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What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call

blog.mixlr.com

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Re: What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call

#31

Post by rexreed »

jmilloy wrote: post #16

I think Greg is too close to the events: I still mostly don't know what happened when Obama used Mixlr. Can anyone help out? Some specific questions: >Unfortunately the call was marketed and promoted as a “conference call” ... which does happen to be what Mixlr is intended for Okay, so what is Mixlr for? I poked around and found out briefly, but I'm still curious what Mixlr allows that they didn't use and could have.…

The article linked in the Mixlr blog post (http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/thecaucus/2013/11/18/another...) seems to tell a different story. From the NYT's perspective, it seems that a significant number of people had problems even hearing the audio stream. The way the NYT article is written implies that many of the listeners, rather than the 0.1% claimed by Mixlr, experienced problems. And it wasn't due to trolls, but rather the basic problem of people not even being able to hear the audio.

I don't see what the incentive for NYT to overstate or mischaracterize things, unless just to cast Obama further into a negative light, so I'm tempted to believe what the press says over what a self-motivated startup CEO would write. The NYT article makes no references to trolls, but rather what seems to be valid claims from would-be listeners that they can't access the audio stream.

If the audio problems were truly experienced by the insignificant minority, and a small number of trolls caused the majority of problems, then why was the article written in the NYT as if the glitches were the primary story, rather than the content of the broadcast (which is not even covered in the NYT article). The truth is somewhere between the NYT article and Mixlr blog post, but most likely weighted more to NYT's side.

I think Mixlr should thank their lucky stars that the blame was placed on OFA and not on them. In fact, I would be thankful the Mixlr name didn't even appear in the article. Had they not written the blog post, no one would have associated the event with their service. Having the president use their service serves as a good reference, but this one teleconference would not be what I would consider to be a positive testimonial.

Re: What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call

#32

Post by JohnTHaller »

zer0defex wrote: post #3

Cool story, but I hope permission was received first to divulge those account usage details.

I believe all the details in this article are already a part of the account's public profile anyway: http://mixlr.com/organizing-for-action/me

The only thing not included is how long they are a member or what they pay, though the latter can be assumed since there are only two tiers of members (free and $10 a month).

Re: What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call

#33

Post by DannyBee »

fotbr wrote: post #13
DannyBee wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Having hosted debates/etc for the white house (I used to run Google Moderator), I can say they will likely be awfully annoyed if this PR was not run by them.

Screw 'em. A London based company is under no obligations to kowtow to the PR wishes of the whitehouse, or the president's pet organization.

At least from the post I read, they seemed like they wanted to keep them as a customer. If that's the case, I don't think your approach will quite work ...

Re: What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call

#34

Post by Goopplesoft »

giovannibajo1 wrote: post #27
Goopplesoft wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I was implying that even after they said 'no problems, go ahead' (perhaps by opening the discussion about an enterprise plan). My reasoning is because it makes it easier to shift blame for the procurement officer. In the event of a service failure instead of being picked on for hosting a presidential conference for the price of a chipotle, you can blame the company you paid a good amount of money to for their…

I see. I reckon it doesn't work either way. Think of how wonderful would have been to run a flawless presidential conference call with $9.99, instead of, for instance, procuring a custom-made IBM+Cisco contract for $200k. Maybe there's a number in the middle, but I think it's hard to draw a line. At the end of the day, if I were a US citizen, I would prefer my government to attempt with a $9.99 service that went almo…

Although they're private and won't be paying using tax payer money, I agree and kudos to them. I was just addressing the risks associated with such a thing.

Re: What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call

#35

Post by greyboy »

pearjuice wrote: post #29
JoblessWonder wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was there before it was deleted?

Turn "show deleted" on in your profile setting.

I see a 'showdead' option, but nothing about showing deleted comments.

Re: What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call

#36

Post by biot »

If I were their VP of Engineering, the questions jmilloy asked would be top of mind for a post mortem.

I'd also raise the issue of whether the $9.99 all-you-can-eat plan should have a specific limit in terms of absolute number of live connections. From their pricing page, it looks like OFA could have just used the Basic (free) plan. Even still, they will never recoup their costs from this one call even if OFA remains a $9.99/month subscriber for a decade. If "We worked all weekend..." means two engineers worked 4 hours Saturday and 4 hours Sunday, that's 8 hours/engineer * 2 engineers * $100/hour = $1600 of time was spent. That's 13 years at $10/month, not even factoring in infrastructure or bandwidth costs from the call itself. And I'm guessing that estimate is an order of magnitude less than the actual time spent. If I were a potential customer evaluating providers, I would be scared off by your current offer of what appears to be unlimited usage and unlimited priority support for $10/month as I'd have serious doubts of your ability to remain in business a year from now.

No doubt the effort invested in preparation for the OFA call will pay dividends for future scalability, but I doubt the people at OFA would have blinked an eye if you told them that there's a $5 CPM rate for connections beyond the first 100. 140K connections would have been a paltry $700. Obviously, only an analysis of your customer usage patterns would indicate whether you'd impact any serious customers if the basic plan was capped at 100 simultaneous live listeners, with additional tiers for higher peak use. Check out PubNub's pricing model for peak connections as this model makes financial sense: http://www.pubnub.com/pricing

Re: What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call

#37

Post by DannyBee »

timruffles wrote: post #22
untog wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Screw our highest profile customer! That'll teach 'em! Heh heh"

Maybe they'll cancel their $9.99/month account!

Maybe they'll blame you for all their troubles publicly to their 40 million followers ....

How many times do you think the president needs to say "Sorry about the technical difficulties, the company we were using was having some troubles" before it hurts them?

Re: What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call

#38

Post by jmilloy »

rexreed wrote: post #31
jmilloy wrote: post #16

I think Greg is too close to the events: I still mostly don't know what happened when Obama used Mixlr. Can anyone help out? Some specific questions: >Unfortunately the call was marketed and promoted as a “conference call” ... which does happen to be what Mixlr is intended for Okay, so what is Mixlr for? I poked around and found out briefly, but I'm still curious what Mixlr allows that they didn't use and could have.…

The article linked in the Mixlr blog post ( http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/thecaucus/2013/11/18/another... ) seems to tell a different story. From the NYT's perspective, it seems that a significant number of people had problems even hearing the audio stream. The way the NYT article is written implies that many of the listeners, rather than the 0.1% claimed by Mixlr, experienced problems. And it wasn't due to trolls,…

Well, I wouldn't discount the bias in the New York Times; they have every incentive to maintain ongoing controversy. Also, notice that it's a NYT blog, which I take less seriously than a news article.

Re: What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call

#39

Post by BrandonMarc »

rexreed wrote: post #31
jmilloy wrote: post #16

I think Greg is too close to the events: I still mostly don't know what happened when Obama used Mixlr. Can anyone help out? Some specific questions: >Unfortunately the call was marketed and promoted as a “conference call” ... which does happen to be what Mixlr is intended for Okay, so what is Mixlr for? I poked around and found out briefly, but I'm still curious what Mixlr allows that they didn't use and could have.…

The article linked in the Mixlr blog post ( http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/thecaucus/2013/11/18/another... ) seems to tell a different story. From the NYT's perspective, it seems that a significant number of people had problems even hearing the audio stream. The way the NYT article is written implies that many of the listeners, rather than the 0.1% claimed by Mixlr, experienced problems. And it wasn't due to trolls,…

> I don't see what the incentive for NYT to overstate or mischaracterize things, unless just to cast Obama further into a negative light

Perhaps the NYT blogger's editorial goal is to counteract the blame aimed at OFA / Obama by pointing it at Mixlr instead.

Re: What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call

#40

Post by codingdave »

rexreed wrote: post #31
jmilloy wrote: post #16

I think Greg is too close to the events: I still mostly don't know what happened when Obama used Mixlr. Can anyone help out? Some specific questions: >Unfortunately the call was marketed and promoted as a “conference call” ... which does happen to be what Mixlr is intended for Okay, so what is Mixlr for? I poked around and found out briefly, but I'm still curious what Mixlr allows that they didn't use and could have.…

The article linked in the Mixlr blog post ( http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/thecaucus/2013/11/18/another... ) seems to tell a different story. From the NYT's perspective, it seems that a significant number of people had problems even hearing the audio stream. The way the NYT article is written implies that many of the listeners, rather than the 0.1% claimed by Mixlr, experienced problems. And it wasn't due to trolls,…

The article linked tells the exact same story, as far as I can tell. "Many" people could not connect, and were vocal about it. There were no numbers in the article, and 7 people quoted as having issues.

Lets assume that there were 100x that many failures, that would be 700 who failed, and 139,300 who could hear, which matches Mixlr's description fairly accurately. They had a large event that went well overall, but the problems that did occur caused a bit of a stir.

Frankly, I have never heard of these guys before, but they earned my respect via their post because they did accept their own accountability for the issues. They are not passing the buck, they acknowledged that there were problems, and they intend to do better next time. That is absolutely the correct attitude.

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