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Hi everyone, here’s a list of everything I’ve ever written! Hope you enjoy it. -A

Posts

• 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 Scooter Platform Play: Why scooter startups are important and strategic to the future of transportation
• 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
• Quick announcement: The Backstory, a private discussion forum for tech, marketing, growth
• 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 can’t 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 can’t 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 don’t 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?
• Jeremy Liew knows his ad networks
• 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
• 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 😉