February 8, 2010
OK, we finally got our ad copy approved by Google and it has word “iPhone” in it. We didn’t do anything fancy, just were persistent and Google caved in. The thing is however that we are getting miserable CTR on those ads. It doesn’t look that Google is good to advertise iPhone apps on it.
Now we are trying Microsoft adCenter. The CTR in Search will probably be low as well. The idea is to get somewhere on a Microsoft page with “OneNote” on it. This should be a relevant page for OneNote client for iPhone, ain’t it?
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Marketing | Tagged: AdWords, Google, iPhone, MobileNoter | 
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Posted by Oleg Kokorin
February 4, 2010
We tried advertising our app on AdWords and were immediately set back by Google. Turned out, they don’t let some trademarked terms to be used in the ad copy. Namely, we can’t use word “iPhone”. They neither allow “i Phone” or “i-Phones”, but you would expect this from Google.
This is obviously wrong, because it’s legal to use a trademarked term to describe product compatibility. And the sole purpose of using the word is to say that our app is designed for iPhone, nothing else.
Funny enough, we can use “Onenote” no problem, even though it’s a trademarked term too. So, Apple nowadays is really the Microsoft of 90s, the enemy of openness, competitiveness, trying to preserve the monopoly by any mean.
Leave a Comment » | Marketing | Tagged: AdWords, Google, iPhone | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
January 30, 2010
I was really looking forward to getting the future Apple tablet. Then at some point I thought: “it will be a cool device, but it will cost about $1000 just like everything from Apple, and it will probably arrive to the market somewhere late 2010″. So I chickened and bought a nice new netbook Compaq Mini 311c.
Turned out, I was all wrong: the iPad will arrive soon, it’s seemingly not overpriced, and it’s totally not cool. Let’s start by comparing iPad to Mini 311c and then see if the tablet is good for anything at all. I won’t compare GHz’s and GB’s. They are in the same price category, similar size, the tablet is slightly smaller and lighter. Let’s get down to consumer characteristics:
| |
Mini 311c |
iPad |
| Battery life |
6 hours |
10 hours |
| Camera |
front webcam |
none |
| Web surfing |
any browser, plugins, Flash |
basic Safari, no Flash |
| Apps |
anything goes |
AppStore only |
| Gaming |
real 3D games like COD6 run |
very basic |
| Video |
720p screen, 1080p HDMI |
standard |
| USB |
3 ports |
needs adapter |
So, I can use the Mini for web browsing, video chats, HD video, gaming. I can use iPad for lame web browsing, and for …. AppStore browsing. iPad is not a normal computer, is not a multimedia device, not a gaming device, not an eBook reader. To further add to the offence, it’s locked into the AppStore.
Obviously, Apple is up to something. They can’t just deliver a device, which is not good for anything at all. What they are trying to do is to invent a new product category. Something like “a household tablet to read e-magazines and for occasional web-surfing”. The fact that the category name is so long is a bad sign. It means they will have to educate consumers about how their iPad is nice and useful.
But it won’t help, because their product is very ordinary. With iPhone, it tooks others 2-3 years to deliver similarly cool devices. With iPad, it will be eaten alive by the competition this year.
Leave a Comment » | Marketing | Tagged: Apple, iPad | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
January 19, 2010
I enjoy reading about dubious startups raising more and more money on TechCrunch every day. How about a startup to burn through $6M to develop a customer support forum software? Basically, it’s the same thing you can achieve with free and open sourced phpBB or dozens of other forum packages like that. Noone will pay you for this guys.
Or how about burning $34M to develop software that lets you “monitor your brand on Facebook and Twitter” and “engage with consumers around conversations regarding a brand”? You really can’t make this stuff up…
Leave a Comment » | Startups | Tagged: investing, scam, Startup | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
January 16, 2010
Whoa, a month of no posts, what a shame. The most notable things that happened recently:
- We released a Wi-Fi version of MobileNoter. The Wi-Fi version doesn’t use a cloud server to sync notes between your computer and your iPhone. It looks like it is pretty popular among our users. We should probably have implemented the Wi-Fi version first.
- We are getting close to thousands of paying customers of MobileNoter. It’s nice considering that we started selling the application only 2 months ago.
- I went on vacations to Thailand for 2 weeks. Internet sucked big time in the location I was, thus no posts.
Leave a Comment » | OneNote on iPhone, Travel | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
December 7, 2009
I just found this beautiful article. In short, the figures are as follows:
May 2009: 900,000 users total; 12,000 paying users.
Nov 2009: 2,000,000 users total; 31,000 paying users.
The cost a user incurs is $0.09 per month.
A few observations:
- The user base growth is very solid. Going from 900K to 2000K in just 6 months is cool.
- Their conversion percentage is up from 1.33% to 1.50%. This is insanely important (unless the numbers were just rounded this way).
- They are loosing money: $4.50 * 12 * 31,000 = $1,674,000 income. $0.09 * 2,000,000 * 12 = $2,160,000 costs of serving the users. Total is ($486,000) annually.
- Those were just the costs of providing the service to the users. They also have user acquiring costs as well as development costs (to improve the service and to extend to other platforms). These costs are easily into $2-3M a year.
Note: I used $4.50 per month fee because it is $5.00 if you pay for a month. If you pay for a year, it’s $45/12 = $3.75 per month. Plus, payment processing is not free, especially for small transactions.
A few questions:
- Is Evernote a good business? Not yet. Even if they stop all development, their operating costs give them a fat red number.
- Will it become a good business? The trend is still not in their favor. However, even making losses, they might be eventually bought out by someone like Google, making a happy exit for the founders and VCs. It seems to be their strategy.
- How does MobileNoter compare to Evernote? I won’t share any hard numbers, but if we stop the development, we’ll be cash positive.
Leave a Comment » | Competition, OneNote on iPhone, Startups | Tagged: EverNote, MobileNoter, sales | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
