thomasd

It's probably more than creating awareness for their dev services. From what I can see, they're rapidly increasing partnership efforts for their ad-based products (e.g. AdX integration). Could be a trojan-horse type of move to get in front of developers who will someday be serving ads to generate revenue.

Singapore :)

Yes, exactly! I'll like to add a few more points.

- The approval process for FB ads is dead simple. Ads are usually approved in minutes vs Google day(s) long wait. The longest it'll probably take is a 1 to 2 hours (usually as a result of a new image upload). This makes it very easy to iterate and improve upon your result

- FB gives pricing flexibility. You can choose whether the objective is for branding (CPM) or if you're looking for conversion (CPC, CPA). The ad units lets you focus on your objective

There is a problem with a focus on getting "likes". It doesn't convert. Neither does it increase sales. It's a vanity metric. I just wrote a post to explain how small of a mileage like actually brings for the effort exerted. http://thomasdiong.com/post/65443615643/social-media-vanity-...

Hmm, this is interesting. What we've found is the direct opposite. Facebook is 4 times cheaper than Google for us. But I suppose the nature of our companies are different. We're in the movie industry and Google search on movies that were released a couple of months ago are almost always queries looking for pirated sources.

Basically, private Hacker News for organizations to share and discuss online articles. This is awesome. Something that I didn't know I need but now I just can't wait to try!

One of my biggest pet peeves is endless emails sent to everyone in the organization by someone who just wanted to share an article that he/she thought was interesting. Then someone replies all with a comment, another person replies all, and soon, my email client just kept on buzzing even if the topic doesn't concern or interest me.

And the most frustrating thing is there's no rule that I can create to filter out those kind of emails.

This is very, very useful. Kudos to the Kippt team.

This can even happen in a tech company. More often than not, this is an issue with managers who are non-techie. They're not sure what automation will do, and since they don't know what's going on when processes are automated, they're reluctant to try. #3 can plague any company. It happened at Apple as well, in supply chain, far away from product engineering.

You know how every product on the Apple Online Store has details on how long it'll take to be delivered to you? E.g. 2 Business Days, 1-2 Weeks, Within 24 Hours. These quotes are manually changed. That's right. Every product on every Apple Online Store (e.g. Singapore, Hong Kong, China, US etc) has their own quote, and these need to be changed manually by someone.

I remember I hated the manual work and made several automation scripts that'll just do everything for me. The managers wanted to have nothing to do with it. "What if the script screws up?". That was their biggest concern. We all know that programs are more consistent than human being so that's nothing to be worried over.

I was only able to convince the managers that automation is an improvement after having everyone in the department using the script without their permission.

I suspect their reluctance was also due to some degree of "if it's not broken, don't fix it".

There are actually many opinions to this.

Another supplementary reading to this has been covered by Mark Suster: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/12/27/should-startup...

In that article, Mark Suster cover a counter example where instead of pushing to become profitable when revenue is almost overtaking cost, companies that are in a fast growing market should consider forsaking profit today for higher growth tomorrow.

Obviously, that depends entirely on the investment climate.

Hmm, the huge difference between US and <>US are mostly self-imposed I think. Self-serve ads are only available for businesses or individuals in US.

Outside of US, to even participate in ad-buys, you'll have to seek out Twitter's agency partners (not transparent, therefore, not obvious who they are), and when you find them, you'll have to commit to a minimum of $10,000 spend over a period of 3 months, which is highly prohibitive. I understand why they're doing this, but that's for another post.

What this means to the difference in revenue per 1000 timeline views is the kind of audience businesses are likely to target. If you are buying ads in the US, you'll most likely buy ads to target people living in US and if you're living outside of US, your target audience will likely be outside of US.

Since self-serve ads are fully accessible in US to anyone, the amount of money spent is obviously a couple of magnitude larger. That means higher competition (read:bidding) and higher revenue, and therefore revenue per 1000 timeline view to Twitter.

The US will still be more expensive than everywhere else even if everyone could purchase ads the same way, but the difference wouldn't be at such magnitude.

> If you are bootstrapping in your side, you will likely work 19 hrs a day and face failure after failure with nearly everyone around finding reasons to make you and your decisions look stupid.

Great point. This is actually not constrained to India but propagate through most of Asia, including the generally rich Singapore. Seems like a favorite "past-time" to watch people fail. It's a society that lives by the saying "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down".

Which is why Silicon Valley is such an attractive place to pursue a startup. The support system is there and there are little social stigma attached to failure.

Failing after putting in all the long hours and weekends is not something that is easy to stomach alone. Failing and having everyone around you rub it in is brutal.

Agree. What Google did replaced plenty of functionalities that are available on desktop (math, spell-check, dictionary).

But their recent card-based solution to a lot of searches seems to show that they're trying to keep users on Google-owned properties. Try searching for a movie review. You'll notice that everything that pertains to the movie is shown on top and on the right. Clicking on actors lead to yet another google search result with another card on the right. In short, you're being kept within Google.

Does it get you the information you're looking for in as little time as possible? Absolutely. But they're doing this at the expense of the sites they took the data from.

I believe they have Facebook envy and now wants to keep every visitors they get on the site for as long as possible, just like Facebook. This is a departure away from their original philosophy in which their goal was to send users to the most relevant site for the user query as fast as possible.

I hope they haven't forgotten that the reason Yahoo lose out to Google was precisely because of this. Yahoo switched their vision from a search engine to a portal, and their product search engine start to suck.

This is dangerous. The best ad platform (which generates the most revenue) are those that are most efficient at sending traffic to advertiser's properties. Facebook main source of revenue comes from mobile app install ads which direct users to the app store for download, and page post ads, which sends traffic to advertiser's website.

A change in priority to hold users as long as possible on Google search isn't very tenable in the long term.

Google probably review their top searches periodically to determine utility related keywords and custom fit solutions to them.

It seems that if they continue to do things this way, sooner or later, Google is likely to replace thousands of utility websites.

This seems like a change in their philosophy from sending users to other websites in as little time as possible, to using Google as a portal.

Interestingly, this change in philosophy by Yahoo from a search engine to a portal was what made Yahoo lose out to Google.

"Life is a series of failures punctuated by brief successes". That's the most precise way of looking at life I've ever seen.

The example of Google can further be boiled down to just aligning your interest with your users. Google did fantastically well because they send users to other sites as fast as they can (doesn't matter that a user spend less time on Google as a result). And they make sure PageRank algorithm does just that.

That is also why dating websites won't be as successful. Dating websites rely heavily on repeat users. That means, their users dates have to go badly for them to return. Their interest and the user's interest don't align.

One thing not mentioned here is how much the Chinese value brand new properties. By brand new I mean, properties that have never been used/lived in.

It's a common trend in real estate where investors buy properties and leave it vacant to brag about the place being brand new to sell at a higher price in the future.

This is likely to exacerbate the "empty" cities problem in China.

Sometimes people misrepresent themselves in a presentation. The explanation wasn't clear or they've described themselves as something that they're not. That can turn anyone away if the alternate interpretation is something that the investor has seen many times and have known not to work.

This, coupled with the fact that almost all ideas are either iteration, combination or derivation of other ideas makes it quite a frequent occurrence if not careful.

Hah it sounds like you guys had a lot of fun working on Trello Gold, building the feature that everyone seems to mock just for the fun of it.

Off the top of my head, content acquisition. Which content to acquire, from which production house, with which actors, in what language, how did they do in the theatres. You can compare these indexed data with internal data, and find correlation. Netflix did them all with in house data, and they can do it because they have 114,000 years of streams every month[1]. Their dataset is large enough to pretty much represent what the general public wants. For up and coming companies, this is very helpful.

[1]http://gigaom.com/2013/09/18/building-vs-buying-how-netflix-...

It always felt like Microsoft was chasing after markets that people are trying to leave. Bing trying to replace google search while google is desperately trying to expand their source of income by looking elsewhere while Facebook eats into their google's advertising revenue.

Which makes the last paragraph especially interesting. Insights. Have Microsoft finally figured that search doesn't have much revenue in there to milk anymore and since they have all these data they've collected at such massive scale, perhaps provide useful "interpretation" of these data? That gets me very excited.

And if the result of it all are APIs for developers to use these data, that's going to change a lot on how we make decisions, at least in the entertainment industry (which I work in).

The greatest thing about faking is you'll actually end up believing it, even subconsciously, which is great.

A great way to start is just by changing postures. Related: http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes...

I've experienced quite a few of this. When I'm having conversation with colleagues in a closed body posture, boy do I stutter a lot.

My first reaction was just like everyone else's. I thought this is a joke. "After just about every chat app minus WhatsApp have added stickers, plus the recent inclusion of them in Path, now a productivity app?"

But it actually make a lot of sense. I think if you're already a Trello users, you're not the target market for this. Trello can be used in small families, among friends to help arrange things. Read: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3546-how-we-the-kims-use-base...

And this strikes right at the heart of it. It makes Trello less of a scary productivity app, and more of an everyday helper and organizer.

Interesting. How would communicating and offering advice to each competing portfolio companies be, with YC having privileged knowledge for all of them.

In a scenario where one company might book an office hour to talk about competition from another competing YC company, I wonder how PG manage what information to release, what advice to give.

Hmm, that doesn't give you much control. I suggest you go straight to the source and use FB's Power Editor. You get control over everything. Facebook has one of the most comprehensive targeting tool in the world. As a startup, you'll want to think of the way you advertise as a customer discovery process.

Know your target audience and target these people as specific as you can. Then set the maximum price you'll pay to get these people's attention. Fine tuning can come later.

I doubt it's retargeting that made the difference. Originally, his CPC was > $1(that's way too much) and he reduced that to ~$0.20. That obviously gave him more clicks for a fixed budget.

Secondly, the "forced sign up" landing page helps as well.

Reference: http://andrewchen.co/2013/07/29/the-highest-roi-way-to-incre...

I have only an idea for gun owners of a certain type. Some gun owners reason for owning a gun is for hunting. For owners like that, location detection can be implemented. Outside of hunting locations, the guns will be "locked" and will only be enabled once they're within the hunting location.

Sometimes, when the paragraph is wide, it's hard to continue reading on the same line and that interrupts and slow my reading down. I do it so that I stay on the same line. Sort of like a ruler