Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

One of the big perks of my new marketing position with Boundless is that I get to work with amazing undergraduate students across the nation. These students are charged with letting people on their campuses know about Boundless and free textbooks. We recently had a great on campus competition, where we motivated our on campus student managers to hit aggressive sign up goals – and a lot of them really did an amazing job! Below is a cool post on the “campus battle” with some great pictures of the action.

http://storify.com/GoBoundless/how-campus-battle-started-a-textbook-revolution

Lots of good content all of a sudden on both mobile and online marketing. Here are some good ones:

• Triggered emails have HUGE open and click throughs: Online Media Daily reports on a study that shows that triggered emails (emails that are sent when a user takes a specific action, such as abandons a shopping cart, have a much higher click through than ordinary marketing emails.”Triggered open rates performed at 75.1% higher”
• I recently posted about email marketing subject line performance. Here are the subject lines email marketers should avoid, and which ones drive good open rates.
• The best email marketing frequency depends on your industry & users, but in general the more you can do the better.
• Yup, people are really opening emails on mobile devices these days; Returnpath “reports that mobile open share has increased 300% since 2010, and shows no sign of slowing, with four out of 10 emails sent being read on a mobile device.” Read more.
• “The iPhone and Android smartphones remain the most popular smartphone platforms for messaging. iOS users account for more than half of those opting into MMS and text-messaging campaigns, compared to 34% coming through Android phones. Those levels are up from 23.6%, and 16%, respectively, in April. BlackBerry accounted for 7% of opt-in messaging.” Read more.

I found this video interesting; is Amazon the biggest threat to Google? The main reasoning is that fewer people bother to go to Google to search for products; now they just go directly to Amazon. Thus, depriving Google of highly profitable adwords revenue for people with an intent to purchase. This is true for my household, so I thought it was compelling.

Where I found it a little less compelling was on the mobile side, but maybe I’ve just been a late adopter of Amazon’s mobile app. I saw some stats recently about how mobile commerce apps were taking off, but of course I forgot to link to it.

What’s the difference between an iPad owner and an Android Tablet or Kindle owner? Well, Mediapost has a great piece quoting some Comscore data that has some of the answers!

Basically, the owners are just as different as the functionality, branding and pricing of the different tablet devices would lead you to believe. For example, Kindle Fire owners are more likely to be female than iPad owners. Not surprisingly, iPad owners skew wealthier than the owners of other tablets.

The following is a chart that I pretty much directly borrowed from the Mediapost article that I linked to above:

Happiest Tablet Owners – Surprise!

Who are the happiest tablet owners? No surprise – it’s iPad owners. However, Kindle Fire users reported a higher satisfaction rating than Android tablet owners, and were probably statistically tied with iPad users.

Total Smartphone – 8.1
Total Tablet – 8.6
iPad – 8.8
Android – 8.2
Kindle Fire – 8.7

Why Buy A Particular Tablet?

The article also looked at purchase decisions; why did a person buy a particular tablet over another? The selection of apps and price of tablet led as the most important factors. Other stuff like the brand name and the operating system also mattered. Here is another chart from the report that breaks down which purchase considerations mattered by tablet owner:

Finally, here is a cool infographic by Comscore on tablets and what people are using them for.

comScore TabLens: Today’s U.S. Tablet Owner Revealed

I’m quoted in a PC World piece about how apps will change the nature of desktop software. I had a long conversation with the author, Jared Newman, about how OfficeDrop’s apps, both our smartphone scanner apps and our mac desktop scanner app, ScanDrop, are dramatically changing how we distribute our SaaS product.

The article’s thesis is spot on:

Not surprisingly, many developers are enthusiastic about the easy distribution and streamlined billing that app stores provide, yet these stores also introduce challenges–some that are unique to desktops, and others that have plagued smartphones since the dawn of the iPhone App Store.

I spoke with Jared for a while about how we were wrong about how customers wanted to use our service. They actually want to download and install apps, not use the web. We were off by 100%.

The soon to be famous Healy Jones quote is:

Healy Jones, vice president of marketing for OfficeDrop, noticed this shift away from the Web immediately after his company released mobile and desktop apps for its document-scanning service.

OfficeDrop, which provides searchable cloud storage, says that it sees seven times more user engagement through its apps than it does through the Web browser, Jones notes. Since releasing its first apps in 2011, OfficeDrop’s user base has grown from 7000 users to 140,000 users.

“We had a thesis that people did not want to install software; that the cloud meant that people could use a browser to interact with software and would never have to install anything. We were completely wrong,” Jones says. “People love installing software.”

Obviously I’m really bullish on apps. That’s also why I’m very bullish on tablets (and part of the reason OfficeDrop recently released an Android tablet version of our app.) Apps are how people want to interact with software. I’m happy people like HTML 5, but if it isn’t installed it’s not gonna grow as well as an app.

I know I ‘ve blogged a ton about how iPads are changing the computing landscape… well, here I go again! A new eMarketer study is suggesting that US tablet ownership will DOUBLE in 2012 to 70 million! DOUBLE! Wow, that is crazy growth.

And we are still seeing it here with OfficeDrop’s customer base. The use of the OfficeDrop iPad app is taking off like crazy, and we will soon have an Android tablet optimized version of the OfficeDrop Android Scanner App.

Tablet Growth in 2012

Here are some of the crazy stats in the eMarketer Study on Tablet Adoption in 2012:

• “U.S. tablet users will more than double this year from 33.7 million to nearly 70 million, or about 29% of the country’s Internet users.”
• “The number of iPad users will grow 90% this year to 53.2 million, down from 144% last year… by 2015, when the number of iPad users will have reached 90.8 million.”
• “In terms of the total U.S. population, 16.8% are expected to use an iPad at least once per month this year, up from 8.9% in 2011. “
• “Among Internet users, that translates to 22.2% penetration, up from 12.1% last year.”
• “More than half (51.9%) of Internet users — or 133.5 million Americans — will have a tablet of some kind” by 2015.

If you haven’t seen my blog posts before on the tablet revolution, check out some of the following:

• Tablet Time – tablets are the only growing part of the PC market.
• Tablet’s Growing Share of Web Traffic – tablet share of web traffic grew 300% last year, beating out mobile phones for the first time.
• Tablet TV Overtakes Laptop – Yup, the third screen (or fourth?) is now number two!
• Tablets to Surpass PC Sales – Going back to that whole thing about how tablets are the only growing part of the PC market.
• Tablet Fight – will Amazon’s Fire get some real market share? Hmm… I ought to try to do an update on this now that it’s over 6 months later!
• Are Tablets the Future of Small Business Computing? – I think the answer is yes!

Fortune has a good piece on the browser wars heating up again.

In particular, the thing that I think is the most interesting is how mobile should change the landscape. I’m actually a little surprised that Safari isn’t growing more, given how popular it is on iOS devices like the iPad.

Web Browser Marketshare

I recently tried out Axis, the new mobile search engine by Yahoo. It seems to be pretty good; but I still like a strange mobile underdog, the Bing app for iPad.

Tablet Sales to Surpass PC Sales

Check out the interesting piece on Business Insider.

Lincoln Murphy, the well known SaaS Marketing guy, got pretty upset at a recent TechCrunch piece on the freemium pricing strategy that posted this weekend. Lincoln says (I’m on his email newsletter list; it’s pretty good): “In a nutshell the Complete Guide to Freemium on TechCrunch is a post by someone who got lucky enough to get their post accepted so he can get a backlink to his site from TechCrunch and where he takes the results of studies and some words from high-profile VCs and weaves it together into a post for the TMZ of the tech industry.”

Ouch. That’s a little harsh. The article isn’t bad at all. The conclusion is 100% great, actually.

What is Freemium?

However, I don’t think it’s the Ultimate Guide to what is a actually a pretty complicated pricing strategy. I happen to disagree with the author’s ideas that a time based free trial = freemium. I can’t tell if my disagreement is a big deal or not – his company, FutureSimple, has a free trial offer, so it’s hard to know how much of the piece is using that as the basis for the post vs. a couple of professors he references. I disagree with the idea that a free trial is freemium so much because OfficeDrop recently made the switch from a free trial to having a free forever plan and we called it “going freemium.”

My definition of freemium is that a user will have the opportunity to use the service/software/whatever forever without having to pay for it. It may be a limited plan or limited features, it may be ad supported; whatever. It just means you can use it for as long as you’d like without paying. FreshBooks has a freemium model, but you run out of “free” pretty quickly. You can jump through hoops to keep it free, but most likely you’ll upgrade. A free trial that expires after a set number of days doesn’t meet my definition of freemium.

OfficeDrop’s free plan is driven by our mobile distribution strategy. I write a little bit about why we think apps are taking over here. But you should listen to my conversation with Lincoln – I call it “Healy Jones on Freemium.” Our free plan is a free forever plan, with some upgrade triggers baked in – search limits, storage limits, OCR limits. But it’s a pretty good product for free; we are the only company offering free high quality OCR for scanned images coupled with storage. People seem to like the plan… and they also seem to like to upgrade to paid plans. We like that part for sure!

Lincoln is putting on a webinar on kicking butt with your company’s free trials model. I think he’s got some good stuff, so I’d suggest you register!

Waiting until the last possible moment before I close the storm windows for the approaching hurricane – so here are a couple of links.

A take on Tim Cook

An acquaintance, Alex Bain, works at Apple and has a post up on his meetings with Tim Cook. It seems that he’s meet with him once a week, and so it’s interesting to hear his take on Tim’s leadership style. Very cool look inside the now most powerful man in tech’s leadership style. (Thanks to Kenny Kellogg for pointing out Alex’s post.)

Updating Mac Apps

I’m proud of a post over on the OfficeDrop blog about how to update apps purchased in the Mac App Store. You’d be surprised at how many people ignore the update icon (or who don’t know how to update their apps!). Anyway, hopefully this how to will make it easier for people to update their apps and perhaps not call our customer service to ask about how to do it. OfficeDrop’s ScanDrop Mac Scanner Software really does work better when it’s the most up to date version!