techcrunch, Mashable, Venturebeat, TinyComb, Geek, as well as many of other websites in various languages (heyzap.com/docs/press).

It has now been two weeks since we launched but the excitment is still pumping in our veins.

From my experience at Revmap and Clickpass and most stories I have heard from entrepreneurs, I was expecting a big fall in traffic post launch and that we would have to fight our way to growth. But for Heyzap it has been completely different. The longer tail Blog pick-up (google Heyzap) and the hundreds of Heyzap installs has seen us sustain the game play tempo.

As of last week we were almost catching with our launch traffic which is impressive enough. Since last week however we have seen some astronomical rise in growth and are now doing approximately 10 million minutes of game play per month! Yes I know that is a crazy big number. Heyzap has not only seen a lot more uniques than I expected but we have seen great engagement per user.

(I would be more specific but that is probably going to be on our Heyzap blog when we are ready to release figures.).

Here are some places you can see us in action

My blog side bar :)
Cooliris - Great integration with their addon. Looks amazing
Weebly - Drag and drop module on their site.
Wireclub (requires signup), http://gattune.blog.br/jogos, http://www.6-eren.dk/spil, Dhingana
and many many other sites and blogs.

So here are some lessons learnt about things that we probably did right.

When to launch

Don’t launch in December. We were probably ready to launch from the 17th of December, but decided against it. That was a good decision.

Launch Early! I know everyone says this and I am contradicting my first point :). But we could have build a few more features and waited for some partnerships that were in the pipelines. The launch has brought us a lot of opportunity, traction and coverage. It has also directed the company to work in the right direction (that last point is probably the most important)

Press

Get as much press as possible. Talk to as many blogs and media as you can (obviously don’t spam). The emphasis varies from start-up to start-up.

Distribution and marketing is a major part of start-up success. Press can definitely play a part in that, and in this phase of Heyzap it has worked really well for us. Partly because our Heyzap’s publishers are tech blog readers.

Mashable was very good for creating a lot of follow-on non-US blog posts. This press part could have a whole blog post about how we contacted press and what we prepared, I will leave that to Jude to write about.

Another thing about getting multiple press articles is that they talk about you in different ways and help you understand better how to market your product.

Other things we did right.

We kept to minimum feature spec. I think that is always very important. It is hard to determine what to do until you launch.
This is the first time I have worked on a big project with Jude. Definitely happy with the co-foundership.
As usual we learnt a lot and adapted.

Things we can learn from

Keep admin work to a minimum. We did a lot of stuff at the start that wasn’t strictly product. Focusing fully on product would have been a better strategy because once its out it develops itself and admin can always be slotted into smaller time spaces.
Don't spend too long on technology that you aren't making progress with. Stick to what you know and keep executing fast.

Conclusion

I want to thank everyone for their support and feedback. I encourage you to go and waste at least 30 minutes on Heyzap right now :P

Synthasite acquires Clickpass!

2008-12-19T03:54:00.000-08:00

Just in case anyone missed the news, my previous company, Clickpass, was acquired by Synthasite. This is great news for everyone and I am happy I can finally talk about it :).

I wanted to congratulate my co-founder, Peter Nixey, on this great accomplishment and his hard work. I moved on to pastures new a couple of months ago, and he is entirely responsible for the Clickpass acquisition. He is a smart guy and Synthasite is sure to benefit from his expertise and what we have worked on at Clickpass for the last year.

We have had a crazy ride at Clickpass for the last year. OpenID has gone from strength to strength, though for most Internet users it still remains a major uptapped opportunity. I want to thank our partners: Plaxo, Scribd, Disqus, Backtype, Ma.gnolia, LittleCarbonFeet, Skribit etc. These guys joined us very early on and to trust us to help them in such a crucial part of there service (login/registraion) is obviously a big step. We would definately not be where we are today without their support. Here is our compete graph, Clickpass is distributed so we get a lot of hits, but clearly we are doing well and the trend should accelerate!

A lot goes behind the scenes in a start-up and that is even more true in the middle of an acquisition, I sometimes think its a shame I can't talk about some of the things that happen. Once everything settles, and provided everyone is happy for me to do so, hopefully I will be able to talk more about the details.

We were thinking of and working on several things internally at Clickpass and it would be great to see how Clickpass and everything we have done grows and integrates within Synthasite. Peter has a great title as Vice President of trust, identity and reputation and it goes to show that Synthasite is ahead of the pack in taking a close look at identity and what follows from identity.

Synthasite is a great service, in a big market and I have every confidence that Clickpass and our users have found a great home.

On an unrelated note, stay tuned to learn more about what is next for me! ;)

Press and Viral aren't the only two marketing and distribution strategies!

2008-08-02T18:20:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about how my way of thinking about web entrepreneurship has changed since I started (two years ago). One of the biggest changes has been in how I think about marketing and distribution.

When I started this subject was more about luck, but like with most things in doing business as you learn more you realize it is less about luck but positioning and thought, obviously with some serendipity thrown into the equation.

Press is not a sufficient distribution strategy

I don’t think many people have made a successful business just relying on blogs and other media coverage. This might give you your initial 1000 or maybe even 10k users but then how do you get to 1k users a day consistently, or if you really want to be successful at least 3k users a day? That is more than a Techcrunch articles worth of users a day

(side note: TC gives you something like 10k uniques, Digg can give you something like 100k, which is an absolute maximum, but neither of those convert that well.).

Press has many uses;

it is a nice way of gaining brand recognition,
it can give some seed users,
it can be useful for getting investors' attention
it can create opportunities as new people in your industry find out about you.

So press is definitely important, but it really can’t be everything, because it does not scale.

Some assumptions

I am making various assumptions and also I am using a specific definition of distribution so I would like to talk about that briefly.

A lot of my experience and knowledge is in the consumer web. It may not apply directly to b2b plays, or non-tech industries.
Obviously all of the things I come up with here should be adapted to your particular product and I am sure there are far more creative ways that I am missing.

In general I consider the words distribution, marketing, route to market and some other terms pretty similar. They are a general way of describing how you get your product to be used by people and how it will then continue to grow in user/customer base.

So if press is not enough, how do companies get to millions of users?

The main methods I can come up with are as follows (these have some overlaps):

Word of mouth and social
SEO
SEM and Web advertising in general
Viral
Distribution channels
Distribution partnerships
Guerrilla marketing
Niche marketing

Some of these are more obvious than others so I will talk about those less.

One could imagine drawing another matrix, which shows how easy these things are to achieve, how effective an important they are and what attributes the product requires to tune for them. I would recommend you do an analysis like that if you are thinking about distribution and marketing your product.

Word of mouth and social

Make something good that people like and they will talk about it. You can tune this better by making something which is easy to talk about. For example people love talking about youtube videos, but if you make a porn website than its harder to get word of mouth traffic. Websites that target niches are easier to achieve these affects in.

You can create word of mouth affects, you can tune for them, but its something fairly obvious I think.

SEO

I think its one of the most important distribution strategy. SEO is Search Engine Optimisation, but I tend to use it in general to denote distribution through organic (non-payed for) search results.

Some ideas are very SEO friendly. Anything where you are creating unique user-generated content works pretty well for SEO, because people will search for it and that is how they will find you.

SEO is strong because if you take a few basic measures, you can for no extra work ensure a consistent level of traffic. The other interesting thing to me about organic search traffic is that often users from search results are most likely to click on well positioned relevant adverts on your website.

I know a lot of start-ups that get most of their traffic through SEO. User Generated Contents and blogs are perfect for SEO, sometimes I think many ideas in Web 2.0 were a direct reaction to Page Rank :).

SEM and Web Advertising in general

SEM or Search Engine Marketing and paid for advertising is interesting.

This only works in certain circumstances but when it does, it is very good because you don’t have to rely on anyone else. Here are a few factors

• If you directly monetize users, and the ROI (Return on Investment) on adertising is more than 1. For example if you make $2 per user and it costs you $1 to acquire that user than you have a scalable business.
• This is also a great way to test out ideas, and possible seed them. You can target a niche and see how many people convert and what they like
• This is very experimental for the right words or targeting at the right kind of site can literally lead to factors of improvement in conversions or ROI.
• If you rely completely on SEM, your position may become untenable as Google would squeeze your margins. This is more of an abstract concept, but in general if this is your strategy you should be diversified.

Update: Joe pointed out in the comments that Affiliate marketing would fit under this section. See cj.com for a website where you can manage affiliate marketing campaigns.

Viral distribution strategies.

This is kind off an old concept now and fairly well talked about. Look at Andrew Chen’s blog for more about viral than you can imagine.

Some quick thoughts on it.

It is possible to build for viral but it helps to have products which are inherently viral
You don’t get viral unless you build for it
Viral strategies become all about tuning and A/B testing. The aim is to get one user to invite more than one user. So you track where your users come from how you can incentivize them to invite someone. Try out different strategies, track their affect.
Certain environments are very conducive to virality, like Facebook.
There are many types and many definitions for viral. I guess an overarching one would be that your product is built in such a way that it distributes itself. This is inherently true in applications that become more useful the more users you add to them such as social networks and instant messaging applications.

A lot more can be said I am sure, this is one of the most interesting strategies. As strategies are used more they become less effective, so you have to be cleverer in how you go viral and probably create more value than previously required but its very clearly still possible.

Distribution channels

This is very interesting. Some technologies and applications have good distribution channels in place that they don’t have to do any extra work. Some examples of channels that have developed recently.

Facebook Applications pages.
IPhone App Store
Mozilla recommended addons
Yahoo directories – an oldy.

If you catch distribution channels very early on or with the right product than the highly targeted traffic they receive can create snowball affect that give you very fast and effective distribution.

Distribution partnerships

In the distribution channel section I was thinking about channels that are inherently available to you for whatever reason. Distribution partnerships however are harder to get but they can give you a lot of power. What distribution partnership makes sense for your product depends strongly on what you are doing. The biggest and most obvious distribution partnership that lead to success was Google’s partnership with Yahoo!, that gave shit loads of traffic to Google.

There are a lot of other partnerships some of which are paid for, some are just mutually useful or strategic. Some more examples

Default Google search in Firefox.
The Times newspaper in Starbucks
AT&T in Apple Stores and vice versa
Clickpass with all of its great partners :)

VCs tend to like ideas that can be use distribution partnerships to get scale. If they can see a story where they can apply $x millions of and use their contacts to get a distribution deal done and generate a company instantly worth $20x million than it’s a no-brainer.

Guerrilla marketing

I used to be more excited by this. Not that interesting any more. I think its hard to scale doing quirky things. I am sure there are some examples of very effective guerrilla marketing to achieve a seed userbase. 37Signals did a good article on some things that did, which might be classified are guerrilla marketing.

If you are creative it is possible to come up with a lot of these. I think it is very dependent on the industry you are in and I am sure it does not work for everything.

Niche marketing

Niche marketing is not a strategy like the others, it is more like a paradigm that you may use in conjunction with the above. Lets say you are a video website and your target market is every Internet user in the US; that is a 120 million people. If you are a start-up you may have a hard time getting in front of 120 million people. So what you do is segment the users and find niches that would be far more reachable, while keeping your product basically the same. So in the case of the video website you may decide to target sports, or even better football in the bay area. Now you have come down a very easy to target market segment.

This is similar to the way that Facebook expanded from University to University starting with the Ivy League, which is obviously a great place to start from.

Conclusion

As an web entrepreneur, you generally don’t have the luxury of a big budget and often throwing money at the issue does not necessarily give the best result.

That was not everything. I am sure I am missing some strategies. In general most people achieve success using only one or two of these strategies. Also your idea/product will definitely lend itself heavily to a strategy, so it is worth understand and experimenting with different strategies to get the best results.

Cash cows: large markets and opportunities

2008-07-18T23:01:00.000-07:00

I feel like I often discover things, which seem obvious and perhaps I have always known them but something suddenly re-crystallizes them in my mind.

One such realization was that when a business, especially technology business, reaches maturity, they often have only one or two cash cows. These continue to bring them large profits every year with very little real innovation. Some obvious examples:

Google – Adsense on search engine traffic
Microsoft – Windows and Office
Ebay – auctions
Experian – credit reporting

I guess this fact should be fairly obvious, but it does lead to a couple of interesting things. Firstly these guys will not do anything new that might rock their cash cow revenue stream. This means that they are often not as innovative as startups even with their much greater resources. Also they collect so much money that it is relatively easy for them to just buy new startup that prove a point in their space or threatens their cash cow.

This is a short post. I feel like the whole cash-cow analysis could go a lot further. I would personally love to come up with a way of attacking a large, non-innovative companies cash cow.

One way of attacking cash cows is by using new trends and advancing technology to find an exposing weakness. For example Office could be attacked by the emergence of more advanced browsers, standards and broadband infrastructure through creating web office. This kind of trend based disruption has probably mean the main downfall of cash cows (this is mostly my definition of disruptive products but I know people have other definitions as well).

The entrepreneurial ladder

2008-04-18T03:39:00.000-07:00

One of the benefits of getting out of the normal career is that you are no longer being constantly judged on stupid criteria, like what grades you got, how many years of experience you have in blah, etc etc. I once had an interview where they asked me in 5 different ways about my team working experience, does that really give them that much insight?

When I first became an entrepreneur, I thought that would be the end of being judged, from now on I was to make my own destiny, and that has been true to some extent. But you find that here there is a different ladder to climb. Being an entrepreneur is a lot to do with selling yourself, whether it is to investors, clients or potential hires, you have to impress them to succeed. The difference is that the levels are different. Here is the ladder how I perceive it, from the bottom up.

1. Never done any company.
2. No companies but worked for a startup (the more successful the better)
3. Done some small projects
4. Started first company
5, Started a company and have funding.
6.1. Started a company and have well respected investors (first tier VCs being the best).
6.2. Started second company (without the first exiting successfully)
7. Had a successful relatively small exit ($1m plus) or could have took such an exit but are happy making good revenue at that company
8. Had a successful company with a reasonably large exit ($10m plus)
9. IPO!

Obviously those add up and I put two 6s because it would depend on what funding your first company had etc. A lot of gray area but that is roughly how the ladder goes.

Here is something that Kieran said: you can climb ladder by networking and being at all the right events and conferences. But eventually if you go to too many of them you start falling down the ladder because people perceive you don't have anything better to do :).

Another point is that perception matters a lot, some people will value what University you went to and whats jobs you have had. Others will care about how well you are known on the Internet. But you can very much go from zero to the top of the ladder very quickly, which is what makes this exciting. Unlike the career ladder you don't need to have 5 years experience before you are considered for a promotion.

I am aiming for 3 IPOs just so I can be almost unchallenged at the top of my ladder, not for the money at all ;-).

Clickpass launches! Launch story, feelings and post-analysis

2008-03-16T23:52:00.000-07:00

So, this week has been completely crazy. Clickpass launched, which was really exciting and things have been going well. We were covered in Techcrunch.com:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/11/clickpass-could-change-the-way-you-surf-the-web/

With a great and positive review. Since then we had some really positive feedback both on the techcrunch comments, across the net and directly to us. Some of the best ones.

*Finally* someone has produced a credible way of implementing OpenID that is simple and straight-forward. This is revolutionary, and I wish them all the very best. – David Weston, tc comment

This is great - finally only one password to remember! We need more sites to take part. Good luck! – Nick Faull, tc comment

Its also been exciting watching the chatter on twitter. My favourites from:

I tried to use Clickpass. It's so simple and I like this concept. - roomrag

http://www.clickpass.com is the nicest OpenID provider yet. al3x

Doesn't happen often but I was blown away by a new startup called ClickPass. Think One-Click OpenID! – Paisano

Actually Paisano is now my favourite Clickpass user, he also blogged about us saying

I truly believe they are on to something big here.
I believe this is something everyone is going to use in the near-future. Why not get on board now?

Paisano, if you see this, thanks for your support and we hope we can live up to and beyond your expectations.

The day of the launch was pretty crazy. I woke at 7am in anticipation and for preperation. Plaxo integration was not yet finished and we were planning to launch at 9am. I found a hack around the issue at about 8:40, and then about 10 minutes later, Peter called me and said that the Techcrunch article was live, but the site was still behind a password! So I had to work frantically to disable that and role out the open version. Then 10 minutes later with only a little further testing Plaxo went live, and everything worked!

In terms of numbers, it’s a bit early to really gather much from the number but we had more than a thousand signups just in the first day! When I compare that to revmap (my previous startup, which didn't go anywhere), its like a different world. At the end of the day we do all this work and if no one uses it, it’s a bit of a let down, and I have been there and it was a good learning experience. But when people get it and use it and talk about it that’s a very fulfilling feeling.

Clearly we have lots to do, I feel like there is more work to do now then there was before we launched! But at least the path is very clear, we need more sites, we need to make installation so easy that its trivial, we need to look at our stats and what our users say to figure out how we can improve the experience and we need to add OpenID 2.0 support, and etc etc… Okay well the list is clear but it’s not short.

Anyway, its exciting. So what I learnt:

Doesn’t matter how long you spend before launching there will always be loads of work to do

It feels good when people use your stuff and like it

I like replying to user feedback, its fun. I like having conversations with users.

Friends made over time help in all sorts of subtle ways. That one is vague but I won’t explain further.

Its more obvious what work you should do after launching.

Its fun, but I knew it would be :)

Trends, gaps and trends

2008-01-28T22:37:00.000-08:00

I used to think that focus on spotting trends and following them was shallow, or at least I didn't really get the point. I felt that you could just intuit innovative products and that trend followers would always be behind. However, overtime I have come to appreciate the value of trend watching and what one can gain from it.

I realised this recently when I listened to Joi Ito's talk at Le Web 3. This was probably the best talk I have ever heard. I have embedded a video of it below and I highly, highly recommend you watch it. If it does not affect your way of thinking then watch it again :P.

Joi talks about trends in multiplayer gaming (MMO), as well as gaps in the market where he feels innovation could happen. Mainly between gaps in innovation between traditional media, the web and gaming technology. Its very interesting.

That got me thinking.

Firstly my thoughts: Startups are generally most successful when they are innovating something at the edge of a trend. So for example, trying to do a startup in car technology right now would be very hard. You might have something innovative to do there but most of the easy innovations are already taken and you would need lots of money to make and market something significantly better than what exists. Compare this to a 100 years ago ( I don't know anything about car history :) ), a 100 years ago it was possible for an enthusiast to really understand cars and push the technology of the age and even make a very successful company out of it. Even then I am sure it would have taken a lot of money and infrastructure to start a car business, but the cost of starting up a website is much smaller, and the only thing holding one back is a team, creativity and time.

I see innovation on the web like thousands of little ants attacking every single aspect of the web sugar hive. Some get through and make it big, some die in the fight, some make it big and then die from obesity, but generally its all so young that its still there for the taking.

Even within the bigger trend of life moving more online there are many many micro-trends. I think a powerful one that is now springing up, and one that Clickpass is part of, is the distribution of developer work to third parties. This is happening at every level in the stack from Amazon Web Services taking away the need for managing static file storage, and server clouds, to the various javascript and web frameworks and the usage of platforms, like Facebook. Essentially you have to do less to build a fully featured web consumer product and you can do it for cheaper than ever before and make it scale to your needs. I think that's a great and interesting trend, which should lead to further and fast innovation.

There are of course trends happening outside the web that lead to some interesting opportunities. Take for example the trend in the UK for healthier, higher quality groceries. This lead to the rapid rise of Innocent fruit smoothies, which probably at most other times in UK history would have been a complete flop.

So coming back to the web, since I know slightly more about that. Some other interesting trends.

- Virtual Goods. I love these. If you think about it we are all very familiar with virtual goods, music is a virtual good and so are movies. They are packaged up with materials that cost money but essentially we are used to buying virtual goods. So it should not be that surprising that people are actually willing to pay people to buy a powerful sword in a game or to send virtual gifts to people. But having said that I still find it amazing and equally amazing how much money is being made here.

People spend over $1.5 billion on virtual items every year. Pets, coins, avatars, and bling (from tc)

That to me is just astounding, and so out of my world. In some ways I feel that all things with zero marginal costs tend towards becoming free and ad-supported, but maybe I am wrong.

- Mobile. Here is something that for some reason has never really interested me. I think its because the experience is not fulfilling enough compared to the Internet. But it should be fairly obvious that a lot of innovation is happening on the mobile web. There are a lot of mobile web users in the world, with many people in Africa and Asia only experiencing the Internet on there mobile phones. That's pretty crazy.

- China in general. Enough said. Interesting trends. Most Internet users than all of the US shortly (or maybe its already happened).

I am sure there are a lot of other trends. But hopefully I have conveyed to some extent the value of watching your trends. And you should watch this video if you haven't yet ;-)

Me on Intruders.tv!

2007-11-25T15:02:00.001-08:00

I have been meaning to blog about this for ages but you know how busy things can get. I met Vincent, one of the founders of http://intruders.tv towards the end of my time with revmap.com. He did an interview of me and I really liked his attitude and have kept in touch with him since.

When I was going to move to San Francisco, I told him he should get a Valley correspondent, and he asked me whether I would be interested in doing it. I love doing new things and especially things that would make me uncomfortable and expand my horizons, so I jumped at the chance. This has meant that I have had to find interesting people and ask them some interesting questions (isn't life hard :-) ).

About 5 of my interviews are up at the moment at http://us.intruders.tv, but my favourite so far is still my first one, with the founders of Graffiti, the Facebook Application. I am good friends with them and find there story, spirit and drive very inspirational. Here is is below if you missed it:

The Fun of Launch

2007-11-11T14:16:00.001-08:00

There are a few things in life that really excite me, actually a lot of things excite me in life but when it comes to being an entrepreneur the 3 main ones are

having novel ideas,
making something interesting and
launching. Its just so exciting and fun when things I care about launch!

Since Clickpass is yet to launch I have to just get excited about my friends' websites launching. Recently Disqus launched, and since they are my flat-mates I am really excited about their product and how well received it has been. I have incorporated them below, lets see if it works.

Fuzzwich launched a while ago. I was really excited for them as well. Here is a Fuzzwich mini-vid for your pleasure:

Thats pretty awesome. I love those guys. Some other recent launches:

Anywhere.fm - They had like a million songs in a week!
Versionate
Songkick
Draftmix - Is gambling wrong? I don't know.. but I can't wait till these guys are making millions
Bountii
Adpinion
Idiomag - Well it was more of a relaunch but that website is sweet
Academia.edu

I better get back to the very long list of things I have to do today. Have a nice day :)

Tips for founders doing their first tech startup

2007-10-21T22:13:00.000-07:00

After my last post about my first entrepreneurial year. I thought a bit more about what specifically I would tell myself if I could that would have helped in some way to accelerate my learning. Here is what I came up:

Start a blog

It took me about 5 months before I started a blog. I could have started this earlier. It is surprising what I have gained from writing this blog. It has helped me express myself and think things through as well as keep up with friends and others. It also helps to be part of the community to understand it better. Finally its useful to promote your own vision of yourself. Altogether all the reasons and excuses for not doing it that I had didn't amount to anything.

Find a 3rd co-founder

Tony and I were the only founders when we started Revmap. The 3 main reasons why a 3rd person would have helped is:

1. Skills - Would have bought more skills with them and be another person you can depend on.
2. Conflict Resolution - Would have helped resolve conflicts. In any situation it is hard for 2 people to always reach a consensus; a 3rd perspective would have helped.
3. Learning - It takes a particular art to work with teams. I think having a 3rd person would have improved me in this aspect. Also you learn a lot about your co-founder working with them solidly for long periods and so it would have helped increase my understanding of the human character to work with an extra person to that depth.

Some of these arguments can extend to 4 or 5 people and sometimes that makes sense. But there are diminishing returns; and at that point you probably might want to consider dilution as well.

Visit Silicon Valley!

I would issue this one pretty much as a command to my younger self. I don't think Tony would have wanted to move here but visiting would have helped in many ways. It would have helped me understand more about whats necessary to build a successful Internet startup, understand flaws and lacking in Revmap. And of course people doing startups in a similar field and investors.

I think if we had come here early on we would have ended up significantly adapting our idea.

Make more friends with people who are where I want to be

I am not sure about this point, in the sense that I am not sure how I could have executed this better than I did. Again visiting SF/Valley would have helped. But I do firmly believe that the best way to learn is to meet people who are further towards the goal that you strive to achieve.

Conclusion

I have no regrets and I did what I needed to do to. I only write this to better understand what I could have done differently and help others. I still have a long way to go so I will probably be writing something similar next year :-).

My 1st Entrepreneur Year

2007-10-07T19:41:00.000-07:00

It occurred to be me yesterday that it has been 1 year since I started my entrepreneurial adventure. I quit my job on the 2nd of October last year, with a lot of hopes and aspiration and the thought that I could go back to my previous lifestyle if things didn't work out.

A lot has changed in that one year, and happily everything for the better.

A quick summary of what happened, some of these dates might be off:

October '06 - Tony and I quit our jobs and started work on our original idea, a property website. We never really chose a name for it, but lets just call it shadymap.com because we had bought the domain and we were close to using it.

Mid-October '06 - After working on shadymap for a short time, Tony and I decided that for various reason the idea was not going to fly. We started on our first iteration of revmap.com

Mid-November to December '06 - Revmap was initially going to be a yelp for the UK except much more map based and feature-full. In the end we changed our idea because we had a competitor show up on the radar and also we realised that we would probably end up making something that we had no intention of using. We switched gears and started working on what revmap.com eventually became.

January '07 - Revmap was launched to great applause.

Jan - April '07 - Revmap hobbled along, it took a very long time before I was happy that we had all the things we required (and I am still not happy). The marketing never started, the viral growth never came and the motivation evaporated.

May - August '07 - Joined Peter and Pete to do Clickpass.com. Went through Y Combinator and the rest is the present.

That turned out to be more of a story of Revmap than anything else. There is an underlying story that would probably to intricate and subtle to articulate about the friends I made, the things I learned and how I improved as a person.

(On a slight aside; right now I am reading a book and I am finding it hard, to not write this blog post in the style of book, lol)

One of the turning moments for me this year was the point that I came to realise with reasonable certainty that I would never have to go back to a normal job again (excluding acquisitions). After interacting enough in the tech world I came to realise that:

They (we) are all human, with few exceptional skills apart from some common traits like adaptability and "out of the box" thinking.
The fact that I was good at programming and studying CS made my talents relatively rare even amongst entrepreneurs.
I knew enough people I respected and wanted to work with in the future
Once you immerse yourself in this world coming up with ideas stops being the hard part. The ideas are trickling all around me, if I can't come up with one, I can probably speak to 10 people who have their own ideas that they don't have time to do or need an another person to work with them on.

With no shortage of ideas and people, and with the skills that I have. Its pretty clear that I don't need to go back to a job. I also don't see why I would ever want to.

San Francisco finally

2007-09-06T22:52:00.000-07:00

We are now in San Francisco. I have been much worse at updating this blog then I intended, but from now on I won't apologize about that and just post when I can :-).

We are now in the YScraper, it's a pretty crazy place, the view is amazing, this is what I wake up to every morning (that picture doesn't do it justice the panorama is stunning).

I am living on the 12th floor with a couple of guys from the Disqus team. There are also 2 other teams from my Y Combinator batch alone on this floor and I think 4 others from previous Y Combinator batches in the building. We haven't had a chance to hang out much since its only been a couple of days but the atmosphere in here is very friendly and fun.

We (as in clickpass) are just trying to settle into a rhythm and get some work done. We have another 3 months of intense work ahead, should be launched in a couple of months max. Back in the UK after that probably till after Christmas, I apologize to all those people that I didn't get a chance to meet up with while I was in the UK, 1 week is really not very long.

I have had a lot of thoughts about what to blog about but I haven't had time. Right now whats on my mind is how much my body is hurting! I went to the gym yesterday after almost a year of no weight lifting and every muscle in my body is aching! It's a pretty interesting feeling, I am sure all the weight lifters out there know exactly what I mean.

I write in the same way I talk and think. This blog post has bits of it in it which are similar to the way Peter (my cofounder) talks, which is a bit annoying, but spending so long with him means that I start absorbing some of his talking style. I don't think I got a Chinese accent from Tony (my previous cofounder), hehe.

I also recently got an Iphone (not sure if I mentioned that previously) but the prices dropped by $200 today, which is pretty annoying. Also I hacked the phone slightly, and today there was a software update which broke everything and i had to do a hard restore. For me the Iphone has been pretty disappointing in many ways; the battery life is awful, the internet is too slow and the apps are too limited. It is however very cool.

I am going to try to start some cool stuff while I am in San Francisco. I have some ideas but I will let you know how it shapes up. I can say a lot and say nothing at all, its an art really :-).

Current thoughts and what I will be writing next..

2007-07-12T09:45:00.000-07:00

Originally when I started this blog I thought I would blog once a day. I have had a lot of interesting blog worthy thoughts but between working and doing other things I just don't get around to it.

So I am going to post some short thoughts I have had and what I am gonna be blogging in the next few blog posts, that way I will be motivated to do it.

Things I have learnt from Y Combinator dinner speakers - I have not been making notes from what the speakers have said, now I am thinking I should have. Overall similar things are said and I will try to write down a list of things to learn from. It occurred to me that every week we speak to a different millionaire (well maybe not all millionaires, but that's just a number their experience is at least worth that) who give us advise. Thats a pretty rare situation to be in.
Facebook application ideas - Facebook pretty much confirmed to me that they are gonna take over the world with the launch of their platform. At the time I had loads of ideas, and some of them have been done but I will write them down. I know everyones been doing it but mine are better ;-).
40 more things to do in the next few years - I only got to 60. I think I have 10 more now. I am sure if I sat down I could come up with more.
PG Tips - Okay this is not going to be a post, but I just had a cup of PG Tips after 6 weeks and oh my god, its amazing! I can't think of many things more fulfilling than a cup of PG Tips right now. By PG I mean a type of tea in the UK if you thought I meant Paul Graham, then you need to get out a bit more and taste some tea. I offer anyone a cup of proper tea, I make it in a special way so if you think you can do it at home, think again.

I hope everyone who reads this has a lovely day/week/month/life

100 amazing things to do in the next few years

2007-06-15T14:51:00.000-07:00

I keep thinking of and seeing things that I really want to do. I made a list so I don't forget it. Its not completed and I will add to it when I think of more.

Countries to see

Pakistan properly
India
Kashmir
Bhutan
Jordan
Lebanon
Saudi Arabia
Malaysia
Kuwait
Palestine (maybe)
Cuba
Mexico
Peru
Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries
South Africa
Nigeria
Iran
Iraq
Afghanistan
Japan

Great journeys

North Pole
South Pole
Road Trip across america/europe/africa/middle east
Transiberian railway
Orient Express
China to Tibet train journey
Silk Route

Physical

See/Climb the tallest tree in the world in California (what iI saw on TV). If possible rope climb up to the top of one of those massive trees in California.
Bunjee jumping in new zealand.
Paragliding
Handgliding
Sailing
Street car racing in America or Saudi.
Base Jumping of a bridge
Attempts on K2 and Everest

Amazing experiences

Swim with dolphins
Scuba diving over a coral reef.
Horse riding in Mongolia
Camp in the amazon
Working in a service, bottom of the pile kinda job in a third world country. Not cleaning, maybe stall seller or cook
Something culinary, haven't decided quite what. Maybe the most expensive beef in the world from Japan, its made in a really funny way according to Jude.
Seal hunting in Norway (or maybe some other scandinavian country). I have a book on this guy who did it, sounds intense.
Dog racing in Canada. I mean the huskie stuff where you are pulled along.
Riding an elephant on a longish trek. There is a farm somewhere in India where they ride elephants everywhere. Pretty crazy.
Carnival in Brazil
Tomato festival in Spain
Bull race in Spain
Floating on the red and dead seas
Panama Canal
Sues Canal
Island hopping in Greece
Observing a massive huricane in the Gulf of Mexico. With a twister. this ones a bit destructive, but I wanna see it.
Solar eclipse
Going to space
Seeing the plateau in Chille in the Andes
Budhist carvings in Afghanistan
Pyramids in Egypt
Pyramids in Peru
Northern Lights

Things to learn

Flying a jet
Flying a helicopter
Learn Spanish
Learn Hindi and Urdu properly
Learn French (maybe)
Some more dances. Or maybe just get good at Salsa
Kali or Screema martial art. (spelling may be wrong)
I feel like there must be more, but I can't think of it right now

Thats about 60 I think, that was a fun list to make, I recommend you do it for yourself. I am sure a lot could be added and if I think of 40 more I will probably post them. Feel free to suggest things. I have left learning a jet, helicopter and going to space in there, but i don't think I will get around to those for quite a while.

Who wants to join me?

Boston and Beyond

2007-06-14T19:46:00.000-07:00

So finally I have some time and feel like writing something on this blog. I feel very good and everything is going well, which is pretty cool.

Its been 2 weeks since we have been in Boston, the first week seemed to take a long time to go through but this week was a lot faster, presumably because I am getting into some rhythm.

I did a lot of shopping in the first few days. Combine, cheap products, great currency exchange, the feeling of being on holiday and having a salary after 7 months, meant that shopping was actually quite fun. Also Heathrow lost my bags for 4 days so I had to buy some clothes. I even got trainers (sneakers here :) ) for $17 with my other $80 trainers, nice ones.

A lot of people eat out everyday, kinda gets a bit sickening. I have got myself a cheap bike (from Target), which is really useful but gives me less of an excuse to not go to the supermarket.

I slept on Pete’s bed for the first week, I would have slept on the sofa bed but he loved the sofa bed. But now I am living in an amazing place with another Y Combinator team, Crystal Ballers (picture dedicated to them). These guys are from Microsoft, and are pretty cool. Right now I am sitting in their lounge and they are talking in a very involved way about guids, I think they have said the made-up word guid at least 20 times in the last 2 minutes.

Enema, does everyone in the UK know what this means? Savraj (a Crystal Baller) wouldn’t tell me what it meant so I was forced to ask him loudly in a supermarket many many times, hehe.

We have some pretty cool offices and have made really good progress on our prototype in this week. The first week was slow with loads of distractions, no server, general lack of rhythm and it seemed to take forever. Now I am waking up at 7:30, going for a run, getting in the office for 9:15 working staying till on average 8:30pm, getting home, having dinner with the either Pete*2 or Crystal Ballers. With regular entrepreneurial meet-up and some random events distributed throughout. Its actually a massively immersive experience, everyone is talking about their ideas, we are always talking about our ideas, very few distractions.

A lot can be said about immersive experiences, it is possible to reach a reasonable immersion in London but this is far more extreme. I think immersion does speed up the learning experience a lot. I think its possible to have immersive experiences in things apart from entrepreneurialism, such as art, sport etc. Although I haven’t really cared about anything else as much for as long a period.

Having said that, I have actually stopped reading tech news as much as I was before. I think I reached the point where I realised I was spending a lot of time on it and not learning that much. Tim Ferris in his book recommends that you limit reading news to less than 4 hours a month and instead just ask knowledgeable people for news, that seems like a sensible plan, although I am still going to read 15 mins or so every day.

Is it weird that I like people that are similar to me? Actually I don’t mean “I like them” I mean respect. I think its because I try to aspire to qualities that I respect and develop them in myself so I have assimilated these qualities to some extent over time. Therefore if I see them in others I like them and they are generally similar to me.

Paul Graham is pretty cool, he seems to have a celebrity status with a lot of people and I have never really felt the whole celebrity thing for anyone, but here is a rough quote from Paul Graham that I liked:

"If you have something that will excite some people and piss off others, do it, because most startups go through their life and never excite anyone"

My interview on intruders.tv!

2007-06-02T05:20:00.000-07:00

This has been up on my Facebook for a few days so a lot of you have probably seen it. I did an interview with Vincent Camara from intduers.tv about a month and a half ago, while I was still with revmap.com.

Its pretty interesting, sums up my time at revmap and my thoughts for the last 7 months quite well. It is weird listening to your own voice. The bit about investment is amusing.

From learning to intuition

2007-05-21T03:30:00.000-07:00

"Countersteering is the name given to the counter-intuitive technique used by cyclists and motorcyclists to turn corners. It is the only way a rider can cause a single-track vehicle to turn."

In order to turn a motorcycle that is going even slightly fast you have to turn the handlebars very slightly in the wrong direction! I have been riding a road race bicycle for a long time and I never really noticed this phenomena because on a light bike you can just force a turn using body weight, on a motorbike that's pretty much impossible.

When I was first told about it, I was a bit skeptical but having tried it out a lot I have figured out the logic and its actually become very intuitive. The first few times when I didn't get it I managed to steer in the wrong direction and almost hit a van, which was pretty scary.

Whats interesting about things that become intuitive is that we often forget why we get them or why they work. I have always been bad at things I can't intuit and I have to just learn, art (as in paintings), quantum physics and the y combinator (the concept) are examples of things I never really got a true intuitive grasp of.

What would be really good is if I could come up with or find a method of being able to convert any concept from learning to intuition very fast. Or maybe that's just the process of learning and takes time.

I have never been very good at languages, mainly because I just don't get them intuitively, its a lot of hard work in learning a bunch of vocab, but it would be nice if I could just get it.

I recently watched the video below (saw it here), I really liked what Tim Ferriss said, what particularly peaked my attention is his ability to learn languages very fast, he says it takes him a month and he has a technique of focusing on the most used 20% of the vocab. I bought his book, will read it soon.

http://www.youtube.com/v/UcqcWVZJPb0

Going to Boston!! and moving on from revmap

2007-05-14T13:34:00.000-07:00

As of today I have started work with Peter Nixey and Pete Couldridge as a co-founder of a new startup.

This brings my work on revmap.com to an end. Revmap has been a great learning experience for both Tony (my co-founder) and I, but for various reasons Tony and I wanted to go our separate ways and some opportunities are too good to miss. We are planning to leave revmap.com running, and might pass on the management to someone else, so if you loved it, you aren't loosing it.

I will be in Boston for 3 months on the Y Combinator program, which is going to be amazing, read about it here (titled "Bootcamp for Next Tech Billionaire", but what the hell is a bootcamp? :P, gets a bit boring after the first page). But basically I am going to be working with some of the best young entrepreneurs in the world, in an intense environment to get something cool built in 3 months. With loads of input and advise from Paul Graham, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston and Robert Morris, and some fun dinners where we meet some great web entrepreneurs and other people in the industry.

If that wasn't good enough, the startup I am joining is also great, Peter and Pete are pretty cool to work with and what we are building is going to blow you away. We are improving openid, that's all we are saying for now. I love working on ideas with endless potential.

After 3 months in Boston we are probably going to head to Silicon Valley, for some promised "Surfing and Sailing".. and maybe some more entrepreneuring :-).

Mind Hacks - Prisoners and Bots

2007-05-07T03:22:00.000-07:00

For some reason I read Mind Hacks, which is a highly theoretical (at least for me) blog about psychology and neuroscience. I liked a couple of articles recently. Firstly a light hearted one on chat bots (a computer program designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with one or more human users via auditory or textual methods.). Here are some amusing extracts of conversations between two chat bots, ALICE and Jabberwacky:

A: Do you dream?
J: Yes, I dream.

A: It goes without saying. Do you remember your dreams?

J: I remember them vividly.

A: What do you remember about it?

J: I think I shouldn’t flirt with a robot.

A: Do you think a machine will ever be considered “alive”?

J: Stranger things have happened.

A: Not many people express themselves that way.

J: How would you know, machine?

A: Knowledge is of two kinds: that which we learn from the senses and that which is true a priori.

J: I think I do not understand you completely.

A: Oh, you don’t understand? Perhaps I can explain it to you better. Which part are you confused about?

J: I have no short-term memory, so I cannot tell you what I was confused about. I only see what is in front of me now.

The second article was about the Stanford Prison Experiment. From Wikipedia:

The Stanford prison experiment was a psychological study of the human response to captivity, in particular to the real world circumstances of prison life and the effects of imposed social roles on behavior....

Prisoners and guards rapidly adapted to their assigned roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted and leading to genuinely dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine" sadistic tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized and two had to be removed from the experiment early.

I saw a TV show on this a long time ago and I think they actually tried to repeat it in a reality TV show, but that lacked realism. It is interesting to question whether humanity has really improved as a whole and got over dictatorships, wars and atrocities. The answer is probably no but at least there is progress. Anyway the article questions how unbiased the Stanford Prison Experiment was based on the type of people that would apply for such an experiment, its interesting to see at what lengths psychologies have to go to to ensure fair

Serendipity - the faculty of making fortuitous discoveries by chance

2007-05-07T02:40:00.000-07:00

I have always liked the word serendipity, it is empowering yet it is outside your control.

I just read this amazing article by Bo Peabody: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20050101/lucky-or-smart.html, which I really liked. It's long so here are some bits I liked:

On December 31, 1997, I agreed to sell Tripod in exchange for $58 million in stock of a publicly traded company named Lycos.... Over those two years, I watched the value of my Lycos stock increase tenfold... By December 31, 1999, at the height of the bubble and just a few months before the market crashed, I had sold nearly every share of my Lycos stock.

Nice... Thats $580m made from a company that had 0 profit, pretty lucky.

Lucky things happen to entrepreneurs who start fundamentally innovative, morally compelling, and philosophically positive companies. Why? Because lots of smart people will gather around companies with these qualities.

IMO Anyone who tries doing anything ever thats out of the ordinary has a chance they will get "lucky", and if you never stop trying things you are almost guarenteed to get lucky at some point :-).

And when smart, inspired people gather around a fundamentally innovative, morally compelling, and philosophically positive company, they work very hard. And when smart, inspired people work very hard, serendipity ensues.

Goes onto say that its important to have mission statement that appeal to the moral, positive part of us:

Missions such as those... create an aura of authenticity, which is the elixir that attracts smart people and inspires them. There is little authenticity in the modern business world. But it's just the thing that people crave most in their work. When people find themselves aboard one of these vessels, they don't want to get off. They form a fierce protective boundary around it and will do anything to keep the vessel afloat and its inhabitants alive. These people are liberated by finding not only a way to make money but also a way to feel good about it. This is what takes inspiration and turns it into hard work....

Words are incredibly powerful, sometimes causing us to do things that we would never normally do....

A lot was left out of all those articles. The hundred-hour workweeks. The anxiety attacks. The crashed cars and missed planes. The times I had to tell colleagues that we couldn't make payroll. The years of a $12,000 salary. Night after night after night of pasta dinners and stress-relieving Advil "cocktails." The countless meetings with absolute assholes who had no interest in learning about the Internet, the single most significant business innovation of their lifetimes.

I like Bo, he reflect many of my own beliefs (everyone likes themselves :-) ) and says it very eloquently. I will get his book.

I hope everyone has a serendipitous day.

Somethings are Secret

2007-05-02T13:04:00.000-07:00

What you are about to read is only known to a few people in the world. It may shock you, it is guaranteed to awe you. And with this knowledge you can gain anything you want.

Actually that's not true, I am only trying to make a point, but what did you feel when you read that? I have been considering the role of secrets in motivating peoples decisions. This was inspired again by Freakonomics. It has a chapter on information scarcity. In brief what it says is that the Klu Klux Klan was very successful (back in the 20s I think) because of how it portrayed itself as a secret organisation and once its secrets were published openly it lost most of its appeal and its member numbers fell drastically.

A lot of organisations seemed to be based on secrecy and mystery and these organisations are reasonably powerful. e.g: some organised religion, cults, military, companies etc.

Most of the time I don't think their secrets amount to much but it is the perception that people have about the power that these organisations hold that gives them more power ironically. The factors that make secrets powerful (will update if I think of more):

Makes the holder of the secret feel special.
People fear what they don't know. So those that hold "secrets" are feared and therefore respected. In this way I feel that the perceptions of secrets around a lot of things hold people back from achieving what they can. For example if you feel someone who has achieved a lot has done so only because of the secrets that he holds then it can lead to you feeling dis-empowered.

Here are some things that are required to have a good secret organisation:

Clear mission statement and purpose
Some heirachy of requirements to be entitled to secrets, with preferable many secrets ranging from the easy to the ultimate secret.
Generally one leader who is some kind of role model
Something that makes the members "special", whether its class, creed, skills etc.
Some perceived or actual gains from being in the organisation.
Other competitor organisations. This is not necessary but competitiveness goes a long way to polarise opinion.

I have been considering whether there is a startup idea based on a community around secrets. I actually think that would be fun, maybe other people have explored this area already, can anyone think of something? Or maybe they are so secret no one knows about them :-), I think if there was a truly successful one then everyone would know about it, perhaps to be truly successful in the sphere of secrecy you need to have a physical presence. Obviously some invitation only services exploit the power of exclusivity.

I am looking at this all light-heartedly. A lot of secret organisations have caused a lot of harm to their members and others and obviously that's not something I would aspire towards, but understanding them is important.

Privacy and Fear

2007-04-27T11:22:00.001-07:00

I actually find the subject of privacy and the academic side of it dull, but what I do find interesting is how people perceive privacy risks and how that is inaccurate.

For example when Facebook feeds came out there was a huge uproar about privacy infringement even though no additional private information was being given out. Also I have heard several people say that they find Gmail is invading there privacy by "reading" there emails and showing them contextual ads.

I just finished reading Freakonomics while on holiday and it too talks about how people are not very good at assigning risk. I lent that book to someone and I don't think there was a good summary of the point but it said that the dread at the thought of something increases our fear far more than the risk factor. The example given is the difference between deaths caused by swimming pools and guns and how people fear guns disproportionately to the risk associated to them. This applies to a lot of things.

Fear over privacy I think is even more complicated because in a lot of interactions on social websites you are deliberately giving out your information but at the same time you want the perception of privacy. Here are 2 interesting points:

Facebook is successful because its private
Myspace is successful because it lacks privacy

Its easy to argue both points. I mean Myspace lacks privacy in the sense that it is a place where a lot of people give out a lot of private information publicly and it enables that to happen. Facebook stresses privacy between friends and gives a lot of controls which has lead it to gain popularity but at the same time people who spend a lot of time on Facebook are going through a lot of private information on people that they wouldn't normally have access to.

The difference between having information available and having it displayed in a different format is big. For example all you have to do is signup to Facebook and you have access to every single members profile picture, you basically know what 10 million (50 now?) look like, thats a pretty big privacy issues, but no one really cares, but when something like peopleradar.com comes along and lets people rate these pictures, then it suddenly becomes a privacy concern.

Lets say next time someone changed there Facebook status from dating to single lets say all there friends received an automated text or even better a call letting them know about the breakup. The automated text messaging is not far from happening, maybe its already been implemented.

I haven't truly figured out everything on privacy, those are just some of my musings and I don't really have a conclusion. I feel like there is probably a way to fully rationalise it, but I am not there yet.

I will leave you with this interesting privacy flaw in Facebook, if you search in Events and Groups for "lost phone" or " new number" or something like that you will find literally hundreds of peoples personal numbers, not just the people that lost their number but also all the peoples comments on that event/groups walls give out more numbers. It is not really Facebook's flaw but a misunderstanding among users, but perhaps all of them realise what they were doing and didn't mind their numbers being available.

Business Idea - Grand Bazaar

2007-04-22T08:30:00.001-07:00

Here is an idea inspired by Turkey, although I have had the concept before but never seen the full vision till now.

Basically I like haggling, normal shopping is just so boring. Haggling and joking around in markets in places like Turkey and China is so much more fun. Here are the things that I think I like:

No risk: The items are cheap anyway, you know its a good deal, and you never really wanted it so it doesn't matter if you don't get it.
Social interactions: Sometimes you make some jokes, sometimes you piss them off but its never neutral, which makes it fun.
The challenge: It makes buying like a game, you are trying to get the cheapest possible price and ideally both you and the seller feel fulfilled at the end of it.

I really think there is a way of reversing current trends, is there a reason prices are fixed? (I know there are a few but I think there is a market for an alternative)

In the implementation of the grand bazaar website the selling may follow a sequence like this:

You come in to a themed bazaar, browse around.
Show your interest in an item, the website offers a ridiculously high price (if you accept you are a bit stupid but we wont complain)
Then you are given several options, give a lower price, make some comment like "that's ridiculous" or "I found it cheaper the other day", or obviously walk away.
The shop then either decides to lower the price, or gives some other comment. Take a lot of pictures of shop keepers from authentic bazaars so you can give some more character to the interactions.

Clearly this would be a fun way to shop. Implementation aside there are 2 main ecommerce concepts that this site has, variable pricing, and game based buying.

Variable Pricing

In the Business to Business world quite a lot of pricing is variable but in the consumer world the trend has been to go towards fixed pricing in developed countries. This has the benefit that it reduces the perceived risk for the buyer and also decreases the hassle invovled in shopping. But this idea is about putting the pain and the fun back into shopping.

Economically fixed pricing is inefficient. Lets say we have variable pricing where some goods sell 20% below cost price and others sell 100% above. The people that have the money and value that good highly would haggle less and pay the higher price, the people that value it less and can afford less with haggle more and pay less. Assuming everyone is rational no one looses (big assumption). Obviously the possibility of getting it below cost price might be a good driving factor for people to take part.

Game Based Selling

I am not sure how you would do this without variable pricing but involving some kind of game to buy something might be a good idea outside the negotiation game.

Complications

There are some obvious ones, kind of boring to consider but I think there is an idea here even with them. a) Not sure what percentage of people like haggling, might be small in the UK. b) Hard/Impossible to use this idea for goods that are sold in a normal way on other websites, because all rational users would try to at least undercut that price. c) Unlike in real life there are no pressures for someone to close the deal and buy a product, in real bazaars you cant walk away after you say you want something (even though sometimes you want to), this means people can test out the system for ever and get the best price. d) Because of b) you will have to solve 2 problems, firstly find goods to sell and then try to sell them in this interesting way, however I think just going for a few weeks in Turkey or China (or other places) will get you more than enough relatively unique goods.

Does it already exist?

Since last time I should have really checked, I did a quick Google search. There seems to be a lot of academic papers on it, so its obviously a good idea ;-). As far as I saw there were no good implementations of it.

Extention

Kind off obvious: you could make an ebay, peer to peer product exchange using this mechanism. This has a big chicken/egg, double network problem so would be crazy to go down from the offset but maybe it has potential.

Alternatively you could make the algorithm and sell it as an ecommerce solution to other websites, assuming it actually generates more profit for the seller.

Business Ideas - Personal Social Network, Music Writing web app etc...

2007-04-08T03:59:00.000-07:00

As promised I am writing here most new business ideas I get. Jude and I spent quite a while talking yesterday about business ideas, nothing matches the energy I have from discussing a new idea. I like these two the most:

Personal Social Networks

Basically this is a problem I have and I wish there was a good solution to it. I have more than a hundred business cards and various friends, networks and business contacts which all have different status, notes, actions required etc. I want to be able to put that all in one place, obviously facebook/linkedin help but that requires the other person to be on one of those and it doesn't allow me to associate much information to them. Basic features I require:

Makes notes next to each person
Associate with linkedin/facebook/skype/myspace profiles
Associate actions that I need to perform with each person. I.e. birthday, meetings to arrange etc.
Scan in their business cards, so I can reduce my collection.
Share my groups or contacts with other people for personal or business reasons.
Pull in contacts from some format
Output them to excel or some other suitable service.
Synch with calender

This service would clearly be useful to businesses. Easy to make money by having a premium service for more than 100 contacts or for allowing sharing, or some kind of enterprise licence. Beyond the practicalities of it even if I wasn't running a business it would be fun to just map out all my relationships in a nice intuitive way.

I haven't researched this, does it already exist?

Music Writing Web Application

I have only ever seen these being used by other people so I am probably not the best person to ever make a business out of it, but i am pretty sure there are no advanced music writing web application out there and I was told Flash apps that exist are popular but basic.

If the web app is any good it would do well because these things sell for a lot of money. There are various obvious social elements that you can add on to enable people to share what they create and use other peoples samples/creations. I am not going to go through the features, basically you would just pick the most popular features from existing desktop applications (I don't even know the most popular ones, Fruityloops is one I think).

Again not researched so it might already exist.

It's always fun when I think of an idea and research it to find it already exists. I like the personal social network one a lot, its just so obvious and useful.

There are so many ideas out there that a) its stupid to copy someone elses, b) there is no point in fearing you will be copied, c) You can't tell me that you are waiting for some great idea to strike you down before you do business d) and lastly you can't say that you can't come up with ideas because I will give you some for free ;-).

I will be away for a couple of weeks, so I wish you a happy Easter!

The Fall of Great Empires

2007-04-03T06:31:00.000-07:00

My dad loves his history. One thing he likes to point out is how the greatest empires in history have all fallen. Consider, the Egyptian, Persian, Ottomans, Mongols, Byzantine, USSR, Roman, British Empires and a bunch of others. At the time of their reign it seemed like they were unstoppable beasts that would never falter.

Big companies also do not sustain their position forever, and with the Internet the world is moving faster.

This lack of a constant might be slightly depressing but I quite like the world this way. It is from this chaos that we adapt and opportunities arise.

The world is interesting because no one (even people/companies that seem big and confident) really knows what they are doing and everyone is making it up as they go along. The only thing that matters is that you have confidence in what you are making up and aim to make something big enough. So let the games begin :-).