Disqus - Latest Comments for OlegR

Re: Thoughts on non-linear growth in B2B startups — NAKUL MANDAN

OlegR — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 15:48:52 -0000

When going top down larger deal sizes are great and hiring less reps is also great... However margin for error on each hire goes up exponentially (you can't mishire even one rep) and scalability of sales hiring pipeline becomes an issue because a) there are infinitely less large enterprise reps out there than velocity ones b) more senior reps interview much better, hiding flaws and thus the risk of a mishire is much higher and c) longer sales cycle (which always happens at larger deal sizes) means the feedback loop on whether you hired the right or wrong whale hunter is much longer, further increasing the risk profile of the strategy.

Re: B2B Lessons From Boston University

OlegR — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 14:44:22 -0000

Being a BU grad i got to say good job to BU. I spent good 20 minutes on the You at BU section exploring content. I've been there, done that, and it still kept me going. I can't imagine how captivating it is for prospective students.

Re: Some more thoughts on the economics of special interest content

OlegR — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:44:17 -0000

What I noticed about Canada vs. US in real estate (at least Montreal) - there are many more younger real estate agents here than in Boston for example.
When I was looking for a condo I worked with 5-6 agents, out of them only 1 was older than 35.
So I assume average agent here is more social-media/web2.0 savvy than anywhere else - hence all the blogs, facebook groups, etc.

Speaking of the way I used that blog in my search. It was absolutely instrumental. I learned about mortgage market from their monthly interest rate reports.
I learned about new condo projects as well as city development plans from their content.
I learned about more or less interesting agents from there (there is a whole bunch of agents contributing to that blog, so I was judging by the depth of contributed content).

I used social media features of the blog to gather opinions about the units that I liked, as well as to get agents offer me competing properties for review.

In general - this blog is a great platform to do research, ask questions, validate ideas and information.
I think this will be the basis of real estate 2.0 - where each property has a fully functional, social-media-integrated microsite, that turns into a forum/discussion board to have all the questions answered in a public manner, opinions shared, problems raised, photos uploaded, etc.

Just think - why would I go to see a unit, if someone saw it 2 weeks before me and said that the building is not what it looks in the pictures.

Cheers-

Oleg (twitter - OlegR)

Re: Digital search vs. human search: Exploring a premise and citing an example

OlegR — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 10:55:04 -0000

Dan,
I absolutely agree with this newbill's.
And this is what I meant when I mentioned social media featurea for ApartmentFinder.com.
Adding some sublte but powerful social media features to each property's microsite will help visitors better connect with the property, or, like newbill says it - with the "branding" of the home.

Re: Some more thoughts on the economics of special interest content

OlegR — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 09:52:08 -0000

Dan,

As always, great thoughts. Why don't you take this experiment one step further?
I don't know the numbers of your blog, but I'm sure they are not bad. On top of that, your blog is read by a very targeted audience, that actually can bring high CPMs.

So why don't you publish your blog stats and put out a call to folks from Gawker, NetShelter or Federated Media to make you a public offer - CPMs, etc. - I'm sure some of them are reading you.

Once we get an idea of CPM on your blog (unless you want to make some actual cash and make it 100% realistic) we could simulate the economics of your blog over some period of time.

I'm sure such a game will draw a lot of attention and shed a lot of light on the blog-onomics. Numbers, derived in such a study could also become a good product for NCI - I think real estate blogging could be of a lot of value.

I bought my condo relying on a very interesting real-estate blog in Montreal area, which covers mortgages, new condo projects, market trends and general education. Here it is - check it out - its a great example for your customers (and a product prototype for you):

http://montrealrealestatebl...

Regards-

Oleg R (twitter - @OlegR)

Re: Digital search vs. human search: Exploring a premise and citing an example

OlegR — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 11:05:40 -0000

That sounds very comprehensive. Not sure if the technical capability to run that structure on a global scale exists today (for example text mining is a pretty slow technology even with today's machine speeds).

When are we launching the next "google-killer"? :)

On a serious note I see two types of businesses arising from our discussion.
First one would be user-ranking/content filtering business.
There were some steps taken in this direction.
What i mean by it is some kind of UGC crawler that would be able to crawl twitter/facebook/etc, aggregate multiple profiles of same users (OpenID?), to unite their UGC clowds.
Then this crawler would compare expertise of these users (their meta-profiles), and assign them to expertise taxonomy with hierarchical structure (e.g. I have more expertise related to the concept of text mining than user X). When this expertise is somehow quantified, UGC credibility matrix can be established.
From there, all the junk UGC content will be automatically filtered out, since its providers are not ranked as credible by the crawler.

So now we have database-structured clowd of UGC content that is indexable and searcheable, while still very relevant and topic-oriented.

Next step is to use a robust search engine (Solr?) to search this UGC universe, and mash it up with machine search content (editorial/general interest).

What do you think about this approach?