On The Trail

Xavier Casanova, founder of Fireclick (a web analytics tool) has moved on to a startup called Perenety that is developing a application that makes it easy to share big files (like videos, images, work files or whatever) with friends or whoever. He also publishes an excellent blog that he doesn’t update nearly enough anymore. He talked about a ton of great stuff, but I’ll boil it down: point one was viral marketing. He showed the hockey stick growth curves of several blogs (including his own). His point was that you have to “seed” your traffic for a while until you get enough “sneezers” to start the viral growth. (I love the term “sneezers”, and I’m going to steal it and use it shamelessly). The sneezers won’t sneeze unless there is something cool or remarkable to talk about. So far so good with blog popularity, but what does this have to do with his startup? Well, for a startup like his to get funding these days it needs to grow virally and quickly. They ran a quick survey to see what people thought was cooler: A program that allowed you to access your files anywhere or a program that allowed you to quickly send big files to your friends and family. They were describing the same product, just with two different messages. Both were received well, but “survey says” #2 is much cooler — so it was more likely to have a successful marketing campaign. This seems like it may not be a big deal, but it changes the focus of the company from business users to the mySpace crowd.
So here is another case of analytics having a huge impact on a company.

More tomorrow!