During my 2 weeks trip to US I managed (next to some other things) get a sun burn on lake Travis in Austin, exhibit at the Cisco Live in San Francisco, get married in Half Moon Bay and visit Guy Kawasaki’s Revenue Bootcamp in Mountain View, CA which is the topic of this post, my first in my new blog.
It was an interesting conference. Hosted in Microsoft’s Conference Facility in Mountain View, I believe there could be close to 200 people, almost all entrepreneurs. Microsoft has really cool room there with a power socket and Ethernet in every seat. Guy wanted to sell us patch cables for 50 USD a piece but his extra source of revenue has been ruined by free WiFi access we got.
There were some great speakers including Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of Wired magazine and author of FREE: The Future of Radical Price, Paul Graham, partner of Y Combinator, Scot Hintz, co-founder of TripIt and many more. I expected to feel like Alice in Wonderland and often I really did. The whole Web 2.0 and the new way of making money on-line was the core topic to learn more about.
Unlike most other conferences, good 75% of the attendees where online by one or another way. 50% had their laptops open (some 50% Macs I would guess), others had smart phones or tweeting by texting. A #revenuebootcamp hash tag has been used during the whole conference and you could see projected on the wall during the whole time people’s comments with 10 sec refresh.
Basically teens are not open to pay for anything :)
It started pretty funny. In an opening panel discussion, there were 4 teenagers out of the 5 panelist (plus Guy as the moderator) and the long story short is that they are practically not open to pay for anything. They do not click on ads, they are not open to pay for TV, if most of the services they use would start to charge, they would leave. Couple of observations: they all use Gmail and love it, eventually would be open to pay a little bit for the service. Most of them use Facebook, but half of them would leave if they would have to pay. BTW, I do not think they have to worry about Facebook started to charge its users for using the site. They get so much valuable info about its users so they can sell very targeted ads. They also like XBox Live, which they find kind of cool. That’s it, everything else on the Internet should be free in their eyes. The future generation of our customers is not open to pay for anything.
In the next panel, we focused on how to get some traffic to your site. The single most important output I have from this discussion is that you should really focus on quality content first to make sure that users come back and find your site useful. All the SEO and AdWords and other ways how to make users visit you for the first time are wasted if all they do is click the back button and will not return. For anybody that plans to provide an on-line service, we need to think about how to start making money from day one. There are some exceptions like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube. But that is it, everybody else needs to think about the revenue model from the very beginning, not hoping to get this huge critical mass so investors will pump the money in the business with hope to monetize it in the future.
Dion Lim, President & COO of Simply Hired mentioned that “SEO is not a project, it is a mindset”. It is not something you think about as one of the features, it’s just one of the foundations of any successful on-line site today. If you have money to play with, you can also experiment with colors. Agar Kamdar, Product Manager of Webmaster Central at Google mentioned, they increased a click through rate on Gmail sign-up button by 20% changing the color from green to more blue, pretty amazing. As I remember Amazon paid a lot of money for a research that showed that yellow is the right color of buttons for them.
Chris Anderson during keynote
Then Chris Anderson had a keynote, basically about his new book and new phenomenon – makings things free and making money somewhere else. The book is very inspiring, I’m in about a middle now.
Chris Anderson signing his book
The next panel was about the future of advertising and if this model is dead or not. It surely isn’t. Every business needs to find the best revenue model but advertising powered content still works pretty well. Tim Kendall, Director of Monetization at Facebook mentioned that social networks can provide a platform to even better serve relevant ads to its users – if you have same hobby as your fiend and he clicks on some, there is a higher chance you click on the similar add too. This can mean much higher percentage of click-through rates, higher content relevance. Imagine what Google will know about you with it’s Google Voice offering.
The next panel – Beyond CPM, Innovative Models for Generating Revenues – was really cool. We learned that IMVU is making millions of $ by selling virtual clothes to the avatar characters in on-line chat. And they do not even make them! Third parties make clothes and accessories and do revenue sharing with the site. I still find it pretty amazing, how much is spent on virtual stuff. They also introduced a virtual wrap paper, started at just 2 cents and increased the price all the way up to 2 $ and users were still buying it – just a background in the text field when you are sending someone a gift (that you paid for as well).
Jeremy Schoemaker, Founder of ShoeMoney Media Group was really funny. Telling his story how he got his first check from Google AdSense for 140k $ for just a month (!!) and he makes money now blogging and tweeting (next to offering his services in exactly this area). He got from “an unnamed” company that launched it’s new search engine about a month ago 400 $ for every tweet where he mentioned that (limited to one tweet per 4 hours for duration of one week). Pretty cool, right? He has 38k followers. It was a eye opener for Guy – he said he did tweet too about this but for free :)
Fireside Chat of Guy Kawasaki with Mike Moritz and Paul Graham
Last session was Fireside Chat of Guy Kawasaki with Mike Moritz (Sequoia Capital) and Paul Graham (Y Combinator). Paul invests some 20k $ in start-ups and tries to make them up and running for the first 90 days so they are ready for next rounds and expansion. I read an interview with Paul in the latest issue of Inc. about the same topic. Mike is a funny guy too. During the chat he obviously felt very comfortable, taking of his shoes while playing with them with his legs showing us very nice blue socks with white dots :) His message was that they search for passionate entrepreneurs who, 7 years from the investment could say that choosing Sequoia was the single best decision of their life.
So, pretty packed day! I exchanged business cards with couple of people there, some at the stage of “we are two guys working on this next big thing”, which is so inspiring to hear and reminds me when all the people at ZOOM fit into one small office and we were all running at 11.55pm out to catch the last metro to bring us home (if we didn’t plan to sleep there that night).
Couple of last thought and links I learned:
- A lot of other ideas can be found from many people tweeting during the conference. The hash tag is #revenuebootcamp which can be displayed easily using TweetChat
- Crazy Egg offers pretty cool service to see how people use your site and where they click even if it is not a button (heatmap from mouse moves and clicks and some other interesting stats)
- SEO Browser allows you too see how crawlers and search engines see your site
- seomoz.org is a comprehensive site for everybody who things and dreams of SEO with a lot of free tools and a pro edition
And because of a little jet leg I got up on Sunday 7am to write this post :)
Tags: entrepeneurship, guy kawasaki, Mountain View, revenue bootcamp
July 13, 2009 at 7:42 pm |
Interesting reading. Looking forward to next one.
July 14, 2009 at 10:08 pm |
Not sure how useful the first panel was. Most of the stuff they covered was easily available online.
July 19, 2009 at 5:31 am |
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