May 01

iStock_000000446664XSmall.jpgThere are a lot of parallels between wind sports and startups. One thing we’ve encountered lately with JumpBox is something I can only describe as the tendency to “fight the wind” in our desire to artificially accelerate the pace of adoption. Everyone who’s tried to wind surf for the first time falls into the trap of trying to muscle the sail into position instead of respecting the wind and working with it. You end up completely wearing yourself out on that first day. By day two you’re so physically exhausted that your only option is to learn to work with the wind.

I feel like we just woke up on day two with our startup. We work ourselves into a state of mental gridlock with all these “open loops” as David Allen calls them. And the reality is we’re doing fine and just need to continue to execute and lower our expectations of how fast we can realistically run given our size.

I would be curious to hear from others who are running a small business: a) do you find yourself encountering this same tendency? and b) how have you coped with it and do you have any reliable techniques to relax and “work with the wind?” We’re in an emerging space and we’re not for lack of a killer product at this point- we have incredibly positive feedback from everyone who uses our stuff. Our real issue is that we see such incredible opportunities and yet we can’t tackle them as fast as we’d like and the market itself is still in its infancy. On first glance it seems our greatest challenge is in spreading awareness, but in reality it may be more in developing patience and becoming comfortable with the natural pace of adoption.

Anyone else in the same boat (or on the same surf board)?

Apr 17

Check out this TED talk by Al gore on the global climate crisis. I just watched it and something hit me square in the face that I had not considered before. He reduced the entire solution down to one activity:

Put a price on carbon.

And that seems logical, right? Penalize the people who produce the most pollution. But what I had never considered is the secondary (and more important) effect this would have: by taxing carbon-based systems and making them financially less-viable, you attract entrepreneurs to create substitutes for a profit motive. You could be an entrepreneur with not one ounce of altruism and be motivated to solve the global warming problem simply because with the carbon tax, there’s now an opportunity to make money.

I had been thinking of the carbon tax purely as a punishment and had never considered the displacement this creates and the consequent incentive effect it has on pulling bright people out of the woodwork to solve the problem. Books like Freakonomics and playing with Kiva.org make me realize the solution to a lot of problems involves ensuring two things: that a) incentives are structured properly and b) entrepreneurs are aware of these incentives/opportunities and have the resources to go make money solving the problem. In hindsight this realization resolves a question that has been subconsciously nagging me: “Why are VC’s so bullish green technology?” It’s definitely not because they’re the most altruistic people in the world- it’s because they realize the magnitude of the opportunity as carbon-based fuels become impractical.

Can anyone think of a reason why the carbon tax doesn’t make 100% sense? AFAIK, the people that would suffer most are the Exxon’s of the world (but with a $500BN market cap I don’t have much sympathy). Everyone else (including me and my SUV) will be hit to a lesser extent- but we should be. I drive a big Tahoe now and I admittedly have some cognitive dissonance about this because I know that I’m contributing more to pollution than drivers of smaller vehicles. But at the end of the day, I don’t want a yugo or a hybrid. However, if a carbon tax made it financially painful for me to keep the Tahoe, I would probably get rid of it. For better or worse, practicality trumps altruism.

I saw a movie last week called the 11th hour – it was like Gore’s Inconvenient Truth in its mission to raise awareness of global warming. The trouble is, awareness is not the issue anymore, awareness of how to realistically act and contribute is. The idea of switching to CFC light bulbs just seems like a feel-good gesture that doesn’t truly help the situation. But implementing the Carbon Tax – now that makes perfect sense to me and is a real, actionable activity that I can get behind. It seems like VC’s with heavy investments in green tech would stand to benefit most from the carbon tax. I wonder if they have the wherewithal to organize and help in the lobbying effort…

If you’re interested in learning more about this stuff, here’s Carbon Tax Web Site.

Apr 15

I read a book on Adwords, watched most of the Google videos and have been tweaking our campaigns for JumpBox for the past 2wks. You can burn a lot of cash during the learning process. Here are ten things I’ve learned that will hopefully save others some time/money:

Custom-designed landing pages were actually detrimental (“jarring” effect)

This was completely counter-intuitive. Our original hypothesis was that it would be worth it to make a professionally-designed landing page stripping away most navigation choices because it would be more aesthetically appealing to a first-time visitor and better “corral” that person to the desired action. What we learned was that it had an adverse effect – conversion rates actually declined when we implemented these specially-designed pages. We achieved a better conversion rate by reverting to a standard page with all the regular look & feel and the same content. Our guess of what’s going on here is that having a landing page that looks nothing like what you get on the next click is either perceived as an ad or is just too visually jarring for the user. Visual consistency trumps design aesthetic and removing normal navigational elements yields no positive effect.

Fear of loss is a stronger motivator than promise of gain (“Fox news” effect)

This is something that my friend Dave Euse told me a long time ago and I’ve seen it confirmed first-hand with our adwords campaigns. While I’m not a fan of “Fox News” style scare tactics- it is more effective to say something like:
“What you don’t know about JumpBox could be costing you days of setup time.”
than something like this:
“You can save days of setup time with JumpBox.”
Think evening news segment teaser just before a commercial comes on. It’s a subtly different message but the idea is that people respond more to stop the prospect of losing $5 of their own money than to an equal opportunity of winning a new $5.

Web Optimizer is good for polishing but not sculpting (“bigger fish” effect)

Kimbro pointed this out and he’s 100% right- the Google Web Optimizer multivariate testing tool is helpful for fine-tuning messaging but it’s premature to use it until you have the fundamentals of the campaign ironed out. Until then there are bigger fish to fry in terms of getting the value proposition clear. We have an educational component to our stuff- the user doesn’t necessarily know how to describe their problem in terms that we can predict. The best thing to do in this situation is to forget about GWO until the point you have a good number of people already responding and then bring it in as an optimization.

Scientific method: control one variable at a time (“Apples to apples” effect)

This one is probably obvious but if you are trying to test a theory, don’t vary multiple elements at the same time. Control all the variables except the one you want to test. With Adwords there are many aspects of the campaign you can tweak and you may be tempted to vary multiple elements simultaneously to speed the testing process. Unfortunately the result will be that you’re unable to attribute the improvement or decline to a single variable when you do so. An example of this might be varying a headline while also changing the display URL – the effect from one may eclipse the other and hide minor effects. The other thing to keep in mind is you need to have a big enough sample size for your tests to be meaningful. There are plenty of free statistical significance calculators that will tell you if your results are truly significant.

The three phases of interaction: acquisition, conversion & retention

It’s helpful to think about the sequence of interaction in terms of these three phases:
Acquisition: the process of getting traffic to your site
Conversion: the process of converting those visitors to customers
Retention: the process of selling more stuff over time to your existing customers
Simple yes, but these are three independent activities with different challenges and different psychology. Thinking about them as three distinct activities will clarify what you need to be doing at each step.

Split test everything you do

Never stop split testing, ever. You should be running different flavors of your messaging in each of the above three phases. Google adwords has a built-in mechanism for running multiple variants of the same ad. Google web optimizer allows you to run multivariate and A/B tests on your site’s pages for the conversion process. And ideally you should be running A/B tests in the retention emails you send. I know Vertical Response is one service that supports A/B testing and I’m sure others do as well.

Analytics can help you visualize your funnel

You can see the click-path from both directions- from an entry page where the visitors went or from a final destination page and the various entry points that got them there. Make sure you have a google analytics account setup and integrated with your adwords and then go to the Content menu selection, click on the page you want to analyze and use the “Navigation Summary” and “Entry points” options. You should also ideally have conversion tracking set up on the thank you page of the intended action so you can tie specific campaigns and keywords to conversion.

Stumbleupon is a great way to get quick traffic for multi-variate testing

Stumbleupon is a firehose of semi-qualified trafic you can turn on at any time to expedite split testing. Keep in mind it’s blind traffic so it’s not a pure substitute to people that come actively searching for something, but it’s a quick way to accelerate the testing process. Have the Google Web Optimizer set up on the landing page and turn on stumble upon ads from an area of interest that most closely matches your target audience. You’ll get a flood of traffic very quickly and depending on how you set your tests up in GWO you’ll either see which version of the page or which combination of individual elements worked best. A/B testing produces a statistically significant result faster since they’re are fewer permutations. The other benefit of Stumbleupon traffic is the secondary wave of clicks that come from the social bookmarking component- you don’t pay for these so your paid campaign can actually seed an organic response if the page is well-received.

Dynamic text insertion

Contrary to what I thought, this is not just a technique relegated to the ebays of the world. These are the ads you see when you search for “steak knives” and see an ad that says “Buy steak knives on ebay.” Anyone can dynamically insert the search term into the text of the ad using this syntax:
{Keyword:search term substitute here}
The substitute word is used in the event that the search term is too long to appear in the ad. This tactic should be done in its own ad group and you should be aware that it generates a high volume of less-qualified traffic (make sure you have a tight daily cap on adspend and monitor closely when you try it). It also works very differently on content network vs. the Google search so you’ll need to experiment with it.

Crazy Egg can help provide clues to usage

Definitely try the free Crazy Egg service out on your landing page. It gives you a heatmap of user clicks and can provide interesting clues about how people are responding to your stuff. We learned the ineffectiveness of presenting a call-to-action too early in the dialogue before the user understood what we offer.

Other Resources


Here are some resources I used to get started: this Adwords book was a good primer- it’s by this guy Perry Marshall who really knows what he’s talking about. It had not just valuable info but it was motivating – all this stuff is useless if you don’t act on it. I posted my visual notes that give a good overview of the important takeaways from that book (I used this same style on the “Made to Stick” book and found it very helpful for retaining concepts). Google’s screencasts are a good starting reference but they’re a little slow – you might be able to figure it out faster via trial & error. Search for a local Adwords meetup in your city- I’m all for “high-bandwidth” face to face interaction in user groups for picking up tricks of the trade and getting answers once you have some experience and a list of questions.

I’m still extremely green to the whole Adwords game and making tons of mistakes as I go but hopefully this summary helps others who are just getting started. Improving conversion rate is crucial and our next big challenge now is to optimize our landing pages to better convert some of this traffic we’re now getting via Adwords. Minor improvements in conversion makes every bit of advertising you do more potent. In theory this process should reach a point where it’s a finely-tuned machine that accepts a dollar at one and and returns five at the other. I’ll report back with more lessons once we get it to that point.

Apr 11

The Google App Engine is the talk of the town this week giving developers access to Google infrastructure and Google customers. If you haven’t heard about it you may be an ostrich and need to read some of these. If you didn’t get one of the 10k beta invites, no worries- you can still play with it. We just made it significantly easier to tinker by releasing a JumpBox for the Google App Engine SDK. This is a freebie and it comes pre-registered so you download it and fire it up and you’re playing with App Engine in minutes. You can leave comments/feedback on it here. And this is our “official” announcement:

Google recently announced a new cloud based application deployment system called Google App Engine. We found this to be a pretty interesting system and since the SDK they released is Open Source we decided to put together a JumpBox for it.
It’s a great solution if you want to play with the Google App Engine SDK without really installing it on your system. It’s also perfect as an integration point for a small team working together on a Google App Engine project.

Google made it possible to build applications for App Engine using several different mechanisms and the JumpBox comes with CGI, Google Webapp and Django environments setup and ready for development. It’s also a really great way to just kick the tires of the different frameworks before committing to development.

Also, since this is a JumpBox our backup system is included which allows you to backup your source code and development data to network shares or Amazon S3.

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Apr 04

We recently launched a new subscription model for JumpBox that makes it essentially the Netflix of Open Source. JumpBox Open is a yearly subscription that gives the buyer access to every JumpBox in our Open Source collection for the next year. We’ve handpicked twenty-five of the most popular open source server apps including wikis, CRM systems, developer tools, bug trackers, CMS’s and made them super easy to use. They install in less than a minute on any OS and the experience is identical across all applications so it’s now trivial to try out five wiki’s back-to-back and use the one that’s most ideal for your situation.

I’ve been meaning to write more about what we’ve been up to but we’ve been wrapped up with this product launch and are finally coming up for air. We had the opportunity to announce JumpBox Open at the Under the Radar event in Mountain View, CA the other week. We were one of 32 startups that presented and it was great to meet a bunch of other founders. Julie from bub.blicio.us took a bunch of pictures and Vator.tv captured all the presos from the event. Here’s video of our five minutes of fame on stage:

I’m now digging into our google ads and landing pages and will have some thoughts to share shortly on what I’m learning from this process.

We’ve priced the JumpBox Open subscription at $199 introductory with the theory that the hours people save on just one application will justify purchasing access to the entire collection. We have some interesting infrastructure-type JumpBoxes in the pipeline that should make the collection make a lot of sense for people. Note: the pricing will be increasing as we build more value into the library, so if you like what’s in there now, lock in a subscription while it’s cheap.

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Mar 27

Two forces of nature give talks that are a must-watch for anyone who is looking to change the world:

Steve Jobs’ commencement address at Stanford:


Randy Pausch’s farewell speech at Carnegie Mellon:

If you ever have an either/or choice of gaining all the knowledge or all the motivation to do something hard, choose the latter because it ensures you will find the former. Both talks put the daily minutiae of stuff like the post below in perspective and replenish the spirit that they sap. Do yourself a favor and take the next 2hrs of free time that you have and watch both talks. Whatever you’re working towards I cannot think of a more productive way to spend that time. Be warned- you will have a tear by the end of Pausch’s talk.

BONUS: The minute you finish the video, when you have the most possible wind in your sails, take another five to open source your goals.

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