The well caffeinated marketer is well caffeinated today, in fact I’m sipping a nice cuppa pu’erh (tea) at Julie’s Tea, Coffee & Herb in the Bay Area.

Pu’erh tea is an acquired taste. It’s tea that has been put through “secret” preparation in China. The secret preparation, of Pu’erh, usually includes lumping huge stacks of unprocessed recently picked tea leaves in a warehouse and letting it sit for months, usually underneath a large tarp. After some time, the tea is then smashed into shape, usually large circles, rectangles or squares about 1.5 inches thick and 6″ to 15″ in width. Pu’erh, was used as a form of currency back in the day. Can you imagine, drinking currency? Interesting, huh? Well I dig this stuff. Some people say that it tastes like old locker room socks, and to be honest that’s - sometimes - not too far from the truth…ha ha. Like I said, it’s an acquired taste.
Yummmmy…the tea is delicious. It has a nice earthy flavor with a hint of ginger and flowers that linger in my mouth for minutes - like a nice glass of wine. I love tea. With MacBook in hand I’m reading the latest news and updates on what’s going on in the social web space. The web - once again - is shattering into a thousand little pieces to reform and coalesce into a few dominant players, again. Oh Joy!!!!!

- Mark

This is old news, but Bebo the ailing social network site (3rd in the U.S.) licensed Facebook’s API and claims to be 100% compatible.   This is very exciting news, because this is our second chance to be amongst the first in an open social platform, again.  We missed the boat when Facebook first opened up their API, we won’t make that same mistake twice when Hi5, Orkut, and others open up their social platforms.  We’ll be ready.
Tomorrow I’m taking the day off - I’m going shopping in San Francisco; however, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday will be very long days for me.  We’re updating KlickNation.com, applying for some trademarks (legal stuff), launching a new application, and porting one to two applications to Bebo and we will be reviewing the Friendster API.  We’re still deliberating the decision to develop on Friendster or not.  They have their own proprietary libraries and APIs, some standardization would be nice.  We looked at Google’s Open Social APIs and they are lacking and half-finished.
A friend of mine visited me today, Meliza from UC Davis.  She’s an attorney.  It was good to see her again.  After b-school school, all of us can get so caught up in the daily maintenance of things that we forget to stop, breath and say hi to our friends.  Thanks Meliza for stopping by the yogurt shop to say “hi.”  It was good to see you.

I’m mentally celebrating at the office at this very moment, You and Me hit 30,000 users a couple of hours ago.  We’re one day ahead of schedule and anticipate reaching our 100,000 user goal by the end of next week.  By the end of the month we should have between 250,000 to 300,000 users if we continue to grow virally.  If we hit these goals then I’ll believe in Christmas again

Happy Holidays,

- Mark

It almost feels like, the closer we get to meeting our goal, as a team, the farther we seem from it. Do you ever feel that way too? Or is it that we raise the bar even higher? I’m rather philosophical this morning, opening mochii yogurt this morning - alone - has given me some time to reflect. Two customers walked in and ordered their usual, a medium combination with three toppings. It’s 11:28AM (PST).
Where was I? Oh yes - goal-setting and the journey ahead. Everyday I feel like we’re a week behind. Time feels more compressed than it ever has for me: Facebook opens up it’s platform and the rules change - for everyone who is an online company. This is in some ways the new social internet.

This morning I checked our numbers for two of our popular applications: You and Me? and Happy Pills. These two applications are inching-up and out maneuvering other applications who have two to three months on us, which is like eternity in this environment. We’re brand new, but as hungry and ambitious as they come.
You and Me?

You and Me is now ranked # 333 (in six days!!) and Happy Pills is ranked #183 (in three weeks) out of 11,300 apps (I think that’s the number). I look purely at “daily active users” as that’s the number that drives page views -> referrals -> and eventually revenue. Install base, is sometimes inconsequential to driving revenue. It’s activity- and the magic ratio. The magic ratio? Yes. The magic ratio. Within three to four days you will know if your application is viral or not. If it’s not, then it’s usually best to move on. I will discuss this ratio in another blog post.
The Future and Beyond: TOP 100
As for the future, “there’s no sleep for the weary.” We’re working at least 14 to 16-hour days, six to seven days a week - sometimes 24-hours a day. Our goal is to break into the top-100 within two months. That’s a tall order and will require more than just having a popular app. It will require statistical analysis, fine-tuning, targeted messaging for acquisition, and speed-to-market to propel us above and beyond our peers. For now, we’re gathering data and will be mining that data for that extra 5 to 10% increase in traffic.

We are in this to win.

Project: You and Me

Launched on December 6th, at 4:30PM (PST), our first match-making application. The application now has over 19,000 users and is - as of this morning - averaging 300 new users per hour (up 100 users from 200 - just yesterday), which is accelerating - on average - about 20% to 50% per hour, day over day. Our target goal is 30,000 users by close of Saturday which we appear to be on track to make and exceed. The app has over 6,000 daily active users, which represents over 30% of our total install base - not bad, but could be better. We are working on adding some additional “messaging” capabilities, such as, “compliments” and a dating widget. These new features should increase the utility of the app and drive time-in-the-app by up to 5%; consequently, increasing our new user attrition by another 5 to 7% based upon our previous experiences. About 20% of all new users unregister the app because they are probably not “single” or interested in a dating. By the end of next week, we suspect this application will break into the top 250 out of 11,000 - the top 2%.

However, it’s still inconclusive as to whether or not this app will continue to grow at this pace. There are many players entering this seemingly-already crowded space. For the most part, the first-movers have been the ones to have captured the greatest market share. If we apply the power law in the applications space then we can infer that the top 2% of the apps will capture 80% of all users and the other 98% will struggle in vain, quit or continue to waste their time and energy.
Project: Happy Pills

Launched on November 20th 2007 at 5:30PM (PST), who knew this app would resonate in the minds of the user? I sure the hell didn’t think it would - but it has. It now has over 130,000 users and over 21,000 are daily active users. The application really speaks to people in England, Canada, and Indonesia where an over whelming proportion of activity comes from. This is what I would consider our first successful application. We’ve launched over 5 others which failed, on retrospect, to live up to expectations. From Happy Pills we learned what worked and what didn’t work as well. We learned (these are generalities - not absolutes): (1) people have a very short attention span, (2) people want simple applications that do not require them to think - much, (3) people want instant gratification, (4) people want to stay on one page - the home page, (5) people want to see what they’re friends are up to, (6) people like to compete, and (7) it’s all about “you.” That’s what I learned.

Summary: DATING(SEX - for many - eventually an outcome) and DRUGS sell.

Today, we launch and test our survey software through the introduction of a simple application called: Blue Pill or Red Pill.

For the past 4-weeks, we have been incrementally building our software library to include: dating, messaging, profile widgets, and now - simple surveys.

We'’ll eventually incorporate survey functionality into some of our other applications. People love to take surveys and see how their friends answered.

On a side note, we’re still having some issues with our computing platform, hopefully these problems will be resolved tomorrow morning.

- Mark