Jul 30th, 2010
by Justin.
Now that summer is here and wedding season is in full effect, I wanted to take a brief moment to announce some recent changes to The Wedding Lens.
New Design
Just to keep things fresh, we worked with Brad, our designer at Vanilla Green, to give the site a bit of a layout facelift. Many of the content elements on the public pages and in the album remain the same, but the background and container make it feel more like an elegant wedding album. There’s also a cleaner and more informative front page to explain why The Wedding Lens is the best way to collect thousands of photos are your wedding.
New Plans
Over the years we’ve gotten to understand our customers better and we’ve decided that a Free Trial model would be more fitting to the customer behavior. There’s now a Standard, Premium and Ultimate plan — each with varying levels of functionality and time commitment. The plans have been live for a few weeks now and it’s been a very positive response so far.
New People
John and I wouldn’t have been able to execute the new direction without the help of the newest addition to our team — Jenny Fong. Jenny’s joined us as our Marketing & Business Development Manager. She has an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and her BS from UC Berkeley (Go Bears!). Welcome her by leaving a blog comment!
Learn More
If you want to stay up-to-date on all The Wedding Lens news, here are a few links:
Remember, if you know someone getting married, let them know that The Wedding Lens is their best way to effortlessly collect and share full-resolution photos from their family and friends! 
Justin
Posted in: Announcement.
Tagged: redesign · the wedding lens
Apr 24th, 2010
by Justin.
It was more than 4 years ago that John and I quit our corporate jobs at Microsoft and HP to start our Two-Bit Operation. My how time flies (or does it). It’s interesting to think back to what you can learn in 4 years of college vs. 4 years of running your own business – one full of academic theory and one packed with practicality. One is not necessarily better than the other, but there were times these past years when I said to myself “I wish I paid more attention in <that> class.” But, alas, nothing good ole Google can’t teach us.
As a small business it’s always important to celebrate the milestones and that’s something we haven’t been good at, but we have definitely been better at celebrating than updating this blog. Some high level notables:
- Menuism.com continues to chug along profitably.
- The Wedding Lens continues to grow and have very happy customers.
- PickFu, being a lean service, is profitable on it’s own. We could use more growth here, so let us know if you have an ideas or want to try out a beta account.
- A couple side projects that bring in money but we’re not ready to share
What’s interesting about this milestone is that it feels like an eternity on the Internet and it’s surreal to watch other similarly aged companies fold due to lack of profitability or pressure from VC investment. People ask us if taking or not taking VC investment was a hard decision for us. In fact, it wasn’t a decision for us. Not taking it was sort of the point of the whole venture. We didn’t want to work for anyone else and we wanted to run our own business. Sure we haven’t had the budgets of our competitors but we get to work on:
Flexibility and owning your own destiny is an amazingly empowering feeling. Here’s to 4 more years!
Justin
Posted in: Announcement, birthday.
A few days ago we asked the supportive community over at Hacker News for some feedback on PickFu. We were extremely pleased to see that the overall sentiment was positive and that there were other entrepeneurs out there who have the same need for quicky and cheap polling. In the spirit of some of the comments, we now offer a few more options for the number of reponses (50, 100, and 200) and for some basic demographic targeting (gender and age group).
If you’ve got some new logos you need to a/b test go give it a try!
Justin
Posted in: Announcement.
Tagged: market research
May 24th, 2009
by Justin.
Some Background
In the past few months, I’ve received emails from both AddThis and ShareThis to use their respective sharing widgets on our site Menuism.com. Since we were already using AddThis, the first email came from ShareThis, asking us to try out their widget. Not having a great reason not, we gave it a try since it looked like they had some nice financial backing and might be evolving the product a bit more. A couple weeks after switching to ShareThis, I got an email from AddThis asking why we switched away from them. I gave him some of the reasons the ShareThis representative gave me about why they were better (newer faster widget, more personalization, etc.) and he countered with their focus on performance and providing an experience that is improved in a measured way. I decided to give AddThis another try with their updated widget. Soon after this switch I got yet another email from ShareThis asking why we took them off.
Man, these guys are good at keeping track of who’s using them. Time to decide, which is going to be? Both seem to have similar traffic levels and if you look at different websites and blogs the usage seems to be pretty split 50/50. I read a bunch of articles on “addthis vs. sharethis” and didn’t find anything overwhelmingly in favor of one over the other. So here’s my crude and unscientific approach to coming to an answer (you may not be convinced after reading this, but, hey, I tried and it’s good enough for me).
The Comparison
| Criteria |
AddThis |
ShareThis |
Verdict |
| The Buttons |
 |
 |
AddThis. While they’re both customizable, I find the AddThis button slightly more appealing since it uses the “+” sign instead of the weird boomerang and the small icons of recognizable sharing services makes it clear what the link is for. |
| The Widgets |
 |
 |
AddThis. I like the simplicity of AddThis and I like the categorization of ShareThis. This was going to be a toss up, but I think the clean list of links on the AddThis widget is just easier to scan and use. |
| Integration |
Simple. Post a HTML javascript snippet where you want the button to appear. |
More complex. While you can also just put the HTML javascript snippet in the place you want the javascript to appear, you get faster performance when you put some Javascript in the HEAD of the page first then make javascript calls when you want the button. |
AddThis. It takes zero though and 5 minutes to integrate AddThis, while it took me some time to figure out a way to get ShareThis to load without much impact to page load times.
Also, the AddThis widget auto-sense where the widget is in relation to the page edges so it’ll either open to the right, left, top or bottom of the button depending on what shows up best. For ShareThis, you have to be explicit about telling it how much offset to use left or right – that’s not fun.
Lastly, when you do the complex javascript integration sometimes the widget doesn’t load if your page isn’t fully finished loading which means clicking the link won’t do anything. |
| Performance |
.0176 shares per page view |
.00782 shares per page |
AddThis. |
| Reporting |
Each site you want to track needs a separate account. Tracks activity by type of sharing (bookmark, email, etc.) and also by content, sharing service and continent. |
Can track activity for multiple domains with a single account. Tracks not only widget activity, but also number of button views, times a widget was opened and also the ratio of both of those to page views. Also tracks top content and sharing services. |
ShareThis. It’s really nice being able to track multiple domains with a single account and the information about widget serves/page view is pretty interesting. |
| PickFu Survey |
Comparison of which button people would click on. |
Comparison of which button people would click on. |
AddThis. Feel free to conduct your own PickFu Market Research Survey. |
Final Verdict: AddThis
I found that AddThis had the best combination of ease of integration, ease of use from a customer perspective, best performance and least impact on the web page loading times. It’s a bit annoying to have an account to track reporting for each website you have, but it’s not that bad nor something I check that frequently.
Just my 2 cents for the whole addthis vs. sharethis comparison. Feel free to come to your own conclusions!
What do you prefer as a user? What do you prefer as a website owner?
Justin
Posted in: Analytics, Decision Making.
Tagged: addthis · bookmarking · sharethis · social media
They always say the adult industry pushes the Internet forward so I thought I’d take a look at the Friend Finder Networks (you know the Adult Friend Finder ads) SEC filing to see if there’s anything we can learn from their business, which did $243 million in revenue in 9 months in 2008. You can also read Andrew Chen’s take on it.
Their Users:
- Visitors (59 million/month)
- Anyone who visits, even if they don’t register.
- Referred through affiliates, search, word of mouth
- They believe they have large numbers because of their focus on continually enhancing the user experience and expanding the breadth of services.
- Members (4 million new registered users/month!)
- Those that have registered for free and given an email address
- Subscribers (1 million paid subscribers/month)
- 77.2% of revenue from subscriptions
- $19.06 revenue per subscriber
- 18% churn (# that cancel each month)
- Paid Users
- Users that pay for products/services on a usage basis.
- 19.6% of revenue
Their Foundations
- Content and services people want (sex sells): Face it, it’s true – there’s money in adult content. They also have “General Audience” sites (i.e. BigChurch.com, SeniorFriendFinder.com), and while they account for a small fraction of the traffic, these “General Audience/Non-Adult” sites account for 8% of the paid subscribers at $16.28/subscriber.
- Reliable revenue through paid subscribers: It’s nice when you’re users pay you for a service and you’re not reliant on advertising in come. Will we see more premium membership social networking sites in the future? What kinds of things would you be willing to pay for on a social networking website?
- Strong affiliate network: You’re in a strong position when you can enable other businesses to exist. Google Adsense is a great example of this. Their success is your success.
- Scalable Website Platform and Model: Apparently they can launch their “friend finder” network in any niche as demonstrated by the church and seniors segment. Even if each new niche doesn’t become a large percentage of total revenue, as long as each segment is profitable then can continue to roll out new niches and incrementally grow the business. In essence, creating a long tail 1 site at a time.
The Name of the Game: Conversions
The key for them to make money is to continually increase their conversion rates of free members to paid subscribers. Pretty much every business comes down to conversions – you just need to figure out what the right metrics are and maniacally improve them.
Some Interesting Risks They Note
- Decreased content contribution from users: This is a risk for many of the consumer-focused social networking sites today that rely on the uncompensated contributions of users. Since the value of the sites comes this free content any decrease would be an obvious blow. If financial compensation is needed to continue the contributions that’ll have a negative impact on the bottom line.
- Inability to diversify and innovate products & services: There’s always new competitors adding the latest bells and whistles and if your site doesn’t keep up then users may leave. That doesn’t mean you have to implement everything under the sun, but you need to at least make sure the majority of users have their needs met – and those needs do change and grow.
Notable Social Networking Features
- Loyalty Program: Give points to users for participating on the site and allow users to redeem them for things like upgraded memberships or more prominence in searches. This sounds like a great way to incentivize users to contribute content.
- Cupid Reports: Automatic notifications of potential matches when the member joins the site. This sounds like a great way to push interaction amongst members.
Interesting Metrics
- # of customer service requests
- # of user actions (images/videos uploaded, messages sent, etc)
- referring link/domain, traffic source
- e-mail domain
That’s all for now. It’s always neat to peek under the hood of another business to see what they’re focused on and what they’re worried about. I found the couple of risks I noted to be particularly interesting.
Any thoughts? What risks are you worried about? Are you tracking the right metrics?
Justin
Posted in: Business Plan, Learning.
Just to keep things fresh, we worked with Brad, our designer at Vanilla Green, to give the site a bit of a layout facelift. Many of the content elements on the public pages and in the album remain the same, but the background and container make it feel more like an elegant wedding album. There’s also a cleaner and more informative front page to explain why The Wedding Lens is the best way to collect thousands of photos are your wedding.
John and I wouldn’t have been able to execute the new direction without the help of the newest addition to our team — Jenny Fong. Jenny’s joined us as our Marketing & Business Development Manager. She has an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and her BS from UC Berkeley (Go Bears!). Welcome her by leaving a blog comment!
