BobbyVoicu.com

Curious about stuff

Big Deal: Joe Rogan’s Podcast on Spotify Only

By Bobby Voicu

This is a big move for Spotify. In some ways it’s like the huge content deals sites like Netflix, HBO, Disney+ and Apple TV+ did when they launched their projects. And I feel that financially is in the same ballpark.

This is how it looks in numbers. Joe Rogan’s Podcast has:

I mean, he’s doing pretty well on his own, personal, distribution channels. It probably took a lot of money and opportunities to move his podcast to what is, essentially, a closed system. Yes, the podcast will be free, but you still have to be a Spotify user, which didn’t happen before.

Rogan’s YouTube channel will remain live, but it won’t contain full episodes. There might be clips or other supplementary content which could benefit from YouTube’s search algorithm and push people to listen to full episodes on Spotify.

From TheVerge

As a side note, I don’t like Spotify as a podcast player. I use Overcast and I find it better for that. I do use Spotify for music and I find it has the best suggestion engine, but I’ve been testing YouTube Music lately, as well.

Going back to this deal. I feel that it can be a turning point in the world of podcasting. The straw that brakes the camel’s back and moves a lot of podcasts (and podcasters) to closed platforms. I don’t love it, frankly, but who knows.

On the other hand, I rarely listen to Joe Rogan’s podcast and, when I do, I usually go to YouTube. So it might not be a sign for the industry at large. Anyway, interesting to follow where it goes, since it can be a first sign for things to come for “freelance creators”.

Image made in 2 minutes with Canva

Worldometers.info Gets 1 Billion Visits in April 2020

By Bobby Voicu

With all the pressure put on the business environment by the quarantine we’ve been into, due to COVID-19, there are some businesses, though, that saw amazing growth.

Still, a statistics site wouldn’t have been one I would’ve thought about before the pandemic. But Worldometers.info saw a growth to 1 billion visits in April. And not even that, but 70% of those visits are now direct. This, compared to 80% of the visits being from Google prior to February 2020.

If you make a “back of napkin” calculation, you see that they generated a revenue of at least $1M just in April 2020.

That’s not bad for a statistics website, right?

By the numbers: Worldometers.info was the #28 most-trafficked website worldwide this month, according to data and analysis from SimilarWeb.

That’s up 20.6% in traffic from March and up 36,928% from April 2019.

More details here.

Of course, this is not the only site with COVID related numbers that made the news recently.

A 17 year old student made a coronavirus tracking website, as well, and he refused $8,000,000 to allow ads on it. As opposed to worldometers, which already existed and had ads on it, nCoV2019.live doesn’t make money and, apparently, doesn’t intend to.

The dashboard is really popular, with about 30 million visitors a day, and 700 million total so far, so it’s unsurprising that Schiffmann has gotten offers to put ads on the website. One offer in particular would have contracted Schiffmann to keep up the site for $8 million, which he turned down, and he says he likely could have made over $30 million if he’d put up his own ads, but he says that’s not the goal of the site.

More details here.

What’s the biggest startup MVP mistake you can make?

By Bobby Voicu

In the phrase “minimum viable product” (or MVP), the keyword is MINIMUM. And there’s your biggest mistake.

First of all, if you don’t that what’s an MVP, see here.

If you want to watch, rather than read, there’s a video at the end of this post. For more similar videos, subscribe to the YouTube channel.

What’s the biggest mistake you can make related to building your MVP (Minimum Viable Product)?

The biggest mistake that people make when it comes to their MVP is doing more than you need to do.

Building an MVP means building the least amount of features that get you the information you need from the market (that your product is necessary).

But our mistake, as startup founders and product creators, is thinking that the least amount of features necessary for something to be the MVP is actually a lot more than what you really need.

Think about this: Dropbox had an email form explaining what their product will do. That’s it. And they had 75,000 people waiting to test their first version.

So, let’s say we’re building a website for pet owners. The MVP should be a form where some owners can put their details and they get the information they need. Even if that means you do the manual job of finding the information for them.

The mistake would be to build an entire website, with a great design or with any kind of design, and put it online and take the time to create a logo and take the time to think really well about the name.

You don’t need that in order for you to test the idea. You just need the form and the information you provide and you need to get some users to use that MVP to see if the idea that you have is actually good for the targeted audience.

Do not over-complicate things: this is the biggest mistake you can make when it comes to the minimum viable product for a startup.

Or, as Paul Graham put it: during the MVP phase, you must do things that don’t scale.

For more similar videos, subscribe to the YouTube channel.

How to Validate a Software/App Idea with Less than $200: A Case Study of MavenHut’s Solitaire Arena

By Bobby Voicu

Do you really need a product to show when you start a new business?

The truth is you can actually start a business without a product. You need to know if there is a market for your idea, though. How do you do this? Asking friends and family is a dumb idea, in my opinion, so you need to find another option.

Read below how we’ve done it at MavenHut, before writing even one line of code. This happened in 2012, but the tactics and strategies mentioned in the post below are still valid.

A lot of people talk about Dropbox’s launch: they had a video, put it on youtube, got 75,000 people signed-up on the waiting list and so on. Of course, by that time Dropbox was a Y Combinator company, a year old company, for that matter, so this might have helped a little bit (more).

How to Validate a Software/App Idea with Less than $200

Use a mock product site

Here’s how we did it at MavenHut: In February 2012 we’d just gotten accepted into Startup Bootcamp Dublin on the perceived strength of the team, mostly, and not because we had some amazing product (read about MavenHut’s 1st year here). We’ve have had some idea of what we wanted to do, but it was fuzzy, to say the least. So, the first thing to do: we needed to confirm that taking classic games and making them multiplayer was a good thing. Take into consideration that most classic games are single player (Solitaire, Tetris, Minesweeper, Asteroids, Space Invaders aso), so the question we asked ourselves was genuine and needed a real answer.

After some analysis, we decided on Solitaire to be the test game. But we wanted to know if people would actually want to play such a game. And I considered that we needed to have the potential users take some sort of action, not only tell us “Yes, I would play this kind of Solitaire!”. As Ford would put it: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” (though the quote is not sure to be real).

I would rather have some action from potential users, rather than have them tell me what they think they want.

What we did, in short:

I bought a domain name (solitairewithyourfriends.com – not live anymore, but you can see some it on archive.org, here).

I installed WordPress on the domain, using some cheap hosting. I am graphically challenged so I just chose the simplest theme possible and I wrote one post. The text on it was, basically, telling people that we work on a great version of Solitaire, but it’s not available yet, though you can play the old version. Also, we had a Photoshopped screenshot of how it would look (which I didn’t do).

The most important thing in the entire page was the fact that we had a link to an “old version” of the same game. And you “could” play that if you really wanted a multiplayer solitaire. The thing is that game never existed. We lied a little bit, but this way we had people perform an action and that told us that they were interested (or, at least, curious).

On the second page, though, people couldn’t play the early version of the game, since we were “just doing some maintenance on it”, but we asked them to complete some form, to give us some information. We thought nobody would do it, but we were pleasantly surprised (numbers below). In the form, in just 4 questions, we asked some info on multiplayer and classic games.

Finally, after building the site, I’ve deployed some Facebook ads and 3 days and $160 later, we had some answers.

So, this is, in short, the story.

Now, some numbers.

1. You don’t need an expensive site

Building the site, from the moment I bought the domain name to the moment it was live, took me about 4 hours (I am in no way proficient with WordPress or graphics). It cost me $12 in the domain name from NameCheap (today, I recommend Hover.com), and I already had some hosting on BlueHost, but I assume you can use any host. I would suggest, though, one that has any type of quick WordPress installer, since it makes it really simple to install WordPress. You can find hosting packages for about $3/month for monthly payments (and, for a test, you don’t need more than that). As an idea, for The CEO Library I use WPX Hosting, which is the best managed WordPress hosting I’ve used, but it’s a lot more expensive (because of the support it offers, the options and so on). The thing is, for a fast test, you can really use almost any cheap hosting you have access to, like Bluehost.

WordPress is the blogging CMS that’s really easy to install, has lots of features, lots of themes to pick from aso. I used ThemeForest to buy premium themes, so I would suggest them. Still, even better, I would choose a free theme, and you can find plenty on the web, starting with the WordPress themes repository.

2. Make the content on the site interesting and engaging for you target audience

Since we targeted people that played games, I used a more tongue in cheek tone, having fun at our own expense, lowering the initial rejection reaction that people would have for being tricked into getting on a page that promised them an interesting game. Also, a screenshot of what you offer (or promise to offer) them goes a long way, showing that you are actually trying to provide what you said (see the screenshot above with our frontpage). You can make good looking images with Canva, it’s an amazing and fast tool (even I can create them).

On the second page we continued with the same attitude, but this time we had to push the “saying sorry” theme since it was a second time we actually tricked the players. So we used the “can’t resist” eyes of Puss in Boots from Shrek and asked to be forgiven. This allowed us to be more cheeky, actually, and also ask for their help with the form: “Pleeeaseeee?”.

3. Users should take some kind of action

The Click here on the first page was the action we were very interested in. And everything on the page drives people to click that. We thought that if they do click (they do some action), they are really interested or curious about what we want to offer (a multiplayer Solitaire). On the same page, you could also click on the Photoshopped image of how the game would look like.

Moreover, on the second page, since we knew we would lose those users anyway (nothing else to do on the site), we added a Google Form (free with Google Docs, puts results in a sheet, best choice in my opinion for something fast and short). In the form we chose to give them just 4 questions – initially 5, because I wanted the “submit form” button to be visible without scroll. The question can be anything you need, we needed some game ideas suggestions from the potential players.

To give you the context, the first iteration of MavenHut was a platform for real money betting on single player games (hence, the third question, about betting).

Finally, a lot of people asked why we didn’t ask for the email addresses. Well, we wanted as many answers as possible in the shortest amount of time and I’ve found out that people become more evasive once they give any type of identification, even email. Moreover, since it was a small test, the list would be really short. Building an email list is a good thing to do, but not in this particular case.

Actually, why don’t you subscribe The CEO Library’s email list. I’m sending a weekly email with tactics for startup growth, books to read, as well as a list of interesting startup and business articles from around the web.

4. Drive some targeted traffic to the page

This is what a lot of people find difficult.

First of all, you need to decide how much is enough: how many visitors, how many clicks, how many answers. We decided that about 200 visitors should be enough to give us an idea of the appeal of Solitaire multiplayer. More, we were really bootstrapped at that point so we wanted to spend the least amount of money possible.

There are two ways to send traffic: free and paid.

Free traffic means going to sites like HackerNews and use AskHN (I think reddit also has a similar section) if your audience is there, go to forums where your audience stays or, if you can, find a blogger to ask his/her audience. The downside of the free traffic is that it takes time to generate it.

Paid traffic means everything from Google Adwords to Facebook Ads. We chose Facebook Ads because we already knew we would launch the first game on Facebook (my co-founders had a lot of experience on the platform), so Facebook Ads was the choice. Moreover, you could target specific audiences, from location and age to, what mattered most for us, interests.

We’ve got some interesting results:

As audience, we chose Solitaire as interest and US as country.

Finally, we sent these users to our site, but we needed to follow them in the site and extract some info.

5. Metrics: the most important thing

First and foremost, you need to understand what indicators you want to follow. From the start, our KPIs were:

– how many people reach the site from Facebook Ads (is there any interest in this type of games?)
– how many people click on the first link on the site (Click Here and the image) – this would give us information on the level of interest for this kind of game
– how many people complete the form (self-explaining)
– how much time people spent on the site, especially on the second page (it means they were interested enough to read what we wrote)

All these numbers were available through Google Analytics, the free solution from Google, which we happily installed.

The results? Well, above expectations:
228 unique visitors, 517 page views, 386 unique page views, 145 pageviews on the second page (the one with the form), 2:09 minutes on the second page.

The percentage of people visiting the second page is 60% (145 unique pageviews compared to 240). This means 60% of the unique visitors (approximately, since we cannot compare unique visitors on the pages, but we expect people didn’t visit the second-page multiple times) clicked on “Click Here”. So 136 people visited our second page. Out of those, 66 people submitted the form to us. A staggering, for me, 48% of the people that got on the second page (and 29% of the total visitors).

The answers? Well, those are for us to have, aren’t they? :) There are two of them in the screenshot below (the same as the one above).

The results of this experiment gave us the push to start building Solitaire Arena. And it gave us first proof of concept.

I am amazed at how many startup founders don’t do this kind of testing (especially seeing how cheap it can be – it cost us less than $200), but I think most of them don’t do it just because they are afraid of the answers. We were quite ready to change course (which we did, we never built a gambling platform, as we initially intended).

Finally, where does the story end?

Well, we presented some great numbers at the Demo Day of the accelerator: see our Demo Day presentation here.

Solitaire Arena had, a year after launch, 1,500,000 monthly active users, MavenHut has been the recipient of $700,000 in investment and it has outgrown the 3 initial co-founders several times.

In 2015 we sold most of the games to RockYou, an US company. MavenHut’s games were downloaded more than 40,000,000 times across all platforms available. And in 2016 I left the company :)

P.S.: I wrote the first version of the article in 2016. This is an updated version I wrote in 2020.

Is Saturday a Business Day?

By Bobby Voicu

Sounds funny, right?

“Is Saturday a business day?”

Short answer: No, for some. Yes, for some others.

Even shorter answer: if you’re an entrepreneur, YES, Saturday is a business day!

Now the longer version and explanations.

I was born in communist Romania. For the first almost 5 years of school, until the fall of the communism, I went to school on Saturdays. Granted, they were “short” days (we had just half of the normal week day hours), but we still went to school on Saturdays.

Back to present day, most of my entrepreneur friends also work on Saturdays. They might not go to the office, but they work on Saturdays. Well, if you are an entrepreneur, do you ever really “leave” your job?

There is a real reason, though, why people would ask themselves if Saturday is a business day. And it usually has to do with working with government or financial institutions (banks, mainly).

In my experience, most of them don’t work on Saturdays. They might have an office or two that are open on Saturdays, but you need to call ahead or look online for their schedules.

Here are some areas where people generally DON’T work on Saturdays:

– government offices
– financial institutions
– lawyer offices
– notary offices

I’m sure there are more, but these are the ones most people want to know about.

If you really want to know what a business day is, here’s a Wikipedia link.

Image source: Canva.

Which entrepreneur made tractors before entering the sports car business?

By Bobby Voicu

Well, if I tell you the first name of the entrepreneur, it might not ring a bell: Ferruccio.

If I tell you it’s a car company, you might think: “Hmmm, italian name… Ferrari! Ah, no, that’s Enzo! Alfa Romeo! Maserati!”.

Or you might say the right name: Lamborghini.

Which entrepreneur made tractors before entering the sports car business?

Yes, Lamborghini, the supercar company owned now by Volkswagen, initially made tractors. And they still do, they’re called Lamborghini Trattori.

But what made a tractor manufacturer start a supercar company? Well, spite. Maybe that’s where Larry David got his “spite store” idea for “Curb Your Enthusiasm”.

Fast Cars Passion

As an entrepreneur, Lamborghini was a successful one, owing it to his tractors. But he was also passionate about cars, especially really fast ones.

He owned Maseratis, but he didn’t like them because he felt they were too heavy. Then he owned some Ferraris, but he was constantly annoyed by the low quality of the pieces they used (especially, apparently, the clutch).

Spite and Personal Need

This is where spite comes up. He went to Ferrari’s owner, Enzo Ferrari, and complained. The proud Enzo, though, dismissed his issues. So Lamborghini started to think he could create a really good Grand Tourer car.

Gap in the Market

While he was passionate about his cars and he probably didn’t love Enzo Ferrari too much, he also saw a gap in the market: a really good super car, with no technical issues. Or at least less visits to the service after you buy it.

Competitive advantage

He also saw his own competitive advantage: because he already produced the tractors, he could adapt pieces from there and create a cheaper car. Companies like Ferrari would buy them more expensive because Lamborghini could buy in bulk. He was probably making a whole lot more tractors than Ferrari and Maserati were making cars so he had this particular advantage.

There’s a lot more to Lamborghini’s history and you can read more on Wikipedia or in this book. We also have Lamborghini Urraco and the V8’s: Urraco, Bravo, Silhouette, Athon, Jalpa in our database of book recommendations, if you prefer reading books.

Supercell’s business deconstructed

By Bobby Voicu

When we were growing MavenHut, one of the models we used was SuperCell. I’ve actually used their business model to convince our investors to put more money into MavenHut.

The company created several games and generated $12.5 billions in 6-7 years with just a few employees (300) compared to other gaming companies.

It’s an amazing story and I’m happy I’ve found this article:
10 Years of Excellence – Deconstruction of Supercell

If you’re interested in gaming, this is mandatory reading. If you’re interesting in startups, the same.

Supercell is one of the rare companies that doesn’t try to beat the competition; rather, it tries to beat the high score set by its own prior games. To date, Supercell has created multiple genre-defining games and generated billions in revenues — all with little more than 300 employees (!).

[…]

There are only a handful of companies that try to disrupt the market by creating new genres or redefining existing ones. Disruptors rely on gut feeling, an extremely high level of talent, and… a lot of courage to pull off this high-risk, high-reward strategy. Supercell has clearly mastered this strategy so far, since they can be credited for creating 4 genre-defining hits: Hay Day, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, and Brawl Stars. This is an astounding achievement as most disruptors are lucky to produce a single hit of that magnitude in their lifetime.

These are just some of Supercell’s incredible achievements so far:

  • $12B in total gross revenues over the last 6 years (mic drop)
  • Its first 4 games passed $1B in lifetime revenues (and Brawl Stars will soon join the club)
  • Long “staying power” of its games, as they remain relevant for years
  • Clash of Clans is one of the most successful mobile titles ever (revenues estimated ~$6.5B)
  • Global footprint (in 2019 ~40% of revenues came from the US and ~15% from Asia)
  • Well diversified portfolio across genres (from simulation to build & battle and MOBA)
  • Currently only 320 employees to achieve all of the above

However, no matter how big of a fan of Supercell you are (and we at Deconstructor of Fun for sure are), you can’t overlook the numbers. In the last few years, Supercell has been on a gradual decline, as existing titles have slowed down and new launches haven’t been able to fill the void.

Again, read the entire article, it is worth it! And read the entire Deconstructor of Fun blog, while you’re at it.

Used Lenovo ThinkPad Buying Guide

By Bobby Voicu

I’ve been looking to buy a cheap Lenovo ThinkPad to play with Linux distributions (later edit: I bought a t440s, update at the end of the post). I’ve lost contact with the PC laptops world a while ago, so I needed to find a good source of information.

This is the best I found:
Used ThinkPad Buyer’s Guide

Used ThinkPads are cheap because they are business-grade computers – and business-grade equipment is purchased new typically every 3-4 years. This is fantastic for the smart or thrifty, as software requirements haven’t changed much since mid 2011. Even better, business-grade PC’s tend to last far longer, and function far more consistently than consumer or even ‘prosumer’-grade technology.

This is a freely offered guide on technology that I, and many others, consider to be the best of the best. That said, your mileage may vary – I can’t promise how much you will like it. :)

It covers everything you’d want to know about the devices.

The only thing that is a bit annoying (not the author’s fault in every way) is that the prices in EU are quite a lot bigger than the ones mentioned (from the US second-hand market). Sometimes it’s even double the price.

Here’s another good guide, if you want to compare advice, just to be sure.

Reddit helped again.

Later update: In the end, I bought this T440s, from eBay, for about €195 (didn’t receive it yet):

  • Lenovo THINKPAD T440s
  • Touchscreen, 1920×1080
  • Processor: Core i5-4300U @ 1,9GHz
  • RAM: 8GB
  • HDD: 500GB – I’ll probably swap it with an SSD

Featured image credit: wikipedia.

Transpose and Remove Duplicates in Google Sheets (Docs)

By Bobby Voicu

I’ve had to do some cleaning for a list of numbers recently and I used Google Docs for that. Of course, I used the Excel equivalent, Google Sheets.

Since it’s not the first time I looked for this information, I thought I would put it here, in case I ever need it again. And in case anybody else needs it.

How to TRANSPOSE cells in Google Docs (Sheets)

  • Use this function: =TRANSPOSE(A1:C11)
  • Change A1 and C11 with the top left and bottom right, respectively. You can see how in the image below.

How To Remove Duplicates in Google Docs (Sheets)

This is even simpler.

  • Just select all your fields (or not, since you also have the option of remove duplicates in the entire sheet).
  • Go to Data -> Remove Duplicates in the top menu (see the image below).
  • Then you are taken to another window, where you can select exactly where you want to remove the duplicates.

    • And that’s it!

“Natural” Mouse Scroll for Windows 10

By Bobby Voicu

After around 10-12 years of using just MacOS and the occasional Linux, I finally got a Windows machine again, to use for some light gaming on Steam.

One of the things you get used from the world of Mac, for good or for bad, is the “natural” scrolling for the mouse. Unfortunately, in Windows 10, if you don’t have a touchpad, you don’t have the option in Settings.

I found this solution, using Windows Registry:

Use the Windows key + R keyboard shortcut to open the Run command.

Type regedit, and click OK to open the Registry.

Browse the following path: Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\HID Quick tip: On Windows 10, you can now copy and paste the path in the Registry’s address bar to quickly jump to the key destination.

Expand the key (folder) that matches the VID ID of your mouse — for example, VID_0E0F&PID_0003&MI_01.

from WindowsCentral.com

There’s a little bit more than the steps above, so go to WindowsCentral for the full list of steps, in case you have this issue.