Another post over on the Distil Blog, check it out:
It’s worth noting however that the same techniques this UCLA PhD student employed to scrape OkCupid are also used everyday for more nefarious purposes. Content scraping is big business – attackers do everything from stealing and republishing original content, performing competitive pricing analysis, and more. It can have a material impact on a business bottom line.
How a Math Genius Hacked OKCupid; And How Distil Would Have Stopped Him
New post over on the Distil blog:
A lot has been written about the relative differences between working at ‘big tech’ versus a startup. But not all startups are the same and there is less on record about the relative experience of working for startups at different stages of maturity.
Massively successful crowdfunding campaigns are almost cliche these days. Seems any group of bright, motivated entrepreneurs can pull together a Kickstarter page and the $$$$ will start flowing in.
Unfortunately this perception is wrong. Dead wrong in fact. Like pretty much anything else, the key to executing a successful campaign is planning and preparation. At Flomio we spent the better part of two months prepping for the FloJack Kickstarter campaign. We did a tremendous amount of research and came up with a detailed execution plan before pressing the big, green LAUNCH button.
This post is a cleaned up and repackaged version of the data we gathered leading into the campaign (along with source attributions). Hope you find it useful.
Have a look at Twine’s referrers:
Source: Kickstarter Blog: The New Creator Dashboard
Kickstarter isn’t a store, it’s a marketing campaign. Every project founder I’ve talked to has seen this long tail of referral traffic. Coverage in a top tier tech outlet like Techcrunch or Engadget won’t ensure success. Your story needs to stand on its own and propagate far and wide for a successful campaign.
Project Duration: Keep It Short and Sweet
Source: Kickstarter Blog: Shortening The Maximum Project Length
The data speaks for itself – the optimal length for success is between 28 and 32 days. It’s simply too difficult to keep buzz going about your project for longer than that. Backers procrastinate and start losing interest as time goes on.
Source: Kickstarter Blog: Shortening The Maximum Project Length
Projects will see a burst of interest in the beginning but this initial wave will quickly wear off as your first and second degree networks become saturated. You’ll need a strong PR campaign full of “spiking” strategies that engage new pockets of potentially interested users (long tail).
|
Reward Level |
Backings |
Dollars Pledged |
|
<$25 |
38% |
10% |
|
$25 |
18% |
8% |
|
$50 |
14% |
11% |
|
$100 |
9% |
16% |
Source: Kickstarter Blog: Trends in Pricing and Duration
For many projects the $100 and $50 reward levels are the money makers. However the smaller reward tiers are by far the most popular (by number of backers). They’re an easy way for people to support and spread your campaign.
Source: ViNull – Kickstarter Stats You Can Use
There seems to be a correlation between number of reward levels and campaign success.
As a group of left brained engineers, we wanted an objective way of looking at successful Kickstarter videos. We were specifically interested in Pebble ($10,00,00 raise), Twine ($556,000), and Smart Things ($1,200,000).
We couldn’t find any data on the topic so we did the analysis ourselves. We transcribed each kickstarter video using a service called Rev. This cost $20 or so. Then we ran each script through basic lexical analysis tool (here). Here’s what we found:
| PEBBLE | TWINE | SMART THINGS | |
| Run Time: | 02:48 | 02:28 | 04:22 |
| Total Word Count: | 359 | 449 | 907 |
| Total Unique Words: | 196 | 206 | 316 |
| Number of Sentences: | 38 | 30 | 46 |
| Average Sentence Length: | 9.45 | 14.97 | 19.72 |
| Hard Words: | 8.36% | 6.90% | 5.29% |
| Lexical Density: | 54.60% | 45.88% | 34.84% |
| Fog Index: | 7.12 | 8.75 | 10 |
Three successful videos with three distinct styles. Pebble used short, simple sentences to communicate their ideas in a very crisp manner. Twine followed the same but in a slightly less formal way. And on the other end of the spectrum Smart Things had a high-fi video with a long script composed of complex sentences and ‘harder’ vocabulary words.
If you’re interested you can analyze the scripts yourself:
Advice From the Pro’s
[vimeo 44324460 w=500 h=281]
This panel interview is full of nuggets of Kickstarter wisdom. The video reinforces and colors much of the research above. I recommend watching it, then watching it again.
The panel includes:
I’ve included some notes on the topics covered. Any mistakes or misrepresentations are mine. All of the good stuff is credited to Eric, Eddy, and Michael.
Eric Migicovsky:
Eddy Vroman:
Mike Woods:
Eric Migicovsky:
Eddy Vroman:
Mike Woods:
Eric Migicovsky:
Eddy Vroman:
Mike Woods:
Eric Migicovsky:
Eric Migicovsky:
Eric Migicovsky:
I’m in agreement with Tony Hsieh’s when it comes to the remote worker debate. This paragraph especially resonated with me:
There are doors on all four sides of the {Zappos headquarters}. The employees of the building’s previous tenant went through whichever door was most convenient. We actually lock all the doors from the outside and force employees to walk around the entire building to get to the front door. Even though it’s more inconvenient, we believe this helps our culture because it creates more opportunities for employees to have serendipitous interactions by colliding with each other in the main lobby.
I’ve worked with both remote and on site teams and I can say without a doubt: the major breakthroughs – the creative sparks that build into massive step changes – rarely happen on email threads or skype calls. They happen over coffee, hallway chit chat, and lunchtime burritos. They happen in person, randomly, when both parties are at rest and technology is out of the way.
It’s not to say these breakthroughs can’t happen remotely, but in a suboptimal arrangement they occur far less often.
Flexible work arrangements should be an integral part of the modern work force (in moderation). However it’s important to recognize the creative cost they can impose.
A visualized representation of the states I called home during the 2012 calendar year (Flomio’s fledgling first year) –
And my living arrangements during that time –
A few weeks back a friend of mine shared a copy of Principles by Ray Dalio. The 120p pamphlet outlines Dalio’s core principles on life and how he applied them to his hedge fund Bridgewater Associates. He believes these core principles – and the culture they fostered – are the main reason Bridgewater has become one of the most profitable funds in history.
Dalio focuses on constant improvement, extreme realism, and hyper rationalism as a few of his core values. I won’t try and summarize beyond that. It’s a brisk read, recommend checking it out for yourself.
After finishing it had me thinking… what are my values? I’ve been operating with a gut feel for right and wrong, better and worse. But I’ve never actually took the time to sit down and articulate my core values. The core attributes that are most valuable to me.
Rather than ponder this question quietly I opted to draft them publicly. Here goes-
I’m sure these will be refined, and improved, with time and experience. Interested to carry out this exercise again in six months and see the delta.
When we talk to customers, fellow entrepreneurs, or others in the Miami startup community I frequently encounter some form of the following question:
“How did you decide to make the jump from a comfortable salary, benefits, and a predictable career path to get Flomio off the ground?”
Well, being accepted into TechStars was a big part of it (more on that later).
The other part of the story – contrary to what most folks think – wasn’t impulsive. Instead it was a highly calculated move that approached the question from a few different perspectives. This post is my attempt to disect that process and illustrate how such a seemingly huge decision became rather obvious with the right approach.
Finding a framework to assess my tolerance for risk was a critical first step before making the startup plunge. How much financial risk could I realistically take on at this point of my life? How will that change with time?
(spoiler alert: it decreases substantially)
Jason Freedman has a great post outlining a scoring system for drag coefficients. 1-3 drag coefficients mean you’re ready to be a startup founder (with the epic risk, huge potential upside, and all the responsibility that entails). 4-6 for early seed stage employees (company has traction already, you have a guaranteed salary, but you only own 1-5% of the company), and 7+ for later employees post Series A (revenue! the most stable bucket – with potential for a nice pay day but probably no riches).
I applied this method to my current circumstances:
No mortgage, no wife, no rings, and no kids. I did take a few student loans – about $6,000 which is pretty small compared to the national average but technically this caused me to pickup one point there. Still with just one drag coefficient it’s clear my risk tolerance was quite high at this point in my life. It was also equally clear that this won’t be the case for too much longer – I hope to have some of the other factors (like kids) in my life at some point.
Conclusion: My tolerance for risk was probably close to an absolute maximum and would decrease over time.
I knew I wouldn’t be earning the same salary or benefits in the startup world. Pre-funding we’d barely have enough money to cover expenses so I’d expect to earn about 25% of my previous salary level. Post-Funding things would get better but still probably top out in the 50-60% range, a pretty big difference.
On top of this I’d forfeit a sizable stock grant I was given as a signing bonus. The vesting schedule was set to a five year period and I’d only completed a year and a half – I’d be leaving 80% of it on the table.
Losing money sucks, but what’s worse is losing a lot of money.
The compensation structure at most Big Tech firms is setup to incent you to stay put. Each year you earn additional options or grants set on a multi year vesting schedule. This starts to compound after three or four years, quickly getting to the point where a departure is just too expensive.
Conclusion: Walking away would become increasingly painful and eventually reach a point where it didn’t make financial sense anymore.
I’d always wanted to move into a more business oriented role. I’d considered going back to school but obtaining an MBA from a top tier b-school can run as high as $300k when you account for tuition, cost of living, and foregone wages. I imagine I’d pickup some skills and build a strong network but the additional debt would hike up my drag coefficients and severely limit my flexibility.
Meanwhile, entering startup life would expose me to life-and-death decisions on venture financing, marketing strategies, sales projections, distribution techniques, strategy, etc. It would be invaluable hands on experience that would prepare me for the next startup. All at the fraction of the cost of a traditional MBA program.
“We learn from the index, not the table of contents”
Conclusion: Learning from the index is efficient, effective, and cheap.
And finally, I found Jeff Bezos’ Regret Minimization Framework to be appropriate:
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwG_qR6XmDQ]
My favorite part:
I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and look back on my life – looking back on my life I wanted to minimize the number of regrets I had.
I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret having trying to participate in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew if I failed – I wouldn’t regret that.
But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. It knew that would haunt me every day.
And so when I thought about it that way, it was an incredibly easy decision.
It’s a powerful approach to take because it uses our mortality to help silence some of the short term noise that might distort your thinking. One day you’re going to expire, so why not make your time count? It’s the ultimate long view.
Conclusion: Years from now you won’t rerget failure. You regret not trying.
Just like software engineering, when faced with a big decision it’s important to approach it with a number of different frameworks before moving forward. They help minimize errors, inject a dose of objectivity, and reduce noise. If you do it right an otherwise daunting decision becomes rather obvious.
