Apparently people are still mind-fucked about the Instagram acquisition. They can’t get over how a simple photo-sharing app could ever be worth $1 billion dollars. A free, simple, ad-less photo-sharing app without a business model to boot! This is craziness! Facebook has so much money they just want to give it away! We must be in a bubble, right?

Wrong.

First, let’s get our facts straight:

1) Instagram is not just a photo sharing app
2) The acquisition was almost entirely defensive
3) Facebook will probably never see an ROI on Instagram

With that, we can dig deeper.

Many people view Instagram as a means to share photos on other (more established) social networks. Turns out Instagram itself is actually a social network. Granted, there aren’t many features, but there are plenty of users – over 35 million at the time of acquisition. Based on that number alone, the $1BN price tag seems like a great deal in comparison to other acquisitions in the past decade. The flaw with this argument is that there is a likely a huge overlap between the Instagram userbase and Facebook userbase. Anyway, what matters is that Instagram is not just a photo app with filters – it’s a social network, which brings us to the next point.

Facebook didn’t buy Instagram because of some magical, futuristic technology that they just couldn’t figure out. They could have built that shit overnight. Facebook didn’t buy Instagram because they were desperate for 35 million more users that were already their users anyway. Facebook didn’t buy Instagram because it was raking in boatloads of cash and would provide a huge ROI someday. Nope.

Zuck was scared, so he snatched up Instagram to avoid another one of these situations. Zuck knew Instagram had the potential to become a huge competitor, and had he not acted quickly, it just might have. Zuck knows better than anybody that when a $1BN social network goes unacquired, it can become a $100BN company. Nobody likes dropping a billion dollars (I try to avoid it if I can), but Zuck did what he had to do when he saw Instagram as a threat to his baby. The cost of doing business, as they say.

Will Facebook ever see a return on their investment? Probably not – at least not directly. Arguably the Instagram acquisition has secured a higher IPO valuation, which could be construed as an inadvertent ROI, but that’s an entirely different story. No, Facebook paid $1BN for a photo-sharing app because that photo-sharing app was a legitimate threat to the future of Facebook. Oh, did somebody say Instagram didn’t have a business model? That sounds like a perfectly valid business model to me...

Well played, Instagram. Well played, Facebook.

Running a startup is loads of work. It demands vast amounts of time, effort, and energy. It’s tough to gain traction and it’s tough to keep going. There’s pressure from colleagues, family, and friends. You may have employees who depend on you and investors with high expectations. That’s a lot to deal with. We know that.

So how you could you possibly give up even a minute of your day with so much to do and so little time?

Well, here’s the thing: we don’t want your work to consume you. We want you to be happy and we want you to succeed. It’s okay to take a break and stop working to enjoy life for a bit. Really.

Startup folks like lists, so here’s a list of reasons why you should take a break:

1) Nobody will think less of you if you enjoy life sometimes

You put in long hours. You work mornings, afternoons, nights and weekends. During the little sleep you get, you dream about your startup. We won’t think any less of you if you take a break or disappear once in a while. We won’t think you’re slacking. We already know you’re a hard worker.

2) Your startup won’t die overnight

Whether your startup is early stage or has millions of users, chances are you can put it on autopilot for a few hours. The internet doesn’t turn off when you leave your computer. It’s always on, even if you’re not there. Just like successful startups aren’t born overnight, they won’t die overnight.

3) Fresh ideas will present themselves

This is the best part. Chances are you’re so caught up in the little, meaningless details that you’ve actually lost sight of what’s important – or your sight is at least a bit blurred (figuratively). Stepping away from your startup will help you realize what matters and where to focus. Who knows, you may even find that killer feature you’ve been waiting for. The world is full of ideas, and they’ll find you if you let them.

So that’s that. Please take a break. Please enjoy your life.

This is a true story about a guy I know. Let’s call him Abe.

In August of last year, Abe contacted me because I recently moved to Los Angeles and he had been thinking of making the move as well. He’d been thinking about it for quite a while, in fact. He graduated with a degree in Music Business almost two years prior and had come to the realization that there were not many relevant career opportunities in the Southern United States. His degree was going to waste while he bounced around between minimum wage jobs. Los Angeles was where he needed to be, but he was hesitant to make the move.

Abe is a family friend and I was more than willing to help him out. I told him everything I knew about LA and offered to let him crash in my guest bedroom for a bit until he could find a place of his own. He was planning on making the move to LA in September. He had already established several industry contacts from career fairs, had references in hand, and even went as far as setting up interviews months in advance. Off to a great start, right?

September came around and Abe hadn’t left yet. He was worried his high mileage car wouldn’t make the journey across the country, so he was looking to replace it with a more reliable vehicle. Fair enough.

He then pushed the trip back another few months because Sept/Oct/Nov/Dec is the “slow season” in entertainment. Pilot season starts in January, so he’ll come then. Jobs will be readily available and he should be able to snatch one up in a jiffy.

Abe’s expected date of departure was now January 11th. January rolled around and that date was pushed back to January 13th. Well wouldn’t you know it, that just happens to be Friday the 13th, and of course it’s unsafe to drive on Friday the 13th, so the departure was pushed back another day, and then a couple more.

The following Monday, after 4 months of delays, Abe finally began his journey. He had taken the first tiny step toward achieving his dreams of working in the music industry.

When Abe arrived in LA, my girlfriend and I were extremely accommodating. Not only did we open our doors and put a (rent-free) roof over his head, we went out of our way to show him around town and make sure he was comfortable. Los Angeles can be overwhelming, and we wanted to ensure he would be able to find his dream job and a place of his own as painlessly as possible. We were in the position to provide such an opportunity.

And what did we get in return? Excuses. A whole fucking month of excuses. Abe spent almost a year preparing for this trip, and when he finally made it to LA, he did nothing. Absolutely nothing. He managed to delay pre-arranged interviews (yeah, the ones he had prepared months in advance) because he didn’t want to deal with traffic. He blew off appointments with his important industry contacts because he was sick (he wasn’t). He didn’t leave the apartment for days on end because he didn’t want to lose his street parking spot. He didn’t get a part time job because it would deter him from finding his dream job. He didn’t go to clubs in Hollywood because they were too exclusive. Oh – and I learnt that he had a handful of friends in the area, but he couldn’t visit them because it’s tough to find parking where they live. I kid you not.

Instead of taking advantage of the tremendous opportunity that Abe had been given, he locked himself in a bedroom and rattled off any excuse he could muster up. And you know what? We kicked him out. He had more than enough time to land on his feet and find direction. But he didn’t. Now he’s renting a room at the YMCA because he didn’t look at a single apartment during his month long stay (despite the tips I gave him on finding a place) and I don’t think he’s found a job yet.

The only person Abe hurt: himself.

* * *

Are you fucking kidding me? It’s 2012, and I call bullshit. We are living in an age of virtually unlimited access to knowledge and opportunity. It’s not okay to have excuses anymore. We complain that we don’t have enough time, but we spend hours a day on Facebook and Youtube. We complain that we don’t have the proper knowledge or skill, but anything we could ever want to know is right at our fingertips and the information infrastructure is expanding so rapidly that we can literally learn forever.

If you aren’t doing exactly what you want to be doing, there’s only one reason: you don’t want it badly enough. That’s all there is to it.

- Antanas Mockus, former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia

- Sean Parker, Napster / Facebook / etc.

Just over a month ago, I shared my first Ruby on Rails app, Pocket, with Hacker News. Since then, I've been working on other projects so I haven't been able to spend as much time on development as I would have liked, but I still use the app every single day for my own note-taking needs.

During the course of design and development, I've loosely followed the the self-proclaimed mantra "so easy my grandma could use it" - i.e. I literally wanted this app to be so easy that my own grandma could, and would, use it for everyday note-taking and reminders. After all, the reason I began developing Pocket (and learning Rails at all) was because I was so frustrated with the inherent difficulties and lack of intuitive user interfaces of existing solutions.

The last time I visited my family, I accidentally left Pocket open in the browser. I stepped away from the computer for a few minutes, and to my surprise, this is what I saw when I returned:

My sneaky little sister, who just turned six a few months ago, had hijacked my Pocket! Not only did she figure out how to make new notes, she had figured out how to change the note colors, rearrange the notes, and edit the contents of existing notes. She did all of this with no instruction whatsoever (though it is possible she may have briefly spied on me while I used the application). If that doesn't exemplify ease of use, then I don't know what does. I dreamt about the day my grandmother would use Pocket, but I never once thought my little sisters, who are just learning to read and write, would be able to pick it up so quickly and effortlessly.

Every app should be this easy to use.

- Loren

- Dane Maxwell, Founder of Zannee

In the past, I’ve dabbled with internet marketing, submitted articles and tips to blogs, and played with Adwords, but I had never experimented with any sort of social or viral marketing before this project … and oh what an experiment it was! We all know the power of viral marketing from designed-for-viral sites like Hipster, Threewords.me, and FMyLife, but could it work for eCommerce? Is it possible to utilize social networks (hint: yep) to sell products? I was willing to give it a shot and find out.

Facebook Events

Like I mentioned before, I’m quite inexperienced when it comes to internet marketing. I don’t have a giant web platform from which I can shout at thousands of adoring fans and my mailing lists consists of a grand total of 0 people. My social reach goes as far as the 179 friends on my Facebook account. But, luckily for me, none of that mattered, because I saw a platform experiencing exponential growth right before my eyes. Over the course of a few hours I had witnessed a single spontaneous Facebook event grow from 50,000 attendees to well over 100,000, and another with similar growth. Not only were they growing – they were extremely active, with new comments and photos rolling in every few seconds. In short: these impromptu Facebook communities were my only chance, and they were mine for the taking. If they didn’t work out, the project was dead.

It was worth a shot, so I went for it. Just minutes after I finished building the site, I posted a link in each in the two events. The picture, title and description were pulled directly from the Snowpocalyse website, so that made posting easy – ctrl+c and ctrl+v (yeah, no MacBook for Loren). The first sale came in just four minutes later, and another just a minute after that. With profits at $8/shirt, the first sale paid for my domain name and the second made the project profitable. Profitable in 5 minutes – can’t beat that!

At that point, I figured there must have been quite a few hits to the site, so I set up a bit.ly link to track clicks in real time. Google Analytics was tracking all visits to the site, but I only used bit.ly to share the link in the two Facebook events to see whether or not my posts were driving traffic. They were:

*Note that these are only clicks on a few links. The actual traffic was significantly higher*
*Tweet count is completely inaccurate since it does not represent other links*

This is the total aggregated data, but most of those clicks occurred within the first two days. 3,857 clicks on links that I had only posted a handful of times, and that doesn’t even include links that others had shared (since I was the only one using the bit.ly link). Keep in mind the structure of Facebook events: the only people who see links posted to the event wall are those who visit the actual event page – event wall posts don’t show up in news feeds. So that means 3,857 people who were looking at the Facebook event pages deliberately clicked my links. CPC = practically 0. Not too shabby, but it got better.

The guy who started the larger of the two events emailed me several hours after I began posting links, and half-jokingly asked for “royalties”. How could I pass that up? I didn’t know what his privileges were as an event administrator, but I told him he would be subsidized if he could leverage the attendees (200,000+ at that point). He agreed, and here’s the result:

And just like that, my t-shirt was effectively in the eyes of hundreds of thousands of people, almost for free. Can’t complain about free advertising! He also removed a few of the spammy low-quality shirt links from the event, though I did not ask or expect him to do this, nor do I think it had a significant effect. In another post I’ll tell you exactly how many hits that silly little Facebook even drove to the website.

Make Sharing Easy

People like to share, and they’re more likely to share if they don’t have to put in a lot of effort. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeonist :D to figure out that placing social media buttons on your website works like freaking magic. So I went ahead and did that.

And how well did that work? Ridiculously well:

According to Facebook, Snowday2011.com was shared a total of 3,730 times over a couple days. Those “shares” are fantastic because they are prominently displayed in news feeds – large, glorious, image and all, with each “share” in front of hundreds of people. Here’s a little secret: “likes” don’t do that. They just get a little tiny line with some text – hardly noticeable compared to “shares”.

I also had a button to share on Twitter, but I’m not sure how well it performed. At its peak, I saw the snowday2011.com link being posted every few minutes, which can’t be bad. I’m not nearly as active on Twitter as Facebook, so I didn’t focus on that medium as well as I probably should have. If anybody has tips here, feel free to share in the comments.

Etc.

Other than Facebook and Twitter, both of which required minimal knowledge and skill, I did almost no marketing. I posted a single link on Hacker News, which rose to the top and remained on the front page for at least 24 hours. The key with Hacker News is honesty and transparency, which are two of the reasons I appreciate the community so much. I didn’t just post a link and leave it at that – I followed up with a response outlining the approximate steps I took to bring the project to life and hung around all day making sure to answer (almost) every last question that was asked. It’s the little things that matter :)

What I Learned

The traffic that generated by these sites doesn't come close to the viral sites I mentioned at the beginning, but tens of thousands of hits a day to an impromptu site with nothing to offer but a silly t-shirt isn't exactly negligible traffic, especially when it results in sales (and profit) every few minutes. So, now you know exactly how I marketed my 4-hour profitable project, but what did I learn about social marketing along the way? Here are some takeaway points:

I also have some things to look into:

If you have questions or anything to contribute, please let me know in the comments, and subscribe to my RSS feed for future updates. Thanks for reading!

- Loren