How to Start a Two-Bit Operation: Small Business Tips

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

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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

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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

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I can’t believe it’s been 3 years of entrepreneurship.  It continues to be an experience I cherish and whole-heartedly recommend.  Being your own boss and having the flexibility to work on what you want, when you want and from where you want really is priceless.  

2008 brought some great new milestones for us:

• Redesigned Menuism and got it to a nice level of profitability.
• Got The Wedding Lens up and running with a professional design after soft-launching in 2007. Did you know what we’ve stored over 50,000 photos for wedding couples with some couples hitting almost 2,000 photos for their wedding!
• 1st full year of pay from our revenue-generating properties (no consulting necessary - yay!).
• Launched PickFu in less than 2 weeks.
• Launched the Greener Good blog.
• Joined forces with Chuck Templeton to form Delta Beans, LLC, the new holding company for all our properties. 

All in all a great year!  While our properties are now owned by Delta Beans, the two-bit blog will stick around as way to continue to document the experience.  Each day always brings more learnings as we try to grow and juggle an increasing number of projects.  

Personally, here are some goals I have for 2009:

• Document the startup/entrepreneur experience better.  I’m tossing around the idea of doing this in a wiki/e-book format. 
• Be much greener.  Greener Good helps with this.
• Eat less meat and be healthier. 
• Read more.  Books, not blogs.

I’m not even going to try to promise blogging more since I don’t want to make a promise I can’t keep, but you can always connect with me on Twitter and I’ll try to do better about blogging :). 

Have a great year!

Justin

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As an entrepreneur, there are many times when you want to get some feedback on something you’re working on or planning to work on.  It might be the name of your new company, the strategic direction of your products, or even just different versions of ad copy or images.  Sure you can annoy your friends with emails or go to a coffee shop and ask people, but in either scenario you’ll be getting a pretty skewed sampling and wasting your time.  

What if I told you that you could get 50 answers to your question in a matter of a couple hours, complete with explanations and demographic info?  All for just 5 bucks. Would that interest you? 

If it does, then PickFu is for you!

PickFu is our latest little project.  It’s a simple service that gives you cheap & instant market research into the general Internet-using population.

If you want to learn more, check out the website. the suggested uses, or the demographic info of our users. 

You can also leave a comment if you want be considered for our Beta program.  Beta users get 5 free questions - that’s a $25 value!

We’d love to hear any feedback you have on the service!

Justin

An example of doing a simple A/B test

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