Wes Cutshall

As the owner for NamingForce.com (a website that allows entrepreneurs to get business name ideas) I often read descriptions of startup website concepts. From time to time, as Naming Force was getting started, I would receive an email suggesting that Naming Force should allow for more space to enter a product/website description. It was my response that if they couldn’t explain their service in 150 characters their was a problem with how they were explaining their product/service to the public. Although I eventually broke down and increased the text box length for website descriptions, I still believe that if you cannot explain your concept in under 150 characters, you have a problem. It’s important to be able to explain, usually in one sentence – or just a few words, what your website does.

I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with numerous members of the press about Fido Finder. I’ve found it important to be able to quickly explain the concept of the website at the very beginning of an interview in order for the media to understand the concept and subsequently ask the right questions. Although in it’s complete definition, Fido Finder is “a website that allows people to search and register lost and found dogs and receive email updates about newly added dogs that match” this isn’t an easily understandable explanation, and from a marketing standpoint it’s not very “sticky.”  What works much better is “a lost and found dog classifieds system.” Now, Fido Finder does much more than offer a static classifieds system, but that’s where the rest of the conversation fills in the blanks. In it’s simplest form the website is a newer version of a lost/found dog classified ad. Everyone understands this concept, and it’s a “sticky” explanation that can be understood and explained friend-to-friend, very easily.

If you’re working on a startup, or have already released your website, make sure that you have a short, canned, explanation of what your website does. Be sure to use this same explanation any time you first introduce the concept to people. Continually tweak the definition as time goes by, as industry terms and the public’s understand of them often changes through the course of a startup’s life. Although “cloud”, “crowd”, “social”, and “smart” are terms that potential customers know now, they didn’t start that way.

After reviewing the failed email queue that was 100% full of Comcast email addresses I decided it was yet again time to review the email/DNS settings to see if there was something I had missed that was preventing Comcast from allowing emails from ALL of our sites from getting through. Comcast does have a set of web pages dedicated to email errors and failed email solutions. Although I didn’t know exactly why Comcast was blocking emails, I decided to fill out the Blocked Provider Request form that allows you to submit your mail server IP address and ask for a ban to be removed. The page says that Comcast will usually respond in 30 minutes, and much to my surprised less than 30 minutes later I received an automated email saying that first of all, yes, the IP had been blocked, and that the block was now removed! The email did say that the IP had been blocked for “patterns characteristics of spam”. Hopefully the previous DNS settings that weren’t 100% up to par caused this block and it won’t return. About a week or so ago I found some DNS settings that needed to be modified based on some reports I ran on DNSStuff.com. Hopefully that will help Comcast to keep us on their white list.

There are many different revenue models for making money through owning a website. The most popular models are a) providing a free website and monetizing the website by running ads, b) running a pay website (subscription/pay accounts) with out ads, and c) running a mostly free website with some pay options, or pay accounts with additional features. This last option is known as the “freemium” revenue model. Many of the websites that I have created use this model. Instead of discussing different ways to implement a freemium website, which can be found elsewhere, this blog post will discuss the elements of a web-based service that make it a prime candidate for the freemium revenue model.

New Type of Product

When a company creates a brand new type of product, or market, freemium can be the best way to get the product off the ground. Being able to entice users to use the product for free can jump start a new concept into being a huge hit. If you are creating a product that is hard to explain to users who have never used it before, freemium is a good revenue model to consider. Twitter.com is a good example of a product that would be a great freemium product. Although Twitter has not released upgrade accounts, for higher volume users or for advanced users, the Twitter concept was new when it was introduced and they allow users to use the service for free in order to get it off the ground. Although Twitter has focused on alternative advertising methods for its initial revenue attempts, at some point upgraded accounts are bound to come into play as a revenue stream. Dropbox.com, an online storage service, is hard for the average PC users to conceive. They have used freemium as a way to get users, mostly from current user referrals, to try their service. So when you tell your mom and dad that Dropbox is an option for backing up all those new digital camera pictures, they can try it out without having to understand the concept first. Once they have decided that they do indeed need a cloud storage service, they can upgrade their account and start backing up all of their files.

Commitment Products

Some products take a longer than average amount of time to sufficiently experience their features. If your users need to interact with your website over a period of days or weeks just to discover whether the product is worth using, then freemium is a good option for your website. This type of website differs from the type described above simply because these types of services are common and already understood by potential users. Flickr.com is a good example of this type of website. Although you can view friend’s pictures on Flickr and become attracted to it’s ease of use as an end user, you won’t really know if it’s worth paying for extended use until you try uploading and organizing your photos for yourself. Since uploading and organizing is what Flickr does best, this must be experienced to make an impact on users. It will take a notable amount of time for a user to upload photos and start organizing them before they could give a good review of the website’s services. Once a user has used the website for a significant amount of time, a percentage of them can be convinced that additional features, like more data storage, are worth paying for. Flickr is not a new concept, but it does require extended time to analyze its usefulness. Products that users will use for a significant amount of time, such as web-based email, can also be great examples of the freemium model. If a user is going to switch from one service to another they would be thrilled to be able to give it a test drive before committing to the new service. Gmail.com, or any other up-and-coming web-based email system, who has to get Yahoo Mail and Hotmail users to jump ship, is an example of a potentially great freemium concept. If you’re going to expect your users to become intimate with (used daily/weekly for years) your product, a freemium model might be the right option.

Social Networking Websites

On some websites the main commodity is the people using the service or the content that those users create on the website. It can be very complicated to start a product like this. In order to attract users these services must be mostly free in most cases. Myspace.com, Facebook.com, Match.com, and even our own FidoFinder.com are examples of websites that only become useful once many others are also using the service. As more users sign up for the service, the service is worth more to its current users. These websites work best when they are of the freemium revenue model. On Fido Finder it’s important for us to have both users who register lost dogs and user who register found dogs. Lost dog finders post for free, as do lost dog owners, but lost dog owners are presented with optional upgrades to their account. It’s these users who pay for the usage that the other users get for free. Without the 100% free listings being taken advantage of, though, the group of users who would consider an upgrade simply wouldn’t exist. This is the same for dating, or other social, websites. If your website is going to need to develop a large network of users before it becomes valuable to the users, freemium is probably the best way to go.

From time to time we send out promotional items for Fido Finder and order boxes from Uline. Uline is a great company with great products and customer support. What Uline doesn’t provide is screen printing on their boxes. I decided for the most recent batch of promotional mailings that I wanted to order boxes with the Fido Finder logo printed on them. When searching for a company to do this I ran into BoxGeek.com which will print your logo on the boxes you purchase. One of the other features that BoxGeek offers is custom box sizes which I also wanted to take advantage of.

So I ordered 120 12×9×5 boxes with the Fido Finder logo printed on 2 sides (standard option). The cost was $2.05 each. Similar-sized boxes from Uline would have been only ~$0.50. The price to me wasn’t an issue, as I saw it as only $2 per marketing kit, as opposed to 4-times the “normal” cost. The boxes I received are considerably lesser in quality than boxes that Uline sells. The (custom) cut lines on the BoxGeek boxes are less than perfect; with jagged edges and cardboard material hanging from some cuts (see image at bottom of post). The fold lines on the box flaps are not perfect. When you try to assemble the boxes they do not fold perfectly on the line where they should fold. Some times the box bows out or crumples along the line when you try to fold the flaps for the first time. On some of the boxes I got a z-shaped line where the flap folded instead of a clean, straight, crease. The glue used to put the boxes together is applied less carefully than with standard boxes. From the inside of the box you can often see glue spilling out from behind the box edges (see image at bottom of post). Most of the boxes I received were slightly glued shut/flat because of this glue being applied haphazardly and then the box closed flat for packing/shipping. This just meant I had to pop them open by sliding my hand inside each box. If I were assembling hundreds, or thousands, of boxes this would add noticeable time to assembling. The printing on the boxes is less than stellar. The location of the logo seems consistent but the printing quality varies from box to box. All of the boxes have some type of imperfection on the printed area. The ink is never applied 100% in any area, and many of the logos have a faded line or two vertically through the logo (see image at bottom of post). I’d say the print quality is 7 out of 10 at best. Overall the quality of the product would be 6.5 out of 10. I doubt these boxes could be used for more than their first shipping use. I’m scared to see what they look like after traveling across the country in a USPS truck.

For my need these boxes serve their purpose of getting a slightly more professional-looking box in the hands of potential customers/partners. For me, having the logo printed, in any quality, on the boxes out-weighs the lower quality boxes as I’m not shipping an actual product, just marketing materials (t-shirts, acrylic countertop display, and business cards). I’d use BoxGeek again, but I would find a better solution if I was mailing out actual products.