This week, Zero Punctuation reviews Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon.

real-time collaborative game-making, looks outstanding [via] 

I wrote a guest post for my girlfriend's coffee website.

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an unhappy footnote: Vlambeer's upcoming game was already cloned  

More than a million people have now used our Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook. And as part of our latest update, in addition to collecting some anonymized statistics, we launched a Data Donor program that allows people to contribute detailed data to us for research purposes.

A few weeks ago we decided to start analyzing all this data. And I have to say that if nothing else it’s been a terrific example of the power of Mathematica and the Wolfram Language for doing data science. (It’ll also be good fodder for the Data Science course I’m starting to create.)

We’d always planned to use the data we collect to enhance our Personal Analytics system. But I couldn’t resist also trying to do some basic science with it.

I’ve always been interested in people and the trajectories of their lives. But I’ve never been able to combine that with my interest in science. Until now. And it’s been quite a thrill over the past few weeks to see the results we’ve been able to get. Sometimes confirming impressions I’ve had; sometimes showing things I never would have guessed. And all along reminding me of phenomena I’ve studied scientifically in A New Kind of Science.

So what does the data look like? Here are the social networks of a few Data Donors—with clusters of friends given different colors. (Anyone can find their own network using Wolfram|Alpha—or the SocialMediaData function in Mathematica.)

So a first quantitative question to ask is: How big are these networks usually? In other words, how many friends do people typically have on Facebook? Well, at least for our users, that’s easy to answer. The median is 342—and here’s a histogram showing the distribution (there’s a cutoff at 5000 because that’s the maximum number of friends for a personal Facebook page):

But how typical are our users? In most respects—so far as we can tell—they seem pretty typical. But there are definitely some differences. Like here’s the distribution of the number of friends not just for our users, but also for their friends (there’s a mathematical subtlety in deriving this that I’ll discuss later):

And what we see is that in this broader Facebook population, there are significantly more people who have almost no Facebook friends. Whether such people should be included in samples one takes is a matter of debate. But so long as one looks at appropriate comparisons, aggregates, and so on, they don’t seem to have a huge effect. (The spike at 200 friends probably has to do with Facebook’s friend recommendation system.)

So, OK. Let’s ask for example how the typical number of Facebook friends varies with a person’s age. Of course all we know are self-reported “Facebook ages”. But let’s plot how the number of friends varies with that age. The solid line is the median number of friends; successive bands show successive octiles of the distribution.

After a rapid rise, the number of friends peaks for people in their late teenage years, and then declines thereafter. Why is this? I suspect it’s partly a reflection of people’s intrinsic behavior, and partly a reflection of the fact that Facebook hasn’t yet been around very long. Assuming people don’t drop friends much once they’ve added them one might expect that the number of friends would simply grow with age. And for sufficiently young people that’s basically what we see. But there’s a limit to the growth, because there’s a limit to the number of years people have been on Facebook. And assuming that’s roughly constant across ages, what the plot suggests is that people add friends progressively more slowly with age.

But what friends do they add? Given a person of a particular age, we can for example ask what the distribution of ages of the person’s friends is. Here are some results (the jaggedness, particularly at age 70, comes from the limited data we have):

And here’s an interactive version, generated from CDF:

 

The first thing we see is that the ages of friends always peak at or near the age of the person themselves—which is presumably a reflection of the fact that in today’s society many friends are made in age-based classes in school or college. For younger people, the peak around the person’s age tends to be pretty sharp. For older people, the distribution gets progressively broader.

We can summarize what happens by plotting the distribution of friend ages against the age of a person (the solid line is the median age of friends):

There’s an anomaly for the youngest ages, presumably because of kids under 13 misreporting their ages. But apart from that, we see that young people tend to have friends who are remarkably close in age to themselves. The broadening as people get older is probably associated with people making non-age-related friends in their workplaces and communities. And as the array of plots above suggests, by people’s mid-40s, there start to be secondary peaks at younger ages, presumably as people’s children become teenagers, and start using Facebook.

So what else can one see about the trajectory of people’s lives? Here’s the breakdown according to reported relationship status as a function of age:

And here’s more detail, separating out fractions for males and females (“married+” means “civil union”, “separated”, “widowed”, etc. as well as “married”):

There’s some obvious goofiness at low ages with kids (slightly more often girls than boys) misreporting themselves as married. But in general the trend is clear. The rate of getting married starts going up in the early 20s—a couple of years earlier for women than for men—and decreases again in the late 30s, with about 70% of people by then being married. The fraction of people “in a relationship” peaks around age 24, and there’s a small “engaged” peak around 27. The fraction of people who report themselves as married continues to increase roughly linearly with age, gaining about 5% between age 40 and age 60—while the fraction of people who report themselves as single continues to increase for women, while decreasing for men.

I have to say that as I look at the plots above, I’m struck by their similarity to plots for physical processes like chemical reactions. It’s as if all those humans, with all the complexities of their lives, still behave in aggregate a bit like molecules—with certain “reaction rates” to enter into relationships, marry, etc.

Of course, what we’re seeing here is just for the “Facebook world”. So how does it compare to the world at large? Well, at least some of what we can measure in the Facebook world is also measured in official censuses. And so for example we can see how our results for the fraction of people married at a given age compare with results from the official US Census:

I’m amazed at how close the correspondence is. Though there are clearly some differences. Like below age 20 kids on Facebook are misreporting themselves as married. And on the older end, widows are still considering themselves married for purposes of Facebook. For people in their 20s, there’s also a small systematic difference—with people on Facebook on average getting married a couple of years later than the Census would suggest. (As one might expect, if one excludes the rural US population, the difference gets significantly smaller.)

Talking of the Census, we can ask in general how our Facebook population compares to the US population. And for example, we find, not surprisingly, that our Facebook population is heavily weighted toward younger people:

OK. So we saw above how the typical number of friends a person has depends on age. What about gender? Perhaps surprisingly, if we look at all males and all females, there isn’t a perceptible difference in the distributions of number of friends. But if we instead look at males and females as a function of age, there is a definite difference:

Teenage boys tend to have more friends than teenage girls, perhaps because they are less selective in who they accept as friends. But after the early 20s, the difference between genders rapidly dwindles.

What effect does relationship status have? Here’s the male and female data as a function of age:

In the older set, relationship status doesn’t seem to make much difference. But for young people it does. With teenagers who (mis)report themselves as “married” on average having more friends than those who don’t. And with early teenage girls who say they’re “engaged” (perhaps to be able to tag a BFF) typically having more friends than those who say they’re single, or just “in a relationship”.

Another thing that’s fairly reliably reported by Facebook users is location. And it’s common to see quite a lot of variation by location. Like here are comparisons of the median number of friends for countries around the world (ones without enough data are left gray), and for states in the US:

There are some curious effects. Countries like Russia and China have low median friend counts because Facebook isn’t widely used for connections between people inside those countries. And perhaps there are lower friend counts in the western US because of lower population densities. But quite why there are higher friend counts for our Facebook population in places like Iceland, Brazil and the Philippines—or Mississippi—I don’t know. (There is of course some “noise” from people misreporting their locations. But with the size of the sample we have, I don’t think this is a big effect.)

In Facebook, people can list both a “hometown” and a “current city”. Here’s how the probability that these are in the same US state varies with age:

What we see is pretty much what one would expect. For some fraction of the population, there’s a certain rate of random moving, visible here for young ages. Around age 18, there’s a jump as people move away from their “hometowns” to go to college and so on. Later, some fraction move back, and progressively consider wherever they live to be their “hometown”.

One can ask where people move to and from. Here’s a plot showing the number of people in our Facebook population moving between different US states, and different countries:

There’s a huge range of demographic questions we could ask. But let’s come back to social networks. It’s a common observation that people tend to be friends with people who are like them. So to test this we might for example ask whether people with more friends tend to have friends who have more friends. Here’s a plot of the median number of friends that our users have, as a function of the number of friends that they themselves have:

And the result is that, yes, on average people with more friends tend to have friends with more friends. Though we also notice that people with lots of friends tend to have friends with fewer friends than themselves.

And seeing this gives me an opportunity to discuss a subtlety I alluded to earlier. The very first plot in this post shows the distribution of the number of friends that our users have. But what about the number of friends that their friends have? If we just average over all the friends of all our users, this is how what we get compares to the original distribution for our users themselves:

It seems like our users’ friends always tend to have more friends than our users themselves. But actually from the previous plot we know this isn’t true. So what’s going on? It’s a slightly subtle but general social-network phenomenon known as the “friendship paradox”. The issue is that when we sample the friends of our users, we’re inevitably sampling the space of all Facebook users in a very non-uniform way. In particular, if our users represent a uniform sample, any given friend will be sampled at a rate proportional to how many friends they have—with the result that people with more friends are sampled more often, so the average friend count goes up.

It’s perfectly possible to correct for this effect by weighting friends in inverse proportion to the number of friends they have—and that’s what we did earlier in this post. And by doing this we determine that in fact the friends of our users do not typically have more friends than our users themselves; instead their median number of friends is actually 229 instead of 342.

It’s worth mentioning that if we look at the distribution of number of friends that we deduce for the Facebook population, it’s a pretty good fit to a power law, with exponent -2.8. And this is a common form for networks of many kinds—which can be understood as the result of an effect known as “preferential attachment”, in which as the network grows, nodes that already have many connections preferentially get more connections, leading to a limiting “scale-free network” with power-law features.

But, OK. Let’s look in more detail at the social network of an individual user. I’m not sufficiently diligent on Facebook for my own network to be interesting. But my 15-year-old daughter Catherine was kind enough to let me show her network:

There’s a dot for each of Catherine’s Facebook friends, with connections between them showing who’s friends with whom. (There’s no dot for Catherine herself, because she’d just be connected to every other dot.) The network is laid out to show clusters or “communities” of friends (using the Wolfram Language function FindGraphCommunities). And it’s amazing the extent to which the network “tells a story”. With each cluster corresponding to some piece of Catherine’s life or history.

Here’s a whole collection of networks from our Data Donors:

No doubt each of these networks tells a different story. But we can still generate overall statistics. Like, for example, here is a plot of how the number of clusters of friends varies with age (there’d be less noise if we had more data):

Even at age 13, people typically seem to have about 3 clusters (perhaps school, family and neighborhood). As they get older, go to different schools, take jobs, and so on, they accumulate another cluster or so. Right now the number saturates above about age 30, probably in large part just because of the limited time Facebook has been around.

How big are typical clusters? The largest one is usually around 100 friends; the plot below shows the variation of this size with age:

And here’s how the size of the largest cluster as a fraction of the whole network varies with age:

What about more detailed properties of networks? Is there a kind of “periodic table” of network structures? Or a classification scheme like the one I made long ago for cellular automata?

The first step is to find some kind of iconic summary of each network, which we can do for example by looking at the overall connectivity of clusters, ignoring their substructure. And so, for example, for Catherine (who happened to suggest this idea), this reduces her network to the following “cluster diagram”:

Doing the same thing for the Data Donor networks shown above, here’s what we get:

In making these diagrams, we’re keeping every cluster with at least 2 friends. But to get a better overall view, we can just drop any cluster with, say, less than 10% of all friends—in which case for example Catherine’s cluster diagram becomes just:

And now for example we can count the relative numbers of different types of structures that appear in all the Data Donor networks:

And we can look at how the fractions of each of these structures vary with age:

What do we learn? The most common structures consist of either two or three major clusters, all of them connected. But there are also structures in which major clusters are completely disconnected—presumably reflecting facets of a person’s life that for reasons of geography or content are also completely disconnected.

For everyone there’ll be a different detailed story behind the structure of their cluster diagram. And one might think this would mean that there could never be a general theory of such things. At some level it’s a bit like trying to find a general theory of human history, or a general theory of the progression of biological evolution. But what’s interesting now about the Facebook world is that it gives us so much more data from which to form theories.

And we don’t just have to look at things like cluster diagrams, or even friend networks: we can dig almost arbitrarily deep. For example, we can analyze the aggregated text of posts people make on their Facebook walls, say classifying them by topics they talk about (this uses a natural-language classifier written in the Wolfram Language and trained using some large corpora):

Each of these topics is characterized by certain words that appear with high frequency:

And for each topic we can analyze how its popularity varies with (Facebook) age:

It’s almost shocking how much this tells us about the evolution of people’s typical interests. People talk less about video games as they get older, and more about politics and the weather. Men typically talk more about sports and technology than women—and, somewhat surprisingly to me, they also talk more about movies, television and music. Women talk more about pets+animals, family+friends, relationships—and, at least after they reach child-bearing years, health. The peak time for anyone to talk about school+university is (not surprisingly) around age 20. People get less interested in talking about “special occasions” (mostly birthdays) through their teens, but gradually gain interest later. And people get progressively more interested in talking about career+money in their 20s. And so on. And so on.

Some of this is rather depressingly stereotypical. And most of it isn’t terribly surprising to anyone who’s known a reasonable diversity of people of different ages. But what to me is remarkable is how we can see everything laid out in such quantitative detail in the pictures above—kind of a signature of people’s thinking as they go through life.

Of course, the pictures above are all based on aggregate data, carefully anonymized. But if we start looking at individuals, we’ll see all sorts of other interesting things. And for example personally I’m very curious to analyze my own archive of nearly 25 years of email—and then perhaps predict things about myself by comparing to what happens in the general population.

Over the decades I’ve been steadily accumulating countless anecdotal “case studies” about the trajectories of people’s lives—from which I’ve certainly noticed lots of general patterns. But what’s amazed me about what we’ve done over the past few weeks is how much systematic information it’s been possible to get all at once. Quite what it all means, and what kind of general theories we can construct from it, I don’t yet know.

But it feels like we’re starting to be able to train a serious “computational telescope” on the “social universe”. And it’s letting us discover all sorts of phenomena. That have the potential to help us understand much more about society and about ourselves. And that, by the way, provide great examples of what can be achieved with data science, and with the technology I’ve been working on developing for so long.

One of my favorite conferences every year is Microconf , because it focuses on small software businesses, which is where my heart and soul is businesswise.  I know a lot of folks can’t justify a trip out to Vegas (though you should really come in 2014 if you possibly can — 2013 is only a few days from me posting this and already quite sold out), so I always ask Rob and Mike (the organizers) for a copy of my video so I can produce a transcript and put it online.  My 2012 talk focuses on building systems to achieve marketing objectives at a software company.  I’ve been successful at doing things at a variety of scales, from my own one-man software business to consulting clients with 8 figures a year of revenue.  A lot of the tactics covered are wildly actionable if you run a SaaS business.

[Patrick notes: As always, I include inline notes in my transcripts, called out like so.  If you'd like to see my 2011 talk, see here.  It focused on how to run a software business in 5 hours a week, including scalable marketing strategies like SEO/AdWords/etc.

Video & Slides (Transcript follows)

Transcript: Marketing, For People Who Would Rather Be Building Stuff

Patrick McKenzie:  Hideho everybody, my name is Patrick McKenzie, perhaps better known as "Patio11" on the Internet.

I sometimes get asked what I do, and I'm kind of confused at it myself. I was going to Town Hall recently to file my taxes, and I was across the street from Town Hall, the light was preventing me from getting across the street. By the way, I live in Japan. A guy comes up to me on a cycle, stops right next to me and says, "Psst!  日雇い労働ですか？" [Patrick notes:  I corrected the Japanese here with reference to a dictionary, but don't remember this as being his phrasing.]  My brain started to flip through all the possible things that could be, and a high probability for those characters, hiyatoi roudou is day labor, “Are you a day laborer?”

I was like, “Wow, there’s only one way I can answer that. ‘Yeah, but my rates are probably a little high for you.’”  [Patrick notes: Unstated background knowledge here: I live in Ogaki, where roughly 90% of foreigners -- who are rather scarce -- are blue collar Brazilian Japanese who largely work in electronics/car parts factories.  Unemployment among these folks has been rather high for the last couple of years, so if you were doing things purely on a statistical basis, "Day laborer" is a much less insane guess for a foreigner standing outside city hall than "Owner of a software company."]

[laughter]

If you were here last year, you heard the grand arc of my transition from really overworked Japanese salary man to totally‑not‑working‑all‑that‑much Bingo Card empire guy. It’s really not all that great shakes compared to some of the things that people have done up here, but it’s the little website that could. It has over 200,000 users and 6,056 paying customers.  [Patrick notes: Current counts as of posting are ~300,000 and 8,249.  The last twelve months have been pretty good.] I’m pretty happy with where it got me to, and just for a little update on this story for last year, if you weren’t here for last year, it’s on the blog somewhere.

I’m sure people will tweet out the link to that video if they’re very, very nice and kind to me. [Patrick notes: The Microconf 2011 writeup is here.] Just an update. The blue bars here are the 12 months before attending Microconf, and the red bars are the last 12 months, so after attending Microconf. Since my business is crazily seasonal, if the red bar is above the blue bar, I’m doing something right. As you can see, in the last six months, the red bar is routinely exceeding the blue bar, so I was doing something very right. The thing that I was doing was stopping working on Bingo Card Creator.

So my first actionable tip is, “If you have me in charge of your marketing,” like say Jason Cohen does, “you need to fire me, and your sales will go up by 50 percent.” We’re not going to talk too much about Bingo Card Creator today, we’re instead going to talk about systems. You heard earlier about building the flywheel, being a growth hacker. This is probably one of the most important things I’ve ever come across, but a job is a system that turns time into money, and a business is a system that turns systems into money.

I was once talking to a Japanese guy at a large automobile manufacturer in central Japan that you might know of, and I said, “T‑Corp is known in America as a company that makes cars, and Ford, or whatever, is a company that sells cars.” He patted me on the head like, “Oh, nice. Silly American. Ford might well be a company that sells cars, but T‑Corp is a company that builds organizations that builds cars.”

Why Engineers Get A Cheat Code For Starting Businesses

I thought that was a very profound distinction. All of us are in the business of building things that help us sell things that we build. I think we are ideally situated to this, because, as engineers, we build systems. You heard earlier about the term “growth hack,” which is just on the cusp of becoming a meme, by the way. You’re going to hear a lot about that over the next coming days, because there are huge platforms these days, everything from Pinterest to Twitter, to Google, to the App Store, that give you ready access to hundreds of millions of users, billions of users, many of whom have credit cards and will actually pay money for things.  [Patrick notes: I'm stealing this from 500 Startups' investment thesis, but I think it is equally applicable regardless of whether one is doing a high-growth startup or a one-man bootstrapped software company.  Again, the most niche app you could think of, run by an unknown guy living in Central Japan, just added 100,000 users last year while in maintenance mode due to effective use of Google as a platform.]

As engineers, we have the capability of exploiting those platforms in a scalable manner. Some of the ways to do it I talked about last year, and I don’t want to give all old content, so if you want to hear about SEO, which is the main reason my sales went up for this year, just watch the thing from last year. [Patrick notes: Or you can read my copious writeups of it in the Greatest Hits section under SEO or Content Creation.] We’re going to talk about new stuff. Oh, totally stealing a slide from last year. In addition to Bingo Card Creator, there were three really big things going on, and I just want to give you updates on them.

The most important one, down in the bottom there. Last year I said something out of school, it wasn’t planned for the talk or anything, it just slipped out of my mouth. I said, “The most important thing in my life right now is I’ve recently met a beautiful young lady, Miss Ruriko Shimada over there, and she is going to be the future Mrs. McKenzie.” That was the first time that thought ever got verbalized, even in the deepest recesses of my mind, so luckily it was not simulcast or anything. That’s official now, it’s happening June 26.  [Patrick notes: Ruriko's only comment on the presentation was "The 23rd, dear.  Be there."]

[applause]

Thanks very much. I don’t have a picture of kids, for obvious reasons, but can I just make a note about this? Everyone has shown a picture of their children or significant other. At a less charitable conference, people might be, “Oh, that’s the boring stuff, skip that, get to the good stuff.” All those other pictures, that is the good stuff. There’s a word in Japanese called mono no aware (もののあわれ）, meaning “an awareness of the impermanence of things.” All this conversion rates and equity grants and profits and all this… Vegas?

[laughter]

This will all be dust and memories. The important part of our lives is our families, our friends, that is what we will be known for. If you have a successful business, and your family isn’t feeling it, something is going terribly, terribly wrong. I can’t just stand up in here and say, “My fiancee is the nicest, smartest, most wonderful, beautiful woman in the world,” for the entire hour.

[laughter]

#include <platitudes.h>… wait, the word I wanted is not platitudes, it’s compliments, drats. I don’t speak the Engrish. Anyhow, updates on other things that are going on. I got a slide up from Fog Creek, which was one of my favorite clients I can publicly talk about, but I don’t really have much content in this presentation about running a high‑priced consulting business. Is that something you guys are interested in? Let’s have a show of hands.

I’m a marketing guy, so let me give you the quick elevator pitch, and if you want to hear about this, we can talk about it at the question‑and‑answer session. Is it interesting to you how I turned down $700,000 a year to do conversion optimization for big software companies? Just raise a show of hands. Would that be fun? Oh, OK. We might talk about that before questions. We’re going to talk a little about “Appointment Reminder” stuff that I learned the second time I tried to make a software business from the ground up, and how you can apply it to your businesses.

This is my new thing, which is, by the way, in almost direct competition to somebody who was in the first session of tear‑downs. You might compare and contrast to the way I do it and the way he does it. I actually went up to him afterwards and tried to teach him what I know about this, because people helping people is what this event is all about. We all get better, even if we’re competitors, sharing knowledge. Anyhow, it makes “Appointment Reminder”, phone calls, text messages and email messages to the clients of professional services businesses.

Don’t Make My Mistakes In Picking A Software Business

This is a wee bit more sophisticated than my bingo thingy. Why did I pick this problem? This is the slide in which I give bad advice. The way you should actually pick a problem, skip back to your notes from Amy Hoy’s presentation. That’s the way you should pick a problem. This is not the way you should pick a problem, but it’s true, so I’ll tell you it anyhow. You see this jacket that I wear in all of my presentations, because the color red looks good on me, and I love this company, Twilio?

Twilio came out with this product that let Web developers basically script up phone calls and SMS messages. I thought, “Ooh, that’s kind of awesome.” I like to view the market, “The market” in the sense of the broad, capital‑C Capitalism sense of the market, as a placid lake, which incorporates everything we know about the world right now. When new information gets added to that, it’s like dropping a rock in the lake. Ripples in the lake are change, and the larger the ripple is, the more change there is, the more possibility there is to get outsized profits over the course of the world right now.

Because we learned from microeconomics 101, the natural state of profits in the system is zero. The steady state. Twilio was dropping a big F‑ing rock into the software world, because you can finally interface with the plain old telephone system without having to understand what an Asterix server is, and if anyone here has ever tried to hack Asterix, I’m sorry for you. What could I do with a telephone that I couldn’t do before? I made a list of 400 ideas and just sat on it, because I was still at the day job at the time. Since I spend 16 hours a day in front of a computer screen, my shoulders ache like crazy, so I sometimes go to massage therapists.

This one day I went into a massage therapist, and asked, “Hey, can I get a shoulder massage, because I’m an engineer, my shoulder aches like crazy.” She said, “It’s going to be about two hours,” and I’m like, “Oh, well I’m gainfully unemployed, so that’s no problem. I’ll just take my iPad, browse Hacker News in the corner here for a little while, then we’ll get the massage when you can do it.”

15 minutes later, she comes back to me and said, “Hey, I know I told you it would take two hours, but it would be really, really helpful for me if I could massage your shoulders right now.” I said, “Sure, no problem, can I ask why?” She said, “I had this slot booked up with somebody else, but he didn’t come in, and now he’s 15 minutes late. If I don’t start massaging your shoulders now, that’s going to throw off the schedule for the rest of the day, and I’ll never get the revenue from these next 45 minutes back.”

I’m like, “That’s interesting. Why don’t you call him?” Notable and quotable line from her, she says, “I’m a massage therapist. If my hands are on a telephone, they’re not on someone’s back, and if my hands aren’t on someone’s back, I’m not making money,” and I thought, “That’s interesting.” I asked, “If I had a system that could call someone automatically before their appointment with you, would that be motivational to you?” and she said, “Yeah.” I went through my list of 400 things, and thought, “This is the first one I’ve had an actual customer need for.”

How did I know it would sell, though? That’s one person. I did two things. One thing I did was just whipped up the MVP, Minimum Viable Product, read Eric Ries’s book “The Lean Startup.” Everyone should read that book, it’s amazing. I whipped up the MVP, which is a website, you can get to it, I’ll show you the link later. You give in your phone number, and it calls you, just like you had an appointment, and says, “Hey, you’ve got an appointment. Click ‘One’ to confirm.”

If you confirm it shows right on the schedule here, “This person confirmed.” If you cancel, it says, “This person canceled.” We would email you right now so you can re‑book the slot and save the money. I just threw this up on the Internet, and waited. People signed up for my pre‑launch list, and said, “That is exactly what my problem is.” The other way I did, was I went home to Chicago, which is where my family is from, and took out $400 from an ATM, and walked around downtown Chicago and looked for salons and other massage therapists, that sort of thing.

I walked in and said, “Hey, do you take walk‑ins?” “Yeah.” “Are you free right now?” “Yeah.” “Are you the business owner?” “Yeah.” “OK, I’ve got a weird proposition for you,” and no, not that kind of weird.

[laughter]

“What’s the rate on a 30‑minute shoulder massage?” She would tell me. It’s almost always a she. I would say, “OK, I’m going to pay you the rate for a 30‑minute shoulder massage, but what I’m really interested in, I’m a small businessman, I live in Japan, I’m interested in the business of massage therapy. How about we just skip to that post‑massage cup of tea that you’re going to offer me,” I have learned this over the years. “Skip to the cup of tea, I’m going to pick your brains about how you run your business, and then I’ll go, no massage needed, and you get your money?” Almost everybody took me up on that, and nobody called the police. Yay.

[laughter]

I would ask questions, like, “What do you use for your appointment scheduling right now?” “Pen and paper version 1.0.” “How many people cancel?” “Lots.” “Do you not like when people cancel?” “Yes.” “Do you phone call people every day?” “Well, yeah, I kind of do, but I sometimes forget,” yadda yadda yadda.

Then the money question. “If I had something that I could show you right now that would call, would you pay for it?” “Yes.” “Would you pay $30 a month for it, because $30 a month is close to your rate for just saving one appointment?” “Yes.” “Can I get your email address right now? As soon as this is ready, I’m going to come back to you and say, ‘It’s ready. Let’s get that $30 a month,’” and I just collected those.

I actually didn’t end up selling any one of those people, but the need was clearly demonstrated to me there. I’ve got a better way for doing it these days, because as I mentioned, I am in the talking‑to‑people‑about‑wedding‑things, and I’m learning stuff about selling wedding dresses, because I am the unwitting victim of that. There’s this thing called the iPad, and every salesman at a wedding venue or a wedding dress shop, or whatever, in Japan, is using the iPad. I predict within five years, that every salesman in the entire world will consider that their key sales tool.

The reason is, when you have a sales discussion with someone with the iPad, you’re sitting next to them, standing next to them, hunched over the shoulder in a very intimate, psychologically‑reassuring way, while they drive the iPad and flip through. “Oh, that’s a lovely dress. Oh, that’s lovely, I really like that one.” “You like that one? I’ll show you more like that.” When they get confused, you can just take over for them, do the little slide‑y slide‑y thing, and it is a very, very persuasive technique.

If you don’t know whether a software will sell or not, go to WooThemes, or go to ThemeForest, pay $15 or $70, or whatever it is, mock up three screens from it, or even mock up two screens plus the final output. Put them in a photo gallery on your iPad, and take it directly to people in real life. Stand out and then listen over the shoulder, it’s like, “Do you really have a wedding dress problem? We got these.” If you’re solving a problem people actually have, they will say at this point, “Shut up and take my money.”

[laughter]

If someone says, “That’s kind of interesting, tell me when that exists,” you have not successfully identified a problem that people actually have. Fail to identify problems prior to spending six months of your life building the solution to those problems that no actual human being, aside from you, actually experiences in their life. You will have much better success that way. Brief interlude on pricing. This was brought up in a few things, and we treated it at a high level, so I thought I would dig into the nuts and bolts, considering many of you are in the software‑as‑a‑service business.

How To Read A SaaS Pricing Grid (And Why You Should Charge More)

I thought I’d read a pricing grid. This one’s from Wufoo. You have seen similar things all over the Internets. I can’t tell you about exact results I’ve gotten from customers, but I talk to a lot of people about this sort of things, so if we’re just kind of anonymizing, here’s how you read it. Find the largest dollar‑amount plan. That plan generates 33 percent to 50 percent of gross revenue. Why? Because it’s sold to people who are not spending their own money, they’re spending a corporate budget. Spending your own money hurts, but spending a corporate budget is kind of the happy thing for a lot of people.

[laughter]

Because, check this out, if you don’t spend your budget, it gets taken away from you. If you’re trying to protect your home position at a company, you want to spend as close to the top of that budget as possible, so help people out. They’re trying to protect their status and job security, by helping them spend their budgets. $200 a month is nothing to a company that has actual employees. The cheapest possible fully‑loaded cost for a college graduate is about $4,000 a month.

$200 a month is five percent of that, so if you’re only spending one or two hours of employee time a month, $200 is a total no‑brainer. So’s $250. Anyhow, the one that has the most users. Nobody likes to be a cheapskate, boom, it’s this one. The one that has the highest support costs. Wufoo has a free plan, I’ll guarantee you they get more annoying emails from people on the free plan than anything else put together, probably squared.

[laughter]

The worst customers, I call them pathological customers, are attracted to things that don’t have a lot of money. It’s amazing how many people have told me this. You raise prices, and you deal with less crazy people. At 99 cents, people have very unreasonable expectations. “What? This flashlight app didn’t do my taxes! One stars!”

[laughter]

When you’re charging people tens of thousands of dollars a month for an enterprise‑level service, they say, “Hey, our business really needs this feature.” “Oh, thanks for the email. I would really love to implement that feature, but we are kind of constrained on time right now. Can I get back to you in the indefinite future, if we get time to do that?” You’ll get a one‑line email back, “Sure, that sounds great.”

Would you rather deal with the no stress and get the tens of thousands of dollars, or “One stars!” for 99 cents? It’s almost self‑explanatory. By the way, I’ve sold a semi‑B2C product for most of my life. I really do love teachers, even when they’re kind of exasperating, and can’t tell the difference between the blue Googles and the green Googles, and don’t understand why they can’t get a CD of the Internet. It actually happened to me today.

[laughter]

In terms of, if I had known then what I know now, I would never go into B2C. Charge businesses, charge them a price appropriate to the value you’re providing. By the way, big surprise about software‑as‑a‑service companies, almost every one has enterprise pricing available. Some of them don’t put it on your things, but I guarantee you there’s a way to go up to Wufoo, go up to almost any software‑as‑a‑service company, and pay arbitrary amounts of money for their product. For example, if you have a $500,000 budget, and you talk to somebody at Wufoo, I will guarantee you that they will find an option to spend $500,000.

Maybe it’s we send a trainer and teach everyone how to use their drag and drop form‑building interface, and then the cost of the trainer’s time is $500 an hour, and the business will say, “Oh sure, yeah, whatever.” By the way, you need to purchase a service level agreement with them, and the service level agreement runs $20,000 a month, and there are businesses that will happily pay that.

Software‑as‑a‑service economics 101, why do you want to charge closer to the top of these pricing points, instead of the bottom of the pricing points? Because you have to get a lot less customers to generate the revenue that you want, to either replace the day job, or to meet whatever your own personal goal is. How do you segment plans? First, align it with customer success.

Getting based‑on features can work, but if there’s a numeric thing that allows you to discriminate between customer classes, such that the more value they get out of the product, the more X number that they need, segment primarily based on that X number.

It doesn’t have to be linear segmentation, because the ability of Fortune 500 companies to pay is not linear, with respect to the size of the company. A 1,000 person company is not the same as collecting 1,000 one‑man companies and putting them all in a room together. They have orders of magnitude more money, so you should probably be charging them orders of magnitude more money.

“Names matter.” Back in my time as a Japanese salary man, I was given a project to run by my boss, and I was trying to buy, I think, “Crazy Egg” for it. I did the projection, I wrote up the proposal for my boss, and said, “By the way, we need the $9.99 hobbyist Crazy Egg plan, and could you please approve the purchase for that?”

Boss takes my printed out proposal for the project, looks down at “Hobbyist,” goes over to crazyegg.com, strikes it out in red, writes “Enterprise,” picks the top plan, which was $250 or $500 or something a month at the time, something like a quarter of my salary, and says, “OK, here’s the new proposal. Sign off on it, and then I’ll sign to my boss.”

I said, “Boss, boss, we don’t need the enterprise plan, our projected traffic is clearly under the hobbyist plan.” He says, “F if I’m going to tell my boss that I want a reimbursement request for the hobbyist plan, so we are under the enterprise plan.” I was like, “Can I get the enterprise salary?”

[laughter]

That did not work out so well. That’s why I no longer work there. Anyhow, feature segmentation can work, particularly if you have features where there’s a hard requirement among some customers, that they must have a particular feature. That segments people into, “Has a little money” vs. “Has a lot of money.”

For example, healthcare in the United States has more money than God, and something that a lot of healthcare customers are going to be very particular about is, “Is this HIPAA‑compliant?” Talk to me later if you want the full story on that one, but the magic words, “Is this HIPAA‑compliant?” means you can charge them as much money as you want.  [Patrick notes: The one-sentence explanation: Healthcare providers in the US are obligated to follow the Health Information Privacy and Availability Act to safeguard patient health information, which imposes some technical and process safeguards on anyone who handles most data for them.]

By the way, you can have a system where all accounts are actually HIPAA‑compliant, but you only tell people that the most expensive plan is HIPAA‑compliant. Because they’re not actually caring about HIPAA‑compliance, they’re caring about being able to sign off on the fact of HIPAA‑compliance. If you simply refuse to sign off on that fact for anything that costs less than $1,000 a month, all of your healthcare clients are going to go for the $1,000 a month plan. Which is, by the way, nothing in healthcare.

The Most Important Pricing Advice Ever: Charge.  More.

Charge more, charge more, charge more, charge more, charge more. Anyone have a question about pricing? You should charge more. You’re probably ridiculously underpricing. $4,000 a month is the cost of the cheapest possible employee, you are less than a tenth of that. You are probably creating a lot more value than many employees in the organization, so charge for the value you are creating.

I was doing tear‑downs earlier. Here’s what I put up for my pricing grid about a year ago, and since I haven’t had all that much time to work on “Appointment Reminder,” I made a lot of mistakes. I haven’t fixed them yet, so I’m going to tear‑downs some of my own pricing grid.  [Patrick notes: Compare and contrast this slide with the current version.]

I have a $9 a month plan.  That was a mistake. I actually have a lot of customers on the $9 a month plan. They account for about 80 percent of my customer support requests, and approximately 95 percent of my headaches, and they pay me approximately nothing, and don’t stick with the service for very long.  [Patrick notes: When I did the math recently, customers on the Personal ($9) plan had a churn rate which was literally double that of the Professional ($29) plan, meaning a single signup on Professional was worth more than 6 Personal signups.]

I have an enterprise plan that’s coming soon, any day now, a year later.  [Patrick notes: Appointment Reminder closed its first Enterprise account a few weeks after Microconf.  If you want to hear about this topic in a lot of detail, I talked about it at a presentation for Twilio several months later -- I'll post it in a week or two.]  There’s actually a plan that isn’t even on here. It’s $200 a month, I call it “Small Business 2,” because I’m very creative like that. It’s just small business, and I bumped this number up a little. Small Business 2, plus Small Business, create over half my revenues that are based on this plan. Oh, quick update on “Appointment Reminder,” it quadrupled in a year without me doing much work on it at all. Thanks. End story, just make systems that really help. A tactic you should all probably steal.

The Tactic All The Savviest Software Companies Use: Automated Marketing Email

Can you raise your hands, everybody? Just get a little stretching. Put your hands down if you have not emailed a lot of customers all at once this month. If you look around the room and you’re looking for speakers, you will find almost all of the speakers still have their hands up, and this is one of the things that consistently segregates the really savvy people from people who are not quite at that level of savviness yet, so of course I didn’t really seriously start collecting emails for six years.

This guy Ramit Sethi, one of the smartest people on the Internet in terms of marketing, he says “The one d’oh moment is that I was not building up an email list.” You heard earlier about an email list is creating your own recurring stream of earned media, because they are people who want to hear what you have to say. They trust you on a subject, and they are begging you to sell them on your solution, so you should be getting those emails. Let’s talk about how.

Why does email rock? Some people, because we’re all techies, might say, “If I want to get in touch with someone about a new blog post that I wrote, there’s RSS feeds for that, right?” Email is like RSS, except better in every possible way. Email is actually read. RSS is not read. Quick show of hands, who here is over 10,000 unread items in their Google Reader?  [Patrick notes: Dramatically less people than when I delivered this talk, I would expect. </rimshot>] I rest my case.

Email is actually read by real people too, and by “real people,” I mean folks who don’t come to conferences like this, and who have authority to sign off on $500 a month purchases without breaking a single sweat.

Email is a necessary time, whereas RSS reading is, “I don’t have anything important to do today. If I don’t have anything important to do I might read some RSS stuff,” whereas emails, if you’re an information worker like all of us, email is your job. You live in your inbox. Many, many things in the inbox get read, particularly when they sound interesting.

The psychology of email is really important. If I put a diamond in a trash store, you’re probably going to think that diamond is not worth so much. Think of the things that will be around your message in somebody’s inbox. It will be a lot of important work. If that’s all important, your message is probably important as well. Think of the things that are probably going to be around your blog post or content in someone’s RSS feed, or someone’s bookmark manager.

It’s probably going to be a lot of commoditized Internet dreck that they’re going to get to the first day after never. [Patrick notes: The following is a little brusque for my typical humor, but was an in-joke for attendees of Microconf from the previous year, where Hiten Shah and I had done live analysis of websites of several attendees.  One had a bookmark manager system with a bovine theme.] If you do free association for, say, “What’s the spirit animal of email?” It’s Thunderbird. It’s fast, it’s powerful, it does important shit. If you do free association with, “What’s an animal we can associate with bookmark systems?” What would it be, a cow? It’s fat, it’s stupid… it shits.

[laughter]

Do email instead. When I say “do email,” what do I mean? Really simple. Collect their email addresses, educate them over the email, and then sell them stuff. Let’s go into detail on that. For a successful landing page, you really only need a few things. Just ask for the minimum possible information from them.

Probably their email address and their name, because everyone likes hearing their name, and you should probably put it in subject lines, because that’ll increase open rates on your emails quite a bit. Give them a nice, attractive button that promises value, not pain. Get something cool. Does anyone here run a website for sadomasochists?

[laughter]

There are no hands up in the room, which means that nobody should have “Submit” as the text on their email button.  [Patrick notes: I use this line because it is punchy and inevitably gets a laugh, but seriously, you can pick up totally free double digit improvements by switching to [Get My Free Guide] or similar benefits-focused copy.  Try it in an A/B test if you don’t believe me.]

[laughter]

Minimize distractions on that page. You generally don’t want to be collecting email from your home page. Why? Because your home page has to serve many masters. You’re probably trying to get people into the trial, get them into the pricing grid. You should generally be collecting email on dedicated landing pages. What will you have on your dedicated landing pages? A sweetener. Because people don’t really care about you, they care about themselves, so tell them that giving you their email will accomplish something for them. Let’s go into ways to do that.

The simplest possible way to get permission from someone to send them email is when they’re signing up for the trial, say, “Hey! In addition to that trial, can I send you email?” Just takes adding one box. Downside, it’s going to minorly decrease your conversion rate to a free trial. Upside, you’ll get crazy conversion rates on this. By the way, who here hates email, and thinks, “Man, I hate getting email. I would never click on ‘Yes, I want to get email from you.’” Yeah, hands up. Real people don’t hate email. Some people like email a lot.

I have a newsletter that goes out to the bingo card people, and it goes out about monthly. I sent it out for October and said, “Hey, Halloween bingo cards! You make them by going to Bingo Card Creator and typing about Halloween stuff!” Then the November email is, predictably, Thanksgiving bingo cards. “You make them by going to Bingo Card Creator and typing about Thanksgiving stuff.”

I didn’t hit the “Send” button on the November email, because I just got busy that month. I got three messages from teachers in America, all of them saying, “Hey, I didn’t get the email from you in November. I must have missed it or something, or it got eaten by the Googles.”

[laughter]

“Can you please send me the email for November?” I wrote back, and I said, “There just wasn’t an email for November, because I got busy, but it was just going to be about Thanksgiving stuff.” They’re like, “That’s sad! I want to read about the Thanksgiving stuff?” Whoa! Missed opportunity. A better way to do things than collecting emails with your trials is to create some specific incentive. For example, Ruben from Bidsketch uses beautifully designed templates of proposals, and says, “OK, I will give you a beautifully designed template of your proposal.

You can turn around and make this into money, and all you need to do for that is to give me your email address, so I can email you a link to it.” Works very, very well. You can see incredibly high conversion rates to this, and the people who convert to, “I care enough about beautifully designed templates to give an email address, just to get a link for a download link for them” are not the kind of folks who hang out in Hacker News like it’s their job. It’s the people who really care about this. They make really great prospects for selling to. Third way…

Male audience member:  [Paraphrased] That doesn’t mention that he’s going to send you an email, though.  Isn’t that a no-no, permission marketing wise?

Patrick:  I think it actually does, I just cut it off with the screen grab.

Male audience member:  OK.

Patrick:  A different way, and this has vastly higher development costs, but you should consider doing it. Make a one‑off tool, gate access to the one‑off tool based on giving your email address. For example, WP Engine does this kind of well. [Patrick notes: See here.  Disclaimer: client.] They have a tool that will tell you if your website is slow, and it takes a few seconds to run and whatnot, so rather than just doing Ajax refresh, they’ll say, “Hey, we’ll send you a link to your report when it’s ready,” and they give you a little option there. “Hey, in addition to hearing whether if my website is slow, I’d also like to hear a one‑month course about how to fix that, and make it more scalable, make it more secure, and whatnot.” Get Jason drunk later, and ask if this works or not. This sort of thing can provide very focused, valuable leads for you, and it’s like a great transition moment into the first couple of emails from you. Let’s talk about that.

There’s a cycle here, of how sales‑y you get. Someone’s coming off the Internet, they don’t trust you, they don’t know you from Adam. For your first couple of emails over the course of a month, and you might send six emails or eight emails over the course of the month, depending on how much of a high‑touch complex sales process your service requires. For the first couple of emails you focus on trust building and education, and that’s it.

If you were just talking about someone’s website is slow, say, “Hey, thanks for signing up for the WP Engine one‑month course on improving your WordPress site. Here’s three ways you can make your website faster.” Very focused on value for the customer. Minimal, if any, sales content for WP Engine.

Then, over time, as you have built up credibility with the customer over three emails, they’ve seen your name in their inbox, they’re starting to associate it with your problem domain, and they’re getting value out of it, you start getting a little more sales‑y, and you push up that sales‑y to the maximum point. Then if they don’t buy it by the maximum point, they’re probably not ready for your offering. Back down a little bit, go more on the education again, and then try it again, but sell a different product offering. For example, a different plan.

I just threw up a random thing here for a template for an email that educates someone about something. It’s not really rocket science, it’s the three‑paragraph hamburger essay that you all learned to write in sixth grade. I hesitate to say this, but don’t be afraid of dumbing it down too much. You all live in your problem domain many, many hours a day, for months, weeks at a time.

Most of your customers are not super‑awesome ninja rock star experts at your problem domain, so teach them the basic stuff, because most people in your problem domain are beginners or intermediate, not super experts. Feel free to share of your knowledge, and answer basic questions that they have, and then at the end, just say, “Hey, do you have a question about this? Send me an email. I read all of them.”

Almost none of you have less than hundreds of thousands of customers, would feel any burden from getting email back from this, because most people think, “Oh, he doesn’t really mean that.” In fact, you will get emails saying, “Do you actually read this?” and then you fire back, “Yes! Signed, CEO.” I guarantee you if they have money, you’ve just got a customer for life. Even if you have hundreds of thousands of customers, like this for “Bingo Card Creator,” the email load is manageable, and you can give options for more and more things to do to convert.

When you’re getting into sales‑y hump on the graph, what do you do? First, you eliminate all decision making that they need to do, aside from, “Do I accept the offer, or no?” which means, if you have four plans, you don’t say, “OK, go to the pricing page and pick which of the four plans is worth it for you.” No, give them a recommendation.

Say, “Most of our customers find that this is the best value, you should buy this. Here’s the reasons why you should buy this. It will solve your problems, it will solve your problems, it will solve your problems, your life will get better, your problem’s solved. You, you, you, you, you, you, you, you.” Offer them a time‑limited bonus. “Yeah, you could have gotten to that pricing page at any time over the last 365 days, but if you take me up on this offer in the next seven days, I will give you something cool.”

It’s up to you what that something cool can be. For many of you, assistance directly from the CEO in integration is a really compelling offer, because wow, you can’t get that anywhere else. Wow, their perceived value for that is very high, and it immediately addresses one of the objections that they have for using your software. It’s like, “Oh god, I have to integrate that. I have to copy‑paste scripts into my web page.”

We’ll do the copy‑pasting for you, and thereby earn your loyalty for the next several years, and several thousand dollars of customer lifetime value, and it will actually be done by a freelancer that we’ve hired and told them how to FTP stuff. I think I stole that one from Rob, works pretty well. Pre‑answer all of their objections in the email, and on any page that you link them to. This is what we were talking about earlier in the tear‑downs.

When you’re talking to customers, you’re hearing their objections, “The price is too high.” Find the customer testimonial that says, “Oh yeah, I winced, but man, it’s so worth it,” and put that right on the page about answering the pricing objection with, “OK, here’s how you calculate the value for this. It’s a screamingly good deal for you. It will save you hundreds of hours of employee time, for only tens of thousands of dollars.” How do you learn about writing email and copy‑writing better? I suggest signing up for a lot of email and getting it from people, because they will convince you to buy all sorts of stuff.

Seriously, Ramit Sethi, did a call out to him earlier, he is a genius at this. He’s a friend of mine, I know he sells info courses for a living, and I’ve never bought an info course on anything. I was reading his email, I sent him an email at the end of it, because he says, “I respond to all of my emails.” I’m like, “Hey, Ramit, this is Patrick. I would crawl over broken glass right now to hand you my credit card. Wow.” Seriously, get his emails. They’re good stuff.

In addition to teaching you how to write email better, they are genuinely worth your time if you’re concerned with increasing your career and/or freelancing business. The Motley Fool does investment advice. It’s bad investment advice, but they sell it really, really well. For any sort of scummy market, like online nursing degrees or anything, people who are paying $100 plus just to get an email for that, probably know what they’re doing or they would be bankrupt already. See what works and use your powers for good, not evil.

Improving The First Run Experience Of Your Software

[Patrick notes: If you'd like to hear me talk about this in a lot more detail, go to training.kalzumeus.com and give me your email address.  I'll give you a 45 minute deep dive into this topic, totally free.]

More specific to software people, let’s talk about the first‑run experience of your software. Hands up, who here knows how many people come back to using their software after the first time, like that is something we check? OK, there’s a few hands going up here. Almost everyone should check that.

For those of you who aren’t checking it, I’m just going to tell you the numbers right now. It is between 40 and 60 percent of people come back after using it the first time. Which, subtract from 100, 60 to 40 percent of people never use the software a second time, because they did not perceive much value in the first‑time use of your software.

They got bored of it after 10 seconds, or within five minutes, so you should make that first five minutes of the software F‑ing sing. It is the most important five minutes in your lifetime, because every subsequent use of the software is gated based on surviving that first five minutes that most of your users are not surviving right now.

Can you just show your software here? Who here thinks that this is a fun first five minutes for software? Microsoft can get away with this, because your first five minutes with using Microsoft Word were probably in 1992, and you had to do it to pass a class, and Microsoft is Microsoft, and you absolutely have to use this if you want to work in the information economy, but it’s kinda sucky.

There’s just so many options here, it starts you with a blank screen, and you have no clue. If this was a free trial product, what do I do to get value out of Microsoft Word, to make the decision on the go or no‑go for buying this? Microsoft, that isn’t really a problem, because you’ve already bought this if you’re seeing this screen. If this reminds you of your software at all, if you drop people into a blank screen, that is a huge failure mode. You’re going to fix that. How?

You script their first five minutes like it is the invasion of Normandy. “You are going to do this, and then you are going to do this, and then you are going to do this, and then you are going to do this, and then you are going to be F‑ing happy.” Can I give you a great example of that? Who here has played “World of Warcraft?” OK, a few hands. Who here managed a raid guild in “World of Warcraft” for a few years? OK.

The first five minutes of “World of Warcraft” is literally, you talk to this guy, there’s a big exclamation point on his head, and it says, “Right click the guy with the big exclamation point.” You right click him, and he says, “You need to save the world from a wolf. There’s a wolf behind you, you can kill it with Z. Z! Z! Z! Z! Z! Z! Z!” So you Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, you kill the wolf, you go back to the guy, he’s got another big exclamation point, you right‑click, because you’ve learned that that works in the world.

He says, “Great job! Save the world, there’s 10 wolves, kill them! You get Z and X this time. ZX! ZX! ZX!” So you ZX, ZX, ZX, and you have a feedback loop where it’s both teaching you on how to use the software, and you feel like, “Yeah, I’m the powerful level one gnome mage that’s has got to spend the next 3,000 hours of my life playing this game,” but it’s a great, awesome experience for you.

At the end of five minutes, you’ve accomplished something, and you’ve learned how to use the software. All of your software should be that addicting. Sign up for the free trial of “World of Warcraft,” play the first five minutes, then stop!

[laughter]

You measure their activity, then you use A/B testing, like we talked about last year to change their activity. This is where the growth hacking comes in, and making sure the designing of their first user experience with the software is actually motivational. Here’s the, “If you’re going to do this, then you’re going to do this, then you’re going to do this, then you’re going to do this” funnel for “Bingo Card Creator,” instrumented out in KISSmetrics, which is, by the way, the way I would go if I had any budget at all to spend on it.

I don’t know what I spend on it, it’s probably like $150 a month, or, you know, nothing. [Patrick notes: I literally was unsure of this until I checked with my bookkeeping software a moment ago.  It was indeed $149.  Relevantly to other SaaS businesses: what does this suggest about the resistance to spending any figure between $50 and $500 at my business?  Right, I don't care in the slightest. So charge me closer to $500 than you do to $50.  If you provided as much value as KissMetrics does I'd pay without a second thought.] You can write arbitrary code to do something like this, and just throw it into a file if you need to. You can see here where people are falling out of the funnel, if you’re into Bingo Cards, like that’s your life, and you can try things to get them to actually work.

I don’t really have enough time to talk about what really worked here, but the punchline here is that a particular intervention increases the amount of people who successfully get through to printing a bingo card with “Bingo Card Creator” by 10 percent. From 60 percent to 70 percent, which is really powerful for me.

If you read my blog, I’ve blogged about what exactly this was. It actually didn’t increase sales, weirdly enough, but similar things that I did with only two hours of work increased sales by 16 percent for two hours of work, durably. About tens of thousands of dollars for two hours of work, very motivational, you should probably do it. You fix the weak spots in the funnel that you’ve identified, once you have the funnel‑analytics in.

Here’s just some examples of things that work for Bingo Card Creator. Probably not too motivational for you, but they paid for my wedding, so motivational to me. Dan gave a great example earlier in the Growth Hacking talk [Patrick notes: Dan Martell's talk is available here], about people that have just signed up, and they can tweet something, but they weren’t really planning on tweeting something, and they don’t know what to tweet so they don’t tweet, and then they go away and never use the app again.

You say, “Hey, you should tweet something right now. Let me give you 10 suggestions. Pick which one you like.” From six percent of the people went through and actually tweeted something, to 70‑plus percent of people tweeted something, which is a huge, epic win in activation. “Activations” means happy use of the software. I guarantee you if you haven’t optimized this at all, you can achieve extraordinary gains in activation for not all that much work.

The thing that worked for Appointment Reminder was implementing a tour mode. What’s a tour mode? Appointment Reminder has sub‑optimal things about the way the market uses it, in terms of getting people through their 30 day free trial. I actually collect credit card at the start, and then they get 30 days to decide whether they want to cancel or not. The problem is that people typically make their appointments for the customers well in advance.

By the time the 30‑day mark rolls around, Appointment Reminder might not have actually reminded a single customer about appointments, because they were scheduled that far in advance, so that’s sucky. They get to the last day, they get to the email, it’s like, “Hey, we’re charging your credit card in 24 hours. If you don’t want that, cancel.” They think, “Oh, this hasn’t really done anything for me, cancel.”

Rather than making it take six weeks for them to perceive value from Appointment Reminder, and to have people come in to their massage therapy practice, or whatever their business is, I wanted to expose that value to them in the first five minutes. So I dragged them by the nose through using the software. Instead of calling their customer, I made a special little mode that would call them instead, and say, “Hey, this is your fake appointment reminder. If you actually had an appointment, it would be five minutes from now. Click ’1′ to confirm it.”

Bing, they click ’1′. “Great. That’s the experience your customer gets, now let me show you how to do that generally.” It walks them through this crazy, obtuse interface, because I’m not an interface designer. Says, “Yeah, put in (555) 555-5555 for one of the clients, and we’ll schedule an appointment for them.

It walks through every step of the work flow, and tells them, “OK, and this is where someone might actually cancel your appointment. Normally that sucks, but we’re going to send you an email, and that’s going to make you money. Isn’t that great? You’re having fun now.” Tell people they’re having fun now. That’s a big secret in Vegas. I bet there’s people running around in skimpy dresses with a lot of alcohol in their hands, trying to tell you all the time, “Hey, you’re having fun! Hey, you’re having fun! Hey, you’re having fun!”

Because if you tell people they are having fun and getting value from the software, they will tend to believe you. Create value, but also tell them that you are creating that value. If there is a social or viral component in your software, if you tweet about using the software, if you invite your friends, if there’s some sort of friends‑list management, first you should probably pre‑populate that friends list using anything that you can possibly do, because people hate managing friends lists.

Make sure that that goes in in the first five minutes, because it will greatly increase your viral factor, and that literally makes or breaks businesses. Zynga obsesses about this. Not a win for the world. Dropbox obsesses about this, that was a win for the world. If, on the other hand, your software requires a lot of data entry, like you’re mocking up things, or creating documents, or making bingo cards for people, figure out a way to eliminate the data entry as a prerequisite for actually getting the fun use of the software.

Maybe give them sample templates that they can use, or just put in fake data, and give them a “Blow away the fake data” button. This is a very deep topic. I have a 45‑minute deep dive available at training.kalzumeus.com. I’ll tweet a link to that later. If you give me your email address, you can download the video at any time. I’m actually not trying to sell you stuff. In fact, when I actually have something to sell you, send me an email and say, “I was at Microconf,” I’ll give it to you for free.

A Brief Digression Into The Scintillating World Of Running A Software Marketing Consultancy

Patrick:  [After consulting briefly with the audience, I decided to talk about consulting for a moment.] What do I do? We talked about this earlier, the way to extract money from any company is to promise them one of two things. Either you’re going to increase their revenue, or you’re going to reduce their costs. I’m kind of terrible with firing people, and that’s the best way to reduce costs for most software companies. But I’m kind of good at scalably increasing revenue, so that’s what I do. By trade, I am a programmer. If I was less savvy about this, I might describe myself as, “I’m a Ruby on Rails developer who knows a few things about a few things.”  Ruby on Rails developers might be hard to hire right now, but they’re hireable. If you have $200 an hour, you can find Ruby on Rails developers. But don’t compete with all the Ruby on Rails developers in the world, because Github is lousy with them.

Instead, say that you are giving an offering that will increase their revenue by a lot.  I can point to particular customers of mine, that they will find very credible within their space, and say, “We worked with Patrick and then our revenue durably did a stair‑step function.” I said, “What is stair‑step 100 percent increase in sales of your software as a service product worth to your company, if you have $10 million of sales right now?” “Oh, that would make our sales $20 million.”

“Oh, great. Then I’m pretty cheap compared to the $10 million marginal revenue you’ll get,” and you get very little push back on prices, no matter how much you bump it up. Scarily low. Yeah?

Male audience member:  When you make that sale, how do you guarantee it, or say, “If I don’t reach this, you don’t pay more than that,” do you know what I mean?

Patrick:  No. [laughter]

I’m sufficiently credible about this thing. I think most of my customers actually succeed, because most of them invite me back. Let’s say a week of my consulting rate is similar to the fully‑loaded cost of hiring an engineer for a month. [Patrick notes: That was a good ballpark figure a year ago.  My consulting rate tends to increase over time as I get more successful engagements to use as references, get pickier about what clients I take on, and just start writing higher numbers on proposals.] If you have an engineer work for you for a month and the product fails, like most products do, the engineer doesn’t give his salary back, right?

Plus the pricing structure would be very radically different if there was downside to me, if it didn’t work out. If there’s downside to me if it doesn’t work out, there should be substantial upside to me if it works out, so if I double the sales for the company, I think as a close approximation I should own half the company afterwards. I’ve actually used that line on people before [Patrick notes: In case it is not obvious, no well-run company anywhere would even consider that payout structure], and they’ve been like, “Oh, that’s cheeky! But we’ll go with the cheap option.”

[laughter]

Where the cheap option is $20,000 a week, or whatever. That is just a representative number, that is not a quote.

[laughter]

How did turning down $700,000 work out? I went to a company in a far‑off land, which is not the United States, because the United States is a far‑off land for me, but a different far‑off land, and I did some stuff. Can I talk to you about what the stuff I did? Hmm. I can’t talk about specifically what the stuff I did, but if you’ve listened to my conference presentations or read my blog, you know that I really like A/B testing, and I really like Search Engine Optimization.  I really like, say, designing the first five minutes of software, and I really like, I don’t know, redesigning purchasing pages to extract more money from businesses that don’t care about how much money that gets extracted from them.

I did some combination of those things for a particular software company, and made them a lot of money. A company that was making X, so say eight figures of revenue, went to a different eight figures of revenue. But there’s a lot of play in the eight figures range.

[laughter]

That was after working for them for two weeks. The CEO said, “Hey, at the rate…” It’s kind of embarrassing for me, but the rate I quoted them was $20,000 a week. Why am I embarrassed? Because part of me has always thought that I’m really not worth that, and I’m just good at bamboozling people.  [Patrick notes: Nagging doubt monster!]

[laughter]

This engagement was the one that turned it around, because one of the things I generally insist on is, “OK, I like this metrics stuff, I’m going to get metrics for the before and after. We’re going re‑test, and we’ll see if this actually worked.” We came back two weeks later and we looked at the metrics, and I’m like, “Oh, I must have mis‑implemented that,” and he says, “The bank account disagrees with you.” I’m like, “Oh, oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow.”

He said, “So, what was it? $20,000 a week, or whatever we’re paying you?” A CEO doesn’t even know, that’s not a motivational amount of money to a CEO at an eight figure‑a‑year company, despite the fact that it’s kind of a motivational number for me. He said, “What was it, $20,000 a week? So if you consult 50 weeks a year, that’s a cool million.

“But you can’t actually consult 50 weeks a year, so there’s overhead and whatnot, and you have downtime, and you have to go to conferences to meet people like me, so let’s call it a 30 percent haircut to that, so that would be what, $700,000? Is $700,00 a motivational amount of money to you?” [exhales loudly] I’m like, “Wow, wow, is that on the table?” It’s like, “I’m the CEO, we’re sitting at a table, bam!”

[laughter]

My life flashed before my eyes, and I’m like, “Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! No, Wow!” I guess the follow‑up question to that is, “Why did I say no to that?” Consulting is the right thing for me right now. I have a wedding to plan for, I have two weddings to plan for, one in Japan, one in the US. People with iPads are successfully convincing me that I’m probably still in your position, but for the consulting business.

I’d love to help you by coming here and spreading knowledge, and talking to you, and taking your emails any time my email is up on the screen. Doing it as a day job again is not something that’s motivational for me, even for more tea than there is in China, I think is the expression. $700,000 is a lot of tea!

[laughter]

Patrick:  Sorry, not meaning to brag there. OK, questions?

Rob Walling:  Can we get a round of applause first? [applause]

[Patrick notes:

My recollection is that I said something here which unfortunately did not make it on the video, but it is more important than the rest of the speech put together, and since this is my blog I think I'll take a moment to say it again.  All the speakers at Microconf, and many of the attendees, receive substantial support from their spouses and families, both in the sense of "Hey honey, can I fly to Vegas to talk with some quirky software people?" and in the day-in-and-day-out support for the entrepreneurship career choice.  That's sometimes risky and sometimes involves annoyances to families that people don't generally have to deal with when their spouse is in 9-to-5 employment, in everything from quirky hours to weird comments from friends/family to the inconsistency relative to biweekly paychecks.  We should recognize the support of our families as being instrumental to our business/careers, and also keep in mind that they are, ultimately, stakeholders in the business, with a claim superior to even employees/investors/customers, because at the end of the day they'll be with us when the business is, as mentioned earlier, but dust and memories.

The attendees at Microconf joined me in giving a standing ovation to the (numerous) family members who had made it out for the conference, and also for the folks who were supporting attendees from home.]

A common convention used when pricing a product is to offer 3 different prices - a premium option, a normal option, and a budget option. Even if you would prefer to offer just one product at one price, the three tier option is usually better.

Why? Because when it comes to making decisions based on prices, people are easily manipulated. Here is a good example that summarizes an experiment from the book Priceless:

“People were offered 2 kinds of beer: a premium beer for $2.50 and a bargain beer for $1.80. Around 80% chose the more expensive beer.

“Now a third beer was introduced, a super bargain beer for $1.60 in addition to the previous two. Now 80% bought the $1.80 beer and the rest the $2.50 beer. Nobody bought the cheapest option.

“Third time around, they removed the $1.60 beer and replaced it with a super premium $3.40 beer. Most people chose the $2.50 beer, a small number the $1.80 beer and around 10% opted for the most expensive $3.40 beer. Some people will always buy the most expensive option, no matter the price.”

As the experiment shows, people often have a preference for the middle option, irrespective of quality or price. Although we tend to think of ourselves as making decisions by comparing the cost of a product to its quality (or our willingness to pay), we don’t always do so in practice. 

Instead, we often compare the options that are immediately available against each other. The type of person that always buys the premium option will go for the premium option, the person sticking to a budget will go for the cheapest option, and most people will see the middle option as the reasonable balance between quality and price.

As a result, a common sales tactic is to offer a budget and premium option around your product. If you just offer one price for one option, customers will only decide whether to purchase the product by comparing it to similar products or estimating how much they think it’s worth. But by offering three options, you can change the conversation and induce people to make their decision by comparing the three options.

This principle can also be applied outside pricing to any area where you are trying to frame a decision for someone. It’s also a great way to manipulate your friends into making a decision you want.

Let’s imagine a completely hypothetical situation involving two roommates. The roommates decide to go out for dinner, but they can’t agree on a restaurant. So, one of them volunteers to research some options.

On Yelp, he finds a restaurant he wants to go to. But rather than suggest that one restaurant, he pitches his roommate on three different eateries: First a cheap Italian restaurant, next the moderately priced and conveniently located Cuban restaurant that he favors, and finally an expensive Chinese restaurant that is far away.

Now, instead of debating the merits of the Cuban restaurant in isolation (as the first roommate doubts that his roommate would want to go), the second roommate is comparing it to two other options. Comparatively, it seems great. It’s neither the overly cheap nor overly expensive option, and it is conveniently located. 

Of course, you probably shouldn’t suggest anything you’re not willing to actually do. In this author’s case, the plan backfired. Bucking the trend, his roommate chose the Chinese restaurant. Luckily, it was delicious.

This post was written by Alex Mayyasi. Follow him on Twitter here or Google Plus.

This week, we list off a few more interesting games you may not have looked into yet.
Come discuss this topic in the forums!

This is the best introduction to ultralight backpacking there is. Ultralight means you carry less than 25 pounds of gear, food and water for a 10 day trip, and maybe less than 5 pounds for a weekend trip! That’s liberating. If you obsessively reduce the mass of things (or leave them behind) by onefold then you can raise your enjoyment of hiking tenfold.

But most of the stuff in a backpack is carried to overcome a lack of knowledge. So whenever you take away weight you have to replace it with knowledge — knowledge that this book supplies.

This book assumes you are persuaded of this zen-like way. If you need to be persuaded that carry-weight is worth obsessing over, or you want the full course of every option available, and the evidence and reasons for each method, and how to make all the stuff yourself, then you’ll need Ray Jardines’ bible on the subject, the previously reviewed and now updated Beyond Backpacking/Trail Life.

But instead of a bible, this fantastic book by Mike Clelland will give you cartoons. Lot’s of them.

It’s jammed packed with dense, informative, easy to digest, and remarkably helpful advice, hints and instructions on how to accomplish and enjoy walking with very little stuff — and this knowledge is mostly compressed into witty cartoons. I am a big fan of Clelland’s other previously reviewed cartoon guides to snow travel and ordinary backpacking and I really like how amazingly effective his drawings are. Each one is worth thousands of words. It’s fun but not silly. Clelland grapples with the real-world details of, say, not taking a water filter or toilet paper (!!!) and his solutions are born of many seasons of experience. The whole book is authentic and reliable. It will very quickly have you out on the trail carrying a lot less than you once did. Even if you don’t get as extreme as he does, you can move in the right direction by substituting knowledge for stuff. I’ve been going super light for a long time and I learned tons of new tricks on almost every page.

-- KK

Ultralight Backpackin’ Tips
Mike Clelland
2011, 144 pages
$10

Available from Amazon

Sample Excerpts:

Longest Sunset

What is the longest possible sunset you can experience while driving, assuming we are obeying the speed limit and driving on paved roads?

—Michael Berg

To answer this, we have to be sure what we mean by “sunset".

This is a sunset:

This is not a sunset:

For the purposes of our question, this is not a sunset:

This is also not a sunset:

This is definitely not a sunset:

And no matter what happens here, this will not be a sunset:

Sunset starts the instant the Sun touches the horizon, and ends when it disappears completely. If the Sun touches the horizon and then lifts back up, the sunset is disqualified.

For a sunset to count, the Sun has to set behind the idealized horizon, not just behind a nearby hill. This is not a sunset, even though it seems like one:

The reason that can’t count as a sunset is that if you could use arbitrary obstacles, you could cause a sunset whenever you wanted by hiding behind a rock.

Note: We also have to consider refraction. The Earth’s atmosphere bends light, so when the Sun is at the horizon it appears about one Sun-width higher than it would otherwise. The standard practice seems to be to include the average effect of this in all calculations, which I’ve done here.

At the Equator in March and September, sunset is a hair over two minutes long. Closer to the poles, in places like the London, it can take between 200 and 300 seconds. It’s shortest in spring and fall (when the Sun is over the equator) and longest in the summer and winter.

If you stand still at the South Pole in early March, the Sun stays in the sky all day, making a full circle just above the horizon. Sometime around March 21st, it touches the horizon for the only sunset of the year. This sunset takes 38-40 hours, which means it makes more than a full circuit around the horizon while setting.

But Michael’s question was very clever. He asked about the longest sunset you can experience on a paved road. There’s a road to the research station at the South Pole, but it’s not paved—it’s made of packed snow. There are no paved roads anywhere near either pole.

The closest road that really qualifies is probably the main road in Longyearbyen, on the island of Svalbard, Norway. (The end of the airport runway in Longyearbyen gets you slightly further, although driving there might get you in trouble.)

Longyearbyen is actually closer to the North Pole than McMurdo Station in Antarctica is to the South Pole. There are a handful of military, research, and fishing stations further north, but none of them have much in the way of roads; just airstrips, which are usually gravel and snow.

If you putter around downtown Longyearbyen (get a picture with the “polar bear crossing” sign), the longest sunset you could experience would be a few minutes short of an hour. It doesn’t actually matter if you drive or not; the town is too small for your movement to make a difference.

But if you head a little ways south, you can do even better.

If you start driving from the tropics and stay on paved roads, the furthest north you can get is the tip of European Route 69 in Norway. There are a number of roads crisscrossing northern Scandinavia, so that seems like a good place to start. But which road should we use?

Intuitively, it seems like we want to be as far north as possible. The closer we are to the pole, the easier it is to keep up with the Sun.

Unfortunately, it turns out keeping up with the Sun isn’t a good strategy. Even in those high Norwegian latitudes, the Sun is just too fast. At the tip of European Route 69—the farthest you can get from the Equator while driving on paved roads—you’d still have to drive at about half the speed of sound to keep up with the Sun. (And E69 runs north-south, not east-west, so you’d drive into the Barents Sea anyway.)

Luckily, there’s a better approach.

If you're in northern Norway on a day when the Sun just barely sets and then rises again, the terminator (day-night line) moves across the land in this pattern:

(Not to be confused with the Terminator, which moves across the land in this pattern:)

To get a long sunset, the strategy is simple: Wait for the date when the terminator will just barely reach your position. Sit in your car until the terminator reaches you, drive north to stay a little ahead of it for as long as you can (depending on the local road layout), then u-turn and drive back south fast enough that you can get past it to the safety of darkness. (These instructions also work for the other kind of Terminator.)

Surprisingly, this strategy works about equally well anywhere inside the Arctic Circle, so you can get this lengthy sunset on many roads across Finland and Norway. I ran a search for long-sunset driving paths using PyEphem and some GPS traces of Norwegian highways. I found that over a wide range of routes and driving speeds, the longest sunset was consistently about 95 minutes—an improvement of about 40 minutes over the Svalbard sit-in-one-place strategy.

But if you are stuck in Svalbard and want to make the sunset—or sunrise—last a little longer, you can always try spinning counterclockwise. It’s true that it will only add an immeasurably small fraction of a nanosecond. But depending on who you’re with ...

... it might be worth it.

lovely WebGL music video  

Sunlight Foundation tool for spotted plagiarism from press releases and Wikipedia  

Ars Technica penned an interesting article this weekend on ad blocking and how it impacts an outfit like theirs. This spawned discussions of varying quality ranging from thoughtful discourse on the problems of client-side ad implementations, all the way to "WTF FUCK ADVERTISING".

I've been in the advertising game in some capacity for nearly a decade now, so I have a bit of a small- to medium-size publisher perspective in all this. Ad blocking has been around for the majority of that time, and that we're still in a battle about it is interesting to me.

It turns out monetizing entire new mediums is difficult.

Fuck Ads

Hey, let's start with users. A large — and vocal — chunk of users block ads. There's three reasons:

The ads, on a technical level, suck.

This covers a slew of ads ranging from poorly-designed ads (audio, graphically substandard, attention-grabbing, invasive) to resource-intensive ads (otherwise known as the "Flash is garbage" movement). In other words, people block ads because they fear ads may otherwise impact their productivity.

The ads, on a targeting level, suck.

This covers everything from low-brow ads ("LOSE WEIGHT FAST!") to adult ads to ads that just don't interest people on a broad level. Personally, I don't even mind ads that aren't targeted to me if the ad themselves are well-done; even though I might not be in the market for a BMW, it's nice to see a well-designed, full-page ad for one of their cars.

Some are freeloaders.

A small group of ad blockers literally won't care and will block regardless.

Fix Ads

As advertising-funded site owners, I'm going to argue the first and last are irrelevant for us. The freeloaders you can't deal with regardless (see: file sharing), and those that block from a technical standpoint are going to be extremely difficult to please, for the simple reason that we've hammered it into their subconscious for years that advertising consists of invasive content. Even if Ars, for example, promises no popups, no Flash, no audio, and no interstitials, users just don't think that way. Ads change over time. This page view may be different than the next. It's easy to block, so might as well block than risk having something jump out at you down the line.

Instead, targeting is a far better option. This includes typical content relevancy (a la AdSense), but it also includes better, high-brow ads. It's the same reason people watch the Super Bowl commercials instead of flipping away: ads are just better then. Far easier to watch. The problem, of course, is that these two areas are extremely hard to make work.

Flux Ads

If you're a small- to medium-sized publisher (even, say, up to Ars-sized), finding advertising is both difficult to do and a pain in the ass to do so. Handling billing, making schedules, monetizing every page view, setting up default chains... just the baseline concepts are a grind to deal with, and every hour you spend reworking ads you take away from doing the stuff you really enjoy doing: namely, working on your site and creating something new.

The path of least friction is to outsource to 3rd party networks. Google, Tribal Fusion, Amazon, whomever. It's far easier than doing direct sales, and they ensure that you can monetize your entire traffic stack from top to bottom. But that's exactly the reason people block: the ads you get are usually shitty, irrelevant, and a pain to deal with. That's the core of the problem: the path of least resistance is the path of most suck.

There's ways to get around this. Google AdSense, for example, is far less invasive, but you're still gambling on the quality of text results to be contextual and not low-brow, and that's a risky gamble. Ideally, networks like The Deck and BuySellAds start taking over as the easiest thing to implement. I run BuySellAds on Good-Tutorials and, though it doesn't offer me enough of a breadth of advertisers to run them exclusively, it does consistently run ads that are topical, neatly-designed, and more clickable than anything else currently.

Farewell, Ads?

I don't think this is going to happen. If the last decade was instructive (which it should have been), it's taught us that site owners are scum or otherwise don't care enough to make advertising an effective long-term revenue model. I doubt advertising is going to completely collapse, of course, but between ad blocking, the user's natural avoidance inclination, and the general decreasing effectiveness of advertising, things aren't going to get better. And the problem with ad blockers is that the online advertising industry has been so messed-up for so long that honest publishers like Ars get slotted into the same grouping as your Viagra vendor and they feel the squeeze financially because of it.

CRAPCHA stands for Completely Ridiculous And Phony Captcha that Hassles for Amusement. It doesn't keep spammers out. It doesn't crowdsource book scanning either. CRAPCHA's only job is to baffle users, and you can add it to your site today.

[Link]

this WaPo story is the best breakdown of how they tracked them down  

Strategies for avoiding interrupted coding sessions. ...

Food is good and all that but YOU REALLY FUCKING NEED WATER. I always drink one glass of water before each meal and another glass right after. Shit, that’s almost all the water you need in a day.

Feeling tired? Got a headache? Nauseous? Fuck those Rx commercials with their crazy ass side effects, drinking more water is the cheapest way to feel better. I drink mine straight but if you’re fancy as fuck then toss in some lemon, mint leaves, lime, cucumber, lemongrass. I don’t give a good goddamn, JUST DRINK IT.

irrevocably delete between 1 to 10 random Facebook friends  

This morning, I woke to the news that Archive Team is working to save Upcoming. This is the Internet equivalent of hearing that Marsellus Wallace is sending The Wolf.

For those unfamiliar, Archive Team is a band of rogue archivists and programmers working to rescue dead and dying websites from destruction. To put it mildly, they are very good at what they do.

Led by computer historian/documentary filmmaker Jason Scott, they've saved massive sites like GeoCities, Friendster, MobileMe, Fortune City and many others from deletion, and collaborate with the Internet Archive to inject their backups into the Wayback Machine for permanent preservation.

The importance of their work can't be overstated. While companies like Yahoo work to destroy as much Internet history as possible, Archive Team is the only group actively trying to save it.

To assist their efforts, they've developed ArchiveTeam Warrior, a virtual appliance that makes it easy for anyone to help archive dying websites and upload the backups to their server.

Want to help? Install Warrior right now.

It's dead simple to get up and running, and works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. And because it all runs in a virtual machine, it can't possibly hurt your system. It will only use your bandwidth and disk space.

After it's installed, you can choose the "Upcoming" project to start backing up Upcoming.org specifically, or pick "ArchiveTeam's Choice" to let the team decide. Posterous and Formspring are also dying soon, and that will allow the team to prioritize your work.

I made a little video showing how easy it is to start saving Internet history.

You can track the status of the Upcoming archiving effort in real-time, currently at around 6% of the complete site.

And again, thanks to all the dedicated volunteers of Archive Team for their effort.

Update (April 23): Three days later, the Upcoming archive is complete. Every event, venue, group, and user page is currently being compressed and uploaded in batches to the Internet Archive. Truly amazing.

My next step: to parse the HTML and extract structured data, distributed that database, and build something off it to make the community-contributed material accessible after Yahoo shuts it down.

 

Anatomical Neon by Jessica Lloyd-Jones is an impressive series of glass blown organs illuminated with neon lights.

The series intends to pay homage to the role of electrical impulses in the functioning of our organs. You can check out video clips of Anatomical Neon in action by clicking on each of the four organs at her website: JessicaLloyd-Jones.com.

If only these were for sale!

Dynamics Of Flight, Phil Jones

- - -

Follow Phil Jones on Tumblr HERE!

I caught some flack for adding a girl to Werewolf.

No dia do Índio, comemorado em 19 de Abril, resolvemos homenagear este povo  que contribuiu  na formação da cultura do povo brasileiro. A arte corporal tem suas raízes na modificação corporal que povos primitivos de tribos dos 5 continentes ainda mantém como forma de marcar ritos,comemorações e homenagens.  Já a tatuagem tem suas raízes na cultura [...]

Newlydeads – Cute little salt-and-pepper shakers that look like a skeletal bride and groom.

Spider Lapel Pin – Steampunky spider with a watch for a body and a taxidermy eye for a head. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this.

Noell Oszvald – Photographer who does really interesting, surreal, self-portraits. I love the raven/shadow one.

Numbers Stations on Twitter – I wrote about Numbers Stations a while back; I had no idea that there may be something similar going on with Twitter.

Dead Frog with Flies – a) There’s a classical painting of a stinky dead frog that’s attracting flies. b) A pair of contemporary artists thought it would be a good idea to digitally animate it. What is this I don’t even.

Day of the Shirt – Site which aggregates all of the “one-day T-shirt” sites (TeeFury, Woot! and so forth) onto a single page for easy perusal.

LastBreathe – Really interesting fashion design; I’m not sure what it’s made of–it appears to be plastic strips–but it looks like the model is wearing smoke.

Cuffs from Bodyline Ribbon – Tutorial for converting an overlarge Bodyline JSK bow into matching cuffs.

Oonacat – Etsy shop specializing in horns, ears, and “heelless hooves” for costumes. The demon hooves are indeed epic, but I have no idea how you’d manage to walk in ‘em.

Dungeon Maps – Some nicely-intricate D&D maps for your adventuring needs. Also I am amused to know that there’s a Tumblr blog called fuck yeah cartography!.

An excerpt from the novel I'm not writing:

Victoria wasn't a beautiful woman, but she was far from an ugly one.  What she was, was a scary woman. When Victoria punched you, you stayed punched.  It's a lesson we all learned at some point.  It was a lesson Thomas was about to learn.  We pretended to be busy while he learned it.