Rahul Pathak : My Personal Blog

Amazon is doing a great job of highlighting relevant content on their user review pages. This is something we strived for at Judy’s Book but never quite nailed.

When there is a profileration of content, people want to know what’s most relevant. This is a natural response to information overload. On a site where there are a lot of reviews, you want to know which reviews you should pay attention to. (At this point, the great Princess Bride quote: “You truly have a dizzying intellect,” is probably coming to mind but bear with me.)

At Judy’s Book, we typically listed reviews in reverse chronological order and displayed the TrustScore of the user. This was a useful proxy but it didn’t really capture whether other people found the review helpful. It wasn’t a true content quality score. Rather, it measured the credibility of the individual posting the review. This is useful and valuable, but doesn’t really address the review. I was trusted on Judy’s Book, but I know nothing about kid-friendly restaurants. There’s no way I could have written useful reviews in that domain.

The challenge with trying to get a quality assessment is that the percentage of users that will rate something is relatively low. As a result, you need a lot of traffic to make meaningful assessments.

Amazon nails this. Their product review page does a fantastic job of summarizing what’s relevant for a potential customer.

They don’t just show the average rating, they show the distribution. This isn’t a new feature. What I love is they highlight the positive and critical reviews that users have found useful. This is awesome. It let’s you see at a glance the most relevant information and gives a user comfort that they are getting the information they need to make a decision.

I love that Amazon displays the critical review as well. This has two big benefits. First, it feels authentic - no product is perfect; seeing the good and the bad lets you evaluate whether its failings are ones that will bother you. Second, even if a customer doesn’t buy this product, they will view Amazon as a place that makes it easy for them to make a good decision. They will either buy something else this session, or they’ll come back in the future.

This is a great example of taking a long view about customer satisfaction and hats off to Amazon. I’ve blogged about them before and remain impressed. Another area where they are doing a killer job is web services, but more on that later.

Related Posts:

• Jeff Bezos Interview in Harvard Business Review
• How Amazon Does A/B Testing

In general, in startups, spending money carefully is a good thing. Cash is the lifeblood of any company and spending it wisely is critical. Having said that, there are areas where you should be prepared to spend because your business depends on it. It doesn’t pay to be too cheap when it comes to your attorney, your hosting & infrastructure and most of all, your people. Identify the critical elements of your business and spend appropriately in those areas. Be as cheap as possible everywhere else.Don’t get me wrong, you have to spend money slowly, but if saving a little today costs you a lot tomorrow, you’re making a bad decision.  

Andrew Chen has a great post on his blog entitled “Why Bloggers and Press Don’t Matter for User Acquisition.” I often find myself nodding as I read his posts and this one is no exception. Press & Blogger buzz while it drives traffic, often has no connection whatsoever to driving users and user engagement.User acquisition is a critical part of any startup’s evolution and it’s surprising how often entrepreneurs can fall into the ‘build it and they will come’ mindset. I was at an event recently where a handful of startups were presenting their companies to a panel of VCs and CEOs. After one pitch, a panel asked the entrepreneur what his customer acquisition strategy was - “How are you going to get people to use your product?” The response was along the lines of - “Well, they just need to try it out and they’ll love it.” Unfortunately, he didn’t have a good answer as to how they were going to hear about it in the first place.You need a clear user acquisition strategy and Andrew has laid out a useful framework for thinking about it. He also has other great post on Viral Loops and social network monetization. Happy reading.

Chris has just started blogging and he has a great post up on his blog about the importance of taking smaller bites when starting a company.

…one big takeaway was a collective resolve to build our next business by “taking smaller bites”, working toward a vision by executing more thoroughly around discrete building blocks of the idea.

I completely agree with this perspective. Even if you’ve got a grand vision, you have to execute like crazy in one small area. Once you matter a lot to a group of people, it becomes easier to reach out to more. Trying to matter to everyone at once is a tough game.

Great post Chris and welcome to blogging. I’m looking forward to reading more.

Andy has a post up on his blog about the decision to scale back operations at Judy’s Book.

Today was a tough day. For the second time in my life I had to tell a great team of people that the idea they’d worked so hard on was going away. After 3+ years, our management team and board of directors has decided to scale back our operations at Judy’s Book and seek a strategic acquiror.

As a CEO, I know this is the right thing to do for our investors. But as an entrepreneur it’s disappointing to stop chasing an idea just when it’s beginning to take root in the popular consciousness.

It’s been a crazy day but Andy’s done an amazing job helping the company deal with a difficult situation.

Dick Costolo has another great post up on his blog called Too Many Chiefs or Too Many Indians. The post is about hiring at early stage startups and whether to hire experience or youthful enthusiasm first. Dick favors experience initially and has some good arguments backing it up.

First of all, in the first year to eighteen months of the business, everybody is generally heads down and go, go, go. By bringing in experienced people who understand the industry, their roles, and what needs to get done, you as entrepreneur are less likely to have to play grown-up and deal with the management issues that can frequently pop-up among a largely junior staff. It’s critical in the first 12-18 months to run as fast as possible, and by bringing in experienced players that can hit the ground running, you give yourself an opportunity to get a lot accomplished quickly. Secondly, as the organization grows from 4 to 20, if your first few people are senior, you can be confident that the future leaders of your organization are do-ers, people who rolled up their sleeves in the early life of the business and know how things operate ‘under the hood’.

Ask the Wizard should be in your subscriptions list if it isn’t already.

There’s a great interview of Jeff Bezos in the October 2007 issue of HBR. I think Amazon is making some great moves lately with their web services initiatives, their foray into movies and music and after reading this article I came away even more impressed than I was before.

It helps to base your strategy on things that won’t change. When I’m talking with people outside the company, there’s a question that comes up very commonly: “What’s going to change in the next five to ten years?” But I very rarely get asked “What’s not going to change in the next five to ten years?” At Amazon we’re always trying to figure that out, because you can really spin up flywheels around those things. All the energy you invest in them today will still be paying you dividends ten years from now…

…For our business, most of them turn out to be customer insights. Look at what’s important to the customers in our consumer-facing business. They want selection, low prices, and fast delivery. This can be different from business to business: There are companies serving other customers who wouldn’t put price, for example, in that set. But having found out what those things are for our customers, I can’t imagine that ten years from now they are going to say, “I love Amazon, but if only they could deliver my products a little more slowly.” And they’re not going to, ten years from now, say, “I really love Amazon, but I wish their prices were a little higher.”

It’s a great piece and while it’s long, it’s well worth it.

As I’ve written before, Facebook holds all the good cards in the game it’s playing with app developers for the platform. Valleywag has a great post up about their letter to application developers applying for Facebook grants - We Reserve the Right to Rip Off Your Idea

During this process, however, it has become clear that we will receive proposals which contain similar or even identical ideas. As a result, and in order to protect other developers and us from claims that we or anyone else copied material without the creator’s permission, unless we agree otherwise in writing, we can’t promise that any materials or information you submit here will be kept confidential, or specifically that we or others might not develop similar or identical products or services. Accordingly, we ask that you not submit any materials or information you consider to be confidential or proprietary to this e-mail address.

This said, if you would like us to delete any materials you have just sent us, please send us an e-mail within 48 hours instructing us to do so with an email subject “DELETE”, and we will delete those materials without review by anyone here. If we do not receive instructions to delete your materials within 48 hours, we will rely on that fact as indicating that you wish us to review your materials, with the understanding that we accept no obligations (whether of confidentiality, payment or otherwise) with respect to any materials, information or ideas included in your submission.

Jason Calacanis sums it up best:

However, give Facebook two missed quarters as a public company and they might not have no choice but to squeeze every ounce of revenue out of Facebook. That squeeze might include competing with the current crop of Facebook developers. You know what you can do if they have to squeeze? Nothing….

…Building inside closed ecosystems is very, very dangerous…. be careful.

If you’re building a business, you need to control your own destiny as much as possible. There are enough risks already.

The decision to release a new feature or say that you support a new geography is ultimately driven by the answer to one question. “Can I deliver a good user experience if I do this?”

You have to be honest with yourself when you answer this question. If the answer is yes, then expose the feature to users or add the location. If the answer is no, wait. By waiting, you’ll ensure that people either have a good experience, or they have no experience at all. This is far better than some people having a good experience and others coming away saying “well, neat idea but they didn’t really have anything there I cared about.”

It may feel like you’re moving too slowly or not addressing a large enough segment, but exceeding expectations for a few is by far the better path to go down. Also, if you’re smart, you’ll find a way to get permission to email users who came but weren’t supported and invite them back when you’re ready.

Seth’s post on follow through and caring about the last inch is a must-read if you haven’t read it already.

Obsessing about the last inch of follow through ensures that the important parts of what you do get just as much (if not more) commitment.

You can’t afford to stop caring about the little things. The equivalent argument when it comes to web sites is: “Well, so few people see that page, we can leave it looking crappy.”

This is incredibly dangerous thinking. The truth is that sometimes you have to cut corners to get something released, but you can’t accept leaving things in a shitty state and you better make sure you come back around and fix it. (By the way, the reverse, obsessing about the little things, is often how great products get built.)

If something isn’t worth doing right, don’t do it, or kill the feature. Otherwise, if it’s up and viewable to your users, then make sure it’s your best work.