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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

#61

Post by JumpCrisscross »

cdibona wrote: post #30
pearjuice wrote: post #26

From an achievement point of view, are there are any challenges after this?

Yep, it turns out that post Obama's use of Moderator (and then hangouts with moderator) we realized that this was only a taste of what can happen when you have a really popular person using your systems. Yes, I'm talking about Lady Gaga. Made Obama look downright pedestrian.

>"we realized that this was only a taste of what can happen when you have a really popular person using your systems. Yes, I'm talking about Lady Gaga. Made Obama look downright pedestrian.*

If you work at Mixlr I recommend you kill this comment. It's not best practice to compare your "pedestrian" customer to someone "really popular".

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

#62

Post by jason_tko »

biot wrote: post #36

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…

There is a tremendous benefit of grabbing hold of an opportunity, and doing whatever the hell it takes to strangle the value out of it. Which is what these guys were trying to do.

This was such an outlier in terms of standard use cases of their system so far, I think the way they responded was great. There's little value in going back and saying "Ohh... this will cost $700, but it's not written on the website, is that still ok?" and risk dealing with rejection.

The value of having POTUS use your service far outweighs the engineering time spent on this. This is now a fantastic leading story for all sorts of marketing efforts and meetings moving forwards, such as this blog post.

Calculating the return on this effort through short-term ROI measured in days seems a bit shortsighted.

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

#63

Post by jsmthrowaway »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #61
cdibona wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, it turns out that post Obama's use of Moderator (and then hangouts with moderator) we realized that this was only a taste of what can happen when you have a really popular person using your systems. Yes, I'm talking about Lady Gaga. Made Obama look downright pedestrian.

>"we realized that this was only a taste of what can happen when you have a really popular person using your systems. Yes, I'm talking about Lady Gaga. Made Obama look downright pedestrian.* If you work at Mixlr I recommend you kill this comment. It's not best practice to compare your "pedestrian" customer to someone "really popular".

You are replying to Chris DiBona, who oversees open source policy at Google. He is referring to Google Moderator.

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

#64

Post by biot »

jason_tko wrote: post #62
biot wrote: post #36

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…

There is a tremendous benefit of grabbing hold of an opportunity, and doing whatever the hell it takes to strangle the value out of it. Which is what these guys were trying to do. This was such an outlier in terms of standard use cases of their system so far, I think the way they responded was great. There's little value in going back and saying "Ohh... this will cost $700, but it's not written on the website, is tha…

I agree that they responded in the only way they could and I hope they can leverage this to greater success. I wasn't referring to retroactively making up bogus prices given that their pricing page specifically says it's "unlimited", even for the Basic free plan. Rather, I'm proposing a hypothetical scenario whereby future subscriber plans are capped for simultaneous connections with an overage rate. Had such a pricing plan existed when OFA initially signed up, I'm speculating that OFA would have happily paid $700 for the extra capacity for the 140,000 simultaneous listeners.

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

#65

Post by Wingman4l7 »

clarky07 wrote: post #47
vezzy-fnord wrote: post #28

Meanwhile, even though we’re not US voters, our hats are off to the President and his team for being agile, using third party web services and trying to be as engaged as possible with his constituents. We love that he’s done an AMA on Reddit, that his team uses Twitter, Facebook and Instagram regularly, and we’re seriously proud they now use Mixlr too. ------- Hardly. They do maintain some sort of vain presence, so a…

didn't they have planted questions too?

What evidence was there of this?

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

#66

Post by Wingman4l7 »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #28

Meanwhile, even though we’re not US voters, our hats are off to the President and his team for being agile, using third party web services and trying to be as engaged as possible with his constituents. We love that he’s done an AMA on Reddit, that his team uses Twitter, Facebook and Instagram regularly, and we’re seriously proud they now use Mixlr too. ------- Hardly. They do maintain some sort of vain presence, so a…

> A few generic responses to mundane and chauvinistic questions.

If you honestly expected any candid answers from a sitting President that diverged from preset soundbites, I have a bridge to sell you.

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

#67

Post by Angostura »

SilasX wrote: post #55
auctiontheory wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still mostly don't know what happened when Obama used Mixlr. Yup. Huge opportunity missed - they should have hired a real writer to tell the story, instead of "this happened, then this happened, then ..."

No, that seems to be the ideal form for expressing information. A "real writer" would have said the same thing but taken 5000 words to say it. It would be more fun to read, sure, but would take much longer to get the gist, and half of it would probably be made up to sound good.

Except, a real writer would have included the gist. Which was sadly missing here.

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

#68

Post by SilasX »

Angostura wrote: post #67
SilasX wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that seems to be the ideal form for expressing information. A "real writer" would have said the same thing but taken 5000 words to say it. It would be more fun to read, sure, but would take much longer to get the gist, and half of it would probably be made up to sound good.

Except, a real writer would have included the gist. Which was sadly missing here.

Can you give me an example of a good, long piece in a news publication, written to be exciting, which also includes the gist so you don't have to click through say 10 pages?
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