Hey I just wanted to let everyone know that our second San Francisco JavaScript Meetup will be held on June 5th at SlideShare in Soma. For specifics on this, head over to the SF JS #2 Meetup page.
Jonathan Boutelle also blogged about it and praised the quality of the last event, so if don’t take my word, take his!
Hope to see you there!
I have mad respect for the Xobni guys. I think they have more courage than almost every other YC company combined. Though I don’t know anything about the cap table, I would guess Matt and Adam could have walked away with something like $5MM each. And hey, is a year or two at Microsoft that bad? These guys took an outcome that many other YC companies would die for and told MS to stick it. Walking away now means a lot, and these guys are definitely ballsy.
So what’s next for Xobni? It feels like there are three main issues to address. First, they need to get out from a position where the only logical buyer is Microsoft. Second, they need to grow the business either by generating revenue, or by becoming far more strategic in both the depth of their product and breadth of their domain. Third, since they have asserted their defiance, do they create an IPO roadmap?
1. Support a whole range of email clients and become the de facto email analytics plug-in across the board. By doing so, Xobni will escape the Microsoft-only trap and will increase their pool of potential users. They have already started doing this with Pine (yes, joke acknowledged) and I am sure others are to come. So, this one is no surprise.
2. Produce an email client themselves when their value proposition gets good enough. As a middle ground, you could simply have Xobni synchronize all of your mail with its own Xobni webmail service (for sure in certain setups, a little technical magic might be needed, but its doable). In this way, anyone with Xobni installed could start to use a Xobni webmail service as a standalone client with all of their messages, contacts, and the like pre-populated. Because they can control the messages, there are lots of powerful things they can do with viral user acquisition strategies a la Hotmail (or even pull some strategies from the Facebook app community since Xobni is a slightly social being). If they get in the door with a plug-in, wean people off with a webmail or local client that has all their existing information pre-populated, and spread like wildfire with some finely tuned viral processes, they could do some serious damage.
3. Don’t build a social network, just make email fun to use and make it easy for people to see what their email graph looks like. While Bill Gates said Xobni is the next-generation of social network, I think this is hardly the place to take that literally and incorporate pictures, walls, and pokes. The communication stack is a hard thing to challenge, and because people have pre-existing and quite different notions of how they use email and social networks, it will be quite the uphill battle to merge those together. People need to feel that each thing they use has identity, and when you blur the lines too much, they get confused or turned off. I would stick to making a fun and useful layer of tools that leverage the social graph instead of becoming the medium on which the graph is built. People love rankings, quantifying friendships, and colorful behavior graphs enough as is. The temptation to be the next Facebook is one to ignore.
4. Become the all-in-one contact threshold tool, and by that I mean users should be able to see their activity across all aspects of communication and set personal alerts for when their interaction level with somebody drops below or goes above a certain level. Efficient networking in the business (and sometimes social) world means knowing exactly how much time to spend with each different person. This sounds cold and impersonal, but if your network is large and sheer efficiency is your game, then it is crucial to have your thresholds just right. If Xobni monitors the whole spectrum of communication, they are in a unique position to do just that. Imagine a day when in Xobni you can set person A to a level 1 contact, person B to a 3, etc and then give weights to different communication types to ensure the level of interaction you are engaging in with someone is not too much or too little given how important they are to you. This is the next level of streamlining your life.
5. Sell employee analytics to HR departments via the huge amount of mailbox data that they can parse and interpret. What if Xobni did some natural language processing on the tone of intra-company emails to sense employee happiness? What if they could sense conflict within an organization before things got serious? What if they could see the exact structure of communication within the company from an organizational behavior perspective to see who really talks to whom, how often, and how decisions are really made? This reminds me in a way of services like those from Success Factors, a company that recently IPOed and now has a market cap of around $500MM. Businesses will pay through the nose to understand their employees and keep things going as a well-oiled-machine. Xobni could be the oil-filter of big business.
6. Attack other verticals on the local machine like the media player, the instant messenger, the file system, the browser, etc. Xobni as a company is clearly good with data, and there’s ways to enhance all of these areas with some kind of data play. I can think of a few right off the top of my head. It’s clear that these guys have the DNA to think of data-driven enhancements, so I am sure they would be able to crack at least a few more verticals on the local machine. If they can unify this data in the right way, they could do anything from building the cross-domain uber-recommendation engine to selling the most detailed, parsed, and dissected consumer data to analytics companies and others. This sounds like ‘Big Brother’, but as long as Xobni adds enough value to those who install, users simply will not care.
X. I wanted to throw a fun one in the mix just for kicks, and that is to implement premium email delivery. Imagine anyone with Xobni could set a price for which they would have any email auto-bubble to the top of their inbox. You as the sender who also has Xobni could certify an email as premium and actually pay money (revenue shared between Xobni and the receiver) to get that email at the top of the receiver’s inbox. You essentially create an open market for everyone’s prime inbox space. How much would you pay to guarantee a super-important business email gets read ASAP? Could sending a premium email be the new ‘virtual box of chocolates’? Would you pay $100 to get your email at the top of Barack Obama, Perez Hilton, or Tiger Woods’s inbox? Sounds like a joke, but maybe just maybe there is a business in there. 
So what would you do if you were running Xobni? Would you have taken the money to begin with? If so, why, and why not go big? If not, what would be your strategy now? I would love to hear some thoughts in comments or email.
I Love It
The other day my friend Arjun got me hooked on Bitstrips and after using it for a while I realized that the mechanics of the site were so good I would just have to discuss it. The basic principle of the site is that you create little characters of yourself and your friends and make hilarious comic strips out of them. The process is fun, quick, and so easy. The first time I got sent one, I almost fell out of my chair laughing. That said, I clearly liked the site a lot. The following are a number of great strategic, design, and interaction principles that totally impressed me about Bitstrips.
Effective Landing Page
The initial homepage (see above) is colorful, friendly, inviting and you just get a good feeling when you go there. The organization is actually intuitive with the full menu on the left, an eye catching focal point on the scene builder logo, the different core initial actions on the far right, anchors to the most popular or recent content, and functional boxes below. For existing users, there is a lot to do, but for new users it is also very clear how they should initiate their Bitstrips experience. These two concepts are generally mutually exclusive (unless two different pages are used), but I think Bitstrips nailed it. The best part is that, no matter what you click on, you delve into fun and action right away.
Viral Loop
The site has an immediate viral loop that comes into play when you go through the registration funnel. It lets you “find your friends” who are already on the site or invite new ones via email address book importing. I’m not a huge fan of email inviting, as the overuse of the medium across thousands of sites has strongly diluted the effect. In this case though, going through the process was actually useful, because people on the site generally have fictional personas (not many real names) so it is hard to search for friends other than via email. It was a pretty frictionless process and one that was reinforced by the banners on the site saying “It’s More Fun With Friends!!” For the first time in a while, I felt I agreed with the viral incentive. Kudos to them for making the spam useful.
Usage Loop
Possibly even stronger than the core viral loop is the number of usage loops they have created. A usage loop is like a viral loop stemming not from the invite process but from usage of the site that throws off cues for others to join. Inherently, these strips are most fun when they involve friends. So, once you make a Bitstrip you will likely send it to friends, making the core of the site an effective usage loop as the friends come onto the site to see the comic. But it goes a bit deeper. Not only can the user base spread through passing links to whole comic strips, but since you create characters of yourself and others, your friends can use your characters to make strips. When your friend uses your character in a strip, you get notified and want to come back to see what they did with him or her. This is an awesome and highly playful mechanic that sucks you back again and again.
Minimized Entry Process
One of the hardest things for web people to do that games people do so well is to not give the user every piece of functionality right away. When the user is able to do too many things at once, they get hit with a paradox of choice and/or utter confusion and leave the site. When the experience is limited and directed, they are much more likely to have fun, stay un-confused, and actually complete whatever process they were attempting. I love the restraint the Bitstrips creators exercised on the initial character creation step. Despite the fact that the characters can get incredibly rich with hundreds of variables, they limit the initial granularity with which you can edit your character to a smaller, more manageable subset of attributes. Why take power away from the user? If the user is overwhelmed and they leave, this is far worse than if the user gets through the process and generates a character at only 80% detail. If they want more, they can go back and refine later, but the initial process is smooth, quick, and fun even for the non-power users. Kudos to restraint!
Sustained Calls-to-Action
Like LinkedIn has the progress bar of completing your profile, Bitstrips has bold, colorful, simple messages telling you what is left to complete on your profile. If you don’t complete them, these huge annoying boxes stay on the page. This in-your-face incentive is awesome as a subliminal cue to make a strip, find friends, build more characters, etc. If the site can get you as a user to buy in by filling in everything in the cues, you are much more likely to stay an active user because you have fully experienced the site and have significant investment in it.
People to Media to People Navigation
An interesting facet of the site is how you find yourself navigating through it. The navigation, at least for me, worked like this. First, I would go to a friend’s page and see what their new strips were. I would view a strip, and immediately look to see what other characters were in the strip. Upon clicking one of the other characters in the strip, I would be taken to that character’s page. That page provides links to the creator of that character, and I would see who it was that made that character and view more of their strips. The interesting thing is I didn’t just move people to people (Facebook, with the exception of photo viewing) or media to media (YouTube) and instead I get this very rich experience where I am interested in people and media and consume them in parallel.
SEO Hooks
There is lots of potential for SEO-able content on the site. Every user, character, and strip has a static detail page with rich metadata that can be indexed via keywords, genres, references to people, etc. There is the ability to embed these strips on external pages, providing a great number of external hooks to come back to the site. The link structure within the site is interesting with all of the highly intuitive relations between the different types of pages (users, characters, strips, series). Finally, these things are just so playful and funny that it is the type of thing bloggers would post, people would put on their Facebook or MySpace, or and friends would email/IM around. This site has the ability to push so much content to external locations that, if done right, it could be a great SEO play.
It’s Just Fun!
When it comes down to it, I really do just love the product as it is inherently fun for me. What I think is more neat is that the product really provides something for everyone. The achiever persona can focus on racking up points, views, laughs, and favorites. The explorer has a huge array of people, characters, and strips to dig through to find funny stuff. The socialite can leverage the platform to flirt with, poke fun at, and harass others and try to incite reactions from their friends or enemies. The builder has an obvious method of achieving satisfaction in the extremely rich tools they can leverage to create some really cool, detailed comics. I think what’s best is that they have really nailed a casual, fun, social interaction where there is something for everyone no matter what type of person you are, or if you’re a power-user or newbie.
Some Subtle Nice Touches
I wanted to close with two little things that impressed me regarding the level of thought put into the site. First, instead of the boring, played out, not-fun positive and negative ratings of “thumbs-up” and “thumbs-down”, Bitstrips uses “laughs” and “groans”. Subtle cues like these indicate to the user that the ability to rate the strips isn’t just a bland feature, it’s a fun social stimulus. Second, in the address book importer, it defaulted the pre-@-symbol portion of my email address to my Bitstrips user name. While this guess could have been wrong, for me it was right and ended up being hugely influential (not sure why, subtle psychology is in play) in me actually going through the import step. From experience with analytics of viral invite processes, I can’t stress enough how important “all the little things” are. Even “little things” can make single or double digit percentage gains in success rates through a viral funnel. I love the attention to detail here.
So that’s it. Go make some Bitstrips!
