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tag:philosophically.com,2014:/feed philosophically 2015-11-04T14:09:16-08:00 Vibhu Norby http://philosophically.com email@example.com Svbtle.com tag:philosophically.com,2014:Post/why-amazon-is-opening-a-bookstore 2015-11-04T14:09:16-08:00 2015-11-04T14:09:16-08:00 Why Amazon is opening a bookstore
Amazon just opened its first brick-and-mortar bookstore in Seattle called Amazon Books. To many who believe that we live in a post physical store world, it doesn't make sense. However, the reasons becomes clear if you just do the math.

In 2013, Amazon had 65% market share of online book sales. That same year, e-commerce accounted for just more than 50% of all book sales. So Amazon accounts for something like 32.5% of all book purchases. Put another way, online customers are likely to buy a book from Amazon. But all customers are likely to buy a book somewhere else.

That may seem like a lot, but book sales are completely flat. So the book market has become a zero-sum game where one company winning means someone else is losing. There's no rising book tide. And there's certainly no evidence to suggest that Amazon is just sitting pretty with 32.5% of the market.

To grow their book sales, they need to do a handful of things:

A) Take 35% of online market share from online competitors.

B) Convert offline book buyers to online buyers.

C) Take market share of offline book sales.

(D) Make books more interesting.)

(E) Get people to stop reading books and use their time to consume other stuff on Amazon.)

A and B are inevitable. Amazon has the best shipping and best selection. Plus, they've had little interest or need to turn a profit on books so they also have the best pricing. So far, it is working very well.

But Amazon has allowed other bookstores like Barnes & Noble to own 50% of the market. Many people still prefer browsing books in a physical store.

Unfortunately for Barnes & Noble, providing a physical store for browsing books is no longer a viable business model. More precisely, providing a point-of-sale next to inventory isn't the advantage it used to be. Too many customers walk in, treat it like their local library, and go home and buy online instead. And because of Amazon's large online market share, most of the time that happens on Amazon. Barnes & Noble made the sale but Amazon got the money.

So the only chance B&N has against Amazon is to invest resources figuring out how to get people to walk out with a book or buy it from their own site. Improving their browsing and discovery experience only helps Amazon, so there is little monetary incentive to do so.

Unlike every other bookstore, Amazon doesn't need to sell books in their stores. They are perfectly fine with customers browsing, walking out, and buying books online, because they're buying it on Amazon. Any in-store sales or customer conversions are a bonus. They're the only physical bookstore without a leaky funnel.

Without needing to worry about sales, Amazon has a monetary incentive to create the best in-store experience for browsing and discovering books. They don't need to cram shelves with as many books as possible, hock excess inventory with discounts, or sell coffee, baked goods, accessories, and novelties. Over time, their focus and iteration on that core book shopping experience will let them capture the large segment of the book-buying population that hasn't yet made the leap.
 tag:philosophically.com,2014:Post/walmart-vs-amazon 2015-07-24T15:36:18-07:00 2015-07-24T15:36:18-07:00 Amazon isn't killing Walmart
There's a lot of hype around Amazon surpassing Walmart in market cap in intraday trading. Amazon is the biggest online retailer in the world, and Walmart is the biggest offline retailer in the world. Amazon may very well be a more scalable or more capital efficient business. But implicit in this hype is the idea that this is a seminal moment in retail history that signals we now live in the post-physical retail world. The idea that Amazon is killing Walmart.

In my opinion, comparing Walmart and Amazon is not comparing apples to apples (more like Apples to Googles?). In fact, it is highly likely that both will continue to exist side by side and both will continue to grow, and that the real comparison here is not Walmart to Amazon, but Walmart.com to Amazon.com.

In the US, online retail accounts for $297 billion in sales (and globally $1.3 trillion).

Last year, Amazon sold $55 billion worth of goods in the US. They sold another $34 billion globally. That means Amazon owns 18% of total US online retail. In 2014, Amazon grew sales 21% from the year previous.

By comparison, Walmart had $12 billion in global online retail sales in 2014. They don't break out online sales by country - but for argument's sake let's give them the same breakdown as Amazon - $7.2 billion in the US and $4.8 billion globally. Walmart online sales grew 21% from the year previous.

It's no surprise that Amazon is the market leader in online retail. However, both sites are growing fast - in fact at the same rate. Amazon has been in this game for 20 years. But for Walmart, e-commerce was a side project until very recently.

While online retail accounts for $297 billion in the US, brick-and-mortar retail accounts for $4.3 trillion in sales (and $21.2 trillion globally), excluding cars/motor parts and e-commerce - and removing restaurants it looks more like $3.8 trillion.

Last year, Walmart (including Sam's Club) sold $346 billion in their US brick-and-mortar stores (and another $136 billion globally), which represents 9% of total US brick-and-mortar retail sales of goods.

In the same time period, Amazon sold $0 billion in their US brick-and-mortar stores (and $0 billion globally), representing 0% of US brick-and-mortar sales. So where Walmart is investing and gaining market share in Amazon's courtyard, Amazon has yet to put a dog in the fight for Walmart's core business (although they are rumored to be working on store concepts).

There are lots of things you can do in a Walmart that you can't do in an Amazon:

You can pay with cash or check in-person. According to Walmart, the "majority" of transactions use cash or cash equivalents. 25% of all US consumers don't have a bank account and a credit or debit card. You can't mail Amazon an envelope with cash.

You can buy gas for your car or other types of fuel in-person.

You can buy fresh and frozen food and groceries (and check if the avocado is ripe).

You don't have to pay the shipping or additional costs to a courier or an annual fee for Prime to get something the same day.

You can get something you realized you needed in the evening or 24/7 at many locations.

You can see how big a piece of furniture is, judge the quality of a TV, and try on a shirt before you buy it.

Returning items is easy and you get your money back instantly.

You can ask someone for help when you can't find something or aren't sure what you're looking for.

You can buy very small quantities of items (try buying a single bottle of water from Amazon.

The reality is, Walmart and Amazon are completely different businesses - they just both happen to sell stuff. Nobody compares Subway to The French Laundry even though they both sell food. Growth in both Amazon and Walmart is driven by technology improvements from user interface to big data, logistics improvements to warehousing tech. In fact since 2006, Walmart has added $174 billion dollars in sales whereas Amazon in the same time period added $78 billion. The data shows that Amazon isn't killing Walmart; rather that e-commerce is another great sales channel for products.

Update This reminds me of a chat I once had with someone that ran support for a large company. They had recently added a community forum as a support channel where customers could post their issues and moderators hired by the company could answer them. The thought behind it was that it would help offset costs associated with high call volumes to the support center, because offering support through a forum is easier for customers and cheaper for companies than offering support on a phone call.

Once it was implemented though, the data showed that adding the forum only increased the support volume and costs by as much as 5-10%. Rather than pushing customers away from their phones to their keyboards, customers who previously didn't contact support at all now had a support channel where they felt comfortable reaching out. The lesson is that in many cases, as is the case with e-commerce vs. brick-and-mortar retail, new channels grow the market rather than take existing market share.
 tag:philosophically.com,2014:Post/magic-1 2014-03-31T19:29:01-07:00 2014-03-31T19:29:01-07:00 Magic
We all know the famous quote from Arthur C. Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." And Teller, the magician, says "Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect."

I think both of these statements are true, and truer together. You can build sufficiently advanced technology simply by spending more time on something than someone might reasonably expect. I think a lot of the magic we see in the products we use is really that more than random strokes of brilliance. When I look at how we can make progress on the future with technology, all I see is that more significant investments of time need to be made on every detail.

For example, the new game consoles have really powerful graphical capabilities. But when you look at some of the graphical content in the games, we are still very far away from the uncanny valley. I think that's just a matter of people's time being dedicated to, for example, the character's facial emotions instead of the ambient environment.

When you have a small company or you're on a small team, you are resource constrained, so you can't afford to make magic happen at a large scale like Google's products or Apple's products feel like sometimes. But what you can do is spend a lot of time and thought and effort on something like the ambient environment of a game. Maybe your company makes the best, most detailed ambient environment engine. Or maybe you have dedicated your team's time to creating the best character facial emotions.

Whatever it is that your company does, you will be advancing the state of technology if you just put more time into your core functionality than anybody else. It's easy to forget that simple truth (I certainly have) and spend valuable weeks and months on things like creating a novel new login system, or redesigning the homepage, or optimizing your signup flow, or creating a better settings view. We often say "love is in the details." But if those details are not core to your business, maybe they are better tackled when your team is bigger and you can afford the luxury. There's a good chance your user will overlook some of the small things when the product is itself magic.
 tag:philosophically.com,2014:Post/firing-and-being-fired 2013-09-24T09:01:18-07:00 2013-09-24T09:01:18-07:00 Firing and being fired
I remember every detail from the day I was fired from my first post-college job. My manager pulled me into a meeting with the engineering director at the end of the day: "We have some tough news for you. We are letting you go. From the start, it wasn't a good cultural fit. It's not that you aren't a good programmer. It's just that this is not the right place for you. I'm sorry."

In 30 seconds, all of my fears of failure and not being good enough to be a software engineer in Silicon Valley had come rushing back. And all of the work I had done in the past 7 months, the unfinished projects, the users I had connected with, the friendships with my colleagues - it all seemed wasted.

I wasn't allowed to go back into the office and I fought tears as I was escorted out of the building. I sat in the parking lot for a long time and considered going somewhere else, doing something easier, working for a bigger company where there would be less pressure.

I remember working on my résumé that night and thinking that it was going to kill my chances of finding a new job if potential employers found out that I had been fired. Like many people who find themselves in my position, I mentally decided to answer the question of why I was only there for 7 months, if it arose, by saying that I had quit, or maybe that I had been consulting. Or the decidedly more ambiguous "I left."

Two days later, I was in a garage with three exceptional people working at a new company on a problem I really believed needed solving. It was a company I had my eye on for a while. There, I was given the tools, the access to programming mentorship that I needed, and the inspiration to excel at my job from the top. I had managers that gave me the freedom to be creative, but also the boundaries to be successful. Our company was eventually acquired and it turned out that being fired was by far the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

It wasn't until I had to fire my first person that I understood how success in your job is an indicator light that you're on the right path, and not the other way around. People don't succeed long term at their job because they're just so good at what they do that nothing else matters. If they're at the right company, they have the right managers, or they love what they're doing, they'll succeed no matter how good they were when they started. Success at anything feeds on itself and delivers continuous fruits.

I remember that day I fired my first employee clearly as well. I took the employee out for a walk with termination documents and a severance check, as well as a page of prepared notes on why I were letting the employee go. I explained to that person that it wasn't a good fit from the start and that their performance wasn't where we wanted, but that it had nothing to do with their capabilities as an engineer. It just wasn't working.

Everything I told that engineer was true exactly as stated. I knew deep inside that everything the manager who fired me told me was true as well, despite my feeling at the time that I had done nothing wrong. In my first job, I worked on an ASP.NET site when I really wanted to work with open source programming languages and frameworks. In my first job, I was given rigid tasks to complete, and the many things that I came up with on my own rarely made it into production. In my first job, I worked for a game company when at the time I was interested in communication tools. Looking back, the only reason I didn't leave on my own was that I didn't have the self-awareness or courage to take my future into my own hands. So my job performance did the speaking for me.

Many software teams are really small, especially at startups. It's crazy to think that every new employee is going to fit in with a small team when there is nowhere to hide like in a big company. A lack of passion for a company's mission or product, even at a level that the employee is unable to verbalize or recognize, will show up in all sorts of ways. When you're in a job that you're not a good fit for, you'll start feeling things like "nobody listens to me," or you'll notice that your manager doesn't seem to appreciate your work or your work ethic. Sometimes your manager seems to be acting weird around you. Sometimes your manager asks you to change your attitude, and you do change, but it's like they can't see it. Those feelings are not necessarily real in the sense that your superiors are intentionally not listening to you or not appreciating your work or being weird. I believe that's your mind signaling to you and interpreting situations with a lens for your wellbeing, basically telling you that you would be better off somewhere else. And indeed, you will be.

We've let go of a couple people by now, and in every case where we let someone go, that person has gone on to work on things that they are more passionate about and where they have excelled and been happier at. When you let go of someone that's not fitting in, the remaining team benefits from increased cohesiveness and self-worth. Having been on both sides of the equation now, I really believe that small companies do not fire people enough and that startup employees do not leave often enough. No interviewing process is good enough to completely understand a prospective employee's deep inner passion for your company's mission alongside evaluating their actual skills. It's too easy to fake either one of those.

In hindsight, I wish the first company I worked for had fired me at the first sign of a lack of fit many months before. Sometimes you can detect a cultural mismatch within the first two months, sometimes in the first two weeks, and perhaps even on the first real day of work. It can be so easy to justify keeping the wrong employee on staff that a decision to fire an employee can drag on unresolved for months or years. However, both the employee and the company would almost always be better off if the separation happened immediately.
 tag:philosophically.com,2014:Post/yin-and-yang 2013-08-28T10:46:54-07:00 2013-08-28T10:46:54-07:00 Yin and Yang
I was talking with the founder of a very successful company the other day and he said something that really stuck out to me. Most companies need two founders. You need one founder who is a creative decision-maker, who will relentlessly uphold the vision of the company and product when employees, investors, and co-founders have their own ideas. The other founder is a team builder and communicator, who softens the blow from the creative founder and keeps the employees driving forward and executing daily.

When you just have the creative founder and not the other, chaos happens. When you just have the team-building founder, confusion happens. In both cases people leave, morale drops, ship dates extend, and money leaves the bank too fast.

If we look back at successful startups, we can see this manifest everywhere. Jobs & Wozniak, Page & Brin, Gates & Allen. Fred Wilson wrote about this as the yin and yang of product and engineering. I don't know if it really matters whether the creative side lies with product or engineering, but it's worth thinking and talking about which role you will play in your company with your co-founder.
 tag:philosophically.com,2014:Post/hi-i-make-a-photosharing-app 2013-07-16T15:32:00-07:00 2013-07-16T15:32:00-07:00 Hi, I make a photo-sharing app
Several days ago, a stranger at a tech event overtly made fun of me for saying I'm the founder of a social network. Usually it just happens behind my back. As such, I have been embarrassed to admit that our company makes social networking and photo sharing apps, so much so that I will pretty much use any other grouping of words to describe what we do. It seems "I make a photo sharing app" roughly translates to "I'm a copycatting clod" in Silicon Valley. I'm not alone – just look on TechCrunch at any story involving a photo-sharing startup and see how hard they try to avoid using the phrase. Just this morning, a photo-sharing app called Viewfinder launched and the co-founder had this to say: "I don't think of this app as being about photo sharing. I think that's one of its constituent parts."

We need to stop this madness. I'm tired of being embarrassed to say what we are working on and I think other entrepreneurs in this space should be too. Yes, there are a ton of photo and video sharing apps. There are thousands of social networking apps. More will launch every few days. Most would say there are too many social networks; I would say that there aren't nearly enough.

Social networks, photo sharing apps, and other communication apps are as fundamental and important to the world as the printing press, the written word, and language itself. Social networks progress societal norms, start and sustain revolutions, perpetuate peace and cross-cultural understanding, and advance human knowledge. A photo-sharing app may end wars – all of them. Photography is a communication medium that transgresses language itself.

From an entrepreneur's standpoint, social networks create outsized financial returns for investors as well. The biggest social networks in China (Tencent) and the US (Facebook) alone have a combined $140 billion market cap. LinkedIn is a $20 billion company. There are dozens of private companies in this space with valuations and revenue anywhere from $100m up to $10b that were all started in the last several years. There have also been many billion-dollar exits for social companies in the past year alone. Instagram, Tumblr, Yammer, and Waze come to mind immediately.

Big tech companies recognize both the impact and opportunity in these services. Google is pouring billions of dollars into this space. Apple is increasingly interested. Yahoo is catching up. Even in the enterprise, social networking is racking up big R&D dollars at companies like Salesforce. Television, music, and all of the arts are being reinvented by social – see Spotify, YouTube, Vevo, and the proliferation of the #hashtag.

The thing is, you know all of this. Everyone knows because communication and social networks consume our lives. We need to appreciate the diversity and the long tail of social networking and photo sharing startups, instead of mocking them and the entrepreneurs and people behind them. If you've worked on social networks for any amount of time, you would know that the way people want to use and communicate with friends and family is as diverse as people are themselves. I use 7-10 different messaging/social apps a day and it has never felt like friction. Every app has a time, a place, and a societal expectation.

There will never be a de-facto or standard messaging app, or social network, or photo sharing service that everyone uses. It's not a winner-takes-all game, and that's fantastic for people, but bad for companies. Some small variations on photo sharing or social networking will be bigger winners than others, but all of them have value to someone. As an industry, we should be creating and funding as many variations as possible. Collectively they are changing the world.
 tag:philosophically.com,2014:Post/dont-launch-your-product 2013-04-23T16:35:12-07:00 2013-04-23T16:35:12-07:00 Don't Launch Your Product
It was Monday, April 9, 2012 and we were at a team dinner. We were launching Everyme the next day at 10:00am. Launch was a Tuesday, of course. Consumers use their phones and the web more on Tuesdays than any other day. We had everything set: the TechCrunch article, the AllThingsD piece, and a handful of interviews with top tech blogs. We had 25,000+ people that had signed up to be notified about our launch. We designed and shipped a special page with a countdown three weeks earlier on our homepage. It seemed like the perfect time for our iPhone-only social network for groups: Instagram had been purchased the same day as our team dinner for a billion dollars and Everyme was, in our minds, the Next Big Thing™.

Our plan was simple. Launch the app and generate enough buzz for 25-50,000 downloads, or what we guessed was enough to propel us into the top apps in the Social Networking category in the App Store. Once we got there, we would start generating "organic" downloads from people checking out the top free social apps. A month later we'd roll out an Android app and web and we would be proclaimed king of the messaging space. Mark Zuckerberg would invite us to Fuki Sushi for vegetable tempura rolls, and we would laugh about how we crushed all of our competitors as he handed us a billion-dollar check addressed to Everyme, Inc.

So that Monday night, we were on top of the world and there was no way we could lose. We were probably in the top percentile of all startups already, having checked everything off of our startup bucket list: Y Combinator. CHECK. Raise a big seed round. CHECK. TechCrunch. CHECK. When I went to sleep that night, my body buzzed with excitement.

Tuesday morning rolled around, and everything went live. Mandatory tweets and Facebook posts went out, congratulatory emails from investors filled our inboxes, and my second monitor looked like NASA mission control, full of custom stats dashboards and Twitter searches.

Just hours later, by Tuesday afternoon, we already knew that our plans and the reality were far apart. Signups were coming in, but at a pace that would never reach 25,000 the first day. TechCrunch was sending hundreds of visitors and not thousands. Our Twitter searches were full of users that didn't get it. And there was no Zuckerberg dinner invitation in our inbox. We peaked at rank 35 in the Social Networking category and ended up with 11,000 downloads and 6000 sign-ups for our first day. Not exactly the day we expected.

It didn't get better the rest of the week either. We had fewer sign-ups on Wednesday than on Tuesday: 2000. And fewer sign-ups on Thursday than on Wednesday. And so on. To top it off, all of our team members had access to the stats dashboards. You could see the psychological effects of dropping numbers impacting productivity and morale significantly. It felt like we had bet it all on red and the ball stopped on black.

The fact is that when you create the big launch event, you will always see the subsequent big drop-off. Your market is not TechCrunch readers and Mark Zuckerberg does not want to eat vegetable tempura rolls with you. If you plan for massive scale out of the gate, you will face disappointment and a morale drain that can kill your company. And unlike a lot of other problems that you face in the startup world, learning this lesson the hard way can cost you your startup right at the outset. Here are a couple reasons why focusing on a big launch is the wrong strategy:

"Launching" screws with your metrics – and you need clean metrics to evaluate and iterate on your business. If you see 6000 signups on day one and 2000 on day two, you can be mislead about the strength of your vision. It clouds your ability to single out the passionate users and understand their usage patterns.

You're probably not going to find product/market fit right out of the gate. So whatever press or marketing you have planned will fall on uninterested eyes. Again, this will mislead you. You'll spend less money and waste less time by locating your interested market first and then pursuing marketing channels to reach them when ready. It sounds obvious, but it isn't. When you have a consumer app, at first, everyone seems like part of your target audience even though they aren't. Likewise with enterprise, not all businesses are candidates for your software.

As mentioned earlier, the bigger your launch, the quicker you will enter the famous "trough of sorrow." No human can easily withstand the emotional rollercoaster of startup metrics. Such baggage can lose you co-founders, employees, and your capital. And you will lose faith in yourself in the process.

You'll be penalized when raising your next round. Neither the bell-curve nor the downward slope is an attractive graph to show investors. You can demonstrate growth by finding one passionate user, and then ten, and then 100 instead of taking in 6000 sign-ups to find 111 passionate ones. Some savvy investors will ignore your charts and focus on you – fine – but you have to be a champion. You can't afford to think negative thoughts about your business when talking to an investor.

Having been through multiple launches, seen companies launch at big conferences, and talked with many startups that have experienced the same effect, what I recommend – and what we're doing at Origami - is not launching at all. Take the word launch out of your vocabulary – it's a sign that you are gambling on your app and not building a long-term, sustainable company. Instead, put your sign-up page up or your app out because you need more feedback on your idea. Find an audience of passionate users, even if small, and reach out to their community through appropriate means. Try SEM and Facebook ads to find a target market. Experiment with business models and onboarding flows. Let the press come to you because they love what you've made.

You wouldn't know it by its plain homepage, but our new product has a thriving community of families in the hundreds already. We've been "testing it" for months. One of these days we might put out a homepage where families can sign-up – but you won't hear about it from the press. You'll hear about it from a passionate fan.
 tag:philosophically.com,2014:Post/the-hairdresser 2013-02-01T19:08:00-08:00 2013-02-01T19:08:00-08:00 The Hairdresser
I was getting a haircut recently, and the owner happened to be present. I asked the owner how the salon got its first customers, because the business is booming and the owner now has multiple salons.

"I used to go hang out in the mall where women from the town would be. I'd offer pretty girls a free haircut or other free hair services, as long as they came to my salon with my business card. The women didn't always show up, but when they did, we'd give them a haircut or coloring or whatever it is they wanted free of charge, as I promised.

I knew I wasn't that good at cutting hair at the time; I had just started. So I wasn't going to be able to sell clients on my talent alone.

What I knew to be true was that if you were a pretty girl, the haircut didn't matter that much – you'd get compliments on your hair all the time whether it looked good or not. And "your hair looks great" is always followed by "who did it for you?" I was able to make a lot of mistakes early on with new customers, and they'd still be a great source of referrals for me.

It still works today. When new employees ask me how to build a clientele like mine, I simply tell them: 'Cut the hair of all the pretty girls for free.'"

 tag:philosophically.com,2014:Post/8-ideas-for-fixing-mobile-platforms 2013-01-30T18:34:00-08:00 2013-01-30T18:34:00-08:00 Fixing Mobile Platforms
I wrote an article recently on why mobile app-first companies are doomed to fail due to their inability to close viral loops and retain users effectively. I pivoted my own company's new product Origami to focus on the web and build mobile as a companion. The article centers on data regarding onboarding and our inability to optimize onboarding in a timely manner. I'd like to propose a couple changes for Apple and Google to consider that I believe would make mobile a viable platform for startups going forward. I've ordered these from most plausible to least plausible.

  1. Ability to pass parameters from a download URL to an app

"I have no idea why people are downloading my app, or how they found out about it" is the response given by most app developers when asked where their mobile downloads are coming from. This is a huge problem and there is an easy and powerful fix.

On the web, there are a number of ways to track a user from page to page:

Referrer header that tells you what page someone clicked to get to the current page.

Cookies so that a website can, for example, store a bit of information about a user to keep them logged in even if they close their browser.

URI parameters that trigger predictable actions on a page (i.e. google.com/?query=soup will always show you a search for soup).

All of these methods let the developer maintain state for the user, as well as potentially actionable insights on where your users come from and what they are doing.

If a user transitions from the mobile web to the App Store, the chain is broken and we've lost all information about the user. We can't maintain state and we no longer reliably understand where the download came from.

The solution is simple: let developers pass arbitrary parameters from the web through to a download.

Currently, the download link to our app is a static URL:

https://itunes.apple.com/app/everyme/id494728164

If we could pass parameters, it might look like this:

https://itunes.apple.com/app/everyme/id494728164?authorization_token=c886nQI5IqLS3112XFk3J674&referrer=philosophically.com

Apple or Google would then make these parameters available to the developer from the native app. The link above would allow us to keep the user logged in from web to download, as well as know where our new user came from.

I believe this single feature alone would spawn an ecosystem of startups. Developers could instantly personalize app downloads and ad companies could sell real performance-based install campaigns. And we'd finally be able to answer the question of where downloads came from.

  2. Show search terms from App Store/Google Play in developer portals

Related to the ability to pass parameters is a simple dashboard that the developer portals should include, with a Google Analytics-like view of how users discovered their app organically in the App Store or Google Play. It would show a list of keywords used to get to your app and their frequency. This doesn't seem that hard to do, and it would provide an enormous increase in visibility into where users are coming from.

In addition, if the user came from a featuring or from a particular category or Top X chart, that information would also be valuable to share with the developer, either afterwards in a dashboard or even better, on the user's first app open.

If we had this information available to us, it would help us optimize our app descriptions as well as give us insights into what users are looking for. We'd save a lot of development time if we knew people came to Everyme primarily because they typed in "Group Messaging" or "Private Social Network" in terms of prioritizing features and marketing campaigns.

  3. Removing the app price floor, allowing paid upgrades, and adding the ability to generate coupons

I believe that the $0.99 floor on app pricing and the inability to charge for an upgrade degrades the quality of apps and has had a negative economic effect on developers as well.

 App developers who shouldn't be making $0.99 off of terrible apps make a profit on every random person that downloads one, and thus they have an incentive to flood the store with low-quality apps at a guaranteed profit margin. App discovery is very difficult on mobile so quality apps get buried under the load.

 App developers who should be making a lot more than $0.99 per app end up pricing their apps at $0.99. Mobile consumers seem to be extremely price sensitive - probably from the pricing floor. Great app developers end up making less money than they should. In addition, since developers can't charge for app upgrades, they have little incentive to continually improve their product. This is passed on to the consumer in the form of higher expectations for 1.0 apps.

 Startups that know that they can't make a long term, sustainable business selling apps at $0.99 give away their apps for free instead. Eventually they will turn to advertising or virtual goods. But users of a free product are not very sticky, and why should they be – they haven't invested anything and don't expect a return.

The solution to me is simple: Remove pricing constraints. No minimum pricing, ability to shift pricing in real-time, paid upgrades, and also couponing. Coupons are a great way to incentivize people to download your app. They let you test price sensitivity of your target market as well as create artificial demand. I'm sure there will be a flood of $0.01 apps, but that's great because all of the bad apps will trend towards free and the good apps will have the opportunity to find their equilibrium price.

  4. Programmatic app submission and developer APIs

As has been pointed out many times before, the ability to deploy fixes and new features on the fly has been a huge boon to the web and we need a similar system for mobile. It doesn't need to be complicated – just a REST endpoint to upload a new Android APK or iOS binary along with metadata – version number, changelog, etc. will do. Coupled with automated build systems like Jenkins, developers will be able to fix bugs faster and test features in real-time with something as simple as a Git commit.

I think a corollary feature to programmatic app submission is more APIs for developers surrounding the app details. Adjusting the icon, screenshots, pricing, search tags, and your app description via APIs would save developers time, money, and would give us more success factors that we can algorithmically control.

  5. Load a native app immediately by hitting a website/URL

Allowing developers to load a native app via the mobile web would solve 95% of the problems with mobile. Here is what I mean by this:

User reads about Everyme in their mobile Twitter client or sees an ad.

User visits Everyme.com.

Mobile web browser encounters a new HTML header tag:

<meta name="associated-ios-app-url" content="https://everyme.com/Everyme.app" />

Mobile browser kicks the user to a black screen and loads the app located at https://everyme.com/Everyme.app.

If the user wants to go back or reveal the address bar, he or she swipes down from the top (currently loads notifications) and the address bar shows everyme.com as being loaded, along with standard browser navigation controls.

Other cool things you can do with this:

User searches on Google for a soup recipe.

Clicks result to https://recipesite.com/recipes/soup.

Browser encounters HTML header tag:

<meta name="associated-android-app-url" content="https:// recipesite.com/Recipes.apk?recipe=Soup" />

Soup recipe is loaded in a beautiful native app.

The main complaint I've heard with this is that mobile apps are huge downloads. That's true – but the average size of a website has increased greatly over time, in addition to our network bandwidth. I suspect that app developers would also adjust their code to load less heavy resources synchronously. We would figure it out as a community.

  6. Allow an app to set itself as the default handler for files, calls, texts, etc.

What I really mean by this is that we need more power over the core functionality of the phone. Android has embraced this but iOS hasn't, and we need buy-in from both systems, especially for apps that have a social component. We need the ability to ask the user if it's ok for our app to handle certain phone events and files by default.

This hurt our company a lot when we realized we could never create an address book app better than Apple's because we weren't able to capture phone calls, texts, or the recent calls log. We ended up creating our own call log internally, but it was a significantly degraded experience from the default address book.

  7. No featured apps or top charts

The featured section in Google Play and the App Store are unfair to startups and individual developers, and create the wrong definition of success. Here's a secret: if you want to get featured, don't build a good app. Build a good relationship with someone that works at Apple or Google. Our app has been featured on both, so I would know. The cycle of getting featured, watching your downloads follow a bell curve of activity, putting a significant update out, getting featured, watching downloads rise and fall again, is completely destructive to a company. It incentives the developer to build non-disruptive things that they know Apple or Google is going to like instead of actual users. Featuring in the App Store defines success as having hoards of random window-shoppers use your app for 5 minutes, and I know for a fact that a lot of startups see that success and think it's real, and start optimizing for it.

The same thing happens with the top charts. When we were first launching Everyme, we planned everything so that we would gain a burst of download activity all within a small time period. We synchronized app featuring, press embargoes, and ad buys so that we could catapult into the top of the charts, and again, have hoards of random window-shoppers use our app for 5 minutes.

The shared problem between top charts and featuring is that they create an ecosystem where it's more important to create generic apps that appeal to a random window shopper, instead of targeted apps that solve people's problems. If featuring and the top charts were gone, it would force users to download apps that met their specific problem via search or maybe an improved directory structure, and thus app developers would be more reliably receiving users that actually want to use what they've made.

  8. No default apps on a new phone

I doubt this will ever happen, but to me this would create the most pure free market for apps. Apple and Google will continually improve upon their native apps and create new ones. Every time they do, a cauldron of startups will face stiff competition from their well-moneyed platform overlords who, conveniently, can reject, delay approval, or destroy their apps at will. This is bad for innovation, users, and app developers. The solution is to let users open their new phone and find a blank slate, or at least some options for their defaults. May the best phone call app, messaging app, clock app, weather app, and calendar app win.

I am hopeful that in the next couple years, at least some of these changes will be implemented. At that time, I think it will make a lot of sense to reconsider a mobile app-first strategy. For now, I still recommend that you build mobile apps to engage and retain users alongside the web, but not necessarily to acquire new ones.

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 tag:philosophically.com,2014:Post/why-were-pivoting-from-mobile-first-to-web-first 2012-11-27T10:40:00-08:00 2012-11-27T10:40:00-08:00 Why We're Pivoting from Mobile-first to Web-first
There has been discussion from the venture capitalist angle on the failings of mobile consumer companies, including posts by Fred Wilson and Om Malik. I wanted to share my perspective, having been the co-founder of a mobile-first startup . We've raised $3.65m to date, and have tried two mobile-first free social products. However, for our next product, we are going web-first and charging out of the gate.

Ads are the Internet's tax on users who want free apps and websites. Allmost all free apps and services have ads. Ad-supported companies are akin to the government in the sense that they are both really good at finding ways to charge you without it seemingly coming out of your pocket. Many people's taxes are taken automatically out of their payroll, so they don't think of that money as being theirs to begin with. Similarly, we feel like everything that we don't directly pay money for on the Internet is free, but that is simply not true.

Unlike taxes, however, ad-based services target lower-income and lower-education audiences because that's where they make all of their money. To take the largest example, Google makes $30.00 ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) per year and charges about $1/click on average to advertisers. That's 30 ads clicked per user per year. I'm certainly not clicking that many Google ads per year and I don't know if most technically-inclined users do. We know where content stops and ads begin.

What's the cost to the user? The cost is the loss of privacy, and future opportunities for the user that they've lost as a result. Those opportunities can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars as well as future happiness. Advertising-based companies need lots of data to win advertiser dollars away from television and newspapers. That being said, your data is given mostly in aggregate, so none of your personal information is revealed or sold directly to advertisers (in most cases). Usually the argument goes that your data is being sold, but that's not mine (unless I'm trying to sell privacy to a lay person). If that were true, consumers would revolt the same way they would if they had to go into their bank account once a year and hand 20-50% of it to the government to spend on programs like the TSA. My argument is different; that because of the way ad-supported companies must operate and grow, your data is compromised.

To gather enough data to be statistically significant to advertisers, as well as to achieve the scale necessary to have a large enough lower-income and lower-education audience to click on ads, all ad-based companies must grow very large user bases. They also have to grow their user base fast in the early days of the company, because nobody will suck up the cost of running a slow-growing and high-cost tech company for a long-enough period. To raise venture capital post-seed round, you need fast growth. You will not find many or any large advertising-based tech companies that have not raised money from VCs.

So advertising-based companies have to grow very large, very fast in order to support their free product. Let's talk some numbers on user acquisition. If you work at a startup and have access to your funnel data, you can confirm that what I am saying is true. User acquisition is ultimately about retaining the user through all stages of the user lifecycle. If you don't focus on that, at each step of your website or app's onboarding and main user activity flows, you will lose a percentage of users. I believe this is the primary reason that mobile is failing.

Let me share with you some rough numbers from our mobile-first startup. Out of 300,000+ downloads and 250,000 unique website visitors, 200,000 people have signed up. So right away, chop off 60% of your audience whom are just window-shopping. As an aside, I have heard privately from an app maker with a 100m+ downloads that 50% of people don't even open their app after downloading. And that's not counting people who can't find your app in the store or decide not to download it after seeing your app rating (4.5 stars, in our case).

We used to have a screen where users could input their phone numbers and emails to help other users find them better. Out of 200,000, chop off 25% who don't have the patience for that or are scared that we will sell their phone number. We also used to have a social network sign-in screen to automatically create groups for our users. Another 25% don't want to sign-in to a social network, don't see the skip button, or get bored by this time. We have since removed those two steps, but it took us a while to get there because we had to re-engineer how onboarding worked.

So that takes our original 550,000 eyeballs + people to 100,000 users. Now that the user is in our app and has an account, we want them to create a group and add their friends or family to the group. 25% of users won't create a group and another 25% won't add anybody to the group they created. Now we need them to share something to those people. Then the people they share with need to see the value, understand what is going on, and go through most of the steps above.

At best, we retain 5% of users through the entire onboarding process. Attempts to fix it have raised it only nominally. We are not alone on that count even amongst apps with much better onboarding and many more app versions than our own.

The most natural way to combat this is to try and ratchet up the total number of downloads and that costs money. If you paid Google's $1 CPC for people to enter your funnel, you're really paying $20 per user and you will never recoup that cost. Simply redesigning or reengineering mobile signup/onboarding is not enough because on mobile, you can't deploy or react to user behavior fast enough to test a lot of things. Non-active users tend to only download big updates and those updates take a ton of development time. You can't ship bugs because your rating will hurt. You also have already lost a potential user because there is no great way to tell a user that got lost in your funnel to come back and try your new funnel. The press is not going to write another article championing your new funnel. Company emails have tiny conversion rates to mobile no matter how sophisticated your emailing marketing tricks are. The user has already calculated in their mind how long it takes to go to the app store, find your app, download it, enter their password, open the app, and go through onboarding, and because it will take so long they simply won't do it.

All in all, mobile service apps turn out to be a horrible place to close viral loops and win at the retention game. Only a handful of apps have succeeded mobile-first: Instagram, Tango, Shazam, maybe 2 or 3 others (Games drive short-term revenue but don't get me started on that topic – sell a billion $0.99 games with 30% taken off the top by Apple/Google and you now have the equivalent revenue of a Call Of Duty opening weekend).

You have an entirely different onboarding story on the web. You can test easily, cheaply, and fast enough to make a difference on the web. You can fix a critical bug that crashes your app on load 15 minutes after discovery (See Circa). You can show 10 different landing pages and decide in real-time which one is working the best for a particular user. You can also close a viral loop: A user can click an email and immediately be using your app with you. You can't put parameters on a download link and people don't download apps from their computer to their phone. Without the barrier of a download + opening the app to try your product, you can prove value to the user immediately upon their first impression, as is with Google. In addition, the experience of signing up for a service is superior in every way. Typing is easier. Sign-up with OAuth is faster. Tab to the next field. Provide marketing alongside sign-up as encouragement. Auto-fill information is a feature in every browser. The open eco-system of the web and 20 years of innovation has solved many of the most difficult parts of onboarding. With mobile, that kind of innovation is lagging significantly behind because we create apps at the leisure of two companies, neither of which have a great incentive to help free app makers succeed.

As I said before, ad-supported companies need to grow very large, very fast, and I said that that is at the cost of your privacy. I made my case for why web companies can retain and acquire users easier, and the way to do that is through testing and the web's ability to provide quick and perceivable value to a user. What follows is my theory: All advertising-based companies will innovate and iterate to approach zero set-up time, zero friction user actions, and a maximum viral factor, because that increases their growth and revenue.

In order to get to zero set-up time, in the best-case scenario a user will be shown a highly targeted list of suggested friends, auto-follow people, or not have to sign-up at all. In any case, they will not be provided customization options. Also, the user will be shown interesting and relevant content immediately, which requires a vast amount of viewable and public content. In order to achieve zero-friction user action flows, like searching or sharing, it will provide few or zero advanced sharing options and in some cases even share automatically on your behalf. Lastly, to increase the viral factor of the app, invitations will be sent seamlessly or automatically and results and content will be available for any user preference or search.

Unfortunately, your privacy is an advanced option and would in most cases damage one or all of those company goals. Nobody wants to share without an audience, consume a news feed without any content, or search and receive no results. So I make the obvious point: Google and Facebook need your data, information, and content to be public so that they have something to show other people.

The cost to the user is monumental. Unfortunately, you don't experience that cost until it's much too late to do anything about it. A blog post could cost you your job, a cached tweet could cost you a relationship, and an inerasable search result can cost you the opportunity for both.

So what can you do if you're an entrepreneur or have a mobile-first startup not getting the traction you deserve? I'm not really sure yet, we are still figuring that out at our company. I don't want to peddle our wares, but I'll tell you what we are thinking and working on at Origami Labs and it's just something for you to consider for your own business.

We want to place our chips where we believe we have the best chance of succeeding based on our theories and data. For us, mobile is not that place, which is why our new product is going to be launching web-first in the next couple months, with mobile as a companion app. We are taking a big bet on the web and the Internet in general, as you'll see by how it functions. We are also going revenue-first because we believe in privacy and we're willing to trade a smaller, slower-growing audience for it. Our new product will cost you money, so you can be assured that it doesn't cost you something else.

In conclusion, I want to say that I don't think mobile is going to stop growing. We are not going web-first because people use the web more than mobile. I use my phone more than anything else. I just don't think that an entrepreneur who wants a real shot at success should start their business there. The Android and iOS platform set us up to fail by attracting us with the veneer of users, but in reality you are going to fight harder for them than is worthwhile to your business. You certainly need a mobile app to serve your customers and compete, but it should only be part of your strategy and not the whole thing.


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text: Quest for the Tree Kangaroo : An Expedition to the Cloud Forest of New Guinea by Nic Bishop, Sy Montgomery It looks like a bear, but isn't one. It climbs trees as easily as a monkey— but isn't a monkey, either. It has a belly pocket like a kangaroo, but what's a kangaroo doing up a tree? Meet the amazing Matschie's tree kangaroo, who makes its home in the ancient trees of Papua New Guinea's cloud forest. And meet the amazing scientists who track these elusive animals. Format: Hardcover ISBN-13/ EAN: 9780618496419 ISBN-10: 0618496416 Pages: 80 Publication Date: 10/30/2006 Carton Quantity: 30 Grade Level: 5,6,7 Age Range: 10,11,12 Also available in: Paperback - $9.99 eBook - $14.99 About the Book About the Authors Reviews It looks like a bear, but isn't one. It climbs trees as easily as a monkey— but isn't a monkey, either. It has a belly pocket like a kangaroo, but what's a kangaroo doing up a tree? Meet the amazing Matschie's tree kangaroo, who makes its home in the ancient trees of Papua New Guinea's cloud forest. And meet the amazing scientists who track these elusive animals. Subjects Animals/Mammals History/Exploration & Discovery Photography Travel Science & Nature/Trees & Forests Animals/General Social Science/Customs, Traditions, Anthropology Adventure & Adventurers Science & Nature/Experiments & Projects Science & Nature/Zoology People & Places/Australia & Oceania Science & Nature/Environmental Science & Ecosystems Related Subjects Animals Common Core Exemplar Common Core Recommended Award Winners Kangaroo New Guinea Award Winners Nonfiction & Reference Photo Essays Forests & Trees Adventure Traditions Environmental Science & Ecology Scientist/Inventors Additional Assets Reading Guide Nic Bishop Nic Bishop, who holds a doctorate in the biological sciences, is the photographer of many acclaimed books for children. He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.Visit his website at: www.nicbishop.com Nic Bishop and author Sy Montgomery won the Sibert Medal in 2011 for their collaborative work on Kakapo Rescue: Saving the World's Strangest Parrot, another Scientist in the Field title. Read More Sy Montgomery Sy Montgomery is an author, naturalist, newspaper columnist, scriptwriter, and radio commentator who writes award-winning books for children as well as adults. She lives in Hancock, New Hampshire. Visit her website at symontgomery.com. Sy Montgomery and photographer Nic Bishop won the Sibert Medal in 2011 for their collaborative work on Kakapo Rescue: Saving the World's Strangest Parrot, another Scientist in the Field title. Read More Other Books By The Author Digging for Bird Dinosaurs Buy Now The Snake Scientist Buy Now The Tarantula Scientist Buy Now Kakapo Rescue Buy Now Mysterious Universe Buy Now Saving the Ghost of the Mountain Buy Now The Quest for the Tree Kangaroo Buy Now Snake Scientist Buy Now Quest for the Tree Kangaroo (Multi-Touch edition) Buy Now Chasing Cheetahs Buy Now The writer and photographer of this exemplary description of science field work accompanied researcher Lisa Dabek on an expedition high in New Guinea's mountains to study tree kangaroos and promote the conservation of this elusive and endangered species. With early references to Dr. Seuss and hobbits, Montgomery connects the world of the young reader to this beautiful, distant place. She paces her narrative well, alternating focus on people and place, keeping the reader engaged and concerned about the expedition's success. As in other books in the series, she describes how local schoolchildren are involved. Her detailed account highlights scientific work habits, including extensive planning, necessary patience, careful observations and recording and the contiunal questions that arise. One unfortunately flipped picture notwithstanding, Bishop's photographs, shots of the expedition members, strinking close-ups of flora and fauna including the sought-for kangaroo and lush, green cloud forest scenes, are beautifully reproduced. From the maps in front to the concluding suggestions for young enthusiasts, information about the language, and index, this is another commendable title from an experienced team.Publishers Weekly, StarredAnother beautifully illustrated entry in the Scientists in the field series... Montgomery gives a chronological, sometimes moment-by-moment account of the challenging climb into the remote cloud forest...[giving] an unusually strong, visceral sense of the work and cooperation fieldwork entails and the scope and uniqueness of theis particular mission...As usual, Bishop's color photographs are exemplary and extend the excitement in close-ups of creatures and of the team at work.Booklist, ALA, Starred ReviewMontgomery's friendliness and curiosity set the tone...Bishop's photography is, as always, outstanding...Dabek's advice to young naturalists...[is a] useful addition.Horn BookIn this fact-packed adventure with stunning photos, readers joins scientists in New Guinea to radio-collar the way-cute tree-dweller.People Magazine"[M]eet the amazing scientists who track these elusive animals." Midwest Book Review November 2007 Midwest Book Review You May Also Enjoy Glow W. H. Beck Buy Now Inside Biosphere 2 Mary Kay Carson Tom Uhlman Buy Now Celebrating Ohio Jane Kurtz C.B. Canga Buy Now


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However Braun is playing solid defense overall for the Sharks, In 13 games, he is a plus-4, and that was only his third penalty.
Casey Wellman and the Minnesota Wild won 4-1 at Phoenix Saturday night. It was the seventh straight win for the Wild. Wellman was on the ice for the Phoenix goal, and was a minus-1 in 14 minutes and 27 seconds of ice time.
The Dallas Stars edged the Los Angeles Kings 2-1 Saturday, but Jonathan Quick was not in goal for LA. Jonathan Bernier, playing in only his sixth game, and took the loss.


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The biggest annoyance for me is to receive a request for a recommendation from someone that I do not know, have never worked with, and/or have never met.
Latest blog post: Are You Still Selling Station Wagons?
I have been pretty active on LinkedIn for the past 4 years or so. In fact, I got my last job as a result of my participation in the groups. So, let's just say I am pretty familiar with the site and can tell you what works and what doesn't from my perspective anyways (share your own in the comments section please).
While LinkedIn itself may annoy me from time to time with their 'updates', there are several things I see members doing that I just don't understand. While it's true that some or all may be effective in the short-term, they will not sustain your presence in a very high light for the long one. So here we go with 12 most annoying things people doing on LinkedIn.
So LinkedIn gives you a default message: 'I'd like to add you to my professional network.' Blah! Shame on them for even giving this much to you and not making you ask me to connect with you and give me a reason why. Please modify this canned message and be personal.
I see this all…the…time! People starting a message with just a link. So, let me give you a hint about the discussions on LinkedIn, we are not supposed to have to go anywhere else to have a discussion! Yes, give me the link to read more, please, but give me enough to give you my thoughts on your topic and don't just spam the group and waste our time trying to drive traffic to your site. If it's that important to create a discussion about then create a discussion, will you?
Bet you have all seen this one, huh? Let's all connect to each other on Twitter and Facebook blah blah blah. Unfortunately, these discussions get so much response they end up in the Featured or Active discussions for weeks. Yes, I have posted my links there one time or another but guess what? I didn't get any spike in followers or fans. Please don't fall for this or start it, I really don't get the point. Thanks!
I love that LinkedIn is global and we can communicate with people from all over the globe, but did you know that you don't have to post your discussion in your native language? Google translate can turn your post into any language but I have to say, and I apologize, but that is extra effort and English is pretty much the common denominator and a lot of people will not translate your discussion.
We know that darks don't belong with whites in the laundry and you shouldn't drink beer before liquor so why are you mixing everything up on LinkedIn? There are job boards for a reason; jobs don't belong in the discussions area. Have a position available at your company is awesome – yay your hiring – but guess what? That's not a discussion, sorry, so take it elsewhere. Same with webinars…put them in the events section.
Ey ye ye ye ye! Just saw Chris Brogan tweet the other day about how his LinkedIn inbox never has anything good in it. Can you relate? Occasionally I will send a message to my connection about something, but I am extremely careful about what I send, how many times I send something and whom I am sending it to. Please don't spam your connections with stuff that's irrelevant. If it's that important for you to send it to all, then make it feel important to us too.
Even if you are not a direct connection on LinkedIn, as long as you are separated by no more than 3 people and/or share a group, you can send a message to them. This is a little different than #6 because I get these messages that say 'we are in the xyz group together and love your opinions and o by the way we sell this awesome product so if you or anyone else wants to buy some, let me know.' Really? Ok, so I have a very negative view of this company and encourage each and every one of you to never ever ever fall for this in the event that maybe it will stop.
This is just a tease. Seriously. You just bragged about this awesome ebook or whitepaper you have and how great it is and all the good stuff I am going to get out of it and then you send me to a form? It's not fair! You can generate leads on LinkedIn without teasing us with content. Give us the content and then we will contact you for more. Trust me, we will! That is, if your content is good 😉 .
Ok seriously, why bother? Are you playing the numbers game perhaps and just love to see 3000+ connections next to your name? I have an extremely small network on LinkedIn because I know everyone and can proudly boast that we connect in one way or another. I question the intent of someone who takes the trouble to request my connection but then does nothing. Let's connect and keep connecting over and over again!
A couple years ago this feature was enabled that allowed people to link their LinkedIn status to their Twitter feed. What I saw happening was that my status alerts of my connections were just tweets. They immediately lost their value to me. There is a way to link some tweets but not all and I highly encourage you to do the former in lieu of the latter.
Unless you are hollow man, the boogeyman or a shadow of yourself, please upload a photo. If you are really that self-conscience, use your logo or a pic of your doggy. I often click on discussions but walk away from commenting because the person who started it has no image. *Apply this rule to any and all social networks you participate in.
LOTS of people do this! It's mostly recruiters and HR professionals (sorry!) that post jobs or discussions about jobs but I would question how many of LinkedIn's millions of users actually use the network. Why do you create an account, ask a question and never come back? Did we not help you? Did you not see the value? Was it too overwhelming? Please, tell me because we would love to have you! That is, as long as you agree not to do anything on this list .
Now that that's off my chest, does anything annoy you on LinkedIn?
Featured image courtesy of tychay licensed via creative commons.
The biggest annoyance for me is to receive a request for a recommendation from someone that I do not know, have never worked with, and/or have never met.
Latest blog post: Are You Still Selling Station Wagons?
@fearlessselling Repent to Linkedin and You are forgiven. ;)
Re: Q&A
Some people are not really answering questions. Beware of that some are just there to play a game to earn expertise and some participants are hard on first timers. Don't let it scare you come back and participate however you feel comfortable.
When you post a question you will not see it right away. If you want to see it right away go to "My Q&A" Or go to Q&A homepage and go to "more" You question will appear on top.
Too many post questions twice because of this. It is annoying too.
You really don't have to post your question in multiple section like "Using Linkedin" or " Career". Just post it in one.
Some will tell you that Q&A is not for job search questions, its right on the form for asking questions. Some people will try to make you feel bad for it.
Be prepared for a wide variety of answers. Not everyone is going to understand you.
You do have the option to hide other people's updates if it bothers you.
I am social media addict that eventually for efficiency sake had to start doing it for a living. Now I am the Director of New Media for hotel development and management company. First off I love your blog. Just discovered it today cause I have you in a twitter list. I will go right now and disconnect my Twitter stream from my Linked In account. I admit I only go to Linked in when I have a question. Not a platform I spend much time on. As of right now I will answer 2 questions for every one I ask. Thanks.
Some combos of the above 12 are really a problem.
• Promoting onesself in a Job page with only a link. Why are you promoting anywhere but Promotions? Isn't that just spamming? Then what is the purpose of it if you never respond, even to people who appreciated your work?
• Posting several links (more than 6) in one day after just joining a group.It may be great content but in the wrong area, like Jobs.
Great post! I think what irks me is folks who send a request to be introduced to someone in my network-- and send a request that is badly written or full of spelling errors, which I can't forward along without risking my own reputation. Or, they want me to recommend them for something, when I hardly know them at all. I don't want to be a hypocrite, because I'm an open networker in general... (mainly because I'm in the business of connecting people, including for global relocation, and have found that open networking is my ticket to doing so). But quality referrals and intros still matter!
Do you all want to hear what else is really annoying? When people start a discussion and then never come back to join the discussion. #13 Start a discussion and never return again. I am SO blatantly guilty of that and I have an excuse (I am not a fan of excuses but there is a time and a place for just about everything with the exception of an eyeroll). So here goes...I was out of state and had no connection. Now it seems strange that I could even claim this with smartphones, iPads and Wifi in just about every McDonald's but its true. With the exception of trying the hotel lobby's complimentary computer which took about, oh, 20 minutes to not do anything, I was trapped. So here I am and looks like this article struck a nerve and better late than never in my book so I am jumping right into your comments. I am SO happy to see that a lot of you love LinkedIn as I do but get annoyed with some of these things as I do.
Here's to educating people on how to use LinkedIn so that it can continue to be a faciliating place to start and join discussions, meet connect and network with like professionals and promote the heck out of ourselves and our talents.
Couldn't agree more with #10. It's like spamming other's feed...
@bridgegroupinc thanks Trish!
@blochexeced Glad you enjoyed it. Do all 12 on that list annoy you or just some more than others?
@angelamaiers @seanmcginnis great article on linkedin... I'm a newbie and I always include a personal message ...great tips! Thnx
@danielnewmanuv Daniel! Have a great week! Off to LA this week, hope to find downtime to write. Hope all is well!
@angelamaiers @seanmcginnis how about use it!
Some great stuff Christina. Great effort. As someone who has been active on LinkedIn since 2005 your number 9 was the biggest item for me by far(all of them were good just that everyday I get several "connect with me" messages. Once I speak over the phone and met with someone in person, I ask permission to add them. I see a couple of things: what if they dont want to add you? (for whatever reason). They get pretty shocked when I say may i add you on my network of connections? I see it as a 2 way street. Most people just connect and never get to meet or learn about the other person and wonder why their network of 9,000+ connections never offer them anything.
What amazes me is that people are treating FB, Twitter and LinkedIn exactly the same as its all about the connection. "Let's connect" term has got out of control.
We still meet people everyday that have not updated their LinkedIn profile or say, "I am not using it as much as I should".
Take time to help others, build a network, ask some good questions, listen to them and build relationships.
Thanks for your contribution.
Great work!
login in
A good list, but one quibble: Bob Borson, an HR professional from the UK, has written a couple of articles on the fact that he experimented with custom messages versus the default message when sending requests to connect and found that, surprisingly, the default message has a much higher connection rate. I don't know if there is an explanation for it, and of course some people will see it as cold or impersonal, but if the odds are that you're more likely to get a connection with the "boring" default message, I'd still use that rather than a customized message more likely to be ignored.
@LMUMBAAlumni Thanks for the RT!
@tedrubin thanks Ted. will take your advise.
@pegfitzpatrick Peg , please say Thanks to Sean @seanmcginnis That Article was exactly what I think as well Christina Pappas Nailed it!
@derekmbrown really? No photo usually means no follow, friend or connect in my world.
@tamcdonald Hey can I bring peeps to the @ZaarlyChicago event this week?
@seanmcginnis I'm just generally annoying. Do you have a checklist for that? :)
Many on LinkedIn post just enough in their profiles to be listed. In doing so, they forget their manners, as well as their common sense (which, unfortunately, is NOT that common!). Also, many just lack guidance in preparing profiles properly. Just like stereotypical males, driving in unfamiliar locations, they avoid stopping to ask for directions.
All of this provides opportunities for those of us engaged in local internet marketing to provide guidance toward more effective use of internet media. For myself and for others in internet marketing, I thank the LinkedIn offenders for hanging out their shingles that advertise the fact that they don't know what they're doing in the Internet.
I can safely say being in the business of recruiting talent that this made me laugh out loud. #3 - most people just assume I'm always in hiring mode/I have the secret link into companies. Sometimes this is true of course but it's not the wisest approach to spam me on Linkedin. How about we develop a rapport first? Just an idea. Wink. Rest assured, there exist select recruiters who are annoyed by many aspects of LinkedIn too. I'm one of these people. Quality trumps quantity.
Enjoyed this. I feel better after venting here!
@DotC Definately some spammy stuff going on! On your second point, I cant help but nod my head. Its as if the person just woke up, found LinkedIn, signed up and shared everything they ever created. This is great and I am glad people are joining the network and contributing but they are missing the whole point which is to discuss, collaborate and network. Hope we can get LI back to a place where people want to spend their time!
Thanks for your comment!
@HeatherKrasna I see this mentioned and yet wonder maybe the solution is for us to post a note on our profile how we will connect and give introductions. Because frankly none of us has the time to guess and ask 100 times over, what's your policy.
(Note to self go add to my linkedin profile how I connect and give introductions.)
@HeatherKrasna That is a great annoyance to add to the list! I have asked people for referrals but I am extremely cautious about who I ask. I will always ask the person what their relationship is to the person I want to be introduced to and that usually will tell me whether I can ask or not. Don't just open an email with 'I saw you are connected to so and so, can you introduce me?' Especially if you have not connected in awhile. Appreciate great networking myself and know the power of it firsthand but there are limits!
@Dhara Mistry Hi Dhara,
I completely agree! I thought this was a great idea for a milisecond and then I saw the tweet's coming through from status updates. Completely defeated the purpose of them for me. The important stuff was now hidden by tweets. And if you are connected with someone that tweets a lot, well just forget about looking at them altogether. Thanks for your comment!
@mikecassidyAZ Hi Mike - go get them bud! talk to you soon.
@wadvisor Simple answer: its simply a numbers game for a lot of people. I can see on Twitter and Facebook the appeal of getting the number 'up' but LinkedIn makes much less sense to me. Unless that is, you have every intention of exercising #6 and spamming your large 'database'.
I am a HUGE fan of collaboration, so I will often use my network is to ask an opinion or for help with something. I think its such a compliment when people ask for my help or advice and I love to return the favor (and get some great ideas and insight at the same time).
Thanks for taking the time to leave a comment and glad you enjoyed the article!
@seomilwaukee No a #LI fan eh?
@turnageb I agree with Christina if you are not taking extra effort to tell me who and why you want to connect with me then you are disrespecting my time.
BTW it is Bill Boorman, not Bob Borson and I and other have doubted the accuracy of the self study because we cannot view the data.
What works for one person does not mean it is a blanket for everyone.
@turnageb Would love to see that research! Do you have a link you can send me?
I will admit that I accept connections that use the default message but only if I absolutely know them. If it says something like 'we belong to this group here together', the chances of connecting drop off considerably. Do people find it risky not to accept the connection? Do you think you will be blackballed or your discussion ignored next time around because you didnt connect? While I did focus on the fact that we should not be sending these, how do we feel about accepting them?
Thanks for your comment and love that you use a customized message!
@turnageb agree with you on that one - I can see why the default message would get a better response - I think if people see a personal message they somehow feel as though they need to reply with something. Whereas the default message allows them simply to hit the 'accept' button and move on and not feel as though they need to reply because the sender sent them a personal message. Weird as it sounds - I think that's perhaps the reason behind it.
@AiDBusiness Yes but there are LinkedIn offenders and there are bots. Any thoughts on how to distinguish the two? About 2 years ago, someone brought these bots to my attention. They have pictures, job histories, they start discussions and they are fake. FAKE!
But we are talking about the real profiles here and the fact that they are incomplete. LinkedIn even provides a progress bar (top right of your profile while in edit mode) to let you know how much more you should add. Here is a tip and I am not the first to say it, but think of your profile on LinkedIn like your resume. Its a professional network and yes its cute that you have 3 kids and a dog, but say something about your career aspirations, what you have done and what you would like to do. And yes, please use good grammar and spell check (I love that LinkedIn has added this to the discussions!!)
Thanks for your comment! There is a lot of work to be done by professionals like yourself!
@MeghanMBiro I went along a couple of times but then I just didn't see the point. I get enough odd requests to add to my business twitter account as it is. And I don't get qualified leads or potential employers from them. Like you said, quantity.
@MeghanMBiro LinkedIn has become quite the rage for recruiters and for people looking for new opportunities (I thought it may have been heading in that direction as a primary focus about a year ago but doesn't seem to be the case). I wil say that the best advice for people on LinkedIn that are unemployed or employed unhappily is to let the recruiter find you. That's just my thoughts. Seeking out and attempting to connect with every recruiter is not going to be very helpful in the end and yes, as you said, you are not always in 'hiring mode or know the secret to get into every company'.
Glad you enjoyed the post! I felt much better myself after writing it!
@C_Pappas Oh, they aren't even sharing their own stuff. Just other inspirational or instructional articles from other people. Like I said, good content, I just don't care for someone who joins a group then floods the group 6 times in one day.
@C_Pappas@wadvisor What I learned from Viveka Von Rosen the @linkedinexpert is when you have a larger base of connections you will have a higher visibility and be able to have more 2nd and 3rd level connections you can reach out to. I always ask hmm "wonder how this could be of benefit" and if I do not know I ask a professional, teach me.
NO it has it's place for sure. Like twitter just haven't used it personally, outside of client work or testing, very much.
@indentmarketing It shouldn't be seen as a message that needs to be replied to in my point of view. It should be crafted in such a way that identifies the person and gives a short reason why a connection makes sense. Like this:
'Hey Mary, we met last week at the MarketingProfs Forum in Boston and loved our conversation about blah blah. Let's connect here on LinkedIn as another way to communicate and keep in touch.'
There. Done. No need to reply. Just a 'o ya, Mary, she was cool and very smart', hit Connect and your done.
@C_Pappas@AiDBusiness Are you saying there is a spell check now? I'm on LinkedIn every day I have not seen this yet. Ihave been asking for this a long time
@C_Pappas Flagging is a wonderful tool to take back the power from the bots. If you think somebot or some person is being inappropriate, don't wait for a moderator to flag them. Anyone can do it.
@prosperitygal I know exactly how that could benefit someone. If you are linked to someone in a group or via 1st, 2nd or 3rd connection, you can send them messages without actually connecting to them. Sales people like this for obvious reasons.
@prosperitygal@C_Pappas@linkedinexpert Of course I am not going to question the LinkedIn expert as she is right. However, a larger base works for everyone but is not a suitable solution for specific industries. A couple of reasons: 1) Specially for someone that doesn't target every industry or every person (Net worth of $25M+ and companies doing $25M+ in sales narrows the crowd significantly). 2) Also focusing in specific niches within those industries 3) If your 1st degree connections have 17,000+ connections each you really need 400 1st degree connections to get a large visibility for 2nd and 3rd. So I still don't see the need of connecting to everyone I meet. Unless I missed something here.
@C_Pappas@indentmarketing I don't mind needing to reply. Especially if I decide not to add them. It is professional to say why you don't want to connect. 90% of my connections are people I have worked with or are in my industry.
I don't need connections that I don't know.
@C_Pappas @indentmarketing Yes, that's a better way to do it - to the point and no reply expected.
@dreamcacther Just tried it and its no longer there. My guess is that is was on a previous version and during an upgrade, it was removed. Thought it was pretty awesome that discussions were spellchecked. They need to bring that back!
[…] 12 Most Annoying Things People Do On LinkedIn Christina Pappas share some of her favorite ways people mistreat LinkedIn. What's your experience been with LinkedIn? Source: 12most.com […]


text: Well located, well priced and clean. Given the price point of this hotel i'd expected to find it full of backpackers. And there was a Top Deck busload staying, however other guests ranged from 18y.o. to in their 60's. Very lean and tidy with a good, small range of services on site.


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text:
Respond to Review of Prinz Myshkin City
by leia
Review: It was our families first time to Munich and we were very happy to have successfully used the happycow app to locate this restaurant early in the day. We made a reservation for 6 pm. The lounge is large with comfortable seating and quite busy. This suited us as we have three children and did not want to be a bother to other diners as our children were the only ones in the restaurant. The menu had a variety of items and many vegan meals as well. The fresh juices were a hit even at 5 euros. There was a sushi bar which was lovely despite the nori being a little chewy. The food was delicious (especially after a week of navigating typical meat filled German/Austrian menus). The vegetables were fresh and the food was well prepared; it arrived on time. The server was polite and knew about the menu to help with decisions and offer recommendations. He even remembered our name when we returned for our reserved time hours later. My only real complaint was the price. Happy cow has 2 carrots for price, it should be 3. Most main meals were around 17 euros. This night out was 100 euros for my family of 5, normally in Europe we spend half that on supper.
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maksim chmerkovskiy
43 maksim chmerkovskiy Articles
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Their chemistry was undeniable from the first practice and in a hysterical and revealing interview on the finale episode of 'Dancing With The Stars,'… Read Article ▶
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This recipe was fabulous! I used black beans instead of the refried beans, which I mashed lightly with a potato masher. I used 1 lb of grass-fed organic beef and 1 can of black beans, drained. I also used 2 cloves of fresh garlic instead of the garlic powder. And instead of the pickled jalapenos, I used fresh roasted green chilies. I pan-fried instead of broiling and served open faced topped with a slice of jalapeno jack cheese, pico de gallo and sliced avocado...no bread, which cuts down on the carbs! FABULOUS and a huge hit with my family!
Southwestern Beef & Bean Burger Wraps
From EatingWell: January/February 2007
Kids and adults alike will love these quick, zippy burgers. The beans make the burgers a little fragile, so be careful when taking them off the broiler pan. Make it a meal: Serve a green salad and frozen mango slices for dessert.
24 Reviews for Southwestern Beef & Bean Burger Wraps
This was fantastic. I'm a fan of Eating Well and I like to regularly try out their recipes, and this was yet another home run. The refried beans made the lean meat extra moist, and the cilantro - lime - avocado mixture is a winning combination in my opinion. I served my wrap with salt & pepper baked Kettle chips. I will DEFINITELY be making this again - might even switch things up and try it with ground turkey or chicken!
I made these using 99% fat-free turkey instead of beef. They were phenomenal. They were not difficult to make and tasted so very good! These will definitely become a staple in my house!
So fast and easy to make. These were ready very quickly. Easy for my 4 year old to eat. Doesn't fall apart on him like a burrito would.
OMG!!! I love it, so quick and easy. great creamy texture in the spread that compliments the burger and crispness in the lettuce.


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People tend to check in during these times:
I was pleasantly surprised, however it may not be worth the price. I wish there was more info about how they source the meat.
Burgers a great...though a bit pricey
Bison Burger = EPICNESS!
They have the Terrapin veggie burger! Go Terps!
best burgers ever get the california berger
The most incredible burgers ever! Little pricy, but an awesome treat. I think my favorite burger is the "Blue Devil". I keep trying new burgers because they are all awesome! :D
If you like onion rings, get the black & tan onion rings. Also get crispy onions on your burger. Fantastic!
Burgers are worth the price and are massive.
Pretty much the best burgers ever.
Milkshakes are wonderful. Especially coffee!
They have two tasty veggie burgers.
Sun devil is amazing if you like spice
The Blue Devil burger is excellent
A little pricy, but try the elk burger for a new experience.
The burgers here are huge and very, very good. Can't go wrong getting dinner here.


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