Ramblings of a Web Startup in Progress

Swayable is Seeking a Drupal Developer.

Posted on November 26, 2011 by admin

Seeking experienced Drupal developer for a Seattle startup called Swayable (http://www.swayable.com and also on iPhone & Android). Get in on the ground floor as Swayable is just starting to see significant growth. Have the excitement of creating new applications and processes. The perfect person is entrepreneurial, self motivated, wants to be part of a startup environment, needs minimal supervision and frankly, likes what Swayable is doing.

If you are interested, you must have good knowledge of Drupal 6.x and add-on modules, as well as a deep knowledge of CSS and theming. This position involves all aspects of web-based software development: from analysis, to design, to development, to test, and to release. This will involve implementing the theme as well as coding modules. This developer will also be responsible for technical documentation.

We’re based in Seattle, Washington, USA, and while we need you to be available for communications during our work day, you can be anywhere. Good communication skills in English are also necessary. This is a project based contract position, with potential for a long term permanent position.

If you would be interested in this position, please send me links to your prior work, your resume/CV, and your availability to jobs (@) swayable.com.

Please share!

Lindsey

Posted in development, Hiring | Leave a comment

Swayable interview with RTE @ Dublin Web Summit

Posted on November 3, 2011 by admin

I had a chat with RTÉ Digital’s Warren Gatchell about my business initiative and how I generated the “Swayable” idea.

For more great RTE interviews from Dublin Web Summit & F.ounders – Go here – http://www.rte.ie/news/dublinwebsummit/

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10 Things I Learned from the Founders at F.ounders 2011

Posted on November 1, 2011 by admin

F.ounders Dublin was truly the most amazing networking experience I’ve ever had. Having an extensive background in experience marketing, this high praise to be sure. I’m still trying to fully process the entire experience a full 2 days after being home.

I was invited to attend F.ounders last spring, and am very honored to have been included on the list of 150 founders from around the world. Seattle was represented by myself and Werner Vogels (CTO Amazon).

The structure of this global event is brilliant – 3 tiers of founders; those that have built era defining companies, those who’s companies are growing very quickly and are on that same path, and those (like Swayable i.e. the company I am a founder of) who are just starting out.

I have to admit, I was rather intimidated when I landed in Dublin. To be in the company of founders and CEO’s of leading world class companies that I not only use products of, but also have much admiration for. For those of us who are not geeks, it’s the equivalent to being invited backstage at a rock concert of your favorite mega artist, “and” an invitation to the private all-night after party…

When all the people in the same room are entrepreneurs who have created companies and have taken personal risks along the way, you find common ground very quickly.

There are numerous recaps and posts about all the events and happenings at F.ounders, (I’ve listed them at the end of this post,) I wanted to share some key insights as a startup that I came away with that has given me renewed passion, fire under my feet and inspiration to keep pursuing, taking risks and persevering.

10 Things I learned from the Founders at F.ounders Dublin:

All founders are willing to talk to you about their experience, give honest feedback and frankly are very approachable, just be confident and ask.
Regardless of current company size, scale or influence, founders have common ground of taking risks and persevering.
All successful founders have all had failures and keep coming back for more by learning from those experiences and being empowered to do better next time vs. letting it crush them.
There was a common business theme: Listen to your customers and pivot as needed, even if it goes a bit against what you thought your initial vision was.
Entrepreneurs share a kinship. The Entrepreneurial spirit is in your blood; it’s part of who you are.
All the founders have a contagious level of passion for their business that comes to life in the way they discuss and represent it.
There is an automatic level of empathy and understanding when speaking to another founder.
Founders all have passions outside of business. They throw themselves into these varied pursuits equally as hard and with as much gusto as they possibly can.
Founders all recognize that there is an element of luck and timing that is out of our control, it’s all part of being an entrepreneur and taking risks.
Every Founders “elevator” pitch was finely tuned and rehearsed like a memorable speech. I could understand what nearly every company does within 30 seconds or less. Polished and personal, genius!

The event is truly a once in a lifetime experience, I hope that F.ounders keeps inviting new Founders each year so others can experience the magic of this event. I also know, for those of you I didn’t get to meet at the event, we will instantly connect on this shared, amazing experience. Thank you Paddy Cosgrave and team for an amazing life experience.

Here are some great recaps and details from other outlets:

Mashable: What I learned from 4 days with the world’s greatest Entrepreneurs
Tech Crunch EU: Founders brings the crazy and the foolish ones to Dublin
The Next Web: F.ounders: a weekend at the Rolls Royce of Technology Events.
Wall Street Journal, Tech Europe: From Bono to the President, Ireland stops at nothing to Woo Europe’s Entrepreneurs
Reuters: A Bono-fied Irish tech success
The Guardian: U2′s Bono: the tweetest thing for web geeks.
Fred Destin: The f.ounders conference: Paddy Cosgrave’s spectacularly successful connective tissue engine

Note: if I am missing any recaps, please leave them in the comments, I’ll get them added

Cheers,
Lindsey Harper
Founder, Swayable.com

Check out Swayable, download the iPhone app, or android app follow @swayable on twitter or follow me @harperlindsey on Twitter.

Posted in Event Recaps, startup | Leave a comment

Break it down into Manageble Bite Size Chunks and Get Moving on Executing!

Posted on October 26, 2011 by admin

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Swayable is going quite well. We have hit nearly 1.5 million responses in the system and nearly 25k Swayable’s have been created. We have just launched our Android application (last friday) in addition to our iPhone app that’s already on the market. Our primary user base is mobile, literally 90% of our users access Swayable via mobile.

We work constantly to update bugs, tweak features etc. and pushing live updates on a daily basis. However, we have elements and features that get put into project “Phases” as I call them, these are things that are beyond bug fixes and minor feature updates/tweaks, that need design/development brain power to scope out. We have been working through the project scope of the next phase and it’s taking longer than anticipated (I’m always assuming things move faster than they do).

I thought I’d do all the development for the next Phase in 1 chunk as it seemed small enough, but as I started working with the design and development teams, I realized I could break it up into smaller components and get feature pushed live faster, first to web, then to mobile.

Seems logical enough right? but even in a project where everything fits together nicely and “should” be done together, you can still break it up in to layered pieces that build upon each other and test, push live, test, push live etc. all the way through the project phase. this gets elements live faster, users actually using these new features and providing feedback and then you bug fixes starting earlier in the process.

So my latest phase has now been broken down into manageable pieces, like bite size cupcakes vs. trying to eat the whole thing at once! from 1 “Phase” down to 4 components, and it’s clicking and moving along much smoother than trying to tackle it all at once.

We are at a point now, where we will start seeing execution on this latest phase as early as 3-4 weeks vs. waiting up to 3-4 months! The challenge is that all pieces of this phase really tie into each other, so you have to understand the whole, before you can piece it out.

Take a minute to see if you can build out the roadmap of whre you want to be, what elements make up that path and what features build upon each other to get there. then start building, and executing… you can always change it if it doesn’t work, much better than sitting stagnant for months at a time.

Posted in development, Project Management | Leave a comment

Scrappy App Marketing – Cross app promotion for higher conversions

Posted on August 31, 2011 by admin

As any startup knows, you have to be super creative with your marketing techniques. This is the same for my startup Swayable (web)and an iphone app . I wanted to share what I call “scrappy app marketing” Since I have an iPhone application, I figured the best way to get downloads and users to my app was to cross promote in other applications. Well that can be pretty expensive and click through and download rates from my testing were so low that I just wasn’t worth the costs.

So I decided to try appmakr.com and create my own applications that target my audiences. I have a large teen following so I created celebrity news applications ala Justin Bieber. In that applications I run inexpensive contest to win swag for that celebrity by using and engaging with Swayable.com I also have the ads within them only cross promote my own products.

Every time I do a push notification to any one of these applications Appmakr does charge a fee, but that’s my only cost and I get much targeted direct access to my potential customers in an application that they love, because I’m presenting them content about a topic they are passionate about. The engagement and downloads I get for the minimal push notifications costs is insanely high, I can’t find any other medium that gives me this much return on investment. The key is providing quality applications/content to cross promote in. Junk apps won’t do.

My goals with this were to simply get more users and more downloads of the Swayable application. In the first 3 months of doing this my traffic tripled each month and continues to grow at increasing rates. I can tell it’s in large part to these efforts based on tracking.

What applications could you create to help cross promote your products/services?

HELP GET SCRAPPY APP MARKETING SESSION INTO SXSW 2012! Myself and Maya Bisineer (founder of MemeTales)have pitched a session titled “Scrappy app marketing” for SXSW Interactive 2012, to go into more detail about how to do this technique and other nifty little tricks.

Please take a moment and vote for our session so we can hopefully be selected to present a full session on “Scrappy app marketing”

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Swayable: Rate Anything on the Web

Posted on May 31, 2011 by admin

Thanks to Robert Scoble, Rocky Barbanica & Building 43 for the chat about Swayable!

Original video & Article from Building 43 posted here.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

What’s your criteria for “doing it?”

Posted on May 27, 2011 by admin

No, this isn’t about sex. Yes this is a link bait blog title.

This post is about what criteria do you use to determine which idea is worth pursuing, i.e the “is this idea worth doing it” criteria.

I’ve had people ask me how I know which idea to pursue and when I knew Swayable was the right idea for me. Well, if you’re an entrepreneur, you have ideas all the time. Determining which one to pursue can become an art in and of itself.

Outside of determining current market, current competition etc. you need to determine what YOU are willing to do and be completely honest with yourself. It’s very easy to get carried away in a great idea moment, but if it doesn’t fit in with your “doing it” criteria, then you will likely burn out quick and end up not finishing the project.

Some of the things you need to ask yourself and answer honestly are:

Do you want to deal with physical products?
Do you want to deal with manufacturing?
Do you want to deal with a sales team?
Do you want to manage import/export?
Do you want to have a product that needs critical mass before it works well?
Do you want to deal with a niche based business or more broad appeal?
Do you feel excited & passionate about the idea?

There are other questions that you’ll have to come up with for yourself, but the above should get you started.

For example, with me – I came up with lots of ideas that I feel I could have pursued and made profitable, but they did not meet my “doing it” criteria. Even though some of the ideas I was super excited about, if they didn’t fit within my criteria I knew I’d burn out.

Finally with Swayable, when this idea came along last year it did fit my personal criteria which is:

No physical store front
No Physical product or manufacturing, I do not want to deal with importing/exporting/shipping etc.
No localized sales needed
No need for critical mass for the product to work.
Broad solution vs. niche based
Web based

Once I knew that Swayable fit my personal criteria, I moved into market research, competition research and then idea validation and I was ready to go.

What questions do you ask yourself before choosing to pursue an idea?

Check out Swayable, download the iPhone app, follow @swayable on twitter or follow me @harperlindsey on Twitter.

And just in case you were curious, here is Swayable in action, embedded right here on my blog (you can get the embed code of any Swayable, right on the respective Swayable).

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Anyone else addicted to the REFRESH button?

Posted on May 9, 2011 by admin

Ok so now that Swayable is growing quite nicely, I am a bit addicted to stats and analysis and find myself constantly hitting the refresh button, whether via applications on my iPhone or online. I seem to get a bit jittery if I can’t check current site stats at any given time… (omg, I just admitted that)

So I wanted to share the tools that I’m using to both check my App statistics and web statistics and hope that if you are reading this, and have tools/apps that you use, you can share them in the comments. Not that I necessarily need more in my repertoire, but I find that each person has a preference in how they like to see data and the apps/services I’ve listed below, may not work as well for you.

For my Swayable iPhone App Stats Here’s what tools I Use:

Online – Applyzer

App ranking/Hourly – they show your apps ranking throughout the day, you need to upgrade to “pro” to see the hourly rankings, but for free you can get the daily rankings in the app store.

Featured History – They also have a great “Featured” link that you can see when/if you are featured in any given country/category.

On my iPhone – AppTrends App –

This app is fabulous! I don’t think it’s owned by Appfigures but it ties into the Appfigures API so you can get all the daily details from Appfigures right on your phone. I’m one of those that gets the Appfigures emails as well as use this app (I did warn you I’m addicted to stats). I love this app because I can quickly glance at it for rankings, reviews, sales etc. I also just like the way the data is displayed.

For my Swayable.com Web Stats & Real time Traffic, here’s what I use

Google analytics is a no brainer so I won’t elaborate on that. But here are 2 tools that I just love to monitor traffic/history real time.

On my iPhone – Quicklytics App Ok this is probably what started my refresh addiction. I seriously refresh this thing way too much! It uses your Google analytics code to give you real time statistics. I can see how today compares to yesterday, the month data and offers 4 data points: Visits, Pageviews, Bounce Rate & Pages/Visit

Online – GoSquared.com Yet another addictive real time stats site. I love goSquared as it’s more visual than some other services I’ve seen and you can see real time tweets about your keywordse etc. I typically have this running most of the time so I can see where traffic is coming from when I see spikes and maximize that source.

Ok that’s it! What services/tools do you use and like? One more question at what point will my refresh addiction stop?

Oh and Here’s Swayable in Action

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Simple way to get better user engagement – 10%+ click through!

Posted on May 4, 2011 by admin

***Plugging my own product post, complete product promotion on this one ****

Most of us that have websites are constantly working on getting better user engagement, more page views, return visitors etc. etc.

Well with Swayable, my big theme is “User Engagement” whether as consumers using Swayable via the iPhone application and website and engaging with their social networks. Or (My favorite part, and clearly my techy geeky side) other website/blog/online businesses embedding Swayable’s on their site – where your visitors can “Sway” comment, share and interact with the Swayable without leaving your site, after all I am a site owner, I don’t want to send traffic away either!. The power of Swayable is that data is consolidated, so if the same Swayable is embedded on 50 sites, the data shown is the same across all sites as sways/comments come in, providing true engagement across platforms/sites/experiences.

MY RESULTS: Well, guess what, on average over the last 3 months where I have tracked Swayable’s embedded on 3rd party sites and tracked data via google analytics and Swayable meta data (that anyone can view below any Swayable). I have seen on AVERAGE 10% click through/interaction with Swayables (low end has been 7% and high end has been 18%)!

I don’t know anything that I’ve used that get’s that high of engagement. (If you do, leave the product in my comments below).

So.. there’s the big tip, try Swayable, embed it on your site and engage your users.

Get Creative- ask for content feedback, relate it to your post, ask for feedback on product features, books, travel etc. anything that you can compare 2 elements in your post, get that engagement. Your users will begin feeling connected with your site & product. More importantly show them what you do with that data (write a requested post, mention the winner of the swayable etc.) show them you listen and that there feedback is valuable.

Ok so in the spirit of things and plugging my own product and all, here’s a random Swayable.

My plug.. (if the post isn’t enough!) – Follow me on Twitter @harperlindsey Check out my site Swayable and download my FREE iPhone app!