A clever pricing approach for growing companies

Spreedly operates a service to make the process of selling subscriptions easy, and they are themselves, it seems, very good at locking in customers. One example is the Spreedly Kickstart offer, where they capture revenue and lock in early customers by asking for a large payment up front to lock in lower ongoing costs.

The advantage for Spreedly is that they receive cash faster, while encouraging companies to commit to using the service rather than just running a trial. They will land bigger customers more easily (they see a deal) but will also capture excess revenue from companies that over-estimate their future transaction numbers.

Oh – and Speedly does not work for New Zealand companies. There seems to be a real gap in the market here for easy payment acceptance services for new companies.

Wotif launches Wotflight – let’s test it out

Wotif have launched a new site – Wotflight. It only applies only to Australian flights for now, but it is certainly worth a look.

I like the simple approach, and there are some nice user interface elements.

Looks great doesn’t it? Clearly there has been a good designer involved.

I went ahead and tried to book a flight. However I failed on the first page trying to search for a one-way flight Sydney to Perth.

That’s when I noticed the large “one way” and “return” tabs on the top left. They seem to be on most airline’s sites, but I contend that they should be history by now. If I don’t want a return flight then why can I not just leave the date empty? Alternatively (and additionally) why not give me a click-box?

While we are at it the return date is in a strange place – why not move it over under the outward date?

So I’ve had a go at editing the home page it to remove everything that is not required. What do you think?

You could remove even more if you try. I’m guessing the designer was told what to put in, and that the usability person didn’t have much say.

The results page has also been designed – and is stunning looking.

It’s quite a lot to take in, but I found it easy enough to navigate. It shows all the options on one page – from flight times and durations to seat types and costs.

Click on “select” under a ticket and you come to the buy summary page. It is not too bad:

However once again while it looks nice, some improvement is required. Here’s the really obvious one:

and there is plenty more to do on that page. So let’s look at the next, payment page:

Scary. It’s lovely to look at in one sense, but simply too scary in another. My hypothesis with the site is that it was done by some pretty good designers, but it was not user tested very much, if at all, and it was subject to some constraints by a business person.

But then – I’m just one more user.

Overall – a good launch effort, but the real work starts now in the daily tweaking.

How to give thanks

Webstock seem to do so much so well.

Here’s the simple screen I saw after completing a feedback survey on Monday’s workshop with Eric Ries.

The workshop was excellent, and the thank you note was just another item in the long list that made me feel good about the whole affair. Well done.

What do your “success” screens look like? Are they as good as this one? Why not?

Why XT keeps failing

With a minor, I think, outage last night, Telecom’s XT isn’t racking up the best track record.

@NealRich is the engineer that put it all together – and to his credit he fessed up to it a FooCamp. I’m a big fan of the XT network  when it works – for my iPhone, and so I am grateful for everyone’s efforts at Telecom.

It was remarkable to hear from all of the the Telecom folks at Foo the story of how Telecom responded to the XT outages, and how it helped the organisation embrace the new web communication methods. It was a potentially transformational moment – and certainly a learning one. I hope it continues to help them drive change across the entire organisation.

However I just couldn’t help editing the picture Neal sent me though. Sorry

Stop spamming me Dopplr

A gentle reminder to everyone that sends out email messages.

An unsubscribe link is a link that says “unsubscribe” and links directly to a page that says “thank you for unsubscribing” or “are you sure Y/N?”

An unsubscribe link is not “click here to login to your account and change your preferences, which means you need to remember your login details, fail and then retrieve a new password, navigate our complicated site and then figure out how to unsubscribe.”

If you want evidence – well here’s what happened when I started typing “Dopplr.com” into my browser. The two links that Safari prompted for me, aside from the main domain name, are “forgot_password” and “account/email.”

Here’s Why
If a customer is sick and tired of receiving your emails, then every additional email she receives is increasingly annoying, and it makes her feel worse and worse about your company and product.

Eventually she will want out – and for companies it is damage limitation time.

Letting customers out as easily and as pleasantly as possible, leaving them with a final impression of professionalism and just a little humour (if you can pull it off) will soften their negative stance, and while they may not recommend your product to others, they won’t be as keen to disparage it either.

So poor Dopplr – the time has long since passed when I thought your service could be useful or even cool. I don’t want to go to your website, I want you to stop sending me emails and I certainly won’t recommend your service to anyone else.

So I’ve now closed my Dopplr account.

To give credit to Dopplr this was not too hard (once I had done the forgot password dance) The close account link was easy to find, I was able to give reasons why I wanted out, and they tell me that all is now deleted.

The Grandmother effect is starting for Facebook

Something I wrote about for Idealog seems to be coming true:

Facebook itself will also sink at some stage….

It’s very hard to predict what and when social networks will succeed and fail, but there is probably a simple test to determine the point of failure—and it’s almost certainly related to the date that your mother joins the network.

Now we hear via The Age that parents are arriving on Facebook – and teenagers are leaving:

Figures show that the number of older users of Facebook increased nearly tenfold in America last year, while university-age users declined by 55 per cent….

The online community has responded by creating groups such as ”My grandma is on Facebook”, ”My granny is on Facebook and I love it!” and ”Proud Nannas, Grandmas, Pas and Grandpas on Facebook’

I like using the analogy of bars and nightclubs to think about social websites and dating sites.

The cool people, whoever they are, discover new pubs and bars to hang out, and the crowds slowly build. After a while the venues become too popular, the bars too crowded and the uncool people dominate. The cool folk give up and move on to the next venue, and the cycle continues.

Facebook is a big popular bar where your parents and grandparents are coming to hang out and dance. The lights have been turned up, the music slowed and, well it’s almost time to leave. It is, however, a very big bar, so it will take time to empty, but once the rush starts it could empty pretty quickly (like MySpace). Small networks of friends will move to the next venue, and their friends and their friends will follow.

The big question is what the next venue will be.

Introducing MyTours

Announcing the launch of MyTours – today we have launched our first product on to iTunes.

MyTours is a website that lets you load pictures, sound and text to create a tour. It’s great for Museums, local bodies, tour guides and other people that already have their own tours, and also for people that want to create their own.

Inside the web application it’s a simple  process to create a tour, add points or stops and then connect them on a map.

and of course, as you’ve noticed from the screenshots, we then make an iPhone application out of it. The first client is Walkingtours.com.au, and their application is live on iTunes.

This is exciting – as it proves the system works, and, while we are forever tweaking and improving, it means that we are open for business.

The team is impressive. MyTours is founded and led by Glen Barnes, with development for both the website and iPhone application by Nik, Ollie and Jared from Code2Customer and design by Natalie and Emma from Decisive

We believe this has huge potential as organizations embrace the iPhone and iPad. The next step is to bring more cusotmers on board. If you or your organization is interested then try it out, email Glen at hello@mytoursapp.com, call him on +64 9 3600 617 or 021 042 9471 or follow us on Twitter.

More Sky spam, and another letter

Dear Sky Sports

I am writing again.

Last time I received your spam we had a great conversation and you promised to make some changes – which you have, and well done. I pointed you towards New Zealand’s Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 and the the handy guide for businesses,

and I suggested four actions. Let’s see how you did:

  • include a way for me to unsubscribe <done – thank you> from your puerile badly photoshopped spam.
  • include the name and address of the sender – who is the sending entity? <done: Sent to you by SKY Network Television Limited
    10 Panorama Road, Mt Wellington, Auckland, New Zealand. good stuff>
  • get my express consent to receive your spam <not done, but as you said last time this is apparently in the T&C’s>
  • tell me where you got my email address from <not done, but not illegal I guess>

So yes – well done. But there is one thing.

You guessed it – it’s the fact that I actually received the email below – and I really didn’t want to. So I have now clicked on the “If you would prefer not to receive communications of this type in the future, please tell us by clicking here” link and clicked “yes” on the functional yet terse page. We shall see whether there is a next time.

Oh – and the sender email address was: skymarketing@mailap.rnmk.com. That doesn’t come across very well.

The signs are not good – friend wrote this to me when he received his version of the email – and he is not happy:

Last time they did this I phoned them and persisted in opting out of everything. But here it is again!

Don’t they ever learn?
Now I’m wasting the time of their call centre staff being angry and annoying.

cheers

Lance

Your unsolicited spam:


5 short comments

1: John Key’s speech was not as bad as all that. The consensus around the political bloggers is that he is not doing enough, but I feel that we in NZ are actually doing pretty well (versus other countries) at the moment, and making dramatic changes to the balance of the economy could create wildly unpredictable side-effects.

I like the emphasis on taxes that are efficient, although I still wish for a simple yet low capital gains tax and GST to remain at 12.5% and an end to the distorting taxation system for share investments. And yes – the landlords will get their comeuppance at some stage.

There is surely a lot more to come but I  am happy that the Government seems intent on governing by consensus not fiat, and by increment and not by big blundering moves.

2: Bloggers can, and should, apply for the Qantas Media awards, but do so before March 1.

3: There sure is a lot of rubbish out there when searching for SEO and social marketing measurement tools.

4: Do you live in Wellington and are thinking of cycling to work? Sign up for some encouragement and inspiration at Active a2b

5: I am still in absolute awe about the Wellington Sevens experience. It was my first time since the first year – and the event was truly remarkable. Thanks to Natalie and friends for dragging me along.
toughing it out

Quantcast tracks all WordPress.com blog stats

I’ve rather belatedly discovered Quantcast – which tracks a good chunk of the web, but is very US-centric. One thing it does do though is track every WordPress.com hosted blog, including, for what it is worth, mine:

There is plenty more there – have a look around and try your favorite site. There are plenty of other bloggers that use WordPress.com – such as Rowan, dimpost, Poneke,  Open Parachute, and home paddock. I confess to not reading any of these aside from Rowan’s – I got them from a list of top NZ blog sites compiled by Tumeke, of which more later.

Puffin signals doom for jetpack

NASA seem to have cracked the three crucial problems with jetpacks with their Puffin personal flying machine.
The kiwi jetpack is obnoxiously loud, and it, well it doesn’t really fly. It’s also only suitable for smaller folk.

The Puffin approach puts the pilot between two stubby wings, is powered by quiet electrical fans and will be able to almost reach the cruising altitude of a jumbo.

Will. That’s an interesting and all too common word in the world of jetpacks. But NASA say it will fly later this year.

Obviously this is aimed at military applications first – but I want one.

Techday joins the spammers

I received this on Friday from techday.co.nz:

I didn’t know I had a relationship with Techday and neither was there an address of the sender included. So I clicked the Unsubscribe link and arrived here:

It’s a website that I have never been to before, and I certainly don’t want to login or register.

Now I did get a registration at Netguide a number of years ago (you needed to do so in order to vote for the Netguide awards – my user name was “whyregister”) but I certainly did not recall giving permission to receive spam from Techday, who seem to own Netguide now. Nor do I feel it is right that my login has moved across to the Techday sites. I’ve searched through my old email and see nothing explaining all this.

So  I suggest that the folks there read this and familiarise themselves with the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act of 2007.

It’s all about the story – launch progress

Things are going well at AllAboutTheStory.com – the site that matches the material from professional writers with editors who buy their material. While it is still very early days, we are pleased to have over 130 members and about 100 vetted pieces of content.

You never know which direction sites will go – and we were pleasantly surprised to see several cartoonists sign up early to syndicate their content. Cartoonists you see each day, including Garrick Tremain and Malcolm Evans. We added a cartoon section and expanded the size of pictures just for them.

Our next challenge for us to to get the sales moving. The content on the site is looking pretty good and we are encouraging editors to take a look around and start buying from now.