This episode became an instant classic. The quotes from it will be repeated for years.
Here it is: http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/267112. Made me ROFL. I mean it actually, literally did. Facebook, Farmville, chatroulette… The Mad Money and TRON touches are a masterpiece.
P.S. Have you been to the chatroulette? The South Park guys do NOT exaggerate about it.
1 Comment | 
Social networks | Tagged: chatroulette, facebook | 
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Posted by Oleg Kokorin
Only a few days ago I discussed the idea of companies using people’s social graph for mass-scale marketing, and here comes the news: Apple is going to do just that in iTunes. This is huge. It will add more power to Facebook in their quest to become the world largest ad platform.
Leave a Comment » | AppStore, Marketing, Social networks | Tagged: facebook, iTunes | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
It is probably not news for anyone who’s been in the AppStore business long enough… My friends, who develop iPhone games say that Saturday is a huge spike in downloads. Sunday is good too. If your app gets into the “new apps” list on Saturday, it’s likely to make some buck, even if it is going to be buried in the 500th spot in the “top downloaded apps” list eventually. MobileNoter is Business/Productivity software. Weekends and holidays are not good for us. Wednesday is one of the best days for sales for Business and Productivity. Luckily, our business model does not rely on bored people who would download and try anything for a few minutes of entertainment. Even though it’s not in any of the Top 10 list, people do find, download and buy our app.
Leave a Comment » | AppStore, Marketing | Tagged: apps, iPad, iPhone | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
It’s interesting to see when the brick-and-mortar companies will start actively use people’s social connections. There are so many examples how it can be done.
1. Many mobile network carriers have plans with one or more “favorite numbers”. When I make a call to one of these numbers, the call is cheaper or entirely free for me. Why not offer me to make all my Facebook connections “favorite numbers”? Make them cheap to call if they are with other carrier and free to call if they are on the same carrier. It’s an incentive for all of us to stick with one carrier.
2. When I buy a vacations tour, why not offer me a discount if I make all of my connections know what agency I used for that? And if anyone from my connections buys at the same agency later, offer more discount or some bonus points? Same goes for anything, like when one buys movie tickets, insurance, or clothes.
The key here is to create incentives for people to promote products and services to their social graph. The reward should be paid for actions (my friend also bought certain something), not for clicks and views. When companies start doing that, they won’t need any other advertisement. Facebook will be the major ad platform of the future, not Google.
1 Comment | Marketing, Social networks | Tagged: facebook, Google | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
Evernote released a decent application for iPad. However, a much more interesting thing about them is that they got their software pre-installed on certain Samsung Android phones, and there are people who integrate their software with Evernote through Evernote API. That’s really impressive.
1 Comment | Competition, iPad and other tablets | Tagged: EverNote, iPad | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
So, the iPad is out. MobileNoter has been updated for iPad, so we got into the grand opening. We see a significant spike in downloads of our app, even though it’s definitely not mind-boggling. This is understandable, since there are not too many devices sold yet.
I started to think more favorably about the iPad. It seems that it will provide everything most people really need from a computer. What people need? A daily fix of Facebook, some games, YouTube, and maybe some news. iPad is great for that.
Leave a Comment » | AppStore, OneNote on iPhone, iPad and other tablets | Tagged: facebook, iPad, MobileNoter | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
I found an insightful discussion about SO/SE (StackOverflow/StackExchange) business model and going for VC money on 37signals. It looks like everything has been said, and the outcome is just remained to be seen. Some key points well noted there were:
Leave a Comment » | Startups | Tagged: StackExchange, StackOverflow, venture capital | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
What happens when you have a great knowledge-sharing site, where people can freely ask questions and other people are willing to answer them?
Let me ask again, what if you have “pioneered a unique web service that offers its members fast, qualified answers to questions … from a network of qualified technology experts”? And not just that, you also have a “patented knowledge-sharing process, combined with the advantages of the Internet”? And if it’s not enough, let’s imagine for a moment that you “received a $5 million first round investment commitment from <drum-roll> J.P. Morgan Capital“?
Well, mostly likely you end up being www.experts-exchange.com. The text in bold above is quoted from the site and from a Business Wire article.
The company is 14 years old now. It’s an eternity by the internet standards. The site was once the largest network of qualified technology experts, or so they claim. What lessons can we learn from its fate?
First, a few observations:
1. Is its traffic going up or down?
2. How does it compare to competition?
3. Was there an IPO or sale to a strategic investor?
I couldn’t find any traces of it in the internet. OK, this is certainly not a hard fact, and if you send me a link about the event, I’ll update the post accordingly.
What can we learn? Perhaps, that Q & A sites are too easy to build (say hi to StackExchange!). That the competition in the area is too fierce. That even patented IP and “smart money” from the investors won’t let you scale the business enough. You may be the leader one day, and a new kid on the block leaves you biting the dust the next day.
Leave a Comment » | Social networks, Startups | Tagged: StackExchange, StackOverflow, Startup, venture capital | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
The question of whether a StackExchange-based site can generate a lot of revenue and my answer to it lead to a heated discussion on the OnStartups Answers. So I decided to estimate what kind of revenue StackOverflow actually generates. Apparently, it’s enough to try to go to VCs, but not enough for a self-sustained growth. Luckily, it is relatively easy to estimate.
Disclaimer: the following calculations are unproven, non-scientific, and cannot be used as a financial advice.
Despite a good and long list by Alex Lam of potential revenue possibilities for StackOverflow, they make money only via paid job posts and site ads (rectangle banner in the right column and sponsored tags).
1. Paid job listing is very easy to calculate. They have about 8-9 new job posts a day. One costs cool $350. So let’s estimate it at 9 * 350 * 30 = $94,500 per month.
2. Ad revenue is hard to estimate. Let’s start with the 26M pageviews per month they claim to have. A lot of these pageviews don’t carry any ads at all: pages like About, FAQ, list of users, etc.
2.1 I would take 80% are ad views and 20% non-ad views. This gives 20,800,000 pageviews with ads.
2.2 The ad inventory is not sold out. Every now and then they display an internal ad – ad for job.stackoverflow.com. To make matters worse, the ads are geo-targeted, showing different ads for different countries. This means that ad inventory and its sold out ratio is different for every country. My tests showed it is about 75% for USA and 45% for India and Russia. Let’s take these figures and assume 75% rate for highly ad-targeted countries and 45% for the other countries.
2.3 My estimation is that half of pageviews go from highly ad-targeted countries and another half from the other countries. Originally I thought that low ad-target countries would make most of the pageviews. However, I browsed through the list of registered users and was impressed with the big number of USA, UK, Australia, Canada users. So let’s take 50% – 50% split, which gives average of 60% sold out inventory ratio. Thus, only 12,480,000 pageviews carry paid ads.
2.4 Now the trickiest part, CPM – the cost per 1000 impressions. fabien7474 came up with roughly $5 CPM for StackOverflow and I tend to agree, not going into details.
Drum rolls: the estimated banner ad revenue is $62,400 per month.
2.5 There are also sponsored tags that display ads as well. I don’t think those are sold on CPM basis, and hardly a lot of people click those tags anyway. Also, consider that few tags are sponsored so far. A week ago I saw a bunch of tags sponsored by Adobe and them are gone. Let’s add ballpark $10,000 for the tags.
The total revenue is $94,500 (for job posts) + $72,400 (for other ads) = $166,900 or $167K per month.
A few observations:
In the next post I will go through competition and examples of similar sites to get the whole picture…
Leave a Comment » | Social networks, Startups | Tagged: StackExchange, StackOverflow, venture capital | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
If you got a startup with a brilliant idea and you think that all you need is a bit of VC money to get off the ground, think again. According to a recent study, about 41% of startups believe that they qualify for venture capital money. At the same time, VCs indicate that they go through about a hundred of business plans to make one deal. That is, fewer than 1% of startups are considered as venture worthy by the money people.
In other words, the businesses grossly overestimate their ability to raise capital. “Grossly overestimate” is probably not good enough to describe the 41% vs 1% discrepancy.
And if you are not an average native Silicon Valley grad (like me), the chances are even worse. Says Vivek Wadhwa, former entrepreneur: Despite having co-founded a software company that we took from startup to $120m in revenue; profitability; and IPO in a record five years, I couldn’t get Research Triangle Park (RTP) VCs to even return my phone calls when I was ready to start my second venture. I later found out why: “my people” <Indians> were great at mathematics and made great engineers, but didn’t make great CEOs — “we” didn’t have the necessary management skills, didn’t like diluting our equity ownership by raising venture capital, and couldn’t “fit” into the rough-and-tough American business-management culture. That’s what one RTP VC told me over lunch, to explain why his firm wasn’t inviting me to pitch my business plan. They were very busy and had to be selective in who they met.
Leave a Comment » | Startups | Tagged: Funding, venture capital | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
