Below are the six criteria they say must be applied for a for-profit private sector unpaid internship. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer – I do not know if this information is correct or current – and none of this should be construed as legal advice. Apply this information at your own risk, and before doing anything, consult your own lawyer.

1. The internship, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to training which would be given in an educational environment;
2. The internship experience is for the benefit of the intern;
3. The intern does not displace regular employees, but works under close supervision of existing staff;
4. The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern; and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded;
5. The intern is not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the internship; and
6. The employer and the intern understand that the intern is not entitled to wages for the time spent in the internship.

Permalink: How do I treat unpaid interns?

I know this is just a fun article, but to get more serious for a minute; the missing thing here (what most people seem to forget when they’re attracting traffic) is that neither of these audiences are part of his target market. He mentions his call to action is attracting votes, and maybe that’s all he really cares about, but it’s worth remembering that the target customer of this app is neither reading HN nor r/programming.

I don’t have a good alternative for how to reach “iPhone-owning NYC cab riders who care enough to review drivers”; I’m just trying to make a general observation about these kinds of traffic-from-A-vs-B tests. Of course, I’ve assumed his objective is app sales, not attracting hacker/VC attention. Nothing wrong with the latter!

I’m not trying to pick on Alastair Coote; he made an awesome app as a proof-of-concept, and my assumption about his goals were incorrect (he was targeting the right audience to attract votes).

His post just touched a raw nerve my obnoxious evil-marketing-suit alter ego has with a lot of the ideas floating around the startup community. Startups with great ideas, even great executions, fail epically when they’re unable to reach their target customers in a cost-efficient way.

GroupOn is a perfect example of the hilarious absurdity of a company that has a couple terrible things going for it:

1. They pay more to acquire customers than their customers spend over their lifetime as customers.
2. There is no second point.

Now, what about all those brilliant venture capitalists who invested in GroupOn? They made a killing at the IPO and stuck the dumb hold-for-value public with a worthless company. Psst… the stock market is for suckers.

But I digress.

The idea comparing acquisition costs (AC) vs lifetime value (LTV) is not new, but lots of people jump over the part where you actually identify your market and decide if you can reach them at all.

The problem with consumer web apps and mobile apps is that “everybody” is a really shitty audience to sell to. You need things like puff pieces in newspapers and million-dollar adword budgets. Narrowing the definition of the  audience has a direct relationship with reducing the cost to reach them.

For Alastair, “everybody” goes down to “New Yorkers” then to “iPhone owning New Yorkers”. That’s not super helpful, but already you can start to have all sorts of geolocation-specific ideas like advertising through foursquare when someone checks into a bar after midnight. Those people only represent maybe 10% of the potential customers, but worse, the group probably includes 100 times more people than those who would even consider using the app. Reaching those people is a waste of money.

The real question is still how to reach “iPhone owning New Yorkers who ride cabs and want to participate in a cab reviewing system”. So here’s what your thought process should be in evaluating a startup idea:

1. who wants to buy this thing?
2. can I reach these people to tell them about this thing?
3. can I do it cost-effectively?
4. is that group big enough to make enough revenue to cover the fixed costs?

Then you leave the realm of the underpants gnomes to reach great success.

Permalink: Great startups fail if they can’t reach their audience

1. Open the terminal (found in /Applications/Utilities/)
2. Type the following (without quotation marks) to show hidden files: “defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true”
3. Hit enter
4. Type the following (without quotation marks) to restart the Finder: “killall Finder”
5. Hit enter

You can turn hidden files back off by doing the same thing, but switching the “true” to “false” in step 2.

And a random tip navigating in the finder: press ⌘ + ↑ (command + up arrow) to navigate to the parent folder, all the way up to root.

Permalink: How to show hidden files in Mac OS X Mountain Lion

I couldn’t agree more.

Here in NYC, there’s an echo chamber in the media world. Everyone knows the common wisdom; reaching your audience requires things like “starting conversations” and “engaging media” and “gamification”. All the speakers on the talking-head circuit say the same thing, and we all spend time hanging out together reinforcing these ideas.

No one in media seems to care about quiet successes, those great ideas that make things better, but don’t win any awards.

The same thing is happening in Silicon Valley.

The craze over the past few years has been “social”. I don’t just mean social networks like Facebook. Every darling Internet startup seems to be based on re-imagining something everyone already does, but making it social. Certainly, that’s the basic nature of the Internet, but there’s also this unspoken rule: you should want your startup to be famous, and to be famous, it better be social (with matching hockey-shaped adoption curve).

That’s why you want a famous angel investor, instead of one that’s tapped into your target industry. That’s why you shmooze at tech startup events instead of the events your target audience hangs out at. That’s why you want a nice writeup on TechCrunch.

You’re chasing the wrong dream. Fuck fame.

Fame is about the shiny new play thing, “the next XYZ but with twice the social”! The problem is that most of these fame-seeking new ideas aren’t novel.

Take airbnb, a company that democratizes the hospitality industry (i.e. locals can post their residence up there and have tourists rent the space). I pick on them because they’re actually doing something quite disruptive to the hospitality industry. Unfortunately, there’s nothing particularly interesting about disrupting the hospitality industry.

Airbnb provides a solution that used to be provided by hotels, craigslist, word-of-mouth, and so on. Certainly, they’re doing it better. They’re adding something new. But there’s not much they let you do that you couldn’t do before. Airbnb lets you… rent places.

I know I’m going to get a lot of flack for ragging on Airbnb. But really – better vacations? Talk about first world problems.

Or take a more obvious example: groupon. Their bright idea is… *drum roll*… to send out coupons. Woopee!

Everyone seemed to be thoroughly impressed by their business model until word spread that they were losing money hand over fist acquiring merchants and consumers – not in itself a problem – but also that merchants weren’t particularly interested in using the service again after their first promotion. It’s hard to make a business selling things people don’t want.

So, I have a thought for entrepreneurs over in silicon valley:

You can make a fine business applying your technical know-how to make things a little bit better, a little bit faster, a little bit more democratic for consumers. If you do, you’ll be able to raise some money (for now, at least) and churn out Yet Another Consumer Web App. Get enough buzz, and you might even succeed.

The alternative is to build things that fix problems that couldn’t be solved before.

There was no reasonable way for me to give directly to an entrepreneur in Sub-Saharan African before Kiva. There was no reasonable way for me to buy science textbooks for a student in Kansas before Donorschoose. I didn’t have access to the smartest people in the world before TED. Or if those are all too philanthropic for you; I couldn’t (automatically) keep track of my finances before Mint.

But I think you’ll have trouble finding many consumer problems that Western Society hasn’t already found some fix for, online or offline. That means you should either think harder about mass market problems in the developing world, or ignore the consumer segment and focus on domain-specific problems in industry.

These kinds of companies aren’t behoven to the Silicon Valley echo chamber. They don’t require fame.

Permalink: New isn’t novel – stop chasing fame.

As a publisher/advertiser, the attractiveness of Facebook’s Like-button is in the way it gets your communication into a user’s social feed. If enough people in my Facebook social circle like a page, it will probably show up in my news feed, and I may be tempted to check out what all the fuss is about. This is the core mechanism that makes something go viral on the social network. Google’s +1 button aims to do the same, but there’s a hitch.

Who exactly is my “Google friend”?

Facebook still gets a lot of flak for mixing up our various “friend” contexts; do I really want to have one place where I connect with family, friends, co-workers, or strangers I met at a party? But over time, individuals come to some sort of equilibrium about how they use Facebook. Google can’t say the same; at least, not yet.

The now-defunct Google Wave worked by pulling in all of our Gmail contacts, but as many of us have over a half decade of email history, this isn’t an accurate reflection of people whose opinions we trust. Herein lies the unanswered element of Google’s social platform – what is the context of my “friend” relationships?

And the elephant in the room … will the search algorithm change to reflect my individual social/usage history?

Permalink: Google +1: A response to Facebook Like-button, minus the usefulness

Permalink: Using Google for quick market research

I’m totally with them through the first minute of the video, during which they say something like, “this is everything that’s wrong with advertising, and while we’re at it, this is everything that’s wrong with web authentication interfaces.”

Great!

But then our philosophies diverge for the next 0:40 seconds. Instead of “and this is how to fix it,” they opted to go, “and this is how to smush the two problems together and take advantage of it!”

I don’t like to call a company out on a thing I disagree with, but the first minute of the video proves they’re not clueless – they get what’s wrong with interruptive ads. But their solution seems to be to force people to engage with the interruptions, instead of ditching the interruptions altogether.

I don’t know enough about the product itself to deliver a final verdict, but this ad turns me off. It claims, “the future of online advertising will require this kind of cognitive approach.” Um, cognitive approach? I’m pretty confident “cognitive approach” translates to “employing psychological tricks”.

Come on – our cabal of internet marketing conspirators at least attempts to maintain the illusion we’re not brainwashing the masses. Stop spilling the beans!

Solve Media seems to have an innovative product, and I applaud their efforts to make the web suck less, but I fear they missed the forest for the trees.

(Regarding the problems of “captcha” nightmares; all captchas do is outsource the work to your customers that your web team should be doing validating users, thereby depressing form completion (and ultimately, sales). In most cases, captchas are for people who care more about their time than their customers’ time.)

Permalink: Solve Media’s new advertising captchas are a step in the wrong direction

1) An acquisition strategy – how will we get our potential customers, wherever they are, to start to think about us?
2) A conversion strategy – how will we turn interested prospects into paying customers?
3) A retention strategy – how will we keep these paying customers?

Marketing consultants the world over have a diagram of this in their powerpoint presentations; it is, after all, a good conceptual framework for understanding marketing. But when you map tactics to these categories – building a website, for instance – the clear boundaries tend to break down. I want to argue that this is okay: don’t panic. This is the real world, not business school!

The title of this post is, “does a website really attract customers?” The answer is: “it depends on your website.”

A website is not automatically an acquisition strategy. When you buy an advertisement, it goes in front of a group of people that are already doing… something. When you build a website, it goes in front of… no one.

Your website doesn’t have a storefront window looking out onto a popular pedestrian walkway. There are no people casually walking through the Internet window shopping your website. Parts of your website meant to acquire visitors (like a blog) aren’t truly acquisition strategies. They still need to be driven to from something else (like guest blogging at another blog to promote your own).

People need to hear about your website – through a link, word of mouth, or an ad – before they can visit it. So, if you’re treating your website like an advertisement, you’re going to have to advertise your advertisement (since not many people serendipitously link to advertisements), which is both a mouthful and a colossal waste of money.

You’re much safer thinking of your website as part of your conversion toolset; its job should be to turn visitors into customers. Now, if the way you go about converting customers is by providing information, tools, resources, and other compelling content, you’re probably going to end up with a website that acts as an acquisition asset as well; you’ll show up in Google searches, other websites will send you traffic, and you’ll be the hippest cat on the Twitter scene. Just kidding; no one on Twitter is hip.

Permalink: Does a website really attract customers?

I want to delve further into this, because this example assumes you have the resources to reach an entire market for a broad category of goods, which you probably don’t. And if you have to pick some customers to focus on, you naturally have to ignore others, so there becomes such a thing as the “right kind of customer.” Market research can tell you who that person is.

Wait, so now market research is good? Hear me out.

Suppose you sell jewelry. It seems plausible you might promote your business to anyone interested in jewelry. “I sell jewelry,” you think to yourself, “so all I have to do is reach the people who buy jewelry.”

Certainly, you can follow a plan that just says “find people interested in jewelry and sell them jewelry at a profit.” That’s even a step up from the TV campaigns of sellers like Jared, Tiffany & Co, and Kay Jewelers, who follow a plan that says “tell everyone.” This brand marketing is effective – someone without other obvious choices will probably default to the TV-friendly brand – but not efficient. All of those marketing resources could be better spent, but with vast resources, it’s easier to be effective than efficient.

“Okay,” you say smugly, “I know already that I can’t afford a TV campaign. That’s why I use the Internets!”

In the late 1990′s, being present was enough, but these days the Internet is just as broad a medium as TV. If you’re hoping for people to find you on Google, it can be tempting to want the 500 million monthly searches for “jewelry” to end up at your store. But that’s what the other 340 million jewelry websites – including Jared, Tiffany & Co, and Kay Jewelers – want too.

A search for “fair trade jewelry” bypasses these major players, and is the sort of market segmentation a jewelry seller could do, assuming the product really lives up to this promise and the customer really thinks in terms of buying something called “fair trade jewelry”. Google says 3,000 people search for that phrase each month, so there’s at least some market out there.

Of course, if you are Jared, Tiffany & Co, or Kay Jewelers, this seems like a laughably small market (which is exactly the point if you’re a small boutique).

This information can’t all come from sitting at your desk and searching Google. You have to get out of the building, whether that means formal market research or talking to real customers on the street. The key is to get to the bottom of who your customer is and what makes your product uniquely suited to satisfy their needs.

But, again, only do this if you can take action on the information. Don’t try to discover a market for your product unless you’re prepared to change some things – in your marketing or in your product – to suit that market.

Whatever your business, you’re shooting for a customer with high marks in three criteria:

1) Receptivity – How interested would this customer be in what you have to sell?
2) Accessibility – How easy is it to reach this group of customers?
3) Size – How many of these kinds of customers are there?

If you made handmade jewelry, you would look at a website like Etsy.com (slogan: “your place to buy and sell everything handmade”) and think “a large (size!) online shopping mall (accessible!) of people interested in handmade (receptive!) goods? Bingo.”

Permalink: How you know when you have the right customers

Facebook isn’t a place where people seek emotional closeness, a main complaint of Facebook detractors as they decry the uselessness of it all. No, Facebook is about status. It’s about looking good.

Remember this as you develop marketing programs that try to ride the viral wave of Facebook. People click the “like” button to signal something about themselves to their friend list, not about you.

Permalink: It’s all about Facebook status