How LinkedIn Just Made 10 Million People Feel Special - Michelle Wetzler of Keen IO. M. Wetzler wrote this post on February 07, 2013 I’m rarely impressed by email spam, but LinkedIn is doing something brilliant right now. I just got an email telling me that I have one of the top 5% most viewed profiles in 2012. Of course I clicked that bright yellow Read More button. This took me to a lovely interface with interesting analytics content, and very easy way to tweet about how special I am.
Pricing Experiments You Might Not Know, But Can Learn From. Lots of entrepreneurs struggle with pricing. How much to charge? It’s clear that the right price can make all the difference – too low and you miss out on profit; too high and you miss out on sales. Don’t ask, can’t tell Asking people what they’d pay for and how much rarely works. For one thing people will tell you what they WANT to pay—which is obviously much less than what your product or service is actually WORTH.
When it comes to money, people are unable to predict accurately whether they’d pay or not. Also it’s worth remembering that people really don’t know how much things are worth, what’s a fair price (which is the reason TV-shows like “The Price is Right” can actually exist). William Poundstone, the author Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value says this: “People tend to be clueless about prices.
People are weird and irrational, and there’s much we don’t understand. Why does removing dollar signs from prices (24 instead of $24) increase sales? The Economist and decoy pricing Anchoring. An Autopsy of a Dead Social Network. Friendster is a social network that was founded in 2002, a year before Myspace and two years before Facebook. Consequently, it is often thought of as the grand-daddy of social networks.
At its peak, the network had well over 100 million users, many in south east Asia. In July 2009, following some technical problems and a redesign, the site experienced a catastrophic decline in traffic as users fled to other networks such as Facebook. Friendster, as social network, simply curled up and died. This is the company that famously turned down a $30m buyout offer from Google in 2003. (Friendster has since been rebranded as a social gaming platform and still enjoys some success in south east Asia.) The question, of course, is what went wrong.
They say that when the costs–the time and effort–associated with being a member of a social network outweigh the benefits, then the conditions are ripe for a general exodus. Of course, communities that are vulnerable in this way don’t automatically fail. IO - How LinkedIn Just Made 10 Million People Feel Special. Gabriel Weinberg's Blog.
My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups. This HN thread by the founder of Github on side projects got me thinking. You could make a strong argument that my most successful projects--NamesDatabase (my last startup) and DuckDuckGo (my current startup)--essentially started as side projects and, perhaps more interestingly, evolved from other failed side projects and startups. I thought it would be illustrative to enumerate my projects. I'm limiting the list to projects that I started (as opposed to consulting/affiliate gigs) and ones that I spent a significant amount of time on (as opposed to just a few weeks/weekends). BBS (1993-1995). Ran a BBS out of my bedroom. Forgot the name.
Yes, people would call into it in the middle of the night and it would make that modem sound. Update: more great comments on HN.