Scaling Versus Scoring

Jason Calacanis has a very interesting new post up that talks about the tension between building out infrastructure to scale a business and introducing features that make people want to use your product/service in the first place.  Calacanis discusses it as the CEO wanting to announce cool new stuff while the CTO is not sure the infrastructure can handle the crush of people wanting to use the new feature—he uses Twitter as a possible example.

But I think this could be a post about the tension in general when you run a business—how much you promise vs. what you can deliver right now.  On the tech side, the question is whether your software/hardware will hold up.  But think about very non-techie businesses and a similar theme emerges. For example, a small ad agency pitches a big client, gets the work and quickly realizes it doesn’t have enough people to do the job.  In addition to the problem of finding the people,  there will be the issue of paying them, as the new project might promise mounds of money in the future, but will completely drain cash flow today. From the outside you see an agency that just landed a big client and is going places. From the inside you see an agency that might go broke before it ever gets the work done that would catapult it to a higher level of success.

It’s sort of the classic entrepreneurial bootstrap story—overpromise and then stress out on how to deliver. If you deliver, you get the rewards. If you don’t deliver, you’ve disappointed users/clients, and you might destroy your reputation before you even have one.

One thing I’ve always enjoyed about being my own boss is that I no longer feel that dread on Sunday night that I have to work the next day.  I think the entrepreneurial tension is something that drives you to want to work, because it’s an exciting challenge, even if it’s more stress than might be healthy.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Disney and the Details

My family went to Disney World as part of our spring break vacation.  I don’t particularly buy the whole “magic” of Disney—it’s an interesting enough place, an impressive business success, but I didn’t spend a lot of time oohing and aahing over anything.  Granted, my kids’ ages kept us completely in the Magic Kingdom, so I can’t speak to the place as a whole, and I did LOVE the Mickey’s Philharmagic 3-D movie. If you’ve never quite understood the hubbub over 3-D, that movie will show you, and I hear Disney has other 3-D movies in other parks that are pretty awesome too.

Anyway, since I wasn’t so taken with the magic of Disney, why am I wasting time writing about them? Because I was particulary impressed with one aspect of Disney, and it illustrated why parents shell out the big bucks to bring their kids there.

My son has certain food allergies that are often difficult to explain to restaurant waiters & waitresses. They don’t understand why his hamburger can’t touch the bun, for example. They’ll come to the table with the hamburger on the bun and when we tell them he can’t have it (which we already made clear when ordering), they often think they can just take the burger off the bun and everything’s hunky-dory, not understanding that the contamination has already occurred.

When we sat down at a Disney restaurant and looked over the menu to see what would be OK, a waiter came to our table. We explained our son has allergies, and he immediately said “I’ll have the chef come talk to you.”  Which is exactly what happened.  The chef showed up, made sure he understood the issues, offered some suggestions on dishes they could prepare that weren’t shown on the menu, and even came back a second time with a box to show us a gluten-free product we’d never heard of. It felt great to be taken care of, to not have to worry whether the food coming out was going to be OK.  And it also gave us a more nutritional option for our son than we usually have when eating out.

So, while I may not admire the magic, I admire the attention to detail.  And I understand why Disney succeeds in getting people to return repeatedly. It’s often the little things that make people return to you for business, and I think this one is a great example.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Looking for Cash, and How to Grow in the Meantime

In an ideal world, Bessed would grow its human-powered search engine as follows: hire roughly 80-100 editors who churn out more and more search results pages each day in order to reach a critical mass that makes Bessed a trusted resource for the vast majority of searches that people do.  (To reach that critical mass would take about three years by my  estimates.)

One of the great things about having this many editors devoted to search would be that Bessed could be timely on searches that change often due to frequent news, while also fleshing out the “long tail” of searches—those thousands of searches done each day on topics/companies/people that do not need frequent updates.  The combination of the two would create a tremendous mass of search results that are spam-free, timely, and accurate.

Unfortunately, to do it right requires a lot of money, much more than we have.  And my casual talks with investor types thus far have basically led to the same conclusion—no money until you show some traction, meaning a certain traffic and/or revenue level.  This is especially true in that Bessed does not have a management team with a home run under its belt.  Hit a home run and investors are more likely to back you next time, because, of course, they’ve seen you hit a home run.

So, toward that end, we at Bessed are going to shift our focus a bit.  Instead of trying to be all Bessed could be if done on a wider scale, we are going to focus on the reality of what we can actually accomplish on a smaller scale, with the intention of going bigger once we’ve proven ourselves.

How does that play out?  Less of a focus on timely events.  Less focus on entertainment, politics, etc. and more focus on the long search of what people actually “need.”  In other words, you might “want” to read about Britney Spears, but you “need” information on finding a job or what the explanation might be for that pain in your left ear.

We are going to spend much less time on updating the daily ephemeral “events” and more time on the timeless searches that mean long-term traffic and, most important, higher revenue potential. We need to show more progress on a small scale, and I believe this is the way to accomplish that. We’ll see how it goes.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Ask the Wizard

I’ve already forgotten where I read about it, but I found the blog of Dick Costello, the founder of FeedBurner (which does something with blog feeds), and it’s really good. It’s especially good if you are a startup trying to understand the whole angel/venture capital game, so take a look if that’s you.

Zink – A Life Changer?

Most new ideas are small, incremental steps forward, or built for a limited audience. This is especially true of many of the Web 2.0 stuff being launched these days, most no more than “widgets” that a relatively small band of hardcore techies have interest in.

Zink is different.

Zink stands for “zero ink.” It lets you print color digital images without ink cartridges or ribbons.

Here’s how it works: Zink is really a special paper that has dye crystals embedded into it. The printer then heats up the paper in a way that it brings out the colors in the shape of the images on your photo. You have to buy the Zink paper for it to work and I think you need a special printer that is compatible with the paper.

This isn’t all ready for you to go out and use, but the point is the technology is there. Now it’s just a matter of getting it into the market. And there’s absolutely no doubt that people want printers that don’t force you to continually buy ink—everyone knows that’s where the real cost of printing lies.

I have no idea about the quality of the Zink images. It might suck. But, even if it does, if the technology has reached this point, it will continue to be refined until it’s the standard. So, no more ink for printing your photos.

Now, when are they going to make this happen for my document printer?

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

GoodStorm’s MeCommerce

In thinking about the business model for Bessed, I’ve been considering alternative revenue sources in addition to advertising. One of the things I’ve been thinking about is teaming with retailers and doing the affiliate-type situation in which ads are placed and you’re only paid if a click-through results in a direct sale. I’m not a fan of doing this, but the strict ad model is somewhat difficult, so I’ve been thinking that if a partnership presented itself that would result in a decent enough cut of sales, it could be worthwhile.

I read today on TechCrunch about GoodStorm’s new service which is actually not relevant to us, but the post did lead to a mention of their earlier announced service MeCommerce.

To some extent MeCommerce is just like those Amazon ads you see left and right on content sites, but the promise is that you would get paid a greater percentage of the sale—half of the profit on each item, although I don’t know exactly what the profit itself is in order to figure that. Regardless, I’m assuming it would be a better % than Amazon.

In addition, MeCommerce is supposed to let visitors buy an item without leaving your site, which is neat.

So I signed up today to test it out and see if it might be worth exploring.

I couldn’t get anything to work. It told me that I could zero in on keywords that would then produce products suited to those keywords, but when I put in the keywords, it told me there were no results. Even for the keywords that they themselves suggested as possibilities, I got no results. I was using Firefox—is it maybe an IE product only?

All I know is, it didn’t inspire confidence. I would want the revenue share, but also greater reliability. Maybe someone from GoodStorm will see this and give me a heads-up on what I was doing wrong. For now, though, it doesn’t seem to be an option.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Making It Relevant

Seth Godin, who I link to often enough that I’m entering stalker territory, has a post that’s simple yet worth remembering, titled Who Wants a Prize Like That? The basic message is that in promoting your work it makes sense to market in a way that is relevant to your target audience—in his example, the Thriller Readers Newsletter has a sweepstakes to win 150 “thriller” books signed by their authors if you sign up for their newsletter. Not cash, not an iPod, but a prize that that particular audience would crave.

There’s nothing colossal about that point, but it’s still worth noting.

Of course some businesses lend themselves to this point better than others. If you sell snowboards, it’s not hard to figure out what some relevant marketing angles might be. You think about what snowboarders might be interested in and follow the trail, so to speak.

But use that same logic for auto insurance—if you sell auto insurance, go where the drivers go? Hmmm… driving isn’t exactly a niche activity. Everyone needs auto insurance, but no one likes it and it’s not like marketing to auto enthusiasts would really be targeting your audience. Car enthusiasts like driving, not buying insurance in case of an accident. They want sleek design, not an insurance statement.

So what could companies that serve a general interest (or necessity) do to stand out, to be relevant? That’s a tougher question. Maybe they target their most profitable potential customers first? For instance, would Allstate or Progressive be wise to target Mommy drivers who are less likely to drive recklessly by offering free car seats to new Moms if they choose their particular insurance? That’s one way to go about it. Find out who are generally your most profitable or most loyal customers and target them first, with advertising or giveaways relevant to them. Do this in a few niches and your big general-interest business can be relevant in your most important customer markets.

By the way I have no idea if mommies are really safer drivers than anyone else, just guessing.

What can your company do to market relevantly to your potential customers? (By the way I have no idea if “relevantly” is a word.)

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Should Disney Open the Floodgates?

Steve Rubel has a post today about Disney overhauling the Disney.com site. Rubel’s reaction is that Disney should be opening up more of its content to be hacked and mashed up if it really wants to take its interaction with online customers to a new level.

I think this is an interesting question for both Disney and other companies that own content that others want to mess with. On the one hand, sure, you want your audience to use your content in new and interesting ways. But, at the same time, you created that content, it has value, and giving it over to those who did not create it but want to use it as raw materials for their own works may not be easy, and it may not be wise.

This isn’t necessarily a new question. The Grateful Dead encouraged concert bootlegs when the recording industry wanted only official releases. Rap used samples from both hit songs and obscure songs as spare parts in creating a new style of music.

But just as artists like the late great James Brown felt that they weren’t getting paid for having their work sampled, media companies aren’t necessarily keen on giving away their content to be monkeyed with, especially if the result is something that someone else profits from while they don’t.

The arguments for opening the floodgates and allowing greater sharing of copyrighted work is that it enhances the brand, possibly bringing your content to an audience that wasn’t aware of it, or giving stale content new life. These arguments make sense, but everyone’s pretty familiar with Winnie the Pooh. He doesn’t really need brand extension, or need to have new life breathed into his brand. The kids are still feeling him. So, what would be in it for Disney in allowing someone to mashup Pooh eating some yummy hunny with the voice of Brad Pitt in Fight Club saying “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.” I’d find that funny, but it’s hard to make the case that it makes me feel more fondly toward Pooh Bear.

I just read Wikinomics (review here) and was glad to see this issue brought up. Because I think it’s great if content creators want to let their audiences interact with their work in new ways, but there also seems to be a feeling by some that they should, as if to defend your right to keep your content in the form that you created it is somehow wrong or pigheaded.

I’m talking about this from a business perspective, but even from an artistic perspective I think it’s important. If an artist has created a work that he/she is proud of, and if that artwork is somehow the realization of a vision that the artist feels he/she successfully brought to life, isn’t it natural that the artist might feel unhappy if it is twisted into a new shape? Should the Rolling Stones really desire to see Sympathy for the Devil mashed up with a Carrie Underwood song just because someone who may be a fan of theirs thinks it would be cool (or ridiculous, which itself can be cool)?

I’m all for social media and using old things in new ways, but I think the whole “content wants to be free” thing is at times simply justification for stealing. If companies and artists want to share, great. If they think it can help their bottom line, super. But should they feel compelled to share? I don’t think so.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Book Review: Wikinomics

As founder of Bessed, a human-powered search site that encourages visitors to shape search results, I was excited to get an advance copy of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. With me they’d just be preaching to the choir, but I was ready to hear the sermon.

The premise of Wikinomics is simple: the more your company lets outsiders in, or even turns the company over to the masses, the more new ideas are generated, the more new products are developed, and the more problems are solved. On the flip side, however, if your company wants to make money, you need to think long and hard about how open-sourcing fits with your business model, or figure out a business model that can take the fruits of mass collaboration and fashion saleable products and services around them. The potential is huge, and the risks may be fewer than you think.

The first thing that pops into your head when you hear Wikinomics is probably Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit (although don’t be surprised if your edits don’t last long). Wikipedia is the ultimate example of using the knowledge of thousands of diverse people to create something exceedingly useful—and something that even a large team of researchers couldn’t have created through decades of work.

Wikipedia is not a for-profit company, however. So, while it’s a great example of what can be accomplished, it’s not a great example of what can be accomplished at a profit. Luckily, Tapscott and Williams attack the question of “how can this make us money?” through the discussion of several business frameworks. These include:

• Peering (indirectly building business through participation in open-source projects)
• Ideagoras (marketplaces where businesses can post their R&D needs to the masses and reward the problem-solvers, or offer up their unused inventions that would otherwise lie dormant and in secret)
• Embracing the Prosumer (encouraging/supporting customers who “hack” your products, creating new features or uses that your company would have never thought of on its own)
• New Alexandrians (breaking down the proprietary walls in the sciences, namely in the fight against disease)
• Platforms for Participation (opening up your technology to allow others to create or even profit from its use, which may add to your bottom line and/or strengthen your brand)

Tapscott and Williams use many specific examples, from IBM’s contributions to building the free software Linux to Proctor & Gamble’s goal to outsource half its R&D, to Merck releasing thousands of human gene sequences to the public domain. What’s nice about the many examples the authors chose is that they aren’t all technology companies, proving that this isn’t just an IT phenomenon. (In fact, the book opens with a story about a very old-school industry, gold mining—Canadian company Goldcorp made its maps and research public, and outsiders very successfully pinpointed where more gold would be found.)

I was also glad to see the book acknowledge the huge issue associated with putting intellectual property in the hands of the masses. If your company spent money to create it, why and under what circumstances should some or all of it be freely shared? That’s the question any company who wants to profit from the wisdom of the masses (or that sees its business model threatened by it) needs to answer.

I had a few quibbles with the book. Neither its “Global Plant Floor” nor “Wiki Workplace” sections offered especially new ideas or insights—globalization isn’t new, collaborating and soliciting ideas in the workplace isn’t either, even if new technologies offer some slightly new spins on these phenomena. I also found myself daydreaming while reading the book. Sometimes this was because an idea or example made me start thinking about how to use it in my own business. Other times, unfortunately, I slipped off when the writing got overly jargony, saying little with a lot of words.

That aside, Wikinomics is an important book for any company or business person trying to understand how to thrive in an age where traditional top-down, command-and-control structures are being aggressively challenged. Mass collaboration may be a flash in the pan, but as some have already found out (i.e., the record industry), ignoring it could leave you burned.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Bessed Versus Wikiasari

So there’s been a big hubbub this week about Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales getting ready to launch a new search engine, thus far dubbed Wikiasari, although that will not be its name in the end. It’s unclear exactly what Wales envisions for Wikiasari, in fact he doesn’t seem quite clear on it himself, but the obvious conclusion is that he wants to get volunteer users to help create search engine results in the same way that volunteers now create Wikipedia.

With Bessed having just begun and having a different but still-in-the-ballpark model, I thought I’d look at what we are doing in comparison to what Wikiasari may be doing, and the pros and cons of each.

Bessed is built on WordPress. We “seed” topics/keyword phrases with a few good sites and invite site visitors to add more sites, dis the listed sites, or just add their two cents via comments at the bottom of the search page. If we haven’t yet created a topic, the visitor can suggest it and we will go ahead and start the new topic. There is no charge to be listed.

Bessed is not a wiki; visitors can not physically make changes, but their comments are publicly made and publicly responded to. In the end, however, our editors make the final conclusion about what should be included and how the sites should be ranked.

Bessed editors are paid, either as employees or as freelancers. We feel this helps us maintain objectivity—no one is adding or not adding sites based on a personal interest in the search results.

On the plus side, Bessed offers: objective, human-powered search that encourages visitor participation but keeps spam out of results. Webmasters can get their sites listed free, and visitors can suggest additions, subtractions and modifications to the results, helping us improve the site continuously over time.

On the minus side, Bessed will have to deal with the issues of scalability. Simply put, a human-powered search site can not cover all the topics a robot-based search engine can, and it has the potential to be expensive to produce, especially in the ramping up phase. No one has been able to solve this challenge—Yahoo started with a Web directory and eventually gave it second-tier status while charging high inclusion fees. The Open Directory tried a volunteer-driven model, which has devolved to a state where no one can get a site listed and there are constant accusations of Dmoz editors holding topics hostage for their own personal gain.

For a startup like Bessed, the money/scalability issue is a huge challenge. Using paid editors versus volunteers is more expensive, even if it yields better results.

Now, on to Wikiasari.

Wikiasari will likely use a format in which visitors can manually make changes to search results, with the thought that this will help the cream rise to the top. This means that the site will rely on volunteers to create the vast majority of its service. As we have seen with Wikipedia, this can be done fairly well. And it completely solves the scalability issue, as you have thousands or even millions of people contributing to it. But can it be done as well with a search service as it has been done with an online encyclopedia?

Maybe, except for one thing that I believe is a huge factor. Wikiasari is a project of Jimmy Wales’ for-profit company Wikia. Wikipedia is non-profit. Are volunteers going to be interested in using their spare time to build a search engine that drives profits to Wikia, while they get nothing?

Jimmy Wales says that the recent cash infusion Wikia got from Amazon is not a factor here, but I have to wonder if Wikiasari is going to use some sort of mix of paid and unpaid editors to build the site out. After all, as a volunteer it’s a lot more interesting to help write an encyclopedia page about Lucille Ball (a la Wikipedia) than it is to make a list of Volvo dealerships in New Jersey (presumably a la Wikiasari). Trying to create a human-powered engine with unpaid volunteers who create and/or edit boring yet useful topics is going to be difficult, especially when it’s being done to build the revenue of a for-profit endeavor.

The hype this week has been about Wales building a competitor to Google. I don’t know if that is Wales’ goal or not, although he took some shots at Google in the original article discussing the launch of Wikiasari. At Bessed, our goal is not to compete with search engines but to complement them. We can’t do what a search engine does, but they can’t do what we’re doing, either. From where I’m sitting, Wales would be foolish to position a human-powered search service as competition to Google, but rather as a more intelligent yet less comprehensive alternative.

All in all, though, Wikiasari is a good thing from where I’m sitting because it gets more people talking about the possibilities of human-powered search, which gives me more opportunities to toot Bessed’s horn.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.