antonybrydon

Goodbye Vizu Answers, Hello _______?

Vizu recently unplugged their Vizu Answers product, depriving me of the single best tool in the market to quickly and inexpensively test new product concepts with consumers. The service was simple and self-service. In a few clicks, you could describe a product concept and create a set of check boxes where consumers could indicate how likely they were to sign up for the service. Vizu would distribute the survey via widgets on a broad set of highly-trafficked sites, and allow you to target certain sites (i.e., tech or political). In a few hours, you could collect several hundred responses, complete with geographical information on the respondent. All for the bargain price of $1 per response.

I've looked at a lot of potential replacements (see below) but haven't found one that meets these four criteria:

• Self-service
• Question length of several sentences, up to a paragraph
• Broad distribution to consumers (panel)
• Inexpensive (single digit dollars per response)

In general, while most of the full-service panels offer good targeting and qualification of respondents, most are designed for more in-depth surveys, none are self-service and all are expensive $10-$100 per response.

And while most of the survey tools are self-service, inexpensive, and customizable to questions of any length, most are designed to feature on your own site and blog and none have a built-in panel of consumers or way to distribute your survey and collect response quickly.

The only one that comes close is LinkedIn answers, but questions are limited to 75 characters, which is barely enough to ask about the weather.

If anyone knows a service that fits all 4 of the criteria above, please let me know.

Salesforce.com's ServiceCloud rises above the crowd

 Salesforce.com announced ServiceCloud earlier this month, billed as a "next generation platform for customer service," allowing companies to monitor and tap into customer conversations all over the web - i.e., Facebook, community blogs, message boards, twitter, etc.

It's an excellent innovation, and important on several dimensions:

• For companies, it's a badly needed interface to a social web that consumers are increasingly turning to discuss products and companies, a structured way of integrating traditional CRM and ad hoc initiatives on platforms like Twitter. It's also an opportunity to create a better experience, better brand, and stronger net promoters cores by delivering a new level of proactive customer support.

• For consumers, it offers a new opportunity to be heard and helped in their preferred avenue, and not forced through the company's preferred CS channels and painful 800 numbers, and reflects a shift in the balance of power from company to consumer.

• For salesforce.com, it allows them to bridge an increasingly relevant social web with enterprise CRM, to keep CRM core and central and the sales and support, and to rise above (and aggregate) a crowd of  new channels emerging for customer support like GetSatisfaction and Twitter.

The implication of Jott's discontinued free service for your freemium service

Jott announced that they are discontinuing their free service effective February 2, citing a terrible ad market that is insufficient to support the free paid product. Customers will need to upgrade to paid plans at $3.95 per month or $12.95 per month to keep using the free service.

It's a surprising move, because the company says 30% of free users ultimately upgrade to paid versions. It's a high upgrade percentage, and seems at first blush like a great example of the freemium model at work.

It's an unsurprising move, because the cost of supporting these free users with a service that uses human transcription has to be very expensive, even if some speech to text automation is used for preprocessing. If the cost to support a user is even a dollars a month, it's easy to see to company going further into the red as the model (and free base) scales. The profits off the paid base are outweighed by the costs of supporting the free base.

It seems less likely that the struggling ad market affected the decision, because the most that advertising could contribute per user per month is a fraction of a dollar. Hit a user once per day at a $10 CPM and you're making only $0.30 per user per month. The ability to offset the human transcription costs with advertising seems challenging in good and bad ad markets alike.

Let's suppose that the entire ad market evaporated and Jott lost all advertising revenue. Since roughly 30% of the base is paid, Jott could offset that loss by increasing the profit on an average paid subscriber by $1 per month. They could do this by introducing new features, introducing a new subscription level, or optimizing price for profit - and maintain a free service and a freemium model that seems to be working well.

Since they didn't choose this path, and chose instead to sacrifice the freemium model, I suspect the costs of the free service are more significant than the reference to the ad model suggests and the profits on the paid service aren't near what's needed to offset the marketing expense. [Note: I've got zero insight into the actual economics of Jott's model - if my calculus is bad, I'd be grateful for a correction.]

They said it better...

Here are a few posts, articles and videos that I've referred back to consistently over time:

Top Posts

• Eric Ries on open board meetings
• Marc Andreesen on product market fit  
• Dave McClure on startup metrics for pirates 
• Sean Ellis on measuring product market fit 
• Fred Reicheld on the ultimate question (netpromoter) and at Amazon
• Albert Wenger at Union Square Ventures on traction trumps team

Other Great Posts 

• David Skok on the killer cost of customer acquisition
• Eric Ries on why $30K in revenue can be better than $1,000,000  
• Eric Ries on continuous deployment and continuous learning
• Eric Ries on using adwords to assess demand
• Eric Ries on the one-line A/B split test
• Eric Ries on the metrics and levers of engagement
• Sean Ellis on the startup pyramid and product market fit 

Series

• Eric Ries' series on continuous deployment
• Eric Ries' series on customer development
• Marc Andreesen's startup series parts 1, 2, 3, 4*, 5, 6, 7, 8* and 9
• The Kissmetrics blog 
• Steve Blank on customer development 

Video

• Eric Ries on engagement loops

Authors

• Eric Ries
• Marc Andreesen
• Paul Graham
• Venture Hacks

What I'm watching...

A quick list of some sites and companies I care about, admittedly more for my benefit than external eyes. I've divided the list into companies where traffic is strongly, somewhat, and weakly correlated with success.