Independence Day

For me, Independence Day fell on June 27, 2012. This is the day that I finally overcame a lifetime of self-doubt and walked away from the succor of someone else's paycheck. As Vice President of Business Development for a Seattle tech company I had a pretty comfortable life and I chose to trade all of that security for a chance to pursue starting my own company (with a few friends) - a process that I ought to have started 15 years ago.

Over the years, I've had tons of ideas - some reasonably plausible, others less so. In every instance though I've stopped short of actually pursuing them, satisfied instead with the vanity of people telling me that's a good idea. There comes a point though (some call it a middle-age crisis) where you ask yourself what you're all about. What are you actually teaching your kids? Are you really happy? Does your work reflect the values that are important to you? 

In truth, I've always asked myself those questions, but the seniority of the positions I held grew over time as did the paychecks and perks, and I got lazy. We got married, we had kids, we bought a house, etc. You can easily convince yourself that it's never the best timing to take a leap into the unknown. Over time, the frequency and amplitude with which I questioned myself lessened to the point where I was basically along for the ride in the near-inevitable corporate machinery of big company America. 

However, earlier this year, along came the catalyzing event that began the metamorphosis from indolent Microserf to fledgling entrepreneur. A trip to a dermatologist and a resultant cancer scare was all it took. Turns out it was nothing but it was all I needed to remind myself of the impermanence of my life. That my mother died of cancer aged 44 should have been enough, but as I said, I got lazy...

So, here I am sitting in a Starbucks on Day 1 of not having a paycheck for the first time in 15 years, trying to focus on the road ahead and ignoring the nagging, fearful self. Regardless of whether Härnu proves to be a hit or a bust, I'm committed to this state of independence that I eschewed for so long. I owe it to my kids to show them that life is something to be embraced with confidence, not survived in fear.

As for Härnu, all four founders are now full-time and there's nothing holding us back except ourselves. We're in the middle of a big redesign, we're rapidly building out our go-to-market plans, and learning as we go. 

If you're reading this post and you have aspirations of starting your own company, I won't pretend to have any advice for you. All I can say is that honesty with myself is where it begins for me. Every. Single. Day.

Good luck! 

p.s. If yesterday wasn't momentous enough, I became the Foursquare Mayor of the India Gate restaurant in Eastgate. What a way to end my Eastside commute!

More Camels

Right now, we're in the middle of a complete redesign of Härnu based on early feedback (both implicit and explicit) from our users. So, as the guy on point for bringing users, there's not a whole lot for me to do but plan assiduously and sit tight for the next iteration.

Having said that though, I've been dabbling in posting Twitter and Facebook updates on behalf of Härnu and what I've learned won't surprise anyone - photos are gold! 

A word on virality

Before I get into details, Facebook defines virality as "The percentage of people who have created a story from your page post out of the total number of unique number of people who have seen it." In other words, it's the number of people "Talking about this" divided by the "Reach" as defined by Facebook.

So, with that out the way, here's a quick rundown of what I've learned so far:

Photos Trump Text

One day recently, I posted a Facebook update about a mother using Härnu to find her adopted son's biological brother in Ethiopia. This was a use case we could never have imagined but it was one that we thought was incredible and were really pleased that our efforts could play a small part in helping. This post was all text.

The next day, I posted a quick Facebook update about Indonesian users now on Härnu. I included a stock photo of Bali to highlight my point.

We saw a virality score of 2.41% for the post about the mother and a 4.55% score for the post about Indonesian users. In other words, the post about Indonesian users was 1.9X more viral than the one about the mother looking for her adopted son's brother in Ethiopia.

Hypothesis #1: Posts with embedded links and / or photos are more viral than those without

Easy and obvious enough right? What came next though was a much better illustration of that point. One of our users from the Philippines whom I've been chatting with, sent me a picture of him and a camel (he's living in Saudi Arabia just now). He also told me that people eat camel meat there. In retrospect, not very surprising. Kind of like horse being on the menu in much of France right? I thought this was pretty interesting, so I posted this to our Härnu Facebook page (note I started with an attention grabbing question):

This post had a virality score of 12.1%. Our most successful one yet and 2.65X more viral than the post about Indonesia and 5X more viral than the one about the mother.

Hypothesis #2: Photos that are more personal and authentic are more interesting than stock photos

Hypothesis #3: Posts framed as questions are more viral than simple text updates

Note I'm using the term "hypothesis" here and not yet "conclusion" - we're still learning and a sample of one does not a trend make. That said, I followed up this last post about a camel with another one with a photo, posed as a question, and tried to piggyback on the Queen's Jubilee in England.

How viral was this one? The answer is not at all. Turns out no-one cares about the Queen, or at least, none of our users does.

Conclusion: While we have yet to achieve Konyesque virality, in the meantime, our winning formula appears to be MORE CAMELS ;-)

For the experts out there, what kind of content has worked best for you on Facebook & Twitter updates? What kind of virality scores do you typically see? Do you think it even matters?

Intent is King

When Härnu's Facebook page reached 100 Likes, Facebook offered us a $50 credit to try out Facebook ads. Now that we've dipped our toes in the water, I thought I'd share some thoughts on the experience.

Wanting to get a really firm idea of not just clicks of the ad on Facebook but actual conversion as measured by new Härnu user sign-ups, I started off with a really niche ad - For the image, I selected our logo, wrote some text in English and then targeted it to users in Norway and Sweden. I layered in some demographic constraints such as wanting to target people between 18 - 35 but that was about it. Oh, instead of having users click thru to our Facebook page, I set it up to have the ad click thru to Härnu's home page.

Well, after running it for about a week and paying $0.67 per click we didn't observe any incremental user sign-ups attributable to the ad. Next, I thought maybe I should try writing the ad in Swedish to make it feel more localized. So, I did and this time restricted the ad to just Sweden, dropping Norway (sorry Norway!). Well, in the past month, I've seen 50K impressions, 18 clicks, a clickthru rate of 0.035%, and zero incremental users attributable to the tactic.

Thinking of ways to spruce up the ad, I replaced the logo image with a screenshot, I re-wrote the ad in English trying to be more direct and impactful, and this time I targeted it to NZ, Australia, and Canada. The thinking there was that maybe it was a cultural thing and English speaking countries might be more apt to try the service out. Well, this time I've observed a click-thru rate of 0.030% and zero incremental users attributable to the tactic.

Conclusion - Facebook ads are not working for us.

I'm sure there are ways we can make this better, and for a new entity, it doesn't help having so little name recognition. However, while I'm certainly not a creative expert, we could see a 10X improvement and it'd still only be a 0.3% click-thru. I've read that average click-thru on Facebook is somewhere around 0.04% - 0.05%. Contrast that with Google AdWords average of ~2% and I'm left scratching my head asking what am I missing?

Just this week, GM decided to cut bait with paid advertising on Facebook and I have to say I can't blame them. For a while now, we've seen Sheryl Sandberg tout the virtue of brands being a part of a user's life on Facebook, while shying away from metrics like CTR, never mind conversion metrics such as sign ups or sales lift:

"Facebook executives argue that the click-through numbers are not that meaningful; they say that people remember ads better and are more likely to make purchases when their friends endorse products." - Business Week, May 2011

If Facebook, with all of the mountains of data at its disposal can't hang its hat on hard metrics, and instead has to rely on some qualitative intercept study talking about recall, then they have a huge problem.

Frankly, I've been one of those sales guys representing ad inventory (not at Facebook) that every metric suggests is not working and it's your job to torture the data and come up with a story to get brands to buy. When it's a new venture, it's easy to make claims that this is a whole new class of ad inventory, and for a while, you feel like you've convinced the brands, but eventually every publisher has its day of reckoning and if the ads aren't working, the media agencies and brands eventually figure that out.

You might still be the smartest guy in the room, but at some point it just doesn't matter anymore. Large amounts of money are being spent and brands want results. You can talk brand equity, you can talk reach, you can even put some new spin on it around building fans but it eventually has to come back to sales, and that's where Facebook is stumbling pretty hard right now in my opinion.

When I am in product research mode, I go to Google or Bing - not Facebook. I triangulate my options using search engines and may subsequently check with one or more friends if it's a big ticket item. However, Facebook is now surfacing those friend recommendations off-Facebook via Bing! In other words, what Google likes to call the Zero Moment of Truth simply never happens on Facebook.

If Facebook's future contemplates the bulk of its revenue continuing to come from ads, surely it must wrest control of those ad dollars away from Google, and it's going to have to find a way to pivot its site to capture those moments of intent.

As brands shift their perception of Facebook from newfangled thing that they're are willing to experiment with to a mature part of the ad spending eco-system, no amount of squishy story telling by its ad execs, even if (s)he's a modern-day version of Hans Christian Andersen,  is going to convince major brands that Facebook deserves to be part of its marketing mix unless it can demonstrate that those dollars are resulting in incremental behavior.

Right now, this little advertiser is not convinced. Losing GM is one thing. Losing the long-tail of advertisers would be quite another...

The Value of Ephemeral Connections

The big news this week is Facebook's $100B+ IPO. Some deride it as a passing fad - not much more than a glorified address book. Others see its Social Graph as the next great monopoly - a dynastic operating system of a social generation. Whatever the case, 900M users gives Facebook almost limitless options and a better than 50/50 chance of succeeding in anything it decides to pursue.

Indeed, with the recent tie up of Bing + Facebook, we're now seeing the first credible social search product. Of course, Google's been at it for a while with Search Plus Your World but it doesn't have the scale of 900M Facebook users behind it.

For example, now when I go to Bing and search for Maui hotels, I now see 3 things: 1) Organic search results - in this case mauihotels.com shows up first; 2) Paid search - Ritz Carlton shows up top; 3) The option to ask my friends on Facebook, or alternatively, where there's a match, Bing suggests friends who may know based on Facebook profile & timeline info.

All of that taken together is much more powerful than simply a paid search result from Ritz Carlton for example, right? However, the success of Facebook enabled social search hinges on two things 1) Our continued sharing of every aspect of our life and 2) The assumption that we are like our friends.

I'm not about to argue with Harvard researchers on the first assumption. However, the second assumption suggests room for further opportunity. That is, while I of course have things in common with my friends, there also many differences - enough to suggest that simply knowing who my friends are is not always enough to infer what I'm likely to consider relevant.

So, if enduring relationships can't always guarantee relevant content, might there be value in ephemeral connections? After all, it happens all the time in the offline world - random encounters at restaurants, in bars, at the movies, in the supermarket, at the park with kids etc. result in conversations with strangers that influence whether or not you buy a product, watch that movie, or go to that bar. These are not friends in the classic sense. Rather, they're people in passing that you struck up a conversation with and trusted enough to listen to what they had to say and valued their opinion, but you're not necessarily likely to add them to your Facebook friend list any time soon.

With that in mind, social search will become much more powerful when it progresses beyond simply mining my friends' likes and comments to actually putting me in touch with potential trusted sources wherever they reside be they friend or stranger. Add in a layer of anonymity so I don't need to become Facebook friends with every ephemeral connection, and now we have a product that truly taps into the potential of the Social Graph.

That vision is very much at the forefront of where we're taking Härnu - a recognition that sometimes seeking out a stranger's opinion or getting a local's perspective can be much more valuable than those available from existing friends.

Dispensing with Matryoshka Dolls

When we initially thought about starting Härnu, it was easy to dimensionalize the social & media landscape to fit within a construct that suggested a new service like ours needed to exist. In fact, in a burst of midnight PowerPointery, my assessment ended up looking something like this:

The point of view expressed above is not that controversial, but with the benefit of hindsight, nor is the situation quite that simple either. Basically, my initial assumptions could be summarized into the headline that we need to cut out the middle man. That is, the primary ways in which we consume media today have made us more insular, less informed, less empathetic, and big media isn't going to change any time soon.

Our goal from the beginning has been to act as an accelerant for empathy - connect people across the world in an authentic way and you can start to chip away at the biases that our media has helped reinforce. Connect people one-to-one and suddenly a like or a share is exposed as embarrassingly inadequate when trying to express solidarity for our fellow man / woman.

Basically, our solve for this was not to build out more nested Matryoshka dolls such as a mobile app on top of a social network on top of a relevance engine on top of an aggregator on top of a search engine on top of content for example, but to simply dispense with the nesting paradigm altogether - enable and encourage direct access to people in locales everywhere and anywhere. Simplify. A battle of Turkey versus Turducken if you will.

Want to know what's happening in Syria? Don't just watch CNN or read about it on [insert social network here]. Instead, actually talk to some Syrians and hear from them directly with Härnu translating all the conversations on the fly into each other's preferred language. Having done so, are you now better informed? Are you inspired to act?

Of course, not every interaction is going to result in someone taking the next plane to Damascus or lobbying the White House for action and in fact, a lot of the interactions are often seemingly mundane - where do you live?, what do you eat?, where do you work? etc. However, all of those interactions together have the capacity to add up to something more than a nanoKardashian.

So, those were the original assumptions. Now that we actually have a service out there, I've learned the following three things so far:

1. As much as we thought we needed to make Härnu completely private to offer a level of comfort to people in countries where censorship is de rigeur, we've realized that sharing features everywhere is simply a must-have for any online community. Perhaps everyone that reads this is saying "duh idiot!" but the point is that people talk about wanting more privacy but what they really want is more control and those two terms are not the same.
2. There's actually a lot of good content out there being produced by citizen journalists everywhere. An example would include GlobalVoices and Twitter is a great way to broadcast that content out into the Internet. However, the trick is still to close the gap between awareness and action. While tools like Twitter and Facebook enable awareness and engagement to some degree, I'd suggest that the missing link is still empathy such that the path to action looks like this: awareness-->engagement-->empathy-->action. More one-to-one conversations can balance the many-to-many speed of light content delivery and consumption tools we have out there today.
3. There's no substitute for face to face interaction...yet! While Härnu may or may not be able to deliver on its promise of instilling empathy for other cultures in a massive way some day, the 15 minutes I spent  last week at the Seattle Globalist launch chatting with a Pakistani editor who's now a refugee, gave me enough of a jolt to realize how lucky I am to be talking about building an online service versus fleeing authorities intent on killing me because I had the temerity to speak the truth as a journalist. If our media in this country were half as brave, perhaps we'd have a press more people would be satisfied with. As it is, a lot of brainpower is being spent trying to fix it or circumvent it entirely. 

I think that part of the solution involves connecting ordinary citizens everywhere and giving them the power to triangulate multiple perspectives. I don't believe it's simply a binary choice between people versus machine-learning algorithms, but rather that in a world of filter bubbles the ability to connect to anyone anywhere as we are to our friends and family today may prove to have merit.

Hot Stacey Goes Global

No, it's not the name of some adult movie. Rather, it's the name my daughter gave to the female version of Flat Stanley. At pre-school, they're using the character Flat Stanley to take photos of their environment for class show and tell. The female version is called Flat Stacey, but as my daughter explains, she left Flat Stacey outside and she got hot, so now she's simply called Hot Stacey.

So, with that as a backdrop, I've been experiencing a lot of mixed emotions this week as we wade ever deeper into our beta test. From bugs affecting users signing up, to inevitable performance tuning issues, to banning users for being jerks (a story for another time), it's been a whirlwind the past few days.

However, just today I got a reply from a connection in the UK where I'd sent the following question:

What did I get back? Only a photo of Hot Stacey at the Olympic Park in London!

(Full disclosure - my Härnu connection that sent this is in fact a friend of mine. However, the kindness of friends is just as welcome as the kindness of strangers!)

As I write this, my daughter is taking an afternoon nap. When she wakes up though, I can't wait to show her this photo and field the many questions she's sure to ask about London and the Olympics.

As we get started with Härnu, I'm buoyed by the thought of all the cool use cases people will use our platform for, and it's gratifying to know we can count on our friends both near and far to to help jump-start the task of building a community that hopefully will bring about some empathy for each other and a bit of levity along the way!

Jerks need not apply.

net makeing world one world

If you're vigilant, you'll have noticed the typo in the headline. Read on and you'll understand why...


I had what I can only describe as a bit of a watershed moment last night in Härnu land. We had our very first user from Egypt trying to sign up for the first time. He / she was having trouble and sent a message to our Facebook page (which I'm monitoring incessantly right now). The thread started innocuously enough with me on one end trying to troubleshoot and our user gamefully trying to communicate with me in English. Not able to get on to the site, we quickly got to a declaration that the site was not good:

We both stuck with it though, and once the user got onto Härnu, our Facebook message thread soon moved to this:

In a matter of minutes, we'd gone from "no good site" to "very good idea. i can making friends. net makeing world one world."


As we were messaging back and forth, I had goose pimples the entire time. After all, this was the scenario we had dreamed about - people in the Middle East talking with people in the West, learning and sharing with each other. I couldn't help but let my mind wander to how viruses spread and hoping that our mystery user was the Egyptian equivalent of Ashton Kutcher and from that would flow millions of Egyptians ready to connect and share with Americans and other people around the world.


Well, here we are the next day, and we still have only one user from Egypt, but one user we have, and that user likes what we've got. Enough to have logged in today and engaged.


If ever I had any doubts about what we're trying to achieve, they were erased in a haze of frantic back and forth with our Egyptian friend last night. We had a moment of panic when we wondered if it was too good to be true, but Google Analytics revealed that yes, in fact we had a session from Egypt.


Whether Egyptian Härnu User #1 turns out to be a Lonely Boy instead of Ashton Kutcher is immaterial. We made contact and we're convinced that from here it's all about execution.


I expect that most start-ups have many watershed moments along the way. In our brief prologue, we've met our first and it was awesome!