71–80 of 133 posts
BBC uses an iStock image in their article, complete with watermark? Seriously?
I'm not sure that there would be all that much value in creating new images for the story though, if a cheaper stock image can communicate the same thing.
This is a great PR play -- leverage the founder's origin story as a hook for the real point: promoting the app.
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Sponsored content. http://www.hulu.com/watch/873050 It is South Park (so you get all the crude/offensive humor that comes with it), but this episode is a pretty good microcosm of this sort of thing.
It's the BBC. Sponsored content isn't allowed.
I don't know whether BBC Worldwide permit sponsored content, but they don't operate under the same rules as the "proper" BBC.
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For me the key take-away is that he couldn't recreate his success later. "First, he tried Pixelotto, a spinoff of the Million Dollar Homepage selling advertising space, then PopJam, a social network for sharing funny content, and One Million People, similar to his first success, just with photos instead of advertisements. None succeeded the way he hoped."
"One Million People" - Huh, well I never. I had a similar idea, inspired by the Million Dollar Home Page, but 5 years before "One Million People". I think mine was a bit more innovative, (but just as likely to have failed!) - rather than just a grid of faces, with users paying $3 to add theirs, mine was free, and was going to scale the images in proportion to traffic and likes for that user. The aim was to get users…
I don't think that was dumb at all :) .
is the "lifetime" subscription just a hail-mary money-grab?
I expect it is one of those strategies that allows you to channel buyers toward your preferred pricing structure. e.g. 1 month = $10, 3 months $20, 1 year $75, lifetime $250. In this example you really want to sleep at $20 for 3 months, so your $75 for a year is for customers convenience, the 1 month for $10 is there so people see how good value it is to get a 3 or 12 no the subscription, the lifetime is there so peo…
It's exactly what you're saying: the $250 option isn't intended to sell people on lifetime subscriptions, it's designed to make the $20 product look reasonable.
Thank you for pivoting this way. Its such a great app. Love the daily stuff to keep it varied and exciting to come back to.
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That's amazing. What's the actual business?
It's in his profile: http://www.searchtempest.com/
At the time I was a poor grad student and was shopping for a portable AC unit to survive the summer in my sweltering apartment. There were about 5 craigslist sites within driving distance, and I was checking all of them, since saving 20 bucks was easily worth an extra hour of driving at that point. :) Figured a simple thing to learn some basics would be a page that would just spit out the links to multiple craigslist results pages matching a given search.
I literally went to the library and got a book called something like, "Basic web development using PHP and MySQL". The initial site was... very basic. Before I made it I'd looked around for existing solutions, and so when it was done I replied to the few forum threads I'd found, where people were looking for the same thing. It basically grew organically from there. (And over time I made it somewhat less basic. Although the design is looking pretty dated at this point; we're currently working hard on a long-overdue responsive redesign.)
A couple years later I made (an early version of) http://www.autotempest.com, which is like kayak.com for used cars. Then around 2009 I quit my day job and hired my first employee. Have been doing this ever since.
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> Sell $1 bills for $0.90. That worked really well for Uber. It can work for you too! Huh? What's the story there?
It's mostly sarcasm, but Uber is one example of several companies whose business model was to disrupt an entrenched industry by providing more value than they were charging for, capture market share, then raise prices. Basically, initially it was cheaper to take an Uber than a Taxi. Currently that's no longer the case.
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I feel the same way about the kind of art that "a 7 year old could do". The part I admire is their ability to get funding.
I think the success of some naïve art is the audacity of the person making it. "I could have done that" "Yes, you could, but you didn't" http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Kk-61u6leYU/UrB3Cfg6x1I/AAAAAAAAEO...
"Yes, you could, but you didn't." should really be:
"Yes, you could, but no one would pay any attention because you don't know the right people, and even if you did, you don't know how to frame a few colored squares on a giant canvas as artistically important."
I always wondered how he got that site running in the first place. I had my own similar "dumb idea" that I created: http://www.ipaidthemost.com , but I have no idea how to get it out in front of people, even though folks tend to react well enough when I show it to them.