Disqus - Friends of maxniederhofer

Re: Who will win Tim Ferriss’s Business Competition? (and the need for a Z Combinator program)

brezina — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 01:18:22 -0000

Testing Disqus Comments <insert something="" witty="">

Re: HOW TO: Make People Care About your Startup

brezina — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:58:58 -0000

Hi Ethan - I'm glad you liked the preso. Thanks for the kind words. Keep up the good work at thestartupist

Best,
Matt

Re: How to create a profitable Freemium startup (spreadsheet model included!)

brezina — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 14:27:48 -0000

Yo Andrew - great post. Also, very funny timing - I just posted a blog post talking about Xobni's freemium business and the 4 metrics I measure for each customer. I also posted a screenshot of our funnel dashboard.

here is a link: http://www.mattbrezina.com/...

Re: The 4 Metrics of User Acquisition and the Customer Bulls Eye

brezina — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 15:19:40 -0000

Thanks Zaid. There is definitely a line between sharing actual numbers and posting something that would reveal too much of your business. I'm glad I could help.

Re: The 4 Metrics of User Acquisition and the Customer Bulls Eye

brezina — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 14:42:52 -0000

i did. sorry, I needed to make some updates to it. I hope to post it again soon.

Re: The 4 Metrics of User Acquisition and the Customer Bulls Eye

brezina — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:42:00 -0000

The dart graph is a very high level way to explain to the rest of the Xobni team what business metrics we measure users on. It isn't a chart or dashboard that I would use every day when monitoring our business.

Re: The 4 Metrics of User Acquisition and the Customer Bulls Eye

brezina — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:43:06 -0000

Hey Dharmesh - i'd love to trade notes - and i'd love to get together for dinner again. I haven't been back to Boston since we moved Xobni out west over 3 years ago! So, maybe we'll have to meet up next time you are out here. Looking forward to it either way.

Re: The 4 Metrics of User Acquisition and the Customer Bulls Eye

brezina — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:46:15 -0000

oh cool - thanks for sharing Mikko! I didn't even realize Randy was writing books these days. I met with him early on in the fund raising process for Xobni. He is a smart guy. Interestingly he told me KPCB wasn't doing many i-net investments at the time. They stuck to it - and now they are mostly doing clean tech. Fortunately, their former rock-star partner Vinod Khosla broke off and started his own VC fund and ended up being our lead series A investor!

Re: Who will win Tim Ferriss’s Business Competition? (and the need for a Z Combinator program)

brezina — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:48:53 -0000

Hey Tyler - thanks for introducing me to Force For the Future - i just checked it out. I know several of the guys on the team, but didn't realize they had started this project. I'll reach out and learn more. thanks!

Re: Great Customer Service Drives Revenue and Profitability

brezina — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:45:30 -0000

Hey Ben - this is a really helpful blog post. thanks for thinking through the whole spectrum of customer support and breaking it down in nice bites. I'm going to send this along to our support team.

new technologies are going to help us scale caring so that we can all have a customer support organization like zappos. http://www.flowtown.com is one company that is talking about helping us do this.

Re: CES 2010: Xobni Hands On Demo

brezina — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:39:24 -0000

Hey Caspan - this is matt, co-founder of Xobni. Glad you enjoyed the features of xobni. In case you aren't aware, you can actually control when Xobni loads - so it doesn't load immediately when outlook starts, and only starts after you first click the sidebar. People that experience loading delays run Xobni like this, and are very happy. You can access this feature in Xoibni menu->options->general

Re: CES 2010: Xobni Hands On Demo

brezina — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 17:31:01 -0000

Hey Caspan - If you have xobni operating in manual startup mode, it won't start indexing new mail until you've renabled it. And we are smart about when we index - we wait until you have idle cycles on your computer before we index. Or you can manually click the indexing button at the base of Xobni to force the index. We are serious about performance

Re: No one cares about your stupid little startup – 5 tips to make them care

brezina — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 18:53:31 -0000

Hey Josh - yes, we've experimented with a lot of paid advertising. Some remained just that - an experiment, and others we've scaled if they performed well on at least one of the 4 metrics we measure: profitability, user acquisition cost, user engagement, or virality. As to which paid channels are working, well that is a secret :)

Re: No one cares about your stupid little startup – 5 tips to make them care

brezina — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 03:18:28 -0000

Thanks for sharing your story Natalie. The closed beta/open beta line is a tough line to walk. And i totally agree, being in SF or the valley helps immensely.

Glad to hear you are liking Xobni!

Re: Follow the Sales Guys

brezina — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 03:00:24 -0000

Hey Jamie, of course PhoneTag is a perfect example. I'd love to hear if the sales guys were your earliest customers and biggest evangelists.

Re: No one cares about your stupid little startup – 5 tips to make them care

brezina — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 03:02:09 -0000

glad i could help cheryl. Thanks for stopping by! I don't think the badge program is dead. Anything that you can get on someone's site that links back to yours is fantastic for SEO and awareness. You just need to think of something compelling for that end user.

Re: Who will win Tim Ferriss’s Business Competition? (and the need for a Z Combinator program)

brezina — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 03:04:10 -0000

Thanks for the thoughtful comment Renee. Great example. I definitely think the stage between initial product and scaling the marketing and business model is super interesting. And, I also think this is a stage that is under represented in most of the discussion on startups. I hope to change that.

Re: The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : Every time I go to New York, I’m reminded how lucky I am to live in California

brezina — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:50:52 -0000

great post fake steve. How far do you think this paying for convenience thing can go? Does it only work for people making over $50/hour? Are all of those songs on ipods (or new york times articles on ipads) going to be bought by the same elite 5% of America? Is this the true source of an upper bound on APPL's market cap?

Re: Notes on customer acquisition and viral marketing from First Round Capital CEO Summit

brezina — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:16:59 -0000

Andrew - thanks for leading this session. I enjoyed. My favorite part was "Optimize your funnels by brainstorming levers"

It'd be great to create a giant list of these levers. I think i'm going to blog my list. The one I was surprised you had and that we've thought about (but never tested) is the filename. That can be huge for downloadable software. Drop off between download and install is high in the funnel and can often be 10-50% depending on channel.

Thanks for posting.

Re: Social Networks, The Monkey Sphere, and Moore’s Law of Human Relationships

brezina — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 15:00:22 -0000

Hey Douglas - great comment. I agree that Dunbar's number has more to do with cranial space than physical space. One thought I had was that reducing the limits of physical constraints we could maybe expand the effectiveness of the limited cranial capacity we have. For example, instead of driving 2 hours to see our grandmother and not be building/maintaining relationships during that journey, we could simply make a phone call and dedicate 100% of our time to the relationship.

Your second point questioning the quality of our relationships is very valid. It is something I think about a lot. I know I'd more quickly abandon technology than abandon the human experience of having high quality, real, relationships.

Re: Entrepreneurs offer their life’s future earnings for an investment

brezina — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:21:12 -0000

nice write-up Kim, but anyone with experience in funding a company through equity financing would never put their personal equity into an agreement like this. And I wouldn't fund someone who is as fiscally irresponsible with their personal finances.

Companies are much bigger than the entrepreneurs that start them. Say this woman sells 6% of her earnings to get $600k for her C corp. The C corp could literally turn around and fire her with very little consequence (except maybe some stock acceleration and severance). Then what? She has traded 6% of her future earnings and she doesn't even have a job at the company she started and limited upside in the venture she started. Super risky.

This is why we have corporations. To separate personal and corporate responsibility. Doing something like they are suggesting is as crazy as repealing the separation of church & state.

Re: Upcoming Topics on how2startup

brezina — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:43:53 -0000

Hey Roy - would love to hear your thoughts on my 4 metrics of user acquisition. It is something i've been thinking a lot about over the past year. It'd be great to get feedback from people on how well it applies to their businesses.

Re: Entrepreneurs offer their life’s future earnings for an investment

brezina — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:17:23 -0000

Oh, nice, "patronage with upside." I like that.

My capitalist brain can't wrap itself around any other logical explanation :)

Re: Freemium ain’t new. It is just a new word.

brezina — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 13:43:16 -0000

Good point Jonathan. I bet if we could measure these contributions we could get a lot more parks built. I don't know if you live here, but I wish, wish, wish the park continued all the way to the financial district, connecting the bay and the ocean. It would be a more accessible oasis for more people in the city, and it would be a commuting route for bicyclists and walkers.

Re: Freemium ain’t new. It is just a new word.

brezina — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 13:43:42 -0000