Using retweets to assess content virality Recently I’ve been running an experiment: Tweet an insight, idea, or quote See how many people retweet it If it catches, then write a blog post elaborating on the topic My recent Growth Hacker post was the result of one such tweet, which you can see above in my [...]
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I recently asked, and then answered my own question on Quora and wanted to share here as well. Has Facebook’s DAU/MAU always been ~50%? According to public info, Facebook’s DAU/MAU is 58% these days. Here’s a link. It states: 901 million monthly active users at the end of March 2012 526 million daily active users [...]
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After writing my recent article on Growth Hackers, I’ve been asked by quite a few folks on how to learn the discipline. The best answer is, learn from someone who’s already good at it – if you’re technical and creative, it’s well worth the time. I would encourage everyone to also read Andy Johns’s Quora [...]
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The rise of the Growth Hacker The new job title of “Growth Hacker” is integrating itself into Silicon Valley’s culture, emphasizing that coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer. Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do [...]
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I was reading today’s NYT article on Google+’s new redesign and found myself continually puzzled by the key metric Google continues to report as the success of their new social product: Registered Users. In the very first sentence, Vic Gundotra writes: More than 170 million people have upgraded to Google+, enjoying new ways to share in [...]
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The first banner ad ever, on HotWired in 1994, debuted with a clickthrough rate of 78% (thanks @ottotimmons) First it works, and then it doesn’t After months of iterating on different marketing strategies, you finally find something that works. However, the moment you start to scale it, the effectiveness of your marketing grinds to a [...]
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I had a nerdy conversation on what might be the next mainstream framework for building web products, and in particular whether the node.js community would ultimately create this framework, or if node.js will just be a fad. This blog post is a bit of a deviation from my usual focus around marketing, so just ignore [...]
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Will CPE (Cost Per Engagement) advertising ever take off? I doubt it – the reason is that it’s targeting metrics at the kind of marketers that don’t care too much about metrics. Broadly speaking, there’s two kind of marketers in the world – a ton could be written about this, so I’ll just provide some sweeping [...]
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Facebook, early 2006 Sometimes, you need to be horribly, embarrassingly wrong to remind yourself to keep an open mind. This is my story of my failure to understand Facebook’s potential. In 2006, I was working on a new ad network business that experimented a lot with targeting ads with social network data, broadly known as [...]
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Once you’ve been working in Silicon Valley for a bit, you’re often offered advice such as: Are you launching at X conference? … where X is whatever hot conference is coming up, like SXSW or Launch Do you have an X app? … where X is whatever new platform just emerged, be it Open Social, [...]
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I recently dug through Favstar.fm and found a bunch of the tweets over the last few months that were saved/retweeted the most. Wanted to save them here for posterity: Teardowns Facebook, Google, Twitter, eBay, YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon, Hotmail, Blogger, Apple: How they used to look http://t.co/fL2zDHu0 The Secret To Pinterest’s Astounding Success: A Brilliant Sign-Up [...]
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Lobby of the Pixar offices in Emeryville, CA “My product isn’t quite there yet.” You’ve said this before. We all have. Anyone working on getting their first product out to market will often have the feeling that their product isn’t quite ready. Or even once it’s out and being used, nothing will seem as perfect [...]
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Quick blog post to congratulate my sister Ada Chen and her husband Sachin Rekhi, who have just announced the acquisition of their startup Connected to LinkedIn. The company was backed by a seed investment from Ignition Partners and Trinity Ventures. Here’s an excerpt from AllThingsD: LinkedIn has acquired Connected, a small contact management startups that unifies [...]
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Yesterday I attended the 500Startups demo day – it was a fun event and will be interesting to compare to the YC demo day coming up later this month as well. For everyone who didn’t make it, I wanted to share all the slides: LaunchBit Ad network for email Zerply Professional networking done right LaunchRock Viral [...]
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