We're looking for a technical-focused marketer to lead our website, SEO and CRO efforts, helping us convert more traffic into inbound leads.
We're a well-funded startup that already generates more than a thousand inbound inquiries per month - now we want to take our demand generation efforts to the next level. We're creating a new category of B2B marketing software in the advocate marketing space and our funding team previously built Eloqua, the marketing automation platform that was bought by Oracle for $871M.
However, I don't think the communication was poor at all - they have sent out 39 project updates over a year, which is almost one per week. Yes, the production was delayed and it took me 11 months to receive my Pebble after ordering, but that's reasonable considering the fact that I was backing the development of an untested and over-subscribed hardware product.
While production was delayed, software is another thing. I backed it for being able to program for. They never explained why being late in physical production meant they did not have to say anything about the software part.
Based on another stat in the article, only 800 artists earn than $50k per year. That means that while that artist is only ranked 17,000 in sales on Amazon, they happen to be in the top ~500 on Pandora.
Pandora is a music discovery tool that is not based on popularity. That is, if you tell Pandora you like a certain type of music, Pandora is about as likely to play similar obscure music as it is to play similar popular music. Other similar services such as Spotify or Last.fm base their music suggestions on the person <-> song graph rather than on the attributes of the music, so they will primarily suggest very popular music (which I will flagrantly assume is well correlated with Amazon sales rankings).
Edit: Oh, I see. I assume these artists just have much better music than they have marketing. It would be interesting to know what sets them apart, though.
Right, I get what the differences in the models are between Pandora and other services. I'm referring to how the artists and/or the music itself differs that causes them to fit into this strange category.
The number of artists in Pandora's catalog is very small relative to all other mainstream services (because of the cost burden of onboarding artists into the Music Genome Project, a manual process). So, put an unknown artist that sounds like Coldplay into rotation and every user who starts a Coldplay channel is going to get them a bunch of times. Do an unknown band that sounds like Guns N Roses, same thing.
Discovery, I'd imagine. Amazon has a "you might like this" but most of the time clicking those links is not actively what you are doing on Amazon, whereas it is Pandora's whole model.
It's not. That's why Pandora is fighting for their life right now. They can't get big investors to keep backing them until they get the law changed. They're in very deep.
I actually think that in this case, Uber does a good job of protecting privacy. I don't see the email address or the last name of the people that I referred, just their first name. I'm assuming that means that they don't see my name/email either when they sign up via my link.
My favourite piracy definition is by Steve Jobs who said: "Privacy is knowing what you signed up for".
We can argue back on forth on what the implications of the names showing up are and aren't[1], but neither the referrers nor the referrals knew that this would happen. That's bad privacy on Uber's and Dropbox's part.
[1]: Not everyone manages to get people to sign up as fast as you did. The implication of this is that if I know who signs up and when, I can surmise their name based on this information, which violates the user's privacy. Again, privacy is very contingent on the implications of what a malefactor might be capable of.
Whether a mountain or a molehill, this is something that just doesn't serve any good purpose but comes with some negative consequences.
You really shouldn't see any of that. I do lots of affiliate marketing and companies rarely give any more information than whether or not people met the requirements for me to get paid - and how much they are paying, if I'm on a revenue share deal.
It's really none of my business who they are and would be an invasion of their privacy for me to know - in my opinion.
I guess an argument could be made for refer-a-friend programs working differently, but the default should always be sharing this kind of data only on a need-to-know basis.
Well, according to Uber's referral program copy, in theory, you're referring your "friends" to the service. Aka people you know, and people who probably wouldn't mind you knowing they signed up. So I can at least see why Uber (and other referral services in general) might not think twice about sharing small pieces of personal information with the referrer. Not saying you don't have a good point, though, because I agree.
Just wrote this up after running an AdWords campaign against my Uber referral link earlier this week. I know that this method is well-publicized for maxing out your Dropbox storage - has anyone else tried this for other services?
Brand arbitrage is a mainstay of many affiliate marketers. Given that one can transform success with it into (large piles of) generally spendable currency, most don't spend too much time optimizing for (small piles of) gift cards.
Great point. I mentioned in my post that "there isn’t a huge amount of upside" financially, but I definitely got personal value out of just doing the experiment. I'd suspect that most of the truly lucrative affiliate opportunities are extremely competitive.
I did this for a few days a while back when Fab.com was offering the credit for new referrals on both ends (money for them, money for me) but wasn't able to get it to ROI positive. There were a ton of sign ups but not enough people made that first purchase to get me the credit and they're pretty smart about expiring credits and the putting in a 30-day limit on when the referral must have completed their first purchase.
Interesting. Does the person need you sign up through you, or just use your referral code at checkout? If it's the later, I wonder if you could target your keywords to "fab promo code" or "fab discount" to try to get people that were near the end of the purchase cycle and were just looking for a promo to complete their purchase.
Actually, it was simpler than that. The link on my ad went to a Fab.com sign up page that already had my referral code embedded. The user simply needed to make a purchase within the first 30 days to enable me to receive my referral credit. Many of the users I paid for most likely did buy something but not within the 30 day timeframe.
For Dropbox, I earned my credit by linking to my referral URL in the download page of my website, which gets about 1k hits a day. It took a while but I maxed about my Dropbox credit and have over 20GB on my free account now. This was basically an ad that I placed myself, so an Adword campaign should work quite well especially with a free advertising code.
As someone who volunteered at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, I can confidently say that the two weeks of the Games was the most exciting time of my life.
The culture of being a volunteer was incredible, and it almost felt like you were part of a cult (in a good way!). I think that biggest reason for the authenticity and commitment of the volunteers was the ongoing emphasis that the actions of any single volunteer could be the difference in ensuring that an athlete, spectator, media person, or official would have a great experience in Vancouver. The organizers made it clear that they were entrusting the volunteers in that responsibility to represent our city and country to the world.
The arguments for the Thiel Fellows to pursue this opportunity and the current debate for the overall college "bubble" have little in common. While they touch on a similar subject of (not) going to college, I don't see how a very narrow fund for 20 of the brightest and most capable teens in America has anything to do with the current status quo for the average young person who is going to college. I think they're very separate debates and it's too bad that the conversation has been sidetracked in this way.
Thiel is certainly not encouraging everyone to become a Fellow of his program. As far as I'm aware it is a connected but distinct branch of his education reform platform. If you visit the Meet the Fellows page of the program's site [1] and browse through, you will see that each and every one is highly accomplished and likely to succeed regardless of Thiel's patronage. Like his funding of Seasteading or Aubrey de Grey's research, it is much more an investment in his personal beliefs and attempting to further humanity (with his name on it) than it is meant to be a large-scale alternative to university.
What he seems to be aiming for is less information asymmetry via increased education on the costs AND benefits of education for those considering attending university, and more of a marketplace for degrees, if they are to be treated as investments. For example, allowing lenders to offer lower rates for those entering STEM majors or people who have demonstrated high aptitude scores, or making information on job placement broken down by degree more readily available.
Does anyone happen to know if all the fellows are American? I cannot seem to find this info online.
Quibbling detail, I know. But I had the impression the competition was not just limited to the U.S. (Which in no way "argues" the above point. I tried to let it go. I really did. Curiosity killed the cat and all that.)
Absolutely not; a fair number of them are from Europe, and some from Asia. (I am one of the "mentors" who get to vote on finalists, and help them out after they're in). Out of 40, maybe 15-20 were non-US born, and maybe 10 were non-US citizens.
It's hard to start and actively run a company in the United States if you're not American citizen especially if you don't even have a bachelors degree to get a H1B visa from your own company.
On the topic of the overall bubble, I think the main problem is that the demands of the marketplace are not effectively filtered into pressure to select certain majors. Thus you have the current absurd situation where there are as many STEM students as there were 30 years ago, but the number of liberal arts majors has skyrocketed.
Not everyone can work in publishing and theater.
Also, it's a shame how 60 Minutes, a main stream cultural bellwether if there ever was one, eviscerates Thiel. He's one of the few practical visionaries around, and his thesis that the American cultural status quo is indeterminately (rather than determinately) optimistic about the future is bolstered by the treatment they give him.
I don't think they did a good enough job. They didn't call him out when he gave as examples 3 total outliers, Gates, Jobs and Zuckerberg. Ditto for saying college costs $250,000 for 4 years. Public colleges aren't anywhere near that cost.
Harvard "full list" is 62,950 and nobody pays that unless they are from a wealthy family.
Syracuse which I would think is typical of private colleges would be about 200k for 4 years.
Many public schools are easily maybe 18k per year room and board for in state students. That is way less than "250k".
I agree. The statement that plumbers make as much as doctors is insanely inaccurate. I think Thiel needs to find a new plumber, because he's clearly overpaying.
While I've not run the numbers, when you adjust for the costs and lost wages from:
* 4 years of undergrad
* 4 years of medical school
* 3+ years of residency
And the potential upside for a plumber who starts his own business or perhaps branches out into general contracting, it would not surprise me if total lifetime wages adjusted for education expenses were fairly close.
This is a commonly made false comparison: employed physician vs. self-employed plumber. You've combined two jobs (plumber + small business manager), then assumed that the plumber is better than competent at both. This will not compare favorably at the margin if you compare e.g. to a surgeon who opens a plastic surgery practice, or uses his surgical skill to found Intuitive Surgical.
Either compare averages or admit that there's no point comparing when you already know the outcome you want.
For what it's worth, I agree it's a poor comparison. I posted as much to ponder how it might have arisen during the interview as to address the GP's statement "that plumbers make as much as doctors is insanely inaccurate"
Yes. Shows what a bubble he lives in. That statement really bothered me (was just discussing that last night with my wife when I replayed the story) and I think it obviously showed Thiel's lack of preparedness for the interview. Imagine going on 60 Minutes and not being prepared. It shows the halo he has around him from talking to people who rarely challenge him. Reminds me of shit I can get away with at a family gathering that would never fly on HN!
Anyway the job (and prestige) of a doctor is vastly different than the "average" plumber or tradesman and comes with a whole host of psychic benefits. And the skills (mechanical and being grimy all day) are much different for plumber than Physician.
As someone who goes to a state school, sometimes I feel like being in college is detrimental to my learning. I'm surrounded by students who don't care, and it can be tough to overcome "the crowd." Looking back, I'm not sure if it was a good idea to save money and go to state school, as opposed to going to an expensive school with motivated students. I guess time will tell...
Expensive schools don't necessarily have motivated students, especially not at the undergrad level. I've met just as many morons from the Ivy Leagues as I've met from state schools (and brilliant people, too). Cost has little to do with desire to learn or focus for an 18-year-old to twenty something.
We're looking for a technical-focused marketer to lead our website, SEO and CRO efforts, helping us convert more traffic into inbound leads.
We're a well-funded startup that already generates more than a thousand inbound inquiries per month - now we want to take our demand generation efforts to the next level. We're creating a new category of B2B marketing software in the advocate marketing space and our funding team previously built Eloqua, the marketing automation platform that was bought by Oracle for $871M.
Feel free to send me questions directly at alex@influitive.com, or see the full job description at http://influitive.com/company/careers-influitive/inbound-mar...