Tom Karlo - Karlo.Org

links for 2009-04-29

• Cupcakes Take The Cake
  All cupcakes, all the time.
  (tags: food nyc blog cooking fun)
• Level & Tap
  Curated photography prints. [Via Daring Fireball, http://daringfireball.net/]
  (tags: store prints artwork shop ecommerce photography art gallery)

Maximizing Your Online Business: Part Three, User Acquisition

Old-school Customer Acquistion in Times Square, originally uploaded by karlo.

(This is a continuation of my series on understanding and analyzing web service and software businesses. If you'd like to start from the beginning, go to part one, "Core Value Proposition.")

User Acquisition

For a web services business, user acquisition is the "input" to the machine you've built by creating appropriate value proposition for users and monetization for the business. I'm covering acquisition last for a number of reasons:
* Without value for users and monetization, how many users you can acquire is irrelevant * Acquiring traffic is easy, assuming you can spend money on marketing -- it's converting those leads into revenue that can then drive further traffic acquisition that's difficult

links for 2009-04-24

• Red2Blu - Upgrade Your Warner Bros. HD-DVDs for New Blu-Ray Discs
  Going to use this to upgrade my copy of Casablanca (and a few other movies) to Blu-Ray. Really wish Universal would offer something similar.
  (tags: movies hd-dvd blu-ray deals hdtv)

links for 2009-04-23

• Incase Slim Hard Shell 3G iPhone Bamboo Slider
  Iphone case constructed 40% out of reclaimed bamboo to reduce plastic use. Also very nice looking. Not bad for $35 from a small-volume manufacturer - hopefully it fits the new iPhones likely to arrive in June.
  (tags: product iphone apple case ecological recycled eco-friendly)

Maximizing Your Online Business: Part Two, Monetization

(This is a continuation of my series on understanding and analyzing web service and software businesses. If you'd like to start from the beginning, go to part one, "Core Value Proposition.")

Monetization

If you've created a service that has a compelling value proposition, and delivers on that promise for its end users, you've succeeded at the most difficult part of building a growing online business. Turning it into a profitable online business, however, takes more than simply making users happy. You have to find a way to generate revenues from your users that doesn't unnecessarily compromise that core value proposition.

There are two primary ways of generating revenue from an online service:

• Direct service charges
• Advertising revenue

links for 2009-04-22

• Prettify* — Nice icons and wallpapers
  Nicely curated and updated collection of wallpapers and icons for Mac users.
  (tags: wallpaper desktop prettify interface gui icon mac osx)

Product Recommendation: Nuun Active Hydration

[Nuun](http://nuun.com/) is a product I've used a ton of myself, and I've recommended to at least a half dozen friends over the years. I learned about it myself via word of mouth -- my good friend Stef Samuel, who has done Ironman Triathlons all over the world, swears by the stuff. Essentially, Nuun is an effervescent tablet that you throw into your drinking water bottle and provides both flavor and electrolytes to improve replacement of the water and salts you lose when exercising. It's like Gatorade without the sugar, and without all of the environmental costs of a disposable plastic bottle, and delivering a bottle of liquid. There's also a major portability benefit - a tube of 12 tabs (good for a dozen 16-oz bottles of drinks) is about the size of a roll of life-savers and weighs a few ounces. You can throw that and a drinking water bottle in your bag and be set for the next month's worth of workouts. (And because there's no sugar, not only is cleanup easy, but if you're exercising to get in shape, you're not ingesting calories that will undo all the work you just did.) One caveat: some folks may find they need some calories in their sports drinks. I've found that I prefer an alternative to nuun when going to spin classes, because I like to get a little bit of sugar from whatever I'm drinking. In general, though, if you're working out for under an hour, you don't need any calories from your sports drink. I could go with just plain water, but subjectively I feel like I absorb nuun-treated tap water better than plain water, with less of that bloated feeling that can happen when you drink 24-32 oz of water while exercising hard. It's not cheap, but it's generally cheaper, more convenient and better for the environment than drinking Gatorade, Powerade or other pre-made drinks. And it's generally better for you, as well. The only flavor I don't recommend is Kona Cola, but they seem to have stopped making that. It's still in some of their variety packs and should be avoided. The other flavors are all fine - they're not fantastic, but they're light and innocuous. I guess my second least-favorite is the "citrus-fruit". Mostly, the flavor is there to cover any potential saltiness from the electrolytes, I suspect. If you are worried about liking the flavor I recommend finding this at your local running or cycling speciality store and trying just one tube. If you're going to order online, sign up for their mailing list (they send out coupon codes fairly regularly) and order 9 tubes or so at a time, because the shipping cost is significant but fixed. I recommend the mixed fruit flavors pack, which has 3 each of 3 flavors.

Maximizing Your Online Business: Part One, Core Value Proposition

This is an extension of an earlier post, which covered how one goes about calculating customer lifetime value (CLV). In this series, I'll be examining the key levers you use to maximize your business, seen through the perspective of CLV. In my previous post around customer value, I reduced the CLV equation down to two key components:

• How much profit you make off each transaction with the customer - i.e. monetization
• How many transactions you get with the average customer - essentially, retention

To transition this a bit more to a customer-centric, rather than monetization-centric, view, your typical business has three key components:

1. The core value proposition to customers - what do they expect to get out of interacting with the company, service or product
2. The monetization of that interaction - how does the company make money off of delivering the core value proposition?
3. Customer acquisition - how does the company find and acquire new customers that find its value proposition compelling?

I'd argue that for most web businesses, it's all about these three components. Everything else is a support function. Any successful business will have to necessarily address all three of these, at least implicitly - you may not have an active acquisition strategy, for example, but that just means you're implicitly depending on word of mouth or another passive method. If you don't have a value proposition, well, that's somewhat more troubling. I'll cover these each in separate posts. I'm going to start with value proposition, because not only is it the heart of the business, but it's also the one component you can't take a passive approach to, whereas there is at least (some) argument that you can leave the mechanics of acquisition or monetization until after you've solved the central value proposition question.

links for 2009-04-20

• Dork Yearbook
  "The way we wish we weren't."
  (tags: humor funny geekery nerd dork retro pictures geek computers photos fun images photo culture)

links for 2009-04-17

• Tactical Bail Out Gear Bag
  For $20, a nifty alternative to more expensive briefcases. If you're going to put a laptop in (like they show), you'd probably want to use a protective sleeve as well.
  (tags: shopping gear bag luggage)