Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

I’ve had great luck at OfficeDrop using the “crowd” to help us with important decisions. We very actively survey our customers on new features, pricing changes, etc. Our most important use of the crowd was when we changed our name from Pixily to OfficeDrop. This name change was an important step for us, since we wanted to reposition ourselves from a document scanning company to a digital office provider. SmallBusinessComputing recently quoted me on using crowdsourcing; check out the article!

Prasad has a new piece on Small Business Trends on Turning email newsletters into customer insights. I’m a little partial to this newsletter since I helped OfficeDrop create these testing tactics (I’m not claiming that these tactics are unique, just that I was the person to bring them to our marketing efforts.)

I really like the point about allowing replies to the marketing emails. I send a lot of emails our to our new subscribers, and let customers reply to me directly. This helps cut off customer service issues early in the process, and also can get a good dialog going with individual customers.

One point that that did not make Prasad’s piece is that we also let customers know about upcoming new releases/products via the newsletter. It is a great way to get early-bird signups to new products.

Hiring talent is one of the most challenging things facing a startup. Hiring the best programming and technical talent is even harder. Taking data from The Entrepreneurs Census, which I wrote about yesterday, we can get a glimpse into how hard it is to hire programmers in Boston, Palo Alto and New York.

It may be easier for startups in Boston to hire programmers than startups in Palo Alto

Startups in Boston may have a better time hiring programmers, as measured by how long it takes to fill an open position and by the percent of startups that have open positions.

Hiring Programmers in Boston vs Palo Alto

The two thirds of startups in Boston were able to fill open positions in under three months – verses about half in Palo Alto and 63% in New York City. (OK, the difference between New York and Boston is probably statistically insignificant.) Three months is a lifetime for many software and web startups; being unable to add a critical developer in that period of time could derail product launches and critical feature updates. Heck, a lot of startups are out of business in 6 months to a year, so if you can’t fill your positions by then who knows if it’s even worth still looking…

The data collected by the study would fit with anecdotal evidence that I have heard from friends starting companies in Palo Alto. Many people have told me that it’s impossible to find talent in the SF Bay area… especially at a reasonable price. I know it is hard to find good people in Boston as well, but this study would suggest it is a bit easier here than in Palo Alto.

Compensation of programmers in Palo Alto is higher than Boston and New York

And of course the other important part of the equation is how much it costs to hire talent. From the study:

Compensation for Programmers Palo Alto Boston

Doing some really crude math, it looks like programming talent in Palo Alto is 13% more expensive than Boston and 36% more expensive than New York. (I very roughly calculated that the average comp in Boston was $66.85k, Palo Alto 75.65k and New York $55.75k; I assumed the comp for each salary range was in the middle of each range for my calculation. Again, the numbers are small so the difference may not be statistically significant.)

The other data point in the above compensation chart that I’m trying to get my head around is low end and high end. The high end is easy enough to understand; you have to really pay up to get good talent in some cases in Palo Alto (and NYC). This doesn’t surprise me too much, but it is interesting that the high end is zero for Boston. Maybe due to a small sample set? I just don’t know enough.

The low end is also pretty intriguing. I’d bet that most of the sub $50k programmers are working for equity. It looks like regions OTHER than Boston have more programmers working for a pittance, trying to get equity. Does this mean that Boston has less of a founders culture???

Pretty ironic and not really very important, but Gmail decided to add in this little advertisement to the top of an email conversation that I’m having with someone about this post… it looks like Google is hiring developers in Boston!

Looks like Apple is going to have to delay the international launch of the iPad due to higher than expected demand in the US. The company said in a press release:

Although we have delivered more than 500,000 iPads during its first week, demand is far higher than we predicted and will likely continue to exceed our supply over the next several weeks as more people see and touch an iPad™. We have also taken a large number of pre-orders for iPad 3G models for delivery by the end of April.

Faced with this surprisingly strong US demand, we have made the difficult decision to postpone the international launch of iPad by one month, until the end of May. We will announce international pricing and begin taking online pre-orders on Monday, May 10. We know that many international customers waiting to buy an iPad will be disappointed by this news, but we hope they will be pleased to learn the reason—the iPad is a runaway success in the US thus far.

This is an interesting development. I am a bit surprised that 1) expectations were only for half a million in the first few weeks because I believe that I”ve seen estimates from analysts that showed much higher projections and 2) this does indicate that the iPad is doing well, even though I was under the impression that they actual success wasn’t matching the hype. Good for Apple!

I guess it’s not a big surprise, but online advertising spending shrank in 2009 by 3.4%, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. There is a good article on MediaPost discussing the various sectors growth last year and forecasts for this year.

I’m happy to announce (a bit belatedly) that Pixily is now called OfficeDrop. Changing the company’s name was a pretty big deal, but it has gone smoothly. There is much more to it that just finding a domain that we could purchase and redirecting URLs. The biggest thing for us was getting feedback from customers and getting their buy in on the new name concept. So far so good!

I hope to post on our journey to find a new name soon, but have been so darn busy that I haven’t had a chance!

The smartphone market just got really interesting with the launch of Google’s Nexus phone. Compete just released a great research report on smartphone users’ mobile purchasing behavior. Some of the findings I found interesting:

• iPhone and Android users are more likely to consider making expensive purchases from their phone
• 36% of users check the price of an item they see in a store to find out if it is a good deal – I know I do this!!

Nielsen has a great blog post on smartphones, Droid and mobile applications. Some of the most interesting points they make are:

• Over the next several months at least six new smartphone devices (like Droid) will be released – these devices are going to have large screens, keyboards and a wide array of applications.
• More smart phones are accessing web pages vs. “dumb” phones as of Q3 2009.
• 24% of cell phone sales in Q3 2009 were smartphones; Nielson expects this to jump to 40% in Q4.
• In 2011 50% of all phone sales will be smartphones
• In 2011 120 million mobile users will be on the internet, and 90 million will be watching video on their phone.

It is clear that we are finally reaching that critical tipping point in terms of mobile internet usage. (I guess we were already there, but now even a slow person like me can see it clearly.) But I believe that phones ARE the internet/computer for many people these days, and that there continues to be opportunity developing services, apps and sites specifically designed for these users. The evidence I’ve seen recently speaks to this point; in particular several of the Techstars mobile companies have really had amazing adoption.

Is Droid, for that matter any of these other new smartphones, going to really take on the iPhone and emerge as a real alternative smartphone platform? I understand that iPhone has a real lead in apps, but I don’t think the market is won yet (although I am a pretty happy iPhone user.) Blackberry shouldn’t be forgotten about either, since their market share is surprisingly large and I think grew to 19% of smartphones recently due to their new phones positive receptions. My gut is that at least BB and iPhone are going to continue to gain share real market share. I have no idea how Droid will do, but if it got 10+% market share over the next year or so I wouldn’t be shocked. And I think it might be good for the overall market if 3 competing smartphone platforms all had real volume.

I’m sure everyone now knows that Google bought Admob this Monday for $750 million. This highlights a pretty important topic – beyond the fact that buyers appear to be re-emerging in the technology world. It shows that companies with real traction in quickly growing markets are valuable. I’ve read rumors that Admob had revenues between $50 and $75 million; not too bad for a couple year old company. And real proof that the service and market are real. Large technology players are willing to pay up to establish early dominance in newly forming markets that are strategic to their core mission. It’s not about just the technology – it’s about getting traction. Congrats to Omar Hamoui, the company’s founder who was at Wharton during the first year of my MBA.

Crowd Science has a pretty cool post on research they have done into Twitter usage. One of the most interesting stats I saw was that 41% of Twitter users prefer to contact their friends via social media rather than telephone. As I consider how I interact with a large percentage of my friends, I’d probably agree with that for many of my contacts! Of course, given the mobile nature of Twitter and the increasingly mobile access points for other social media, I sure hope that the cell phone providers are thinking this through and building their networks to support the massive amount of data traffic/the shift to data that is coming…

However, my favorite finding from the study was that 22% of users had at some point posted something via social media that they later regretted.