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Hi everyone, here’s a list of everything I’ve ever written! Hope you enjoy it. -A
Posts
- How to break into Silicon Valley
- The āDinner Party Jerkā test — why founders need to pitch themselves harder and more futuristically
- Startups need dual theories on distribution and product/market fit. One is not enough
- Every time you ask the user click you lose half
- Why the worst users come from referral programs, free trials, coupons, and gamification
- The most expensive game cost over $1B, and how AI will transform it
- How to write more
- How to write a business book — behind the scenes from THE COLD START PROBLEM
- Fun graph from Peter Attia’s book Outlive
- Reforge Podcast: 2024 predictions, AI apps, the future of PM, what we can learn from gaming, and more
- Heading into 2024 – Life update, books, links, and more
- When AI is too verbose, full of repetition and says sorry for being an AI…
- Lessons from launching SPEEDRUN, the Games x Tech startup accelerator
- How I use AI when blogging and writing
- Creator Economy 2.0: What we’ve learned, why it’s hard, and what’s next
- The Next Next Job, a framework for making big career decisions
- What to do when product growth stalls
- One year after launching a16z Games Fund One – here’s the pitch deck
- How to design a referral program
- Personal updates: Moving to LA, a new role at a16z, and more!
- How to reinvent your product growth strategy for the tech downturn
- Solve a Hard Problem (Tinder). Chapter 8 of my upcoming book, The Cold Start Problem
- I’m on the Tim Ferriss podcast — talking my new book, growth hacking, metaverse, creator economy, and more
- Previewing a full chapter of The Cold Start Problem — my upcoming book dropping in December
- Why the best way to drive viral growth to increase retention and engagement
- What to look for when you’re hiring a Head of Growth
- Why premature scaling fails: The Traction Treadmill
- What today’s social apps can learn from Web 2.0, the social network revolution from 15 years ago
- The next generation of the SF and LA tech ecosystem
- My first book, The Cold Start Problem. Plus Clubhouse, and more. Itās 2021, and Iām back!
- The Adjacent User Theory
- My top essays/tweetstorms in 2019 on product/market fit, investing, KPIs, YouTubers, and more
- “Is your startup idea taken?” — and why we love X for Y startups
- The Passion Economy (Guest essay by Li Jin)
- 10 lessons from a serial entrepreneur – Justin Kan, Atrium, YC, and Twitch
- 28 ways to grow supply in a marketplace — by Lenny Rachitsky, ex-Airbnb
- Why startups are hard — the math of venture capital returns tells the story
- The Podcast Ecosystem in 2019 – a16z’s 68 page analysis
- The Dumb Idea Paradox: Why great ideas often start out by sounding dumb.
- Announcing Pietra and a16z — my first ex-Uber investment!
- What do you look for an investment? How long should a founder be without salary? And other Q&A
- 2018 essay collection on growth metrics, marketplaces, viral growth in the enterprise, and more (PDF included)
- Silicon Valley network effects, OKRs for your personal life, and more: Podcast Q&A with Product Hunt
- Consumer startups are awesome, and here’s what I’m looking for at a16z (70 slide deck)
- What’s next for marketplace startups? Reinventing the $10 trillion service economy, that’s what.
- How to build a growth team – lessons from Uber, Hubspot, and others (50 slides)
- The red flags and magic numbers that investors look for in your startup’s metrics – 80 slide deck included!
- a16z Podcast: When Organic Growth Goes Enterprise
- a16z Podcast: Why paid marketing sucks, Network effects, Viral Growth, and more
- Why “Uber for X” startups failed: The supply side is king
- The Power User Curve: The best way to understand your most engaged users
- DAU/MAU is an important metric to measure engagement, but here’s where it fails
- Required reading for marketplace startups: The 20 best essays
- Conservation of Intent: The hidden reason why A/B tests aren’t as effective as they look
- The Startup Brand Fallacy: Why brand marketing is mostly useless for consumer startups
- The IRL channel: Offline to online, Online to offline
- How startups die from their addiction to paid marketing
- Podcast Q&A: Dropbox’s viral growth, Uber’s tricky funnels, and future growth channels
- Update: I’m joining Andreessen Horowitz!
- Hello 2018! Books, essays, and more from the past year.
- 10 years of professional blogging – what I’ve learned
- How to build a billion dollar digital marketplace – examples from Uber, eBay, Craigslist, and more
- Startups are cheaper to build, but more expensive to grow – here’s why
- This year’s top essays on growth metrics, consumer psychology, Uber, push notifs, NPS, and more
- Growth is getting hard from intensive competition, consolidation, and saturation
- Psych’d: A new user psychology framework for increasing funnel conversion (Guest Post)
- Startups and big cos should approach growth differently (Video)
- The Bad Product Fallacy: Don’t confuse “I don’t like it” with “That’s a bad product and it’ll fail”
- What’s next in growth?
- 10 years in the Bay Area – what I’ve learned
- How To (Actually) Calculate CAC
- Growth Interview Questions from Atlassian, SurveyMonkey, Gusto and Hubspot (Guest Post)
- What 671 million push notifications say about how people spend their day
- The state of growth hacking (Guest post)
- Growth is a system, not a bag of tricks – Manifesto Conference Q&A video/transcript
- A Practitioner’s Guide to Net Promoter Score
- Uber’s virtuous cycle. Geographic density, hyperlocal marketplaces, and why drivers are key
- My top 2015 essays on Uber, online dating, push notifications, Apple Watch, and more
- Personal update- I’m joining Uber! Here’s why
- This is the Product Death Cycle. Why it happens, and how to break out of it
- Quick update: Quoted in WSJ on dating apps, recent podcast interview, plus recent essays
- New data shows losing 80% of mobile users is normal, and why the best apps do better
- Photos of the women who programmed the ENIAC, wrote the code for Apollo 11, and designed the Mac
- The Next Feature Fallacy: The fallacy that the next new feature will suddenly make people use your product
- Why investors don’t fund dating
- Why we should aim to build a forever company, not just a unicorn
- Ten classic books that define tech
- How I first met Eric Ries and also why I’ve ordered his new Kickstarter-exclusive book The Leader’s Guide
- This is what free, ad-supported Uber rides might look like. Mockups, economics, and analysis.
- Personal update: I’ve moved to Oakland! Here’s why.
- The most common mistake when forecasting growth for new products (and how to fix it)
- The race for Apple Watch’s killer app
- My top essays in 2014 about mobile, growth, and tech
- Why messaging apps are so addictive (Guest Post)
- IAC’s HowAboutWe co-founder: How to Avoid Delusional Thinking in Start-up Growth Strategy (Guest Post)
- Mobile retention benchmarks for 2014 vs 2013 show a 50% drop in D1 retention (Guest post)
- New data on push notifications show up to 40% CTRs, the best perform 4X better than the worst (Guest post)
- Why Android desperately needs a billion dollar success story: The best new apps are all going iPhone-first
- Early Traction: How to go from zero to 150,000 email subscribers (Guest Post)
- New data shows up to 60% of users opt-out of push notifications (Guest Post)
- Why aren’t App Constellations working? (Guest Post)
- There’s only a few ways to scale user growth, and here’s the list
- Lessons learned adding messaging to a notes app (Guest Post)
- Retention is King (Guest Post)
- Why consumer product metrics are all terrible
- How to solve the cold-start problem for social products
- How to design successful social products with 3 habit-forming feedback loops
- Congrats to my sis Ada Chen, who’s joining SurveyMonkey as VP Marketing
- How to make content creation easy: Short-form, ephemeral, mobile, and now, anonymous
- My 2013 essays on mobile, startups, and tech
- When a great product hits the funding crunch
- A clever way to buy Facebook ads based on what your users like (Guest post)
- Use this spreadsheet for churn, MRR, and cohort analysis (Guest Post)
- Zero to Product/Market Fit (Presentation)
- The Rise of Fat Venture Capital
- How Google and Zynga set & achieve meaningful OKRs (Guest Post)
- Case studies from “Why you canāt find a technical co-founder”
- Easter Egg Marketing: How Snapchat, Apple, and Google Hook You
- How is Yahoo really doing? Here’s the Google Trends data (Guest Post)
- Ignore PR and buzz, use Google Trends to assess traction instead
- Books I’m reading (2013)
- Constrained media: How disappearing photos, 6 second videos, and 140 characters are conquering the world
- The highest ROI way to increase signups: Make a minimal homepage (Guest Post)
- 9 ways a billion dollar new mobile company might be created (Guest Post)
- Mobile traction is getting harder, not easier. Here’s why.
- Why you canāt find a technical co-founder (Guest Post)
- How to grow your app revenue with DuPont analysis (Guest post)
- New college grads: Don’t sell your time for a living
- Does your product suck? Stop adding new features and “zoom in” instead
- Linkedin, Facebook, Google, Twitter, eBay, YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon, Hotmail, Blogger, Apple: How they used to look
- The critical metrics for each stage of your SaaS business (Guest post by Lars Lofgren of KISSmetrics)
- The death of RSS in a single graph
- Featured essays from 2011-2013: Facebook, Growth Hacking, Mobile, and more.
- Why developers are leaving the Facebook platform
- RSS, I quit you. Please subscribe to email updates for this blog instead.
- How this blog grows: Evergreen content, Social whales, and “Don’t get bored”
- Why are we so bad at predicting startup success?
- My Quora answer to: How do you find insights like Facebook’s “7 friends in 10 days” to grow your product faster?
- I got a startup pitch via Snapchat, here’s the story
- Social products win with utility, not invites (Guest Post)
- Minimize your Time to Product/Market Fit
- I’m a Google Glass skeptic and think it’ll be the next Apple Newton
- Rational Growth (PDF): An intro to growing user signups via data and analytical thinking
- 3 common email marketing failures (Guest Post)
- Why it’s hard to evaluate new social products
- Confessions of a Startup Seagull
- Retention causes virality, and vice versa
- Why good design and open design often conflict
- Polite growth
- Retention versus frequency for mobile product categories
- How to write good and bad titles for your blog post
- Blog posts I don’t want to write
- SaaS products aren’t viral (preso)
- Is your market actually big? Or is it a fake market?
- My friend Noah and his $100M lesson after being fired from Facebook
- Career Suicide versus Startup Suicide
- Design & Thinking: A film about design thinking at PAIFF
- You don’t need a growth hacker
- After the Techcrunch bump: Life in the “Trough of Sorrow”
- How mobile startups can iterate better, faster, stronger
- How long will the “seed stage bubble” last?
- Mobile app startups are failing like it’s 1999
- Why companies should have Product Editors, not Product Managers
- Don’t just design your product, design your community too
- What factors influence DAU/MAU? Nature versus nurture
- No, you donāt need a real-time data dashboard by Mike Greenfield
- Pitch the future while building for now
- Strive for great products, whether by copying, inventing, or reinventing
- How do I balance user satisfaction versus virality?
- What does a growth team work on day-to-day?
- Apple’s Minimum Viable Product
- Quora: When does high growth not imply product/market fit?
- War of the platforms: Facebook, Apple, Android, Twitter.
- Stop asking “But how will they make money?”
- Know the difference between data-informed and versus data-driven
- What makes Sequoia Capital successful? “Target big markets”
- How to use Twitter to predict popular blog posts you should write
- Quora: Has Facebook’s DAU/MAU always been ~50%?
- How do I learn to be a growth hacker? Work for one of these guys :)
- Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing
- Google+ and the curse of instant distribution
- The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs
- Visual Basic, PHP, Rails. Is Node.js next?
- Quora: Will CPE (Cost Per Engagement) advertising ever take off?
- Why I doubted Facebook could build a billion dollar business, and what I learned from being horribly wrong
- How sheep-like behavior breeds innovation in Silicon Valley
- Top tweets recently on startups, tech, and more
- Ask me anything!
- Why you’ll always think your product is shit
- Linkedin acquires Connected – congrats to my sister Ada!
- 20+ pitches from the new 500Startups cos
- Don’t compete on features
- Quora: What UX considerations were built into Google+?
- Simple is Marketable
- How to use A/B testing for better product design
- VIDEO: The Anatomy of a Fundable Startup by Naval of AngelList
- Does anyone care about your new product? (Doing market research with Google’s Keyword Tool)
- “Anyone can start a Groupon!” and other startup myths
- When Does Paid Acquisition Work for SaaS Startups?
- Why it’s smart for consumer startups to grow first and make money later
- When has a consumer startup hit product/market fit?
- Designing for distribution with Eric+Eric (YC 2011, Mochi Media)
- 2011 Blogging Roadmap: “Zero to product/market fit”
- Metrics Driven Design slides from SXSW, by Joshua Porter
- Question: What kind of blog do you prefer me to write?
- Quora: How did MySpace, with a smart team of people, do such a bad UI/UX job with the new design?
- Quora: What are the best metrics for measuring user engagement?
- Quora: What is considered a significant number of users for a free consumer internet product?
- Stanford CS major seeks sales/marketing monkey
- Bonus stats: Instagram up 40% in Jan, 300k MAU, 35k DAU (lower bound estimate based on Facebook app activity)
- Quora stats: 150% growth in January, 160k monthly actives, 18k daily actives (lower bound estimate via Facebook app data)
- Retention metrics roundup of articles and links
- Minimum Desirable Product and Lean Startups (slides included!)
- Startup Lessons Learned Conference on April 23
- Notes on customer acquisition and viral marketing from First Round Capital CEO Summit
- Congrats to my friends at Mochi Media, especially my little sister Ada!
- What I’m reading: Interaction design, Riddles, and more
- Top posts for 2009: Freemium, Design, and Metrics
- A newer, bluer, real-time Google
- My quickie review of the Fitbit
- Minimum Desirable Product
- Why the iPod Touch is more strategic than the iPhone for Apple
- Update on the Steve Jobs post from an Apple alum (Updated again!)
- Does every startup need a Steve Jobs?
- Checking out new mailing list on Lean Startups
- Product design debt versus Technical debt
- Adding design to an agile development process
- The question that got me to leave Seattle for greener startup pastures
- Why my blogging has sucked lately :)
- What I’m reading: Viral Loop by Adam Penenberg
- Are social gaming offers scamming users? A detailed analysis of Techcrunch’s Scamville article
- How Facebook could clean up the offers industry
- How social gaming offers create value for everyone (not just Facebook, Zynga, and Offerpal)
- Building lifestyle companies versus VC-backable startups: Is it walk before you run?
- How helpful is venture capital experience to building startups?
- Ignore Cougars, Follow the Money: 3 social gaming tips for monetizing younger users
- 5 crucial stages in designing your viral loop
- Age (and ARPPU) ain’t nothing but a number: Data on how age impacts social gaming monetization
- Whenever ad networks talk about their “targeting” remember the Netflix prize
- How to keep visual design consistent while A/B testing like crazy
- Netflix on their Freedom and Responsibility culture
- Why low-fidelity prototyping kicks butt for customer-driven design
- Building the initial team for seed stage startups
- BBS door games: Social Gaming innovation from the 1980s
- How desktop apps beat websites at building large active userbases
- iLike, Lookery, Google Voice: Recent platform lessons from app developers
- To my first 10,000 blog subscribers: Thank you!
- What if interviews poorly predict job performance? What if dating poorly predicts marital happiness?
- Does Silicon Valley noise detract from long-term value creation?
- Social design explosion: Polls, quizzes, reviews, forums, chat, blogs, videos, comments, oh my!
- Built to Fail: How companies like Google, IDEO, and 37signals build failure-tolerant systems for anything!
- Dear readers, should I keep the automatic weekly Twitter links?
- Why metrics-driven startups overlook brand value
- Why you should make it easy for users to quit your product
- Benefit-Driven Metrics: Measure the lives you save, not the life preservers you sell
- Creating value versus optimizing revenue
- How do you do concrete interviews for non-technical people?
- I want more tools to reach my readers, not monetize them!
- Dear readers, I need your help!
- Talk to your target customer in 4 easy steps
- Bay Area investors I’m following on Twitter
- 3 key ideas from a recent Freemium dinner conversation
- “Stealing MySpace” and my personal experience monetizing MySpace ads
- Designing and Testing an Ad Product: 5 lessons learned form imeem’s audio ads (Guest Post)
- Will social payment platforms really work long-term? (Guest post by Jay Weintraub)
- Video: Panel on “Monetization and Business Models for Flash Games”
- Friends versus Followers: Twitter’s elegant design for grouping contacts
- Random links for week of March 16th
- App monetization: Gambit launches, funnel metrics, and ARPU vs “CPM”
- Free to Freemium: 5 lessons learned from YouSendIt.com
- Twitter links for March 4, 2009
- Bay Area entrepreneurs that I’m following on Twitter
- 5 warning signs: Does A/B testing lead to crappy products?
- Which startup’s collapse will end the Web 2.0 era?
- 10% off for Flash Gaming Summit, March 22nd in San Francisco
- Warren Buffett’s bio “The Snowball” and lessons for startups
- Returning from my blogging vacation + Twitter links
- Great iPhone preso on AppStore retention curves, pricing strategies, engagement metrics, etc.
- How to create a profitable Freemium startup (spreadsheet model included!)
- Twitter links for Jan 19, 2009
- 2009 conference schedule for the digital media industry
- Will be in Seattle on Jan 8th and 9th
- Freemium business model case study: AdultFriendFinder ARPU, churn, and conversion rates
- Twitter links (while still on blog vacation!)
- Taking a quick blog vacation…
- Video up from Virtual Goods Summit, Metrics for Virtual Goods Businesses: The Whirled Case Study
- How to calculate cost-per-acquisition for startups relying on freemium, subscription, or virtual items biz models
- Amazon Associates stats for this blog
- The Secret History of Silicon Valley (next Thurs, Nov 20)
- List of essays from this blog is now up to date!
- Twitter links from last week (posted 11/09/2008)
- Usability presentation for iPhone apps and store
- Poll results are in – what YOU want to read on this blog, revealed!
- What would Facebook look like if it sold out to ads? Click here to see…
- What topics do you want to read more about on this blog?
- Ad-based versus direct monetization: Which one is better for you?
- Ad rates drop in social networks, music, entertainment
- Amazing presentation on leadgen tactics from Jay Weintraub
- Slate on split testing in the McCain and Obama campaign (robo-calling versus text messaging)
- Links from my Twitter (Oct 29, 2008)
- How to generate awesome test candidates for A/B testing
- Virtual items design: Build it yourself or use UGC?
- 4 major cultural differences between Games people and Web people
- Go-to-market strategies for vertical social products
- Quick link to another fave blog Altgate, by Furqan Nazeeri
- Twitter links from last couple weeks…
- I have blogger’s block!
- Revenue, ARPU, Funnels, and RPM: My talk from Startonomics on Revenue metrics
- The best new games blog you’re not reading yet
- Dan Cook’s slides on productivity + last week’s Twitter links
- Quick link: List of $350MM of VC investments in social gaming, virtual worlds, casual MMOs, etc
- Virtual Goods Summit 2008 + last week’s Twitter links
- The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics
- Open mobile platforms and Facebook developer refugees
- Weekend links from Twitter (9/14/2008)
- Growing renewable audiences (a talk at O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures)
- Ad targeting talk from Community Next: People Not Pages (updated x2)
- Help me fill in the blanks: iPhone platform versus Facebook platform
- How to measure if users love your product using cohorts and revisit rates
- More weekend links from my Twitter account
- Gaming versus gambling ARPUs
- Remnant ads and the advertisers who love them
- Prosper.com and peer-to-peer lending in the economic downturn
- Quick weekend links from my Twitter
- Super Rewards and the leadgen side of Facebook virtual currency – can it last?
- As Facebook saturates in the US, what’s the next step?
- Counting your big pile of Benjamins: 5 startup tips for maximizing ad revenue
- Moved the blog to http://andrewchen.co
- Quotes from entrepreneurs and friends about Futuristic Play
- Speaking at Startonomics and guest blog post: 5 startup tips for maximizing ad revenues
- Weekend links from my Twitter
- Giving a talk at CommunityNext in 2 days (free spots available for publishers)
- Recent random links from my Twitter feed
- Internet Advertising Bureau and Bain on pricing in online ad markets
- YouTube vs Webkinz: Case studies for new product adoption
- What web product does this Google Insight map represent??
- Early adopters vs the Mainstream: Google Insights points out websites only used by Silicon Valley nerds
- Virtual goods: Who will be the Amazon.com of virtual item sales?
- How to start a professional blog: 10 tips for new bloggers
- Poll results for user acquisition: Viral, SEO, word-of-mouth, or other?
- 7 ideas for billion dollar companies in the online ads
- Quick link – NYT article on a “wow” product
- Google Analytics report for top referrers to Futuristic Play
- 50+ essays on viral marketing, social network monetization, product design and more
- POLL: Where do you put most of your effort, for user acquisition?
- Google AdSense FAIL
- AdAge article on agency perspectives of online versus traditional advertising
- omg I’m just a startup, I can’t do those fancy analytics!
- Hello world! (from Disqus)
- Experiment: Will adding @andrew_null to my blog title lead to more Twitter traffic?
- Virtual economy for notification “credits” on Facebook apps
- Recency Frequency and Monetization (RFM): Optimizing your notifications strategy
- Are Web 2.0 startups wasting their time with Web 2.0 early adopters?
- More gloomy news on the advertising recession
- I summarize Foo Camp 2008 activities so you don’t have to
- In Seattle from the 25th to 30th – who wants to meet up?
- Online advertising during a recession: 5 key trends for ad-based startups
- Off to conferences for the next few days…
- Yahoo’s BOSS program doesn’t go far enough: Why not open up Yahoo search traffic?
- Poll results from “How would you launch a new product?”
- Most ungoogley product ever from Google?
- From analog dollars to digital pennies: The crisis in traditional media
- What are you really trying to measure?
- Trying out the new Amazon Recommendations widget
- Obama and McCain: How political marketing has evolved from offline to online
- 25 reasons users STOP using your product: An analysis of customer lifecycle
- Companies reading Futuristic Play – advertising, games, media, and more
- Poll: How do you launch a new product or service?
- Craigslist to surpass eBay in 2009? Compete and Quantcast seem to think so…
- More detailed analysis of social network value on Techcrunch
- MySpace versus Facebook: Analysis of both traffic and ad revenue, using Google Trends
- Free consulting on retention metrics* :)
- Are you working on a product targeted at teens? 10% off YPulse Conference on July 14-15
- Where are all the video startups? Maybe Content=King, online and offline
- Social gaming design – Bartle types versus Web 2.0 participation pyramid
- Social Gaming Summit: Recap and observations
- Social Gaming Summit tomorrow – see you guys there!
- Dear readers, need a quick favor!
- 5 steps towards building a metrics-driven business
- Users, customers, or audience – what do you call the people that visit your site?
- Data portability: Is the social network data you’re hoarding treasure or trash?
- Social gaming and MMOGs: Quick link roundup
- User retention: Why depending on notification-driven retention sucks
- What’s the value of a user on your site? Why it’s hard to calculate lifetime value for social network audiences
- Social network death spiral: How Metcalfe’s Law can work against you
- GigaOm’s “10 Blogs We Love” and 15 Blogs that I love!
- Online advertising report for 2007 by the IAB
- Social network marketing: Getting from zero to critical mass
- Lessons from the casino industry on engagement metrics and lifetime value
- Has the Facebook platform hit its peak?
- Facebook Apps: Why they’re focused on fun instead of utility
- Quick link: Movie versus video game
- Vertical ad networks: What are they, and why did Cox just buy Adify for $300MM?
- Facebook app CPM numbers from Inside Facebook
- When will Slide release their hounds on the social gaming sector?
- 10% discount off of the Social Gaming Summit
- Viral marketing, activation, and retention metrics – commentary on Dave McClure’s Web 2.0 presentation
- Moving to SF and joining the tech community – Lessons from my first year
- iGoogle start pages: Vertical integration of the first, second, and Nth click
- Viral loop coverage in Fast Company
- Viral coefficient: What it does and does NOT measure
- ComScore predictions versus Google performance actuals
- Great stats on social media usage from an ad agency
- Quick link: Long-tail private jets using agent-based simulations
- MySpace versus Facebook: Winning in the US, Losing internationally
- Woohoo, broke 3,000 subscribers today! New readers: Feel free to intro yourselves
- Ads should be next to brand-elevating content
- Quick link on quant trading strategies
- 5 factors that determine your advertising CPM rates
- Your ad-supported Web 2.0 site is actually a B2B enterprise in disguise
- Innovation from Asian-based social sites
- How NOT to calculate ad revenue
- Faceoff between Facebook app analytics startups
- Search stats for this blog
- Web 2.0 Haikus
- Reader question: What fuels you?
- Bridging your traffic engine with your revenue engine
- Too many social networking aggregators?
- Reader question: What’s the difference between “Viral Marketing” and “Word of Mouth?”
- Google’s second click versus Facebook’s second click
- Rethinking Facebook’s “Daily Active Users”
- Reader question: What are you working on?
- Reader question: Does Facebook + performance ad network = awesome?
- Reader question: Specialized resources for driving traffic?
- Reader question: First-time entrepreneurs
- Reader question: What 5 blogs do you read regularly?
- Facebook viral marketing: When and why do apps “jump the shark?”
- Facebook and Platforms conference: Graphing Social Patterns (San Diego) recap
- Ask the readers: If you could drop 100M users onto any site, what would you build?
- Reader question: Why answer questions?
- Reader question: About college…
- Reader Question: Are there new opportunities in social networking?
- Trying out a new widget called Askablogr
- I’m sick :( Also, going to Game Developers Conference for the week
- From Seattle? Please introduce yourself…
- Nasty ad on Facebook
- Diminishing returns on social media virality?
- What’s happening with the top Facebook apps?
- Question for FB app developers: How do you avoid becoming a 3rd-tier Slide.com?
- The design of social spaces
- Top keywords for how people find my blog
- Followup to social network monetization
- Quick thought on blindly copying Facebook features
- What do Yahoo’s monetization woes have to do with social networking sites?
- MySpace’s new platform – what a difference 6 months makes!
- Declining stats on Facebook apps?
- Quants versus brand folks on viral marketing
- Quantitative approaches to consumer internet
- For-profit app developers versus For-attention app developers
- How many subscribers did Scoble bring to this blog?
- Quantcast and its cousins in the analytics space
- Recession + Advertising = ?
- Interesting graph on Second Life usage
- Dear lazyweb, Recommendations for designers?
- Overheard at dinner last night…
- Not everything can be free!
- 10 signs you’re a product fanatic
- Take the driver’s seat on web stats, don’t be a passive observer
- Hot off the presses! Scrapbooking scandal!
- Congrats to Jared and friends at WeGame
- How does internet ad spend compare to other media?
- Does Facebook reflect your true friendships? How about e-mail?
- Is blogging worth it? What’s the ROI?
- Big exits for New York consumer internet startups?
- 2008 anti-prediction ;-)
- How will continued social media growth affect overall online ad CPMs in 2008?
- Quick professional update, and what an Entrepreneur-in-Residence actually does ;-)
- Are your SEO efforts working, or failing?
- Public and private spaces, and why YouTube comments are so awful
- Do you use Google Reader? I need your help!
- 5 ways to break past the San Francisco echo-chamber
- Is your website a leaky bucket? 4 scenarios for user retention
- Glitter obsession, both online and offline
- Why your friends list gets polluted over time
- Tech bubble music video
- Do you ever say, “MySpace is sooo ugly?” This blog’s for you…
- Why bloggers and press don’t matter for user acquisition
- My top read blogs…
- Differences between MySpace, Facebook, and others
- Technology always changes, but people always stay the same
- Quick tinkering on my blog
- How should app developers look at OpenSocial?
- Profile on Max Levchin @ Slide
- Things that used to be cool that are no longer cool
- Ad networks: Winner-take-all or Everyone-wins?
- Who’s right? Panel-based measurement versus raw server logs
- Invite targeting on Facebook gets standardized out
- WSJ article describing the difficulty of monetizing UGC
- Photos from Day 1 of CommunityNext conference
- Couple quotes on Facebook in Wired, Fortune, and NYT
- 5 things that make your social network monetize like crap
- New Diner Dash: Entrenched casual game companies versus new casual MMOs
- CommunityNext almost sold out! Also, what can social network platforms learn from desktop platforms?
- 5 differences between a NY ad conference and a SF web 2.0 conference
- Out to NYC for Advertising Week
- Blog on vertical ad networks
- Great article on different types of “Platforms”
- Yahoo’s Mash: Analysis of viral marketing technique
- Fun article on Club Penguin
- Social network convergence and private/public networks
- Possibly the worst naming guide ever
- Wall Street Reading List
- Coming back from Austin
- Out of town at Austin Game Developers Conference
- Viral marketing is not a marketing strategy
- A math nerd’s perspective of the world – Here’s a couple book recommendations
- Reward schedules in HotOrNot
- Are people like lab rats? Using reward schedules to drive engagement
- Facebook quote in the LAST issue of Business 2.0
- Congratulations to Nabeel + Conduit Labs
- 10% discount for the next 48 hours
- CommunityNext: Platform – 2 days, 20+ speakers, top 100 Facebook developers, and over 300 attendees
- Wanna bet? In 1 year, will Facebook be bigger? Or will MySpace?
- Fun Phishing quiz
- What’s your viral loop? Understanding the engine of adoption
- Oh “SNAP” = Social Network Application
- I have some pownce invites…
- 10% discount for registration in the next 24 hours, to the CommunityNext Viral Marketing conference
- The new web paradigm for 2007?
- How do you tell the difference between old Google employees and new ones?
- Happy Monday! :)
- When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail
- Quick links for the weekend
- What every Web 2.0 entrepreneur should know about virtual goods
- Hanging out at the Virtual Goods Summit tomorrow…
- Do a lot of Seattle startups suck at user acquisition?
- How much is a Facebook user worth, anyway?
- Has anyone seen Microsoft Surface?
- What is your W2SAT* score? (*Web 2.0 Startup Aptitude Test)
- How to fool VCs into thinking you have traction, Part 4
- Is a Facebook user the same as a regular user?
- Weekend fun :)
- Social network requirement in Craigslist posting
- Is your site really viral? Viral Branding versus Viral Action
- Why is social shopping such a disaster?
- Your site will succeed or fail in the first 10 seconds
- 10 reasons why every Web 2.0 developer should attend the Virtual Goods Summit
- Stop asking: “Does the world need another social network?”
- How do you apply math to Web 2.0 websites?
- Click on this crazy widget, thanks :)
- How does the online ad gold rush impact your Web 2.0 site?
- Forget advertising – is virtual goods the killer revenue model for Web 2.0?
- Happy Mother’s Day
- Need a solid Web 2.0 business idea? Go upstream from a proven model
- Cracking the code: Analyzing viral strategies
- Adwords is not enough for success on the consumer web
- Random drawings (that I made!)
- How to fool VCs into thinking you have traction, Part 3
- In Seattle next week (17-20)
- Level up for features instead of freemium?
- How to fool VCs into thinking you have traction, Part 2
- Tripbase – an interesting travel concept
- The most sophisticated ad unit I’ve seen in a long time
- How to fool VCs into thinking you have traction, Part 1
- Why is TextAmerican imploding?
- What’s your Web 2.0 website worth?
- Digg for developers
- Is Facebook killing dating sites?
- Hanging out at CHI this week…
- Rule of thumb: Is 1-9-90 really correct?
- How do you find a badass co-founder, Part 2
- Two cool videos about mobile computers of the future
- Google: A tale of two graphs
- Widgets = ad networks
- Next couple days in LA for EconSM…
- Revenue implications of non-sticky websites
- Is Google the next Wal-Mart?
- Entrepreneur-in-Residence in 3 flavors
- VentureBeat covers new MDV website
- Man, I’m kind of bored by the Web 2.0 conference…
- How to win at Rock Paper Scissors
- How long will the investing bubble last?
- 7 ways to define an emotionally engaging product
- Are you good at picking consumer media companies?
- Where to find startup ideas for the “Average Joe”
- Couple great weekend videos
- 10 obvious strategies to ruthlessly acquire users
- New website I’ve been using…
- LinkedIn Network on #1 ad opportunity
- What’s the #1 opportunity in online advertising?
- The myth of the 7 day product
- How to build a product in 7 days
- On the topic of humanizing people…
- 24 hours into Twitter
- Stupid twitter
- Quick thought on eyeballs versus dollars…
- Eyeballs versus dollars: What should startups focus on?
- Article in the NYT on games for older adults
- How do you find a badass co-founder?
- Engaging travel site?
- Crazy Alexa growth for file upload sites
- Quick comment on broad reach ad companies
- What’s broken with online travel?
- Making user profiles more fun
- Archive of a couple older posts
- What’s broken about online dating?
- Game design tutorial at the GDC
- Web + Games = ?
- Fun little video from GDC
- Tired but back from GDC
- More Alexa problems revealed
- Off to GDC next week…
- New data from Yahoo’s ad system
- Explicitly commercial widgets
- Product creation in entertainment
- Why CTRs for Yahoo aren’t necessarily a good thing
- Widgets and their uneasy truce with blogging platforms
- Starbucks product versus experience
- To all women blog readers…
- How to tell the difference between eyeball companies
- Verifying startup assumptions, Part 2
- Dolt versus DoIt
- CNN on autonomous car sponsored by MDV
- Conference on the “Future of Entertainment” next week
- What matters more? Engagement or pageviews?
- How to do market research via LinkedIn :)
- Why do people avoid checking their assumptions?
- 10 ways to verify assumptions
- Urban Dictionary Word of the Day: Connectile Dysfunction
- 3 lessons from a web idea that didn’t go anywhere
- My second bad website :)
- The future of online communities
- Eyeball companies versus revenue companies
- 10 tips for meeting people at industry events
- Meeting people in Silicon Valley
- What’s an Entrepreneur-in-Residence?
- No new blogs, but I have new photos!
- Neat little conference…
- Why build a vertical ad network?
- Only nerds ask: “Is the Web 2.0 bubble collapsing?”
- Taking a break from blogging…
- Another great post about founder equity
- Why is Google offering domains?
- Dating site within an MMO
- Congrats to the Isilon guys
- Old media versus new media
- Everything on Valleywag is true…
- eHarmony’s matching mechanism is useful for other problems too!
- Evolution of eBay’s technology platform
- It’s hard to be serious and fun at the same time
- How to get random people to e-mail you
- How to meet lots of people through LinkedIn
- What a button can teach you
- Cute little blog
- How to draw in MS Paint
- People to meet in Seattle before I take off?
- Yahoo’s problems with search monetization
- Fun casual strategy game :)
- Why BitTorrent Inc. is no sure bet!
- Splitting equity between partners
- Simplicity and choices for users
- Just switched to Camino…
- Federated Media’s business model
- Product versus Experience
- Autmated models versus human experts
- Flash will dominate the media-sharing web
- Cargo cult science
- Happy thanksgiving!
- I love it… more estimation error for Internet stats
- IDEO Method Cards
- I don’t usually do this…
- Problems facing hit-driven media, from the gaming perspective
- Making functional apps more fun!
- Looking to connect with game designer types?
- Designing for other people versus designing for yourself
- Geniuses versus very smart people
- Are you misusing Alexa numbers? (Probably)
- Good moves for brand ad networks
- Nice interview
- Winners don’t quit, and quitters don’t win…
- Big news: I’m moving to Silicon Valley
- New metrics for social media sites?
- Unclear definitions for click fraud
- IDEO on urban design
- Coin-flipping contest
- Ironic article about math
- Inventory glut in social media
- Development methodologies in video game design
- Skill versus luck in entrepreneurism
- Yelp: An example of a high-value advertising model
- Cultural perspectives on failure and innovation
- Taking a vacation is productive too!
- The myth of (business) prodigy
- Artificial markets in games
- Similarities between creative disciplines
- Funny article about rich people
- From mythology to science
- Short, interesting observation
- Potential consumer business models
- Wow! I’m surprised! Google + YouTube
- Irrational advertising exuberance and the pyramid of ad dollars
- E-mail is for old farts
- What’s the ad unit? (PayPerPost)
- Great directory of Game Design essays
- Diagram of Fanboys from Joystiq
- Wallop and different perspectives on interfaces
- Just got a new book, woohoo!
- Trending towards people-focused products
- The difficulties facing video ad networks
- 5 ways I screwed up my first website
- Favorite game design article
- Do hardcore Microsofties suck at startups?
- YouTube and Monetizing Social Networking
- Random notes on early adopters
- Creating value in the online ad market
- Early nerd memories ;)
- First post!
