Disqus - Latest Comments for Tony Wright

Re: Can The Y Combinator Idea Turn Into A Movement?

Tony Wright — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 10:54:04 -0000

it doesn't work against you. There were a lot of founders in their 30s in the last batch. Two were approaching 40.

Re: Rails Shared Hosting

Tony Wright — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 01:19:41 -0000

Great post.

The Rails response will (inevitably) be, "we don't WANT to be big" (which I think is stupid, too.

Another side effect of being big-- you can sell installable products in the language. How do you think Mint ( the stats mint-- not the finance mint) would fare if he had released it for Rails (it's an installable PHP stats package).

Rails playing nice on shared hosting would make Rails better, would provide a incubator for budding devs, and provide a marketplace for low-cost Rails products.

Re: RescueTime - So perfect yet…

Tony Wright — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 14:34:55 -0000

The real sticky challenge with a lot of your suggestions is to make it REALLY lightweight. WE don't want to make a time-management tool that takes 30 minutes a day of babysitting to get meaningful pile of data...

We are definitely doing some heavy experimentation/exploration to try to get more insight into "activity context".

Great and thoughtful ideas-- thank you!

Re: 5 Marketing Tools Every Startup Should Use

Tony Wright — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 14:32:40 -0000

My favorite marketing quote (dunno who said it) is "Marketing is a tax you pay for being unexceptional".

There are lots of brands out there that don't NEED marketing effort to be seen. IMO, founders should concentrate on making their offering differentiated and downright better than the competition. Make it something people WANT to talk about. Most startups f

Once you've proven that people want to talk about you, then marketing is like pouring gasoline on a fire.

Re: Trying out a new widget called Askablogr

Tony Wright — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 10:40:28 -0000

Wow-- neat idea... Lousy new user flow.

I wrote a question, hit the submit/ask button and it took me to a sign-up page. Did my question go through? Does it disappear into the ether if I choose not to sign up?

Re: Your ad-supported Web 2.0 site is actually a B2B enterprise in disguise

Tony Wright — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:19:30 -0000

Great post Andrew-- you might ponder referencing:

http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2007/02/26/three-ways-to-build-an-online-media-business-to-50m-in-revenue/

(Three ways to build an online media business to $50m in revenue)

It's another great post on the topic.

This is why I'm not a huge fan of B2C plays (other than the "freemium" route). Every single free web site (without exception) has degraded as they shift focus from serving the user to serving the advertiser. Look at any 3 year old B2C play and it's inundated with craptacular ads.

Re: Social network death spiral: How Metcalfe’s Law can work against you

Tony Wright — Mon, 19 May 2008 13:56:58 -0000

Great post!

I always liken web startups to a leaky bucket with a hose pouring water into it.

You can focus on increasing the flow (making the "hose" work better) or you can focus on plugging the holes.

Increasing the flow (with new opportunities in viral marketing and old standbys like SEO) is comparatively easy and feels really good.

Plugging holes is hard and only incrementally rewarding.

If you look at great businesses that you envy, I think you'll find most of them focus more on plugging holes... Adding value for users (first and foremost), providing outstanding support, and optimizing the sales funnel.

Re: Usability reflections: rescuetime.com

Tony Wright — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 01:07:48 -0000

Some excellent points here. Thanks for the feedback.

I totally agree on the clear text password issue. It's a carry over from our very small closed beta and should've been fixed before we opened it up.

We need to make the client a touch smarter about knowing when communication is occurring and when it's failing.

But hey, it's beta-- we're working on it! :-)

Re: RescueTime

Tony Wright — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:51:13 -0000

Hi Caity!

Thanks for for mentioning us and thanks much for your great suggestions on our GetSatisfaction forum. Until Jan 3, RescueTime was a side project for the three of us... But based on the great growth we've been seeing, we've jumped into it full-time and have recently gotten seed funding from YCombinator (with a few of your countrymen!)

Sooo, expect insane progress over the coming months.

Cheers, -t

Re: 2007/12/13/jobster-ceo-steps-down/

Tony Wright — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 08:14:25 -0000

@Chris311

Chris, what you're saying is (IMO) just plain wrong.

Quote from Fred Wilson:

â€œâ€¦Of the 26 companies that I consider realized or effectively realized in my personal track record, 17 of them made complete transformations or partial transformations of their businesses between the time we invested and the time we sold. That means there a 2/3 chance youâ€™ll have to significantly reinvent your business between the time you take a venture capital investment and when you exit your business.â€

The team matters more than the concept. Though the market you're playing in matters more than your team (IMO).

Re: 2008/07/14/seattle-summermash-wrapup/

Tony Wright — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 08:03:59 -0000

@polysig I dunno-- maybe you should have had different expectations.

I was expecting a social/networking event with a DJ. I had a blast and had some great conversations!

I didn't ever hear it referred to as a "conference" -- if you did (of if you were expecting one), I can see how you might've been disappointed.

Re: 2008/07/20/ycombinator-startups/

Tony Wright — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 19:09:20 -0000

Regarding Google and design... It's interesting to look at what clever UX design did in the mobile space with the iPhone.

Google's search UX is simple (and that's good), but there is certainly room for innovation. Of course, unlike other types of innovation it's hard to imagine how a UX could be improved until you actually see it and say, "holy crap-- it never occurred to me that a touch-screen with this crazy 'pinch' idea could turn the mobile world on it's ear."

Re: Users, customers, or audience - what do you call the people that visit your site?

Tony Wright — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:09:11 -0000

Members?

It's probably along the same lines as "audience" but earlier in the company life-cycle.

Community and social sites start by serving "members" and eventually graduate to serving their real customers (the advertisers) by harvesting clicks/views from their "audience".

Re: Bloggers: Disqus doesn’t help you in Google

Tony Wright — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 15:47:12 -0000

@Pratham - Google's been making noises about indexing JS content for a while now... It'll happen someday.

I commented on Steve's post, but I'll comment here too.

I think bloggers are approaching this issue from the wrong angle. You need to think about user VALUE (the readers of the blogs), not about how to maximize the marketing exposure of your blog. Nothing is better marketing than having a better product.

Blog comments right now are pretty painful. They're hard to follow threads, rife with spam (or self-promotion), hard to scan (in high volume), etc.

But, if you're going to be a slave to page views and exposure, you should consider the SEO/traffic benefits of Disqus. All of the pages actually provide a nice pile of incoming links from Disqus.com. They also promote lively conversations on their home page (more SEO juice) and presumably could eventually offer TechMeme-like aggregation of conversations around a topic (yet more promotion).

Apparently, self-hosted folks can use the API rather than JS-- comments are perfectly SEO-friendly if you go this route.

Re: Did I harm my blog by FriendFeeding this year?

Tony Wright — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 12:18:27 -0000

Robert,

(First of all, you should use RescueTime to truly understand what percentage of your work life you invest where! <-- Shameless plug!)

Twitter & Friendfeed are pretty much forums/chatrooms... They are great places for you to invest some time... 2-way conversation is good.

But I'd question what you've "gained". I don't think a lot of people there constitute a "new" audience for you. I don't follow you on either service (sorry, it's like drinking from a firehose!), but many/most of the things you write about that are relevant to me get to me somehow (retweeting, techmeme, what have you).

Further, I'd question the number of "followers". First, most of those people aren't reading what you say... Following does NOT equal consumption/engagement.

Pretend you'd invested ALL of that time in your blog and instead of losing 14% of your traffic, you gained. And pretend you did a bunch of A/B testing to get your RSS subscription up. And pretend you focused a bit on SEO. And pretend you created/emphasized an email subscription program and promoted it. How many more individuals would you have touched? My guess is way the hell more than the 20-30k represented on Twitter/FF (lots of overlap in the two userbases, I'd imagine).

Heck, how many unique visitors does the 14% by itself represent?

Re: Faves.com still alive, but on life support

Tony Wright — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 05:30:00 -0000

Ad-supported sites are _hard_ for venture-backed businesses that are aiming big, especially if you have a non-targetted audience.

Favorite quote on the topic:

"Be a site with a broad reach (say general social networking, communications, news). At large scale, without a great deal of targeting possible, a startup’s “run of site” or “run of network” advertising might be able to get to the $1 RPM range (Revenue per thousand impressions, including CPM, CPC, and CPA models). To get to $50m in revenue you would need 50 billion pageviews in a year, or just over 4 billion per month. According to Comscore, Bebo had the 10th most Pageviews in the US in Janurary 1007, with 3.4bn, so you would need to be bigger than that."

From: http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2007/02/26/three-ways...

Re: Where have all the Jobsters gone?

Tony Wright — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 07:21:00 -0000

Great stuff!

Say what you will about Jobster, but senior management there did an outstanding job of hiring a pretty amazing crowd of people with a pretty intense entrepreneurial spirit.

Re: Xobni scores $7 million from Cisco; Where's Microsoft?

Tony Wright — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 11:34:00 -0000

"According to TechCrunch, Microsoft made an unsuccessful run at Xobni last year for about $20 million, a deal that collapsed because -- as Erick Schonfeld reported -- Xobni's leadership grew increasingly uncomfortable "about its eventual fate inside the Microsoft machine.""

I don't know more than you do, but I *DO* know that a $20m exit is a big whopping failure for a company like Xobni, which had taken about $5m before the B round. Pretend then $5m A-round was on a $15m post-money valuation and then do the math on how much of a return $20m would represent for investors and founders... It's a bad deal unless they were swirling the drain (the were-- and are-- not!).

When you take $5m, you have to be shooting for a bigger endgame than a $20m deal or you shouldn't be playing.

Re: Introducing ... Inkd

Tony Wright — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 06:24:00 -0000

"It has been done. StockLayouts has been in the business for over 6 years. In fact, it looks like Inkd has done a great job copying StockLayouts business model.

Check out the original:
http://www.stocklayouts.com"

Wow. You can also check out some original search engines over at excite.com and lycos.com, too. Oooh, and Apple's original handheld is worth checking out, too (it was called the Newton). Being the original is over-rated.

The sites clearly serve the same need (quick, high quality design work on the cheap), but I think the similarity ends there.

Re: The Tragedy of the Commons

Tony Wright — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 13:37:00 -0000

Absolutely fabulous post. I totally agree that we need to find a way to compensate content creators.

But the idea of aggregators (Google News or otherwise) having to PAY newspapers for indexing and linking to their articles is ridiculous... It's akin to Redfin trying to charge Google for using the fine content on the Redfin Blog ( http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ablog.redf... ). You could say, "Without us, Google, when people search for 'sweet digs', you'd be woefully lacking in content and people to link to. So here's an invoice for indexing, displaying, and linking to our content."

Um. Google actually charges people for that.

It's INDEXING. Newspapers need to find a way to monetize the visitors who make it to their sites-- not try to charge the company who helps get them their visitors.

There are content sites galore out there who are making fat-and-happy profit margins. What's wrong with that model? If the New York Times morphed into a debt-free web-paper, had a dozen or two core writers and a few dozen more contract writers around the world, could they be happy and profitable? Sure. Could they have outstanding content? Absolutely.

Re: Emptyspaceads attracts cash to fill Web site margins with ads

Tony Wright — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 06:03:00 -0000

Depending on CPM, I think this could be a good way to go. Content sites struggle with creating trust when the first visual impression you have of a site is plastered with ads for teeth whiteners and belly fat removal. EmptySpaceAds seems like the equivalent of a magazine putting ads on page 2 rather than page 1 to improve first impressions.

Re: The 'Seattle Startup Index' and the future of Internet advertising

Tony Wright — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 06:13:00 -0000

I think you're reading way more into it than you should (though perhaps a lot of other folks are, too).

As you say, it's a traffic list. In fact, it's not necessarily an accurate one, as Alexa/Compete are notoriously bad at measuring traffic (especially for non-mainstream sites). Not only that, traffic is hard to measure even if their data is PERFECT. How do your 100,000 uniques with a 64% bounce rate and a 1m 31 second average time on page compare to my 100,000 uniques with a 51% bounce rate but only a 45 second average time on page? How does your totally untargeted 100,000 uniques compare to my largely-US 100,000 uniques in a hugely lucrative vertical like (say) home remodeling?

It's just a fun metric and it's about the only one we can track about private businesses. It should be obvious that it's not the most important metric for most businesses. Heck, it's not the most important metric for traffic-centric businesses.

Marcelo does a fine job qualifying, describing, and disclaiming. It would be ridiculous to call it the "Seattle Startup Traffic Index that is only Moderately Accurate but fails to consider important metrics like bounce rate, time on page, revenue-per-visitor and entirely fails to account for sites that aren't in the traffic business at all".

This is a non-debate.

Re: Guest Post: We're better than this

Tony Wright — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 08:51:00 -0000

Great post and I'm glad you wrote it.

I love the reporting of TechFlash but I think there is a universal opinion about the "community" that comes at the end of each post. The interesting comments are drowned out by the haters.

I think karma systems and logins are a great step, but I think John needs to step up and say, "If you are hateful on my blog, I'll kill your comment. As instantly as I can. If you're borderline on my blog anonymously, I'll kill your comment. If you're borderline on my blog and will sign your real name, I'll drop you a note/reply and we can talk about it."

We should all certainly grow up-- but we won't. Anonymous comments CAN be interesting (and lower the barrier to the conversation)-- and sometimes there is good reason to be anonymous (voicing an important opinion that might piss off your boss/investors, for example).

If the assholes get silenced here, there'll either learn their lesson or find somewhere else to spread their bile. But no matter what software solution you put in place, someone has to wade in and moderate.

Re: Cure Email Addiction Using RescueTime (video)

Tony Wright — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:09:51 -0000

We LOVE your video! In fact, we love it so much, we just added it to our home page. On a related note, we referred to you as "Financial Planner & Author" - is that the best short description for you?