G+ Deja Vu All Over Again?

A quick Google search on "Pinterest growth" emits the latest Silicon Valley effervescence (yeah, recommended Googling that too ;). It's true that rarely a day passes when I am not notified of at least 2 or 3 new "followers" on the service. And for some reason, I feel compelled to "follow back" out of courtesy. At least, I used to. Now the follows come so furiously that I've lost track.

Which feels like Google+ Deja Vu All Over Again. After the whackamole frenzy of adding G+ Followers my own Circles, I also soon stopped, exhausted and scratching my head at why it was even meaningful.  But Google was quick to assure the world that in its first month, it attained 40 million users.

Um, and...what is usage? Turns out this can constitute simply clicking +1 at the end of any story. Because this feeds back to your Google+ page, this means you are a Google+ "user." At least, to Google+ and the blogging that perpetuates these frothy myths.

Back to Pinterest. Despite claims that it's "2012's Hottest Startup," I'm hard-pressed to be impressed. Like Google+, its users are dramatically skewed towards one demographic (male engineers in G+ case, and women in Pinterest's). But I could stand teh imbalance if the actual significance merited the jubilee. But even some bubbly articles with titles like "Holy SMOKES! Pinterest is the fastest-growing site ever" also include disqualifiers at the end like, "Users aren't spending that much time at the site -- about 90 minutes a month, compared with 7 hours for Facebook."

No matter: it's far more fun to just talk about numbers in abstract; even if out of context, stats make for some sexy infographics. Like, "Over 1/5 of Facebook Connected Users are on Pinterest Daily." Does this  mean the server that hosts my (primarily untouched) Pinterest boards is sending server hits back to this count? And "Daily Users have Increased by 145% Since the Beginning of 2012". Same question as before and added to that is, what was the baseline at the start of 2012 anyway? Let's never forget the so-impressive "Raised $37.5M in funding since October 2011" stat in our list of business fundamentals.

The final straw that eliminated any last ounce of credibility I held for the service was when I learned that Pinterest is "quietly" making money from affiliate revenue. A partner fittingly called "Skimlinks" has helped it create a scheme where Pins that are clicked send an affiliate fee from the content provider straight to Pinterest.

So, in addition to lots of fluffy usage numbers, Pinterest is hiding how it's benefiting from the (few?) women actually taking the time to post stuff to their boards.

Well, at least it's not ALL women.

But...really...is there any reason we don't use metrics like DAU and ARPU here? Tell me I'm missing something...

 I'd Pin this if I trusted the service more...

CLMs

According to one of my favorite sources of information, Urban Dictionary...:

CLM: Career Limiting Move

Something that you do at work, that will get you fired, or end your career very soon.

Cut to scene at work this Monday.

CLM #1

Failure to toggle quickly enough out of Lexulous during pre-Thanksgiving Day at the office

CLM #2

Boss: "What games are we gonna pick for this Bowl Game promo?"

Me: "I dunno. We want to go early but what is the "Mountain West" division? The "WAC"? Wha - teams like from SPOKANE or somewhere play in those right? FAIL."

(Boss is from Spokane).

Happy Thanksgiving - here's to a job I not only love, but have! :D

What was it that McNealy said about dog food?

I wrote this post up for a friend who told me he'd pay me $75 for a blog submission.

But I did it before doing any kind of SOW....

Keeping Cash Flow Positive when Contracting

“Full-time, home-based freelancers and independent contractors in the U.S. are expected to increase by 200,000 workers to 11 million by the end of 2009, says Ray Boggs, a vice president of IDC, Framingham, Mass., a market-research firm; he sees another 200,000-worker increase in 2010.”

- “The Five-Second Commute,” The Wall Street Journal, November 29, 2009

The life of a freelancer has its pros and cons. One not often cited, however, is getting paid in a timely fashion. Small businesses often have their invoices put aside or ignored because they do not enjoy the support of legal or collections departments, or (and) service other small clients with their own cash flow problems.

One way to address this is to include very clear deliverables in the Statement of Work (SOW). Clear milestones, and using phases for the work, help clients and providers spread out the work and payments, and be on the same page with respect to deliverables and expectations.

An SOW should list out:

• Clear work deliverables
• Milestones/due dates for these work deliverables
• Process for iterating / accepting the deliverables
  
• Payment terms (e.g. hourly, or how much is to be paid for the retainer at which milestone, etc.)

Setting expectations clearly up front not just about the work but about the payment helps you meet your cash flow obligations and build a solid foundation for growing your business.

Discordance

In college I did a spring break "experiential learning" program where we explored homelessness. We even spent one night at a homeless shelter. When it came time to share what our main take-aways of the week were, I shared this pearl:

" I learned that I never...ever....want to be homeless."

Fast-forward to a few months ago, when I participated in a "peer coaching" group through my business school. The peers? A bunch of unemployed MBAs. Though I was employed, it certainly left me with a very similar feeling I had all those years ago in college (simply replace "homeless" with "unemployed").

This is why I am bristling at the thought of outplacement services! Hanging out with other unemployed people + a chipper, theoretical organizational development 'professional' rather than with real, productive, employed people somehow does not feel helpful to me...

Perhaps akin to locking up felons up with other felons and expecting it to be "correctional"?

I love you, Mike Judge. You get discordance.

I said it first

In my utter shock at yet more millions (as in, 40, that biblical #) being injected in already-cash flush Facebook by Chinese Li Ka-shing, I exclaimed "Ka-shing=Ka-ching". Then 3 more posters after me repeated it. Don't I get the credit?

But really, onto my real point: when is enough enough? How can one firm of less than 400 employees possibly spend all that money ... at least, spend it WELL? Has anyone been to the offices of that overfunded adult sandbox, Linden Labs? It's amazing what a surplus of cash, in shielding one from market forces, can do to take the edge off. How did Solomon know??

Partying takes work

A few months ago, I pontificated on how things in Web 2.0-land were starting to feel a little, well, frothy. A different take on this came today in this Techcrunch post ; while not necessarily vindicating the degree of frothiness that I'd feared, it does vindicate my marathon-esque search for the "right" startup:

It’s so cheap to create Web startups these days that we are going to be seeing a whole lot more of them. Many will be inane, redundant, or half-baked. But a few will rise up from the froth and create something lasting. Bubble or not, it’s worth keeping an eye out for those game-changers. We just might have to wade through a lot of junk to find them.

Of course, that concept of "weeding through a lot of junk to find the right one" sort of plays into my other theory....