As of this exact moment, the TechCrunch site is definitely hacked. There is some offensive messsage at the top of the homepage. I’d post the screenshot, if it hasn’t contained lots of f-bombs. So, “turns out” LAMP isn’t more secure than Windows? 
TechCrunch was just hacked
January 27, 2010
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Uncategorized | Tagged: hackers, techcrunch | 
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Posted by Oleg Kokorin
Bill gives Facebook another try
January 21, 2010Turns out, Bill Gates started using Facebook (again) and also just started using his Twitter account, which was created half-year ago. My guess is he’ll stop using them both soon, OR will assign a secretary or PR person to handle it. These services might be good for him to encourage people to do more charity, but it certainly doesn’t require his personal involvement.
I don’t see any value in Twitter, and only limited value in Facebook (unless you are a student). It might be fun, but it also distracts you from real life. This endless stream of status updates and messages is just resembling spam. Any sane person avoids spam.
Leave a Comment » | Social networks | Tagged: bill gates, facebook, twitter | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
Raise more money, it’s never enough
January 19, 2010I 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
What happened recently…
January 16, 2010Whoa, 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
Evernote reveals their usage finances
December 7, 2009I 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
What do you do if your sales slump?
December 6, 2009We had a sales drop recently, due to the holiday and Black Friday that followed. It is natural for software sales to suffer during the holidays, especially for Productivity software. What can be done to prevent the slump or increase the sales during non-holiday days? There are a few simple and realistic things that lead to immediate increase in sales.
- Start (or increase your current) AdWords campaign. This is easy to do. It will cost money, but again it’s easy to track how much you spend on ads and how much revenue it brings in. As long as the cost of acquiring and keeping a new user is lower than the money you get from a sale, it works.
- Offer discounts via coupons, “bargain of the day” sites, or just old plain ”holiday” discount. This always works, but sometimes it can alienate your recent customers who didn’t get the discount, and it also teaches potential customers wait for next discount period instead of buying outright.
- Draw attention to you product or company by sending out a press-release or posting some cool controversial article. Sending out press-releases is next thing to spamming, so I don’t think this works very well anymore. Posting a cool article is a much better thing to do. And it has to be controversial to draw people’s attention.
- Run a contest or lottery with a meaningful prize. For example, if you offer software for a specific industry, it could be an industry specific gadget or book. This works very well, but it will cost some money, and most of the time your site doesn’t have enough visitors, so you need to advertise your event on other sites and it will cost even more money.
- You can always send people emails reminding about your great product and how it is a good time to buy it. I’m not talking about blind spam here. You need to build your own mailing list by giving people something good in exchange for their email address. It can be a free version of your product or a white-paper on the topic of their interest. This means that you should plan this in advance and work your way to creating a list of people who is interested in your product. It is therefore more of a marketing strategy than a quick “trick” to increase the sales, which is my topic in this post. So I will end the list here.
Leave a Comment » | Marketing, OneNote on iPhone, Startups | Tagged: MobileNoter, sales | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
People like our products
November 27, 2009It’s been only 2 weeks since we switched to paid subscription for MobileNoter, but we already have paying customers in hundreds of users. We plan to hit the “in thousands” milestone somewhere next year.
In addition to that, we released another product this week. Meet “My Office” – a service dedicated to independant consultants, who work for direct sale companies like Amway or Mary Kay. The service offers the consultants a simplified CRM, accounting, and personal schedule module. The service is in beta as of now, and it’s free. We plan to translate it into English and eventually other languages next year. We have two buttons on the site: Compliment and Complain. So far, people are clicking “Compliment” button much more than the “Complain” – this is a good sign!
Leave a Comment » | OneNote on iPhone, Startups | Tagged: MobileNoter, MoiKabinet, sales | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
Evernote just got $10m more to burn
November 18, 2009It’s all over the high-tech news, so I guess I can’t ignore this one. Evernote is kind of our competitor. Not exactly a competitor, because we are tiny (yet) and Evernote is probably #1 online note-taking software. Indeed, the main competitor for Evernote is Microsoft OneNote. OneNote is huge, but it’s totally locked into Windows platform. Even their upcoming clouded Office 2010 release won’t change that much. Microsoft stuff just doesn’t run well in other browsers. Sharepoint pages still don’t render anywhere except for MSIE. And when we take mobile devices, the browsers is not the best choice for good user experience. iPhone proves that – everyone creates native apps, because browser experience just isn’t that good.
So what we are going to do is to ride on the back of OneNote’s success and expand its reach into all other platforms that are not Windows. We are going to stick to this strategy and eventually displace Evernote as the #1 mobile and online note-taking software. What we don’t want to do is to burn money to embrace the platforms that are past their prime or just never going to be there, like Palm Pre. I won’t name some others to avoid controversy. So good luck to Evernote with burning more cash on the obscure platforms.
I will be posting more about Evernote and other competitors. Let’s consider this post as a disclaimer: we develop MobileNoter, which is a competitor to Evernote and other note-taking software. Thus, whenever I write on the topic, don’t forget that I’m biased.
1 Comment | Competition, OneNote on iPhone, Startups | Tagged: EverNote, MobileNoter, Startup | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
Is Amazon.com a good business?
November 12, 2009Our OneNote on iPhone software is doing very well for its first day of sales and it got me thinking about who else is doing very well. Amazon.com? Everyone knows this company. I personally have been buying from Amazon and I really admire it, just like millions of people out there. It must be a good business. They are the biggest online retailer, the 900-pound gorilla. So I took a look at their annual reports. They are available from their site, go to the bottom link “Investor Relations”. It’s not very easy to find the most important figures, but it’s not very hard either. I won’t tease you, here is the table of their annual profits (or should I say losses) for the years I was able to find:
| 1996 | -6 |
| 1997 | -28 |
| 1998 | -125 |
| 1999 | -720 |
| 2000 | -1411 |
| 2001 | -567 |
| 2002 | -149 |
| 2003 | 35 |
| 2004 | 588 |
| 2005 | 359 |
| 2006 | 190 |
| 2007 | 476 |
| 2008 | 645 |
Total: -$713,000,000.
As you can see, the great company had a glorious result for last 13 years. It has spent much more money than it earned. I won’t even go into stock prices and P/Es. Is Amazon.com a good business? I don’t think so.
Leave a Comment » | Startups | Tagged: Amazon, Startup | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
New release of MobileNoter is out there!
November 11, 2009I am excited about our recent release of the MobileNoter. Technically, it is an update for our iPhone app. However, it is a really major update, AND we offer a paid subscription now. Previous version was free, and “free” doesn’t count when we talk about product’s viability. Apple approved our update a few hours ago and we are already have paying customers – this is a good sign!
So it’s time to become serious about marketing. I don’t think our app will make into the Top 10 in its category any time soon, because it’s kinda niche app. On the other hand it’s not a throw-away app either, that is when an app is downloaded, run once, and happily forgotten or removed altogether. We’ll see how it goes and I will post about interesting discoveries we are sure to make.
Leave a Comment » | AppStore, OneNote on iPhone | Tagged: AppStore, iPhone, OneNote | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
