bwagy
It is entirely feasible that at any point in time 20% of accounts are bots. It is whether they have counted them in their mDAU that matters.
We put it through the lens of, what helps clients understand the value of content and if people are actually enjoying it.
In terms of solutions, there is a few - profiling real users, using benchmarks of the outputs to real actions (i.e. people reading content tend to do this after) help a lot. As well as measuring in the first place. A surprising number of people still don't measure adequately.
A soft solution is simplifying the supply chain, keeping it transparent. Accountability drops the further you are from the end customer.
Something I maybe missed in this post, is the cost of this. This is real tangible cost, and we have seen cases over time in the millions of dollars. That's money robbed from creating a free and open internet. Advertising provides a significant subsidy for the eco-system.
And that is the messy part, finding the good from the bad - and is worth solving that issue. That's the wider point, this type of, or framework of problem is going to be more and more prominent.
Good or bad.
It certainly is a leap of faith initially but you can make small leaps to get started.
To deliver the worlds best products, you have to have the world contributing
Native content is the future. All brands are adjusting their marketing communications to content and in turn native. This is a ground floor opportunity to come in and drive the sales of Nudge.
Nudge is a native content platform that helps brands understand the impact of their content. The full toolkit ranges from analytics to distribution optimization to attribution.
We even have a CommonSenseBot, a bot that checks content for anything impacting performance.
More info here: http://giveitanudge.com/account-executive-nudge/
Has anyone had success selling on AWS Marketplace?
Ask HN: A practical use for bot traffic
As a by-product of I do in my day job we detect paid bot traffic. Just thinking there must be some practical uses for them - maybe in testing? Any ideas? Just curious
Ask HN: Platform for recurring micro transactions
My wife wants to sell a digital product $1-$5/month and I'm having a look for a nice platform that could process it and/or provide the platform for selling it.
What we do that is different in this is estimate the earned media impressions based on our own network wide dataset. It's a great way to compare the relative performance of a couple of pieces of content. Ideally yours versus a competitors :)
Whack in a few pieces of content to see how it performed - we have a couple of examples there.
Over time we'll roll out more data as we can.
Show HN: Nudge Analytics
He demonstrates how big ideas come from making lots of little bets, which can be imprecise but begin to give shape to a solution.
Ie you start wide to get your operating field then hone in as you get more feedback or data.
So there's huge benefits in being imprecise... at the right time.
Less likely to happen going straight into a job.
Invoicing: Xero Managing people: pick up Tom Peters, Little Big Things. Managing Projects: Getting Things Done & The Lazy Project Manager Managing Team Software: at your size you are small enough that can just talk and communicate. So something simple like BaseCamp & Weekly WIPS (work in progress meeting and bullet point list) will suffice. Then you want to evolve to something like ProWorkFlow / WorkFlowMax which provide the visibility, project management and time tracking.
Any questions email me [email protected] happy to help.
Check out Outbrain & Twitter - getting great results there at the moment. Twitter especially given your product manager focus.
You have a few options - Exit, sell to someone else. - Explore a management buyout, if you have a strong number two who wants to run it. You can remain as advisor / chairman. - Find a partner who you can bring on to help grow it.
I suspect you probably just need a bit of a break to rest refresh - come back and look at what can you can do to achieve breakout growth. And I'd try get a partner to help, businesses with two partners grow 30% faster.
Year 2 of our business we were similar, we built a game plan anchored on achieving 20% month on month growth - we didn't know how we could do it but figured it out as we went. It certainly doesn't sound like you lack ambition!